Witnesses say documents not controlled

Witnesses say documents not controlled

	Published : Fri, 27 Apr 2007 18:39 By : Agencies Print this Story

SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) - Testimony in the case of a Chinese-born engineer accused of stealing U.S. defense secrets revolved Thursday around whether he needed government approval to export a document on a quiet submarine propulsion system to China.

Authorities believe Chi Mak, a naturalized U.S. citizen, stole thousands of pages of defense documents from his defense contractor employer, Power Paragon, and gave them to his brother, who passed them along to Chinese authorities over a number of years.

He was arrested in 2005 in Los Angeles after FBI agents stopped his brother and sister-in-law as they boarded a flight to Hong Kong. Investigators said they found three encrypted CDs in their luggage containing documents on the propulsion system, which would make U.S. submarines virtually undetectable underwater.

Mak, 66, has pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiracy to export defense material to China, failure to register as a foreign agent, attempted and actual export of defense articles and making false statements. His wife, brother and other relatives also have been indicted.

On Thursday, the first full day of the defense case, two employees from Power Paragon's parent company, L-3 Communications, testified that they were asked to review the propulsion document after Mak's arrest. They said they were asked to determine whether it needed government approval to be taken out of the country.

Nancy Hindman, L-3's internal special compliance official, said she reviewed the document -- which Mak himself wrote and presented at a 2004 engineering conference -- and determined that he didn't need a government license to export it.

She testified that initially there was some disagreement between L-3 and Power Paragon about whether the document contained sensitive information, but the companies eventually agreed it didn't.

'Would you personally have a problem delivering this to the People's Republic of China?' Assistant U.S. Attorney Craig Missakian asked Hindman on cross-examination.

'No,' she replied.

A second defense witness, L-3 engineer Kenneth Shelly, testified that he also felt the document didn't contain any threats to American security. He said Mak's paper didn't contain anything that couldn't be found in graduate-level engineering textbooks.

'There's no specifications, there's no design parameters.... He talks about concepts,' Shelly said. 'There just wasn't enough there.'

Outside the jury's presence, Missakian told U.S. District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney that the government disagreed with L-3's analysis and found that the document was export-controlled. He asked the judge to exclude Hindman and Shelly's testimony, but Carney declined.

Missakian questioned Hindman on her motivation for finding the documents harmless. He suggested that she was acting in L-3's interest because the company didn't want a multimillion-dollar fine for allowing the information to become public.

He also focused on the disagreement between L-3 and Power Paragon about the sensitivity of the information and said Hindman had ordered Power Paragon officials to go along with her views.

Investigators have said that during a search of Mak's home they found two torn-up notes from Chinese officials asking him to get documents on a number of sensitive U.S. naval projects involving torpedoes, electromagnetic artillery, missile-detection and nuclear defense.

They also seized documents on the DDX Destroyer, a next-generation, multimission warship as quiet as a submarine; electromagnetic launch systems for aircraft carriers; high-powered electromagnetic guns; and submarine-mounted kinetic energy projectiles, according to court papers. The government also suspects Mak has been feeding information about Aegis-class warships to China since the 1980s.

Mak could testify as early as Monday in his own defense, his attorney, Ronald Kaye, said.