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Title: PRC Spokesman Comments on Case of Arms Smuggling Into U.S.
AFP (Hong Kong)
May 23, 1996 1124 GMT
Beijing, May 23 (AFP) -- China said Thursday [23 May] it was
investigating the arrest in California of two representatives of
state-run arms companies for smuggling 2,000 AK-47 automatic rifles
into the United States.
According to federal officials quoted by THE NEW YORK
TIMES, the two were part of a group arrested late Wednesday
in San Francisco, after a 16-month-long sting operation
brought to a premature close because of fear of media
disclosures.
"We are looking into the case," Chinese Foreign
Ministry spokesman Cui Tiankai said.
Some 2,000 AK-47 fully automatic rifles worth around
four million dollars were seized in the raid, which the
officials described as the largest haul of smuggled
automatic weapons in U.S. history. Had the sting operation
continued, the sources said, more powerful Chinese weaponry
and at least one important Chinese official might mave been
lured to the United States. "There were discussions of some
very sophisticated systems that the Chinese said they could
provide. They ran from hand-held aircraft missiles, to
explosives, to lots of other devices," one federal official
in Washington told the daily. The sting operation is likely
to further strain relations with China, following U.S.
threats of sanctions for its export of nuclear-related
technology to Pakistan. More than 90 agents from the
Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) and
the U.S. Customs Service have arrested at least eight U.S.
nationals and Chinese visiting or living in the United
States, the officials said. Two of the Chinese were
described as representatives of government-run arms
manufacturers in China: Northern Industrial Corp. (NORINCO)
and Polytech. The daily said it was unclear whether the
smuggling operation was sanctioned by the Chinese companies
or devised by corrupt officials out for personal profit.
The two companies were the focus of the sting operation
because there was evidence that they had previously
smuggled weapons into the country, the sources said. NORINCO
turns out the bulk of China's military equipment, including
tanks and armoured personnel carriers, and is the country's
principal arms exporter.
It is an umbrella company for more than 300
enterprises and research institutions with total fixed
assets estimated at more than 10 billion dollars.
Polytech is part of the Poly Group -- China's largest-
run military concern which is affiliated to the People's
Liberation Army's (PLA) General Staff Department that
oversees the military's operational readiness.
Poly Group, the PLA's main arms dealer, thrived in the
1980s under the management of two of China's so-called
"princelings" -- He Ping, the son-in-law of paramount
leader Deng Xiaoping and Wang Jun, the son of late Chinese
vice president Wang Zhen.
Both NORINCO and Poly Group were hit by a ban on
imports of Chinese firearms to the United States imposed by
U.S. President Clinton when he renewed China's most-
favoured-nation (MFN) trading status in 1994.
Details of the sting operation were scant, THE NEW
YORK TIMES said, adding that a lengthy court complaint would
probably be unsealed in federal court in San Francisco on
Thursday. News of the operation, about which THE NEW YORK
TIMES and LOS ANGELES TIMES had earlier knowledge, came
hours after Defense Secretary William Perry said the U.S.
had uncovered evidence that China was attempting to buy SS-
18 missile technology from Russia, the daily said. "It's
hard to know if it's worse that they are trying to buy
nuclear weapons technology or sell guns on American
Streets," an unidentified senior State Department official
told the daily. "Either way, they don't make it easier for
us to stabilize the relationship," added the official,
referring to China.
>>>>>>>
"ASSAULT WEAPONS" FOR U.S.
But of all the decisions, waivers and export liberalizations
executed on behalf of the Chinese by the Clinton White House,
none rivals what the administration did for Wang Jun, the
princeling chairman of China's state owned arms conglomerate,
Poly Technologies. For years, China had been doing a land office
business exporting to the U.S. semi-automatic rifles and ammo
made by Poly and another arms manufacturer, Norinco. Reportedly,
the gun trade was worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually
to the PRC. But suddenly in 1994, there was a problem: the
Clinton Assault Weapons Ban. Overnight, China's weapons cash cow
evaporated.
Not to worry. According to a Scripps Howard report by Michael
Hedges, which ran on the front page of the March 14, 1997 edition
of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, the Clinton administration
granted Wang Jun's Poly Technologies importation permits to flood
America with over 100,000 semi-automatic weapons and millions of
rounds of ammunition -- despite the president's own cherished gun
ban. That was on Feb. 2, 1996 -- just days before Clinton issued
the first satellite waivers for Loral Corp.
It gets worse. On Feb. 6, just four days after the assault
weapon waivers were issued, Wang Jun was ushered into the White
House for a personal meeting with Bill Clinton. Wang's escort
was Yah Lin "Charlie" Trie, who had laundered over $600,000 from
Chinese sources for the Clinton Defense Fund. Combined with his
campaign donations to the DNC, Trie's total contributions to
Clinton coffers topped the million dollar mark in 1996. For that
kind of money, it's a good bet Charlie Trie could bring anybody
he wanted to the White House.
And Charlie Trie wasn't Wang's only solid White House reference.
Charlie had worked with longtime F.O.B. Ernest Green to get Wang
a U.S. visa, though Wang conveniently forgot to mention that he
was a Communist arms dealer on the visa application. Had he
disclosed that fact, Wang Jun would never have been let in the
country, let alone the White House. The day after Wang's visit
with Clinton, Ernie Green's wife donated $50,000 to the DNC.
Except for these import waivers, issued two years after Poly's
rifles had been banned at the president's own direction, there
would have been no legal U.S. market for Wang Jun's guns.
Michael Hedges interviewed lawyers involved in negotiating the
deal, nearly all of whom were stunned when Poly Technologies got
the exclusive approval. "All of a sudden there was a
breakthrough. I can't account for it.", said one attorney.
Another admitted that the Clinton administration had been tying
other arms importers in knots to keep guns out of the country
because the president was opposed. He described the abrupt
turnaround in U.S. import policy as "highly suspicious". And
this was from a guy who was working to make this deal happen.
Last year, Hedges told me that his evidence included signed
copies of the importation permits for Wang Jun's guns. Between
the on-the-record interviews and the documentation, his expose
was rock solid. Yet, despite the fact that the implications of
his report were absolutely staggering, only one New York or
Washington paper thought its readers were entitled to this news.
Eleven days later, The New York Daily News followed up on the
Wang Jun 100,000 gun story.
News Columnist Michael Daly managed to uncover the destination
for Wang's 100,000 guns: a Detroit firm which investigators have
linked to the Chinese Armed Police. The Chinese Armed Police
used similar assault rifles to mow down demonstrators in
Tiananmen Square in 1989.
The massive gun shipment would have gone through, flooding
America's cities with weapons ruled inappropriate by the Clinton
administration, but the deal was suspended in the wake of the
aforementioned COSCO connected smuggling operation - which was
short-circuited by federal agents just weeks after Wang Jun's
importation waivers were granted. On the night of March 18,
1996, undercover Customs and BATF agents accepted delivery of
guns smuggled aboard the COSCO ship Empress Phoenix, as part of
an ongoing sting operation dubbed "Dragon Fire." The undercover
agents had lured the Chinese into making a trial shipment of
Chinese machine guns: a dry run set up to establish a working
relationship before the Chinese granted access to their full
inventory. Besides the smuggled guns, which they recommended for
the California street gang market, the Chinese operatives
explained that they were ready to sell everything from grenade
launchers to shoulder fired Red Parakeet surface to air missiles,
which they boasted could "take out a 747". (Coincidentally, a
Boeing 747 was taken out over the skies of Long Island just
months later.) That March night, federal agents secretly
unpacked COSCO crates containing 2,000 Poly Technologies AK-47's
delivered from the hold of the Empress Phoenix. It was the
largest seizure of fully operational automatic weapons in the
history of U. S. law enforcement.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Illegal weapons were well-traveled
Mexico-bound, they went round the world to S.D.
San Diego Union-Tribune
21-Mar-1997 Friday
Valerie Alvord
STAFF WRITER
One of the largest caches of illegal weapons ever found in the United
States began its convoluted journey to California about nine months ago in
Vietnam.
Two of three containers delivered to the Port of Long Beach Jan. 12 aboard
a South Korean shipping vessel were bound for Mexico, but were found two
weeks ago in a San Diego warehouse. When cracked open, boxes filled with
thousands of grenade launchers and disassembled parts of automatic rifles
spilled out.
The San Diego Union-Tribune tracked the cargo around the world and learned
that the third container did a U-turn out of Long Beach back to Ho Chi Minh
City. It then was rerouted to Thailand, came back through the Long Beach
port and was sent by rail to New York City.
It appears none of the shipment ever made it to Mexico, despite initial
reports that as many as four containers of contraband were missing and may
have moved across the border.
The shipping crates -- each 20 feet long, 8 feet wide and 8 feet high --
were marked as containing strap hangers and hand tools.
Their discovery has focused attention on the ease with which dangerous
material can enter the United States, sparking new complaints that America
is helping to supply weapons to law breakers in Mexico and becoming part of
the debate over the future of the Long Beach port.
The containers themselves have left a wake of confusion and embarrassment
as they circled the world.
"This is some very strange movement and I want to get to the bottom of it,"
said an executive of the Hanjin Shipping Co., which routed -- and rerouted
-- the contraband through nearly a dozen ports, onto several ships, and
finally aboard a cross-country train.
"This appears to have been a very long-lasting trip -- intentionally," he
said of the journey of the third container. Like everyone contacted who had
anything to do with the shipment, Hanjin executive Ky Ahn disavowed
knowledge of the containers' contents and was eager to provide information
showing that his company was an innocent pawn in an international intrigue.
"We don't usually ship arms or weapons," he said. "But sometimes the
freight forwarders in Asia do not describe the commodity properly," he
said.
Ahn said his records first pick up the shipment in Singapore. He said the
three containers were sent to Hamburg and sat in a warehouse for a few
months before being redirected to Long Beach, via Bremerhaven, Germany, a
major port.
Usually a shipment from Asia, bound for America's West Coast, would cross
the Pacific, he said. Because this shipment was already in Germany, it was
routed across the Atlantic and through the Panama Canal.
Ahn said the containers were carried aboard the Choyang Volga, which is
owned by the Choyang Shipping Co. Hanjin and Choyang have agreements to
share resources.
A Choyang spokeswoman concurred that her company had nothing to do with
booking or shipping the arms.
In Long Beach, two of the containers passed through U.S. Customs
uninspected, were loaded aboard trucks and driven down the freeway to the
San Ysidro border crossing. The owner of the trucking company refused
comment yesterday. It appears that his drivers were unable to get the
paperwork to cross the border, so they stored the cargo for six weeks
before it was moved to a San Diego warehouse and later discovered by
workers who broke the container seals.
Customs investigators here took the weapons away and have refused comment
other than to say they are investigating international leads.
Fueling controversy
The containers traveled "in-bond," meaning they were cleared to cross the
United States unopened on their way to another country. Their discovery,
first reported last week in the Union-Tribune, has sparked criticism of the
U.S. Customs regulations that govern such shipments. It also has fueled
protests over plans by the city of Long Beach to lease a shipping terminal
on the site of the old Long Beach Naval Station to the China Ocean Shipping
Company, or COSCO.
COSCO has been a tenant at the Port of Long Beach for more than a decade.
But protesters contend it is an arm of the Chinese military and say leasing
a huge terminal to a company closely aligned with a foreign government
could make smuggling easier and put national security at risk.
San Diego Congressmen Duncan Hunter, R-El Cajon, and Randy "Duke"
Cunningham, R-Escondido, who oppose the deal, pointed to the shipment as
proof that bringing contraband into the country is already too easy.
While COSCO has not been implicated in the San Diego shipment, two years
ago one of its ships was used to smuggle AK-47s into Oakland.
The arms seizure in San Diego came as Congress debated whether to override
a presidential decision to certify Mexico as a full partner in the war on
drugs. Although that debate appears to have ended in compromise, the
weapons seizure highlights complaints by Mexico that the United States
hasn't done its part in the drug war by keeping weapons out of the hands of
drug cartels and gangs in Mexico.
A Mexican embassy official in Washington who asked not to be identified
said yesterday that his country has asked to be kept informed on the
progress of the investigation into the San Diego shipment.
"We are still waiting on information from the U.S. side," he said. "We
assume that both governments are doing their utmost on this."
On Tuesday, the attorney general's office in Mexico City issued a bulletin
saying that the Mexican customs office is investigating the presumed
recipient of the containers.
The bulletin said that the Customs attache at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico
City had said there is no indication so far that the two seized containers
are part of any larger shipment of weapons or that any might have entered
Mexico.
Nothing but trouble
Through interviews, shipping documents and computer records, the
Union-Tribune learned that the arms started their journey in Vietnam some
nine months earlier.
The first person to handle the shipment appears to be Paul Khoa of the t&m
Forwarding Co. in Vietnam. He contacted Humberto Gomez in Mexico City to
guide the cargo from San Ysidro to Tijuana.
In a recent interview, Gomez said he was never given an address for the
actual buyer and that's why he was unable to get the cargo cleared to cross
the border.
Gomez also complained that Mexican officials had been questioning him and
that the shipment brought him nothing but trouble.
"We are freight forwarders," he said. "Our agent in Vietnam instructed
their representative office in Germany to consign this shipment to us and
address it Tijuana. Tijuana was the final destination on the bill of
lading."
He referred further inquiry to Khoa in Ho Chi Minh City.
In a telephone interview from Vietnam, Khoa said he was "shocked" that
containers held arms. He said he only booked passage for two containers and
that he never saw what was inside.
Khoa said his first indication of a problem was earlier this week, when
Gomez called from Mexico City and said there was "trouble" with the
shipment. He said he learned from a reporter that the trouble involved
weapons.
Khoa said he knew who owned the shipment, but refused to name the person.
The individual "must have known what was in it," he added.
"I'm shocked," he said. "I'm going to think about it and I may have to go
to the authorities."
Khoa said he delivered the containers to a Hanjin agent in Ho Chi Minh City
and that the shipment was to travel to Singapore aboard a small feeder
line, then on to Bremerhaven. From there, he said, it was to go to Tijuana
via Long Beach.
Computer records show that when the shipment left Bremerhaven, it was
comprised of three cartons -- not two. Three cartons were unloaded in Long
Beach.
Two made it to San Diego, and a Hanjin computer tracking system showed that
the third was reloaded and sent to Singapore, then routed back to Ho Chi
Minh City. From there it went to Thailand, then was put aboard another
vessel, the Hanjin Beijing, that carried it across the Pacific to Long
Beach. On March 6 the container was loaded on a train which arrived in New
York City on March 18. There, the Hanjin tracking system lost its trail.
"We have to trace this shipment," said Hanjin executive Ahn, who like Khoa,
said he was only learning the extent of the intrigue from a reporter.
"We have a high reputation in the shipping world and we don't want to be
involved with that suspicious business."
AFP (Hong Kong)
May 23, 1996 1124 GMT
Beijing, May 23 (AFP) -- China said Thursday [23 May] it was
investigating the arrest in California of two representatives of
state-run arms companies for smuggling 2,000 AK-47 automatic rifles
into the United States.
According to federal officials quoted by THE NEW YORK
TIMES, the two were part of a group arrested late Wednesday
in San Francisco, after a 16-month-long sting operation
brought to a premature close because of fear of media
disclosures.
"We are looking into the case," Chinese Foreign
Ministry spokesman Cui Tiankai said.
Some 2,000 AK-47 fully automatic rifles worth around
four million dollars were seized in the raid, which the
officials described as the largest haul of smuggled
automatic weapons in U.S. history. Had the sting operation
continued, the sources said, more powerful Chinese weaponry
and at least one important Chinese official might mave been
lured to the United States. "There were discussions of some
very sophisticated systems that the Chinese said they could
provide. They ran from hand-held aircraft missiles, to
explosives, to lots of other devices," one federal official
in Washington told the daily. The sting operation is likely
to further strain relations with China, following U.S.
threats of sanctions for its export of nuclear-related
technology to Pakistan. More than 90 agents from the
Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) and
the U.S. Customs Service have arrested at least eight U.S.
nationals and Chinese visiting or living in the United
States, the officials said. Two of the Chinese were
described as representatives of government-run arms
manufacturers in China: Northern Industrial Corp. (NORINCO)
and Polytech. The daily said it was unclear whether the
smuggling operation was sanctioned by the Chinese companies
or devised by corrupt officials out for personal profit.
The two companies were the focus of the sting operation
because there was evidence that they had previously
smuggled weapons into the country, the sources said. NORINCO
turns out the bulk of China's military equipment, including
tanks and armoured personnel carriers, and is the country's
principal arms exporter.
It is an umbrella company for more than 300
enterprises and research institutions with total fixed
assets estimated at more than 10 billion dollars.
Polytech is part of the Poly Group -- China's largest-
run military concern which is affiliated to the People's
Liberation Army's (PLA) General Staff Department that
oversees the military's operational readiness.
Poly Group, the PLA's main arms dealer, thrived in the
1980s under the management of two of China's so-called
"princelings" -- He Ping, the son-in-law of paramount
leader Deng Xiaoping and Wang Jun, the son of late Chinese
vice president Wang Zhen.
Both NORINCO and Poly Group were hit by a ban on
imports of Chinese firearms to the United States imposed by
U.S. President Clinton when he renewed China's most-
favoured-nation (MFN) trading status in 1994.
Details of the sting operation were scant, THE NEW
YORK TIMES said, adding that a lengthy court complaint would
probably be unsealed in federal court in San Francisco on
Thursday. News of the operation, about which THE NEW YORK
TIMES and LOS ANGELES TIMES had earlier knowledge, came
hours after Defense Secretary William Perry said the U.S.
had uncovered evidence that China was attempting to buy SS-
18 missile technology from Russia, the daily said. "It's
hard to know if it's worse that they are trying to buy
nuclear weapons technology or sell guns on American
Streets," an unidentified senior State Department official
told the daily. "Either way, they don't make it easier for
us to stabilize the relationship," added the official,
referring to China.
>>>>>>>
"ASSAULT WEAPONS" FOR U.S.
But of all the decisions, waivers and export liberalizations
executed on behalf of the Chinese by the Clinton White House,
none rivals what the administration did for Wang Jun, the
princeling chairman of China's state owned arms conglomerate,
Poly Technologies. For years, China had been doing a land office
business exporting to the U.S. semi-automatic rifles and ammo
made by Poly and another arms manufacturer, Norinco. Reportedly,
the gun trade was worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually
to the PRC. But suddenly in 1994, there was a problem: the
Clinton Assault Weapons Ban. Overnight, China's weapons cash cow
evaporated.
Not to worry. According to a Scripps Howard report by Michael
Hedges, which ran on the front page of the March 14, 1997 edition
of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, the Clinton administration
granted Wang Jun's Poly Technologies importation permits to flood
America with over 100,000 semi-automatic weapons and millions of
rounds of ammunition -- despite the president's own cherished gun
ban. That was on Feb. 2, 1996 -- just days before Clinton issued
the first satellite waivers for Loral Corp.
It gets worse. On Feb. 6, just four days after the assault
weapon waivers were issued, Wang Jun was ushered into the White
House for a personal meeting with Bill Clinton. Wang's escort
was Yah Lin "Charlie" Trie, who had laundered over $600,000 from
Chinese sources for the Clinton Defense Fund. Combined with his
campaign donations to the DNC, Trie's total contributions to
Clinton coffers topped the million dollar mark in 1996. For that
kind of money, it's a good bet Charlie Trie could bring anybody
he wanted to the White House.
And Charlie Trie wasn't Wang's only solid White House reference.
Charlie had worked with longtime F.O.B. Ernest Green to get Wang
a U.S. visa, though Wang conveniently forgot to mention that he
was a Communist arms dealer on the visa application. Had he
disclosed that fact, Wang Jun would never have been let in the
country, let alone the White House. The day after Wang's visit
with Clinton, Ernie Green's wife donated $50,000 to the DNC.
Except for these import waivers, issued two years after Poly's
rifles had been banned at the president's own direction, there
would have been no legal U.S. market for Wang Jun's guns.
Michael Hedges interviewed lawyers involved in negotiating the
deal, nearly all of whom were stunned when Poly Technologies got
the exclusive approval. "All of a sudden there was a
breakthrough. I can't account for it.", said one attorney.
Another admitted that the Clinton administration had been tying
other arms importers in knots to keep guns out of the country
because the president was opposed. He described the abrupt
turnaround in U.S. import policy as "highly suspicious". And
this was from a guy who was working to make this deal happen.
Last year, Hedges told me that his evidence included signed
copies of the importation permits for Wang Jun's guns. Between
the on-the-record interviews and the documentation, his expose
was rock solid. Yet, despite the fact that the implications of
his report were absolutely staggering, only one New York or
Washington paper thought its readers were entitled to this news.
Eleven days later, The New York Daily News followed up on the
Wang Jun 100,000 gun story.
News Columnist Michael Daly managed to uncover the destination
for Wang's 100,000 guns: a Detroit firm which investigators have
linked to the Chinese Armed Police. The Chinese Armed Police
used similar assault rifles to mow down demonstrators in
Tiananmen Square in 1989.
The massive gun shipment would have gone through, flooding
America's cities with weapons ruled inappropriate by the Clinton
administration, but the deal was suspended in the wake of the
aforementioned COSCO connected smuggling operation - which was
short-circuited by federal agents just weeks after Wang Jun's
importation waivers were granted. On the night of March 18,
1996, undercover Customs and BATF agents accepted delivery of
guns smuggled aboard the COSCO ship Empress Phoenix, as part of
an ongoing sting operation dubbed "Dragon Fire." The undercover
agents had lured the Chinese into making a trial shipment of
Chinese machine guns: a dry run set up to establish a working
relationship before the Chinese granted access to their full
inventory. Besides the smuggled guns, which they recommended for
the California street gang market, the Chinese operatives
explained that they were ready to sell everything from grenade
launchers to shoulder fired Red Parakeet surface to air missiles,
which they boasted could "take out a 747". (Coincidentally, a
Boeing 747 was taken out over the skies of Long Island just
months later.) That March night, federal agents secretly
unpacked COSCO crates containing 2,000 Poly Technologies AK-47's
delivered from the hold of the Empress Phoenix. It was the
largest seizure of fully operational automatic weapons in the
history of U. S. law enforcement.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Illegal weapons were well-traveled
Mexico-bound, they went round the world to S.D.
San Diego Union-Tribune
21-Mar-1997 Friday
Valerie Alvord
STAFF WRITER
One of the largest caches of illegal weapons ever found in the United
States began its convoluted journey to California about nine months ago in
Vietnam.
Two of three containers delivered to the Port of Long Beach Jan. 12 aboard
a South Korean shipping vessel were bound for Mexico, but were found two
weeks ago in a San Diego warehouse. When cracked open, boxes filled with
thousands of grenade launchers and disassembled parts of automatic rifles
spilled out.
The San Diego Union-Tribune tracked the cargo around the world and learned
that the third container did a U-turn out of Long Beach back to Ho Chi Minh
City. It then was rerouted to Thailand, came back through the Long Beach
port and was sent by rail to New York City.
It appears none of the shipment ever made it to Mexico, despite initial
reports that as many as four containers of contraband were missing and may
have moved across the border.
The shipping crates -- each 20 feet long, 8 feet wide and 8 feet high --
were marked as containing strap hangers and hand tools.
Their discovery has focused attention on the ease with which dangerous
material can enter the United States, sparking new complaints that America
is helping to supply weapons to law breakers in Mexico and becoming part of
the debate over the future of the Long Beach port.
The containers themselves have left a wake of confusion and embarrassment
as they circled the world.
"This is some very strange movement and I want to get to the bottom of it,"
said an executive of the Hanjin Shipping Co., which routed -- and rerouted
-- the contraband through nearly a dozen ports, onto several ships, and
finally aboard a cross-country train.
"This appears to have been a very long-lasting trip -- intentionally," he
said of the journey of the third container. Like everyone contacted who had
anything to do with the shipment, Hanjin executive Ky Ahn disavowed
knowledge of the containers' contents and was eager to provide information
showing that his company was an innocent pawn in an international intrigue.
"We don't usually ship arms or weapons," he said. "But sometimes the
freight forwarders in Asia do not describe the commodity properly," he
said.
Ahn said his records first pick up the shipment in Singapore. He said the
three containers were sent to Hamburg and sat in a warehouse for a few
months before being redirected to Long Beach, via Bremerhaven, Germany, a
major port.
Usually a shipment from Asia, bound for America's West Coast, would cross
the Pacific, he said. Because this shipment was already in Germany, it was
routed across the Atlantic and through the Panama Canal.
Ahn said the containers were carried aboard the Choyang Volga, which is
owned by the Choyang Shipping Co. Hanjin and Choyang have agreements to
share resources.
A Choyang spokeswoman concurred that her company had nothing to do with
booking or shipping the arms.
In Long Beach, two of the containers passed through U.S. Customs
uninspected, were loaded aboard trucks and driven down the freeway to the
San Ysidro border crossing. The owner of the trucking company refused
comment yesterday. It appears that his drivers were unable to get the
paperwork to cross the border, so they stored the cargo for six weeks
before it was moved to a San Diego warehouse and later discovered by
workers who broke the container seals.
Customs investigators here took the weapons away and have refused comment
other than to say they are investigating international leads.
Fueling controversy
The containers traveled "in-bond," meaning they were cleared to cross the
United States unopened on their way to another country. Their discovery,
first reported last week in the Union-Tribune, has sparked criticism of the
U.S. Customs regulations that govern such shipments. It also has fueled
protests over plans by the city of Long Beach to lease a shipping terminal
on the site of the old Long Beach Naval Station to the China Ocean Shipping
Company, or COSCO.
COSCO has been a tenant at the Port of Long Beach for more than a decade.
But protesters contend it is an arm of the Chinese military and say leasing
a huge terminal to a company closely aligned with a foreign government
could make smuggling easier and put national security at risk.
San Diego Congressmen Duncan Hunter, R-El Cajon, and Randy "Duke"
Cunningham, R-Escondido, who oppose the deal, pointed to the shipment as
proof that bringing contraband into the country is already too easy.
While COSCO has not been implicated in the San Diego shipment, two years
ago one of its ships was used to smuggle AK-47s into Oakland.
The arms seizure in San Diego came as Congress debated whether to override
a presidential decision to certify Mexico as a full partner in the war on
drugs. Although that debate appears to have ended in compromise, the
weapons seizure highlights complaints by Mexico that the United States
hasn't done its part in the drug war by keeping weapons out of the hands of
drug cartels and gangs in Mexico.
A Mexican embassy official in Washington who asked not to be identified
said yesterday that his country has asked to be kept informed on the
progress of the investigation into the San Diego shipment.
"We are still waiting on information from the U.S. side," he said. "We
assume that both governments are doing their utmost on this."
On Tuesday, the attorney general's office in Mexico City issued a bulletin
saying that the Mexican customs office is investigating the presumed
recipient of the containers.
The bulletin said that the Customs attache at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico
City had said there is no indication so far that the two seized containers
are part of any larger shipment of weapons or that any might have entered
Mexico.
Nothing but trouble
Through interviews, shipping documents and computer records, the
Union-Tribune learned that the arms started their journey in Vietnam some
nine months earlier.
The first person to handle the shipment appears to be Paul Khoa of the t&m
Forwarding Co. in Vietnam. He contacted Humberto Gomez in Mexico City to
guide the cargo from San Ysidro to Tijuana.
In a recent interview, Gomez said he was never given an address for the
actual buyer and that's why he was unable to get the cargo cleared to cross
the border.
Gomez also complained that Mexican officials had been questioning him and
that the shipment brought him nothing but trouble.
"We are freight forwarders," he said. "Our agent in Vietnam instructed
their representative office in Germany to consign this shipment to us and
address it Tijuana. Tijuana was the final destination on the bill of
lading."
He referred further inquiry to Khoa in Ho Chi Minh City.
In a telephone interview from Vietnam, Khoa said he was "shocked" that
containers held arms. He said he only booked passage for two containers and
that he never saw what was inside.
Khoa said his first indication of a problem was earlier this week, when
Gomez called from Mexico City and said there was "trouble" with the
shipment. He said he learned from a reporter that the trouble involved
weapons.
Khoa said he knew who owned the shipment, but refused to name the person.
The individual "must have known what was in it," he added.
"I'm shocked," he said. "I'm going to think about it and I may have to go
to the authorities."
Khoa said he delivered the containers to a Hanjin agent in Ho Chi Minh City
and that the shipment was to travel to Singapore aboard a small feeder
line, then on to Bremerhaven. From there, he said, it was to go to Tijuana
via Long Beach.
Computer records show that when the shipment left Bremerhaven, it was
comprised of three cartons -- not two. Three cartons were unloaded in Long
Beach.
Two made it to San Diego, and a Hanjin computer tracking system showed that
the third was reloaded and sent to Singapore, then routed back to Ho Chi
Minh City. From there it went to Thailand, then was put aboard another
vessel, the Hanjin Beijing, that carried it across the Pacific to Long
Beach. On March 6 the container was loaded on a train which arrived in New
York City on March 18. There, the Hanjin tracking system lost its trail.
"We have to trace this shipment," said Hanjin executive Ahn, who like Khoa,
said he was only learning the extent of the intrigue from a reporter.
"We have a high reputation in the shipping world and we don't want to be
involved with that suspicious business."
