Would-Be Spy Feared Demise of Western Civ : Driven by a Tortured Psyche, Engineer John Charlton Sold U.S. Secrets to Save ‘European, Christian’ World

By 1993, the Cold War was over, but the fate of Western civilization still hung by a thread--especially the destiny of the “greater European race.” At least, that was how John Douglas Charlton saw it, federal documents say.

So the retired Lancaster engineer with the keen intellect and bulky frame methodically set about his plan to rescue the Western world, offering to sell U.S. defense information to friendly governments so they could save “European Christian civilization” from extinction with superior weaponry and power.

Germany passed on the deal. So did Britain, Italy and Australia. But France rose to the occasion, and sent an emissary who promised Charlton more than $150,000 for secret documents, which the former Lockheed and Bendix employee willingly provided.

It seemed the start of a profitable relationship--until the French official was unmasked as an undercover FBI agent and Charlton was arrested. Earlier this month, after he had already pleaded guilty in a brief federal court hearing, Charlton was sentenced to two years in prison. He was the first person in greater Los Angeles since the fall of the Soviet Union to be convicted for trying to peddle classified defense data.

The case was widely publicized when the eccentric, 63-year-old Charlton, who said he was trying to finance a lung-cleaning invention, was taken into custody 2 1/2 years ago. But there was little insight into his motivation or the undercover operation that netted him.

Now, FBI reports and sealed court records obtained by The Times show that Charlton may have been an accident waiting to happen: a highly intelligent but intensely withdrawn man whose history of mental problems and unorthodox views combined to launch him on a crusade that quickly grabbed the attention of authorities.

“He was an easy mark for the sting,” said Charlton’s attorney, Donald C. Randolph, who cited Charlton’s well-documented mental illness in seeking a lenient sentence. “This man was a tragic figure.”

Prosecutors contend otherwise, arguing that in spite of any impairment of judgment, Charlton knowingly betrayed his country for money.

“Getting access to classified information is a sacred public trust, and a willful breach of that trust is a serious action,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. George B. Newhouse Jr. “He knew what he was doing was wrong.”

But prosecutors acknowledge that Charlton may well have suffered from psychiatric disorders that persuaded them to offer a reduced prison sentence. And they concede that Charlton, who declined to be interviewed for this story, probably did not intend to harm his country but rather to help it in some distorted way.

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Indeed, records and interviews show that his desire to save Western society from communist and non-European countries verged on obsession. That extreme anxiety led Charlton to seek out Western allies to offer technological information and his own ideas, which he believed would prevent the doom of the “Free World.”

“We are going to lose the next war if we don’t get off our duff,” Charlton snapped at FBI agents who caught up with him in Lancaster in September 1993. “I did what I did to save your civilization.”

It was an outsize mission born of a misguided mind, 40 years or more in the making, according to confidential court documents filed by Randolph.

During his boyhood in the Mojave Desert and Pacific Northwest, patriotism ran high in Charlton’s extended family, many of whose male members served in the military. Charlton apparently absorbed their zeal, enlisting in the Navy in 1951, fresh out of high school.

But throughout his early years, an unhappy period marked by the death of his father when Charlton was 6, he also began exhibiting the unhealthy introversion that psychologists say later flowered into mental illness.

Chess and books, including the encyclopedias he read straight through, were the boy’s primary refuge, court records show. In high school in Washington state and Bakersfield, the budding perfectionist aced his classes but shunned friendship and dating.

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In the military, Charlton scored first in his class in field technician school at Camp Pendleton, then excelled aboard ship during the Korean War, where his scientific work garnered ribbons of merit.

Yet Charlton felt his fellow recruits resented his efforts and his formidable intellect because they looked inadequate by comparison, according to naval records. Rigid and tightly controlled, he disdained the others as lazy and simple-minded.

“He found his peers uninteresting and their hilarity irritating,” according to naval documents submitted to the court. Off-duty recreation for sailors was “limited to drinking, smoking, card playing and fornication, none of which he indulged in.”

In 1954, the Navy’s medical board diagnosed a “schizoid personality.” But judging Charlton “fully competent” to leave the service, it issued an honorable discharge.

“He was left to his own devices to enter society with a mental illness,” Randolph said in an interview, adding that Charlton’s condition went untreated for more than four decades until his arrest by the FBI.

Charlton’s antisocial behavior continued at Bendix and Lockheed, even as the UC Berkeley graduate’s work was, by almost all accounts, meticulous and innovative.

“His work was very high quality,” said Robert C. Parsons, who supervised Charlton at both companies. “He had some ideas that people thought were pretty far out, but John could sit down and show you numbers. . . . A lot of his ideas were way ahead of their time.”

Eventually, he grew certain that his bosses were out to get him, rejecting his ideas and projects though he believed them vital to NATO and the Western world, FBI reports say. After his retirement from Lockheed in 1989--whether forced or voluntary is unclear--those thwarted projects assumed an overarching importance in Charlton’s mind, especially the lung-cleaning machine he claimed would save millions of lives.

A flurry of resumes and proposals to U.S. defense agencies got him nowhere. Desperate and depressed, Charlton decided to force the country’s hand, mailing letters to various embassies offering his services and defense information for cash, which he could later use to build his lung machine, according to the FBI.

When “Emmanual Suquet” from the French Department of Transportation telephoned in July 1993, Charlton was ready.

“Don’t you understand? I wanted to help us and NATO,” Charlton told a psychologist, according to court documents. “No one for all these years would listen to my ideas. And finally, someone came to me who was interested in what I thought.”

During four meetings with Suquet at the Desert Inn Motel in Lancaster, Charlton--initially hopeful of getting a job offer--ended up accepting $55,000 in exchange for several documents, including information on a stealth ship called the Sea Shadow and an underwater weapons system.

At their final meeting on Sept. 10, 1993, Charlton presented Suquet with a list of other items he was willing to sell, with the prices, in thousands, noted beside each entry.

Minutes later, FBI agents “raided” Suquet’s motel room, hustling off the faux French official in handcuffs, a show of force to scare Charlton into talking.

The ploy worked.

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With a glass of orange juice to steel his nerves, Charlton began by denying that the information he sold to Suquet--who he actually suspected was an undercover German operative--was classified. After more questioning, he admitted that some of the data could still be confidential, but insisted that he had acted only for the good of Western civilization.

“Charlton believed he was doing nothing wrong by selling classified information to the Germans because they were part of the greater European race, which was under siege by the non-European world,” FBI reports say. “ . . . Charlton advised that his motivation for selling ideas and classified defense information to Germany and other European countries was to save the European Christian civilization.”

He also told agents that “within 300 years the blond hair, blue-eyed genetic trait would become extinct unless immediate action was taken to prevent its end,” FBI reports say. But Randolph, Charlton’s attorney, dismissed suggestions that his client is a racist, saying Charlton brought up that particular characteristic because he believed Suquet--himself fair-haired and blue-eyed--to be German.

“The lines he draws are between Western civilization and [former] Communist Bloc countries, not between white or black,” Randolph said. “He is not a racist, never was.”

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FBI reports say that Charlton, who never married and cares for his elderly mother, ultimately hoped to make $1 million to finance his lung machine.

His interview with the FBI ended when he declared that he did not need a trial and was willing to go to jail or be summarily shot.

Randolph maintains that his client, who has been emotionally devastated since his arrest and sentencing, did not believe that any information he passed along remained secret or the property of the U.S. government.

“In his mind, everything he gave [was] declassified,” Randolph said. “The part of the case I think that’s sad is that the government decided to use John Charlton as an example to other ex-defense employees. . . . This man was not a good example.”

Prosecutors disagree. While they acknowledge that Charlton’s motives may have differed from Thomas Patrick Cavanagh--who sold defense information to the Soviet Union in the 1980s at the height of the Cold War and was the last person in Los Angeles to be convicted of such a crime--prosecutors say the breach of public trust was the same. Cavanagh is now serving a life term.

“We can’t have the worker bees running around and making foreign policy,” Newhouse said. “It may be that in 10 years, China is our ally and a European country is our enemy.”