Teledyne Will Plead Guilty in Zirconium Export Cases : Arms: Company will pay $13 million in fines to resolve charges. Metal is believed to have wound up in Iraqi weapons.

Teledyne Inc. agreed Thursday to pay $13 million and plead guilty to federal charges that it illegally exported tons of zirconium that was used in making cluster bombs for Iraq in the 1980s.

The settlement is the Los Angeles-based company’s latest effort to dispose of a barrage of federal charges and civil lawsuits filed against it in recent years. The claims have given Teledyne one of the worst ethics records among U.S. defense contractors and have cost it more than $100 million in fines, penalties and settlement payments.

The latest agreement allows Teledyne to resolve two cases in which federal grand juries in Miami and Washington had separately indicted the company over the export of zirconium, a metal used in compressed form to enhance the firepower of munitions.

In the Miami case, a grand jury in May, 1993, had accused Teledyne of conspiracy to violate the U.S. Arms Export Control Act by illegally exporting more than 130 tons of zirconium to Chile to make 24,000 cluster bombs.

Teledyne’s customer, Chilean arms maker Carlos Cardoen, allegedly sold at least 10,000 of the bombs to Iraq in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war, according to the indictment. (Cluster bombs disperse hundreds of small bombs over a wide area.)

Teledyne agreed to plead guilty to the conspiracy charge and to one count of making false statements on an export-license application with the Commerce Department, said Assistant U.S. Atty. Frank Tamen, who prosecuted the Miami case. Teledyne will also pay a $4-million fine.

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In addition, the company said it will plead guilty today to similar charges in the Washington case. Teledyne will also pay fines in that case, along with administrative penalties to the Commerce Department and other U.S. agencies, totaling an additional $9 million.

Last July, a grand jury in Washington accused the company of conspiring to ship 154 tons of zirconium to Jordan in the late 1980s. Prosecutors said that cargo, ostensibly bound for Greece, also probably ended up in Iraqi hands.

During the Miami case, Teledyne had maintained that U.S. government officials knew the zirconium would be used to make bombs overseas but that they approved the sale as part of a covert plan to help Iraq in its eight-year war with Iran.

But U.S. District Judge Shelby Highsmith ruled last May that Teledyne could not defend itself by asserting that its actions had been quietly approved by the government as part of U.S. foreign policy.

And in its plea agreement Thursday, Teledyne “specifically admitted that it undertook the exports in an effort to secure profits and not as any attempt to participate in any covert U.S. foreign policy,” the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami said.

Nonetheless, Teledyne issued a statement Thursday maintaining that the U.S. government “possessed the knowledge and the administrative mechanisms to prevent the shipments in question but failed to do so. While this does not excuse the later lapses by the company’s operating division, criminal prosecution seems inappropriate in such circumstances.”

But in a telephone interview, Tamen countered that “any lawbreaker could say that ‘if the police were more efficient, they could have stopped me.’ I don’t think that’s a defense.”

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The zirconium was shipped by Teledyne’s Wah Chang Albany division in Albany, Ore. Two Teledyne employees, Edward A. Johnson and Ronald W. Griffin, were also indicted in the Miami case and are scheduled to begin trial Feb. 6.

Cardoen, the arms maker, was also indicted, but he was never extradited to the United States from Chile. However, Tamen said, “We intend to look into the matter of extradition” after the trial.

Meanwhile, Teledyne resumed paying quarterly dividends on its stock. Its board declared a per-share dividend of 25 cents--10 cents in cash and 15 cents in preferred stock--payable March 8 to holders of record Feb. 15. Teledyne’s last payout was 20 cents a share Nov. 24, 1993, but the dividends were suspended Jan. 27, 1994.