Dans Papers - June 8, 2007 - Riverhead, Iran, & An Arrest In California

Last week, a federal judge in California sentenced a popular flight instructor at an airport in Orange County to two years in jail for crating up stolen F-14 fighter jet spare parts and trying to sent them to Iran. His name is Reza Tabib, he is 52 years old, speaks four languages and was born in Tehran. He is the son of a well-known judge there. People seem amazed that such a nice guy would try to do such a thing. But he did.

The F-14, featured in the Tom Cruise movie Top Gun, was the most sophisticated and best fighter plane in the world during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. It was built by Grumman at their plant in Riverhead. It took two pilots to fly it. All together, about 712 of them were put into service.

According to the Pentagon, there are only two countries in the world that still use F-14 fighter jets, the aircraft that was featured in the movie Top Gun and built here in a factory in Riverhead. Those two countries are the United States and Iran. Most recently, the United States aircraft carrier USS Nimitz sailed into the Gulf of Aqaba to join the rest of the American fleet there. Onboard, backing up the current Navy carrier jet of choice, the F-18, was a squadron of F-14s. Across the Gulf sit the F-14s of Iran.

How Iran came to be the only other country in the world to get F-14s is an interesting story.

The fighter was considered so good when it was first put into service that the Pentagon ruled that it could not be sold to any other country, even our allies. However, in late 1979, the Shah of Iran was in trouble and under pressure from Islamic Militants to resign and allow an Islamic based government to be formed. There was fighting. As a result, President Jimmy Carter made an exception to the rule and, in order to bolster the Shah, ordered 80 of the planes to be shipped to him. They arrived with a full complement of spare parts, operation manuals and about 100 trainers and mechanics from Grumman in Riverhead to instruct the Shah's air force on how to use them.

They never completed their mission. Five months after their arrival, the Shah was overthrown in a bloody military coup and forced to flee into exile. At the main Iranian airbase outside of Tehran, the Grumman workers were evacuated by C-47s, taking as many parts as they could carry. They never returned.

From that day to this, the Iranians have never been able to use the F-14s for the purpose they were intended. There have been a few instances where Iranian pilots were able to get them up into the air and fly them around. But, apparently, they have never been able to figure out how to work the sophisticated armaments. Several F-14s have crashed. There were cases of Iranians being executed for either stealing parts off F-14s to sell them (back to the United States?) or for damaging the aircraft. Death was the penalty for damaging government property, unless a man or his family could scrape up the money to repair the damage. One man accidentally set off a pilot's ejection seat while in the cockpit and, though he parachuted to earth safely, he was arrested upon landing and ultimately had to pay the supreme penalty.

How many Iranian F-14s are operational after all these years is not known but it is thought that the number is fewer than 10. At this point, however, what with the present Iranian government developing Atomic bombs and other weapons, an effort is apparently being made to get those F-14s flying again.

At the present time, except for two American squadrons that remain in service, all remaining F-14s are being handed over to a company called Government Liquidations Inc., which is in charge of dismantling the aircraft and destroying the remains. The problem, however, is that Government Liquidations, in making it's contract with the government, got the government to agree that, under certain circumstances, individual planes and spare parts could escape the crusher if they were to be used by air show operators, museum owners or antique collectors. By the time the paperwork for this part of the contract got down the government food chain, the ultimate document only contained the caveat that parts or whole airplanes could be sold as long as the buyer signed a form promising that they would not sell any parts of an F-14 to any foreign government.

In discovering the crates of F-14 parts in Abib's possession, however, government investigators determined, by looking at the serial numbers of these parts, that they had arrested somebody else a few years ago for trying to sell exactly these particular parts. Somehow, after that arrest and conviction, the parts had gone around and come around and now here is Tabib, trying to ship them.

Maybe the Iranians intend to use these parts, some others, and a bit of tape, chicken wire and scotch tape to fashion something that could carry an A-bomb.