Lancaster Man Tried to Sell Secrets, U.S. Says

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 attempted espionage charges for allegedly trying to sell secret plans concerning the Sea Shadow, a Navy stealth project.

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

The Lancaster resident, who worked for Lockheed divisions in Sunnyvale and Burbank, including the high-tech military research group known as the Skunk Works, 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, and hoped that the secrets would net him $100,000.

In an interview late Thursday at his Lancaster home, where he lives with his mother, Charlton described his involvement in the case. He claims that he was approached in 1993 by a man speaking fluent French who identified himself as Manuel Suquet from “the French Ministry of Agriculture or something” who wanted to buy “only the classified stuff.”

“It’s all a pack of lies,” he said of the charges, saying he sold no classified documents. Charlton said he gave the man papers, but most of them detailed his own unclassified proposals that Lockheed had refused to fund.

Many of the documents regarded his plans for a chemical coating to be applied to submarines that would make them virtually undetectable to enemy sonar, which he hoped that 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,’ ” said Charlton, who claims that his research on missile flight paths was partly “why we won the Cold War.”

“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?”

When agents arrested him, “I thought I was going to be killed,” he said. “It was right after Waco and Ruby Ridge, you know.”

Charlton said he was promised $167,000, with which he planned to develop a “lung-cleaning machine” at an Idaho laboratory. 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 meeting occurring in September in a Lancaster motel room near his home, where he received $50,000 in cash for several documents.

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

Charlton, who company officials said worked for Lockheed from 1980 to 1989, is expected to surrender at the federal courthouse in Downtown Los Angeles, where he will be arraigned before a federal magistrate.

Assistant U. S. Atty. George B. Newhouse Jr. said federal prosecutors will ask that Charlton be required to post $100,000 bail to remain free.

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

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 inquiry, 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, said Newhouse, “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.”

Charlton was not taken into custody immediately because authorities believed there was no immediate security threat after the classified materials were seized, the prosecutor said. Also, “because it’s a serious case, there was a great deal of review and discussion of the case in Washington before the charges were brought,” Newhouse said.

Due to cutbacks in the aerospace industry, “there are a considerable number of laid-off aerospace engineers who are languishing out there with access, at least in their minds, to classified information,” he said. “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.”

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

“Even with the demise of the Cold War, there is still a significant amount of espionage going on out there, now coming from nations who are allies as well as former enemies of the United States,” Newhouse said.

“We have to continue to zealously safeguard our national defense secrets. That’s what this case is all about.”

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

The indictment stunned Lockheed officials.

“I’ve been with Lockheed for more than 25 years, and this is the first time I have seen an indictment of this nature,” said Jim Ragsdale, a spokesman for what is now the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, based in Palmdale. Lockheed merged recently with the Martin Marietta Corp.

“I think it’s very rare. When you look at the hundreds of thousands of people who work in the defense industry nationwide, many of them having access to classified information, it is extremely rare for anyone from this industry to be charged with espionage.”

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

Before joining Lockheed, he worked on sensitive defense projects with Bendix, prosecutors said. Ragsdale said Lockheed’s records show that Charlton left voluntarily under an early-retirement program in 1989. But he acknowledged that Charlton may have taken that option if a forced layoff was imminent.

“We have been in an almost constant state of reducing employment since the early 1980s,” Ragsdale said. “In Los Angeles County alone, Lockheed’s employment since 1980 has dropped by approximately 22,000 workers.”

Newhouse said Charlton “wasn’t entirely happy about the circumstances of his departure.”

Neighbors on Lancaster’s Cinema Avenue, home to several retired Lockheed employees, said they knew little about Charlton and were unaware of his work for the company, not surprising given the secretive nature of the Skunk Works.

They said his mother is well-regarded in the neighborhood. But Charlton evidently kept a low profile.

“If he does live there, he is sure as heck invisible,” said neighbor Kenneth Hodge, who used to work for Lockheed in Burbank.

Added another neighbor: “He just stays there with his mom and takes care of the garden for her. Sometimes he takes her to the store.”

When the neighbor heard about the indictment, he didn’t immediately make the connection with the quiet man living next door.

“Poor old John. I hope he didn’t do it,” he said.

Chester Quick, who lives down the street from Charlton and his mother, said the accused man seemed like a devoted son who cared for his mother when she injured her shoulder several years ago. But like other neighbors, he said he knew almost nothing about the man, even though he had been at Charlton’s house.

“All we’ve discussed is how you have to cut the grass every week and it’s endless work--neighbor small talk,” Quick said. “I have no idea of his marital status or where he worked. He is just sort of an unknown who moved in with his mother.”

Times staff writers Lisa Leff and Michael Arkush contributed to this story.

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Spy Case Indictment

John Douglas Charlton, a former Lockheed engineer from Lancaster, was indicted Thursday on charges of attempting to sell secret plans for the Sea Shadow, a Navy ship designed to avoid radar. If convicted, he faces up to 105 years in prison and $2.75 million in fines.

Specifications:

160 feet long, 70 feet wide, displaces 560 tons. Maximum speed about 13 knots (15 m.p.h.). Crew of four operates ship with remote control box from outside top hatch.

Cost:

Program costs $195 million over 10 years, including $50 million for making the ship.

Date built:

Building began in 1983. First ran in 1985, when Navy began preliminary testing at night.

Features:

Designed to be invisible to radar, similar to Lockheed’s F-117A Stealth fighter.

Testing again:

In April, 1993, the ship was brought out for three weeks of daytime testing off Santa Cruz Island before journalists and other observers.

“The indictment charges that he leaped at the opportunity.”

--Assistant U.S. Atty. George B. Newhouse Jr.

“It’s all a pack of lies.”

--John Douglas Charlton on the charges against him.