Ex-Aerospace Worker Indicted in Spy Case : Espionage: Retired Lockheed engineer is accused of trying to sell plans of a Navy stealth project. He denies the allegations.

In a move the government called a warning to disgruntled aerospace workers tempted to peddle U.S. defense secrets, a former Lockheed engineer was indicted Thursday on charges of attempted espionage for allegedly trying to sell secret plans concerning the Sea Shadow, a Navy stealth project.

John Douglas Charlton, 62, allegedly tried to sell the plans concerning the ship and other projects to an FBI agent posing as an official of an unnamed Western European government, according to prosecutors. Charlton remained free late Thursday pending his planned surrender to federal officials today in Los Angeles, authorities said.

The Lancaster resident, who worked for Lockheed divisions in Sunnyvale and Burbank--including the Skunk Works, the high-tech military research group where the Sea Shadow was designed--was charged Thursday afternoon in a 10-count federal grand jury indictment.

If convicted on all charges, he faces up to 105 years in prison and $2.75 million in fines.

The government case alleges that Charlton tried to get cash for information classified as secret or confidential.d

In an interview late Thursday at the Lancaster home where he lives with his mother, Charlton said he was approached in 1993 by a man who claimed he was from “the French Ministry of Agriculture or something” who wanted to buy “only the classified stuff.”

Charlton said he sold no classified documents. “It’s all a pack of lies,” he said of the charges.

Charlton said he gave the man papers, but most of them were of his own unclassified proposals that Lockheed had refused to fund.

Many of the documents concerned his plans for a chemical coating to be applied to submarines that would make them virtually invisible to enemy sonar, and he hoped the French official would pass on to North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies, Charlton said.

“I thought, this is my last chance to get [the coating] into NATO,” he said. “It was a moral dilemma. The Red Chinese have [similar technology], the Russians have it. If I can’t get this guy to get it into NATO, our whole civilization is going to be destroyed. What am I supposed to do?”

Charlton said he was promised $167,000, which he planned to use to develop a “lung-cleaning machine.” He said he was easily duped because “I know physics, I don’t know people.”

According to the indictment, Charlton met with agents at least five times in the late summer of 1993, the last time in a Lancaster motel room, where he received $50,000 in cash for several documents.

Several days after that last meeting, agents searched his home and seized numerous documents, federal officials said.

Charlton also is accused of lying in 1989 when, upon retiring from Lockheed, he signed an agreement stating that he had returned all classified material in his custody.

“He is essentially a disgruntled, laid-off aerospace engineer who was trying to profit from the secret and/or classified information he worked with over a 20-year period,” Assistant U. S. Atty. George B. Newhouse said.

Lockheed officials were informed by the FBI in 1993 that the agency was working on an espionage case involving the Sea Shadow. The company cooperated in the probe, they said.

“As a result, we formed an undercover operation that specifically offered Charlton the opportunity to sell classified information to a perceived foreign agent,” Newhouse said. “The indictment charges that he leaped at the opportunity.”

Charlton was not taken into custody right away because authorities believed there was no immediate security threat after the classified materials were seized, the prosecutor said. Recent defense cutbacks in Southern California have cost the jobs of thousands of aerospace workers, including many who are in possession of classified information, if only in their memories.

“We want to send a signal to these people that their obligations to comply with federal secrecy requirements regarding classified information will be rigorously enforced,” Newhouse said.

He added that despite a decline in international tension, spying is still taking place.

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The Sea Shadow is a 160-foot-long vessel designed to avoid radar like the Stealth jet fighter, which also was developed at the Skunk Works. After nearly a decade of secret development, the first model was briefly unveiled to the media by the Navy in 1993.

Charlton joined Lockheed Missiles & Space Co. in Sunnyvale in early 1980 as a research specialist, the company said. In 1984, he transferred to the firm’s Burbank plant, which included the Skunk Works division.

Lockheed said its records show that Charlton left voluntarily under an early retirement program in 1989. But a spokesman acknowledged that a forced layoff may have been imminent.

Newhouse said Charlton “wanted to continue to work on a number of [defense] projects, but Lockheed cut back, and he took, in effect, an early retirement. He wasn’t entirely happy about the circumstances of his departure.”