Wandering weapons: America's lax arsenal

Records show that everything from Stinger missile guidance systems to mines have vanished from U.S. stockpiles since 1991.

Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, February 1993. A U.S. Army sergeant looking for a leaky water pipe finds plastic explosives hidden in a wall panel of an apartment at the Khobar Towers military complex.

West Babylon, N.Y., August 1994. A man gets a package with a return address reading, "Guess Who?" Inside: a 6-inch pipe bomb with enough explosives to blow him and his house to pieces.

Richmond, Va., November 1994. Police searching the home of a suspected serial killer discover a live antitank rocket in a bedroom.

Three close calls. Three inexpensive, portable, easy-to-hide and powerful munitions. And none came from a rogue arms dealer.

They all disappeared from the U.S. Army's $30-billion munitions arsenal.

Since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, thousands of pounds of explosives, hundreds of mines, mortars, grenades and firearms and dozens of rockets and artillery rounds have been lost or stolen from U.S. stockpiles, government documents show.

In many of the 242 reported cases, the lost or stolen munitions were safely recovered. But some remain unaccounted for. And at least four devices blew up, injuring 15 people.

The documents, made public by the Pentagon in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the St. Petersburg Times, chronicle a litany of accounting problems that contributed to some thefts and losses.

The Army was the most responsive branch of the military, releasing 223 incident reports. The Navy and Marines made public 15 reports of lost munitions, and the Department of Defense released four. The Air Force did not release any reports. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which tracks incidents of lost and stolen munitions, said there are likely other cases that were never reported to officials in Washington.

Oversight was so lax at a few bases that it was easy to steal almost anything designed to cause death or serious battlefield injuries, Army investigators learned.

In one case, classified guidance systems for three Stinger missiles disappeared somewhere between Fort Bliss, Texas, and Tucson, Ariz., in 1998 or 1999.

"There is no accountability of issue and turn-in," testified a soldier caught swiping a grenade during a training exercise at Fort Benning, Ga. His sergeant, the soldier said, turned a blind eye to thefts and told him, "Deny everything if questioned."

Military officials downplay the losses, stressing that pilferage and sloppy record-keeping are not widespread.

Every year, the military moves hundreds of thousands of tons of cargo by land, sea and air.

During Operation Desert Storm, it hauled 6.5-million tons of equipment and weapons to 33 ports, loading supplies onto 37,000 40-foot commercial containers aboard 564 ships bound for Saudi Arabia.

In the war against terrorism, shipments to Afghanistan by rail and road crossed thousands of miles of some of the most rugged terrain in the world. After supplies reached Uzbekistan and Pakistan, private trucks hired by the military inched through massive snowdrifts and climbed 6,000-foot mountains en route to troops in Mazar-i-Sharif, Bagram and Kandahar.

"The amount of items reported missing is minute when you consider the blinding amount of explosives and munitions in the U.S. arsenal," said Marc Raimondi, a spokesman for the Army's Criminal Investigation Command at Fort Belvoir, Md.

What is more, vastly improved shipping and storage procedures since the Gulf War have given commanders tighter control over their inventory, military officials say, and advances in technology - including use of bar codes and radio frequency tags - have helped cut down on the amount of weapons and ordnance lost.

But no system is 100 percent foolproof.

"Rules and regulations are made to keep honest people honest," said Lt. Col. Susan Carlson, chief of the munitions division at Army headquarters in Washington. "You have someone dishonest and all the rules in the world won't matter."

More than half of the roughly 150 thefts were inside jobs involving military personnel, National Guardsmen or civilian employees of the military, the documents show.

At several bases, ammunition handlers miscounted munitions, failed to keep track of explosives during training exercises, or deliberately issued more than receipts showed.

"If it's an inside job, they just cook the books," said Stephen Scheid, an intelligence research specialist for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Fort Lewis, in Washington, reported 10 thefts involving some 100 pounds of explosives. In one case, soldiers made off with six mines from a bunker and replaced them with 51 pounds of M-16 rifle ammunition. Paperwork was changed to cover up shortages, a corporal and a specialist told Army investigators.

Sometimes, the documents indicate, reporting delays by supervisors hampered efforts to find the thieves.

One report quoted a man who received stolen explosives from a soldier at Fort Drum, N.Y. "No one collected or accounted for unused explosives, so the unit members just took them home," he said.

While some said they simply forgot to return government property, other suspects confessed that they stole for revenge or profit. Grenades, bomb detonators, rifles and ammunition turned up in the hands of drug dealers, gang members and a militia group.

When Virginia police searched the home of suspected serial killer Stuart Duke Jr. in 1994, they found a 66mm antitank rocket that the Army didn't know was missing. It was manufactured in Texas in 1972, shipped to Europe and probably stolen, the Army said.

Investigators also broke up at least a dozen smuggling schemes by soldiers returning from war. In a van at Fort Carson, Colo., military police found 2,759 rounds of ammunition and 35 grenades, among other things, in a duffel bag and repackaged ready-to-eat meals smuggled from Somalia in 1993.

Guns, grenades and an 81mm mortar turned up at gun shops in at least four states. In 1994, a Delaware gun dealer admitted receiving experimental armor-piercing ammunition from a civilian researcher at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.

The researcher, who the Pentagon refused to name, was charged with larceny after investigators recovered 11,902 rounds, valued at $34,000, in his house. The charge was dismissed, according to documents.

The Army found no evidence that any of the missing munitions reached terrorists. But it uncovered plenty of accountability problems with Middle East shipments.

For example, 7 pounds of TNT were removed from a torn crate in Saudi Arabia, or at the Sierra Army Depot in Herlong, Calif., or somewhere in between. Accountants said they couldn't be sure where the loss occurred or when - maybe 1992, 1993 or 1994.

In the Khobar Towers case in 1993, investigators traced the 23/4 pounds of C-4 explosives found in the apartment wall panel to a lot made in Louisiana and eventually shipped to Kuwait before the Gulf War. They found two fingerprints on the wrappings, but never caught the thief or whoever hid the bomb.

The sergeant who found the explosives escaped injury or death because it was not rigged to explode. Three years later, though, 19 airmen weren't so lucky. They were killed when a terrorist truck bomb ripped through the same complex. There was no evidence the explosives in that bomb came from U.S. stockpiles.

Rockets, cannon rounds, grenades and rifles also vanished during or after military operations in Haiti, Croatia, Bosnia and Somalia, the newly disclosed documents show.

Near the heavily fortified border with North Korea, investigators reported nine incidents of lost or stolen munitions.

In one case, three defense employees illegally sold 120 tons of surplus munitions, including parts of a damaged F-16 fighter jet, to unspecified buyers in 1993. The employees falsely certified that all of the items had been rendered harmless.

Two years later, South Korea's army reported losing five mortar rounds from a U.S. shipment, each weighing 120 pounds. They were believed to be in a lot of 775 rounds that arrived in Southeast Asia in 1969. For 26 years, they sat, unchecked, in plywood boxes. By the time the crates were opened to verify all the rounds could be accounted for, paperwork had been destroyed. It could have helped trace the whereabouts of the missing rounds.

"Due to inventory procedures over the previous years, it cannot be established that the rounds were ever in Korea," the Army concluded, adjusting its books to reflect an inventory shortage. "This matter is not being pursued as a larceny."

The reports document similar accounting problems at several big stateside weapons complexes. Often, they received munitions crates that they counted but didn't open and inventory.

In Anniston, Ala., for example, inspectors couldn't track 96 sticks of dynamite in 1996, two .50-caliber machine guns in 1998 and five rockets in 1999. The rockets can each destroy a tank at ranges up to 500 yards.

At Aberdeen, accountants in 1996 found a discrepancy between their records and their count of old 120mm tank shells made with radioactive depleted uranium to puncture armor. They were four rounds short. They concluded the rounds were "most likely a shipping or paperwork discrepancy."

The Pentagon said its inspectors try to count every item by serial number. At the same time, officials acknowledged they don't routinely open crates of munitions shipments after they arrive, unless there is evidence of tampering. What's more, counting every item would be too time-consuming and costly, they said, though, at times, worth the effort.

At Lettekenny Army Depot in Pennsylvania, for example, accountants searched for 6,732.5 pounds of C-4 explosives that could not be located between 1983 and 1993. Eventually, they reappeared - under a different stock number.

On the other hand, the top secret guidance systems for three Stinger missiles that disappeared between July 1998 and May 1999 remain unaccounted for, the documents indicate.

While the missile parts are useless on their own, the guidance system is considered the Stinger's brains. It keeps the missile on course as it maneuvers toward any threat flying below 2 miles - from fixed-wing aircraft to cruise missiles.

According to the Army, "person(s) unknown by unknown means" made off with the guidance systems. A spokeswoman for the missilemaker, Raytheon Missile Systems, said the size and weight of the parts are "classified" and referred questions to the Army.

The theft apparently occurred while the missile parts were getting trucked for repairs from a Raytheon plant at Fort Bliss, Texas, to a Raytheon plant in Tucson, Ariz.

In their report, investigators said the Defense Department insisted that Raytheon, which owned the truck, replace the systems with "equivalent property" worth $103,000, at "no cost to the government."

The bases that reported munitions losses referred questions to the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, which released the documents after blacking out the names of suspects.

While a spokesman at the command stressed that much of what was lost was eventually found, the documents illustrate the dangers of just a little leakage.

In 1995, seven children, ages 6 through 15, were hurt when a grenade exploded at an apartment complex playground in a suburb of Memphis, Tenn. Authorities later found seven other grenades, all apparently swiped by teenagers riding bicycles through a military firing range at Fort Sill, Okla. They thought they were duds.

Elsewhere, sharp-eyed people averted close calls.

When Sammy Cruz got the "Guess Who" package bomb at his West Babylon house, he knew what to do with it. His girlfriend had alerted him that a dangerous package might be on the way.

The bomb, it turned out, was made by Peter LeMay, the husband of Cruz's girlfriend. LeMay, a paratrooper at Fort Bragg, N.C., was angry because he believed Cruz was having an affair with his wife. Cruz carried the unexploded bomb to a backyard pool and called police. LeMay and an Army acquaintance who helped build and mail the bomb pleaded guilty to attempted murder.

Other items, ranging from live mortars to plastic explosives, were found by hikers, hunters, pedestrians, fishermen and motorists, in forests, cornfields, a Maryland lake, a Georgia riverbank, a creek in Hawaii and a gas station in North Carolina.

A couple unpacking in their new house in Harrisburg, Pa., in 1994 discovered five grenades, a mortar and a rocket in the attic, along with K rations with 1950s dates.

The Army didn't realize they were missing until after they were discovered.

- Times researchers Kitty Bennett and Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

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