Torrance Firm a Victim as U.S. Blocks Jet Deal : Aerospace: Misguided geopolitics to punish Jordan and Indonesia prevents 1,200 new jobs, company says.

As President Clinton was jawboning the Saudis recently into buying $6 billion worth of passenger jets from Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, the State Department was making sure a little Torrance aerospace firm doesn’t sell to Indonesia and Jordan.

The government dealt the blow to Eidetics Aircraft Inc. almost inadvertently, by barring Jordan’s planned sale of some U.S.-made fighter planes to Indonesia because of the former’s tilt toward Iraq in the Gulf War and the latter’s record on human rights in East Timor.

Such actions by Washington aren’t unusual; just last month the State Department applied sanctions against China that could disrupt Hughes Aircraft’s satellite sales. And Eidetics knows that the leaders of Indonesia and Jordan aren’t candidates for sainthood.

But Eidetics executives also know that blocking the deal won’t keep either country from getting the military equipment it wants. Suppliers in other nations are only too happy to make the sale.

The result, Eidetics says, is 1,200 potential Southern California jobs down the drain, for no purpose at all. The firm’s executives, led by founder and president Andrew Skow, are fuming.

Eidetics’ story illustrates the hard choices facing the White House when foreign policy collides with the desire to create jobs at home, not to mention the difficulty of achieving foreign policy goals by curbing purchases from American companies.

The Eidetics case also shows how a small aerospace firm can easily get caught up in the ever-shifting tides of geopolitics. Companies all across the Southland have seen their fortunes rise and fall depending on the Cold War, the State Department’s view of some far-off tyrant and the ebb and flow of power in Congress.

For Eidetics, it all started at the 1991 Paris Air Show, where four Eidetics executives decided that Jordan’s plans for selling some F-5 fighter jets gave them an opening.

Skow and several other Eidetics employees are alumni of Northrop Corp., which built the F-5, and they used their Jordanian contacts to wrangle this deal: Once Jordan had sold four F-5s to Indonesia for about $25 million, Eidetics would upgrade the planes--install new radios and the like--for the Indonesians.

The deal would have been worth $7 million to Eidetics over six months--double what it normally grosses in a year.

Then, Jordan planned to take the $25 million and hire Eidetics to upgrade Jordan’s remaining fleet of F-5s. That contract, Skow maintains, would have created 1,200 jobs at Eidetics and its suppliers.

But one morning in mid-July, Skow was told the State Department had nixed the deal. “My heart dropped to my gut,” he recalled.

The agency is unhappy about East Timor, an island where brutal civil war erupted after its annexation by Indonesia in 1976. U.N. resolutions have condemned the takeover, and Amnesty International asserted last year that East Timor was among the world’s worst cases of human rights abuses. Altogether, about 100,000 people are said to have died since the annexation.

East Timor is an issue with other U.S. officials as well. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week voted to tie all U.S. arms sales to Indonesia to an improvement in human rights in East Timor.

But in stopping the F-5 sale, the State Department also cited “other complications for other programs for Jordan which are under active review.” The agency declined to elaborate, and had no further comment about Eidetics or the F-5 sale.

A State Department official who asked not to be identified said the blocked sale also reflected the view that Jordan did not fully back U.S. actions in the Gulf War.

“There’s still a lot of bad feelings” toward Jordan in Washington, the official said, adding that although Jordan’s King Hussein met with Clinton in June “to repair some of the damage, it wasn’t that successful.”

So Eidetics’ contract vanished, as did about $1 million that Eidetics had invested in the project--a huge sum for the privately held firm.

Skow is especially livid because, he contends, the U.S. government earlier signaled that the deal would go through, then blocked it to make a political statement, allowing Eidetics to be a sacrificial lamb.

“We’re not Indonesian human rights experts,” Skow said. “It’s a new Administration (in Washington), it has a whole new set of priorities, and that’s fair. But I can’t accept being singled out as this weak target that can’t fight back.”

He noted that Boeing recently delivered an upgraded 737 surveillance jet to the Indonesian Air Force, and U.S. firms are shipping spare parts for Lockheed F-16s--a far more sophisticated fighter than the F-5--that Indonesia already operates.

In a scathing letter to Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Skow said the decision “totally ignores the human rights of over 1,200 American workers who will not be hired.”

“It is also a violation of the U.S. workers’ right to expect that their job security be placed ahead of symbolic gestures of undefined benefit to the ‘human rights’ of citizens of another country,” he wrote.

Eidetics’ workers recently sent their own plea to Clinton. It was signed by about 30 employees, including one who added, “I am the single parent of three teenagers--I need this job.”

Skow also says Eidetics hasn’t gotten enough help from California officials in trying to overturn the decision.

In fact, Sen. Barbara Boxer supports the State Department because she’s long been concerned about abuses in Indonesia, said Boxer spokeswoman Linda Marson: “She doesn’t compromise on certain human rights issues.”

But Michael McGill, chief of staff for Sen. Dianne Feinstein, said the senator is “continuing to seek some appropriate means of making this deal possible” for Eidetics.

Can’t Eidetics just wait for Jordan to sell its four jets elsewhere, then strike another deal for upgrade work? Skow said preparing for another sale would require another big investment by Eidetics--money the firm isn’t sure it can afford without a guaranteed deal. But he’s not giving up.

“We are threatened,” he said. “But we will figure something out.”