La Grande Fauche: La Fuite des Technologies ver l'Est

(English title: Gorbachev's Technology Wars)

Chapter 1: The French Scandal

Seizure in Luxembourg

For French businessman Aimé Richardt, it was the type of experience he could have done without.

It all began simply enough. On May 9, 1985, as he had done many times in the past, he signed over five crates of high-tech gear to a freight forwarder near his home in Vesoul, France. The shipment was slated to reach Moscow via Basel and Paris. To ensure all went well, Richardt handled the local Customs authorities himself. The crates contained parts of an ion engraver - a rather outdated piece of equipment, he explained - that was part of a big order he had been shipping to Moscow over the past eighteen months. In this sleepy French town, close to the German border, no one blinked an eye. The Customs officer in charge examined the documents Richardt presented, checked that the invoice corresponded to the tarif code, and affixed his stamp: "Export approved." With everything in order, Richardt's freight forwarder hauled the crates to the Basel airport, on the French border, and turned them over to Air France for the final leg of the long journey to Moscow.

But four days later, things began to go wrong. Because of underbooking, on May 14, 1985 Air France cancelled its cargo flight SU 730 from Paris to Moscow. To satisfy their customer, they transferred Richardt's cargo by truck to Luxembourg's Findel Airport to meet up with the regular Havana-Luxembourg-Moscow flight of the Soviet national carrier, Aeroflot. And that was when lightning struck.

Was it the shipment of enriched uranium they had intercepted the year before that had rendered the Luxembourg Customs agents working under Inspector Beck so suspicious? So at least the local press would speculate in the weeks to come. When the case came to court, Richardt would complain of a "breach of sovereignty" by the United States Government, implying that his shipment had been seized upon direct order from the U.S. Customs Service. Whatever the reason, the attention of the Luxembourg Customs was attracted by the name of the addressee marked on the crates: V/O Technopromimport, Moscow, USSR. And when they saw that the sender's address in France was a mere Post Office box, they decided to have a closer look.

As luck would have it, either Richardt's freight forwarder or Air France had made a mistake in the paperwork. On the Airway bill they had indicated that the equipment was of European origin. But on the Customs documents, it was clearly marked that the crates contained an American-built machine. Inspector Beck knew that the Grand Duchy's lone export-licensing official, Oscar Schmidt, was particularly attentive when it came to re-exporting American technology. Special authorizations were required, and this shipment had no license whatsoever... On May 21, the Luxembourg Customs informed René Thil, the local agent of Air France, that they had impounded the five crates belonging to a Dr. Aimé Richardt. As an additional precaution, they decided to inform the Paris office of the U.S. Customs Service of the seizure.

According to American law, the Customs Service is the sole enforcement agency allowed to "police" export control violations abroad. And Customs takes its role so seriously it claims "extraterritoriality" in its quest to prevent critical American technologies from reaching the USSR and the Soviet bloc. This means that the U.S. Customs Service can intervene directly in foreign countries when it believes that vital American technologies are being diverted to a denied customer in the Eastern bloc. Since 1981, this control effort has been dubbed "Operation Exodus." Its aim: to slow the flow of militarily critical technologies from reaching the Soviet weapons industry, and to disrupt the networks of technobandits running the show. Among themselves, the Special Agents of the U.S. Customs Service devoted to Operation Exodus call themselves the "Techbusters."

Special Agent JD didn't need an earful of details when he got the phone call from his Luxembourg colleague. He scooped up the small suitcase which he had made a habit of keeping in a corner of his office at 58bis, rue de la Boetie in Paris, and hopped on the first flight for Luxembourg. A few hours later, accompanied by the Luxembourg Customs and a representative of Air France, he had rolled up his sleeves and gone to work in a corner of the huge hangar where the five suspicious crates were being kept in the Customs zone of Findel airport.

"I couldn't say I was really surprised, given where the stuff was headed," Special Agent JD said later. "Still. It was a good haul." Inside the crates he and his Luxembourg colleagues found 3.2 metric tons of sensitive high-tech gear, with a declared value of $573,095. The "rather outdated piece of equipment" being shipped to the USSR by Aimé Richardt was in fact a Microetch 10 inch ion beam Milling System, used in the manufacture of computer chips. It was precisely to stop this type of equipment from reaching the Soviet military that Operation Exodus was set up in the first place. Indeed, microelectronics manufacturing equipment is top on the list of Western technologies the USSR has been trying to acquire through clandestine means over the past fifteen years. And the 55-year old Frenchman, Aimé Richardt, was one of the USSR's best suppliers. At least, until the Luxembourg seizure.

Playing by the rules

The equipment Richardt was trying to ship the Soviets was manufactured in the United States by a Long Island company called Veeco, and distributed in France by Veeco SA, whose headquarters are located in Gometz-le-Chatel in the suburbs of Paris. To confuse the trail leading back to the U.S., Richardt's "mailbox" company, Les Accessoires Scientifiques, purchased the equipment from another member of his network, La Physique Appliquée Industries (LPAI) in Grenoble, which slightly modified the machines before turning them over to the freight forwarder for final shipment to the USSR. Classified as "strategic technology" by a decree of the French government, export of these machines is tightly controlled in France. Licenses are required from the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of Foreign Affaires, and Customs. In certain particularly sensitive cases, exports must be approved by the Defense Ministry as well.

And yet, as the Director of Veeco S.A., Francis Steenbeke, told the 7th Chambre Correctionnelle in Luxembourg when the case came to court, these procedures were scrupulously "forgotten" by the exporter, Les Accessoires Scientifiques (LAS). Steenbeke testified that his company had clearly marked the invoice which accompanied the equipment to LPAI to show that it had not been approved for sale outside of France. But documents presented to the court showed that LPAI's invoice to LAS, the final exporter, simply dropped the export warning.. This convenient sleight of hand explains in part why the local Customs at Vesoul, where Richardt handled the Customs clearances, were so unsuspecting. Claude Ferry, of the company Ferry-Mougin which transported the goods for Richardt, still recalls the meeting with Vesoul Customs. "It went as smoothly as dropping a letter in the Post," he said. "You've got to understand that at the time, we had never even heard of COCOM. What a mess! Still, as far as I'm concerned, Richardt plays by the rules."

But whose rules? Richardt's client, V/O Technopromimport, was much more than an innocent "buying office," as Richardt and his lawyers liked to pretend. In fact, this state-run Foreign Trade Organization has provided convenient cover for a massive collection effort on the part of Soviet intelligence over the past fifteen years, to pillage the high-tech treasures of the West. Two of Technopromimport's Deputy Directors, Lev Pavlov and Artur N. Zolotarev, were expelled from Great Britain in 1971 for "activities unbecoming their diplomatic status" - a polite reference to spying. For their efforts, they have been rewarded by their respective intelligence agencies. Pavlov today holds a General's rank in the GRU, Soviet military intelligence, while Zolotarev is a KGB Colonel. Both are specialists in Western dual-use technologies. They were named to the board of Technopromimport in 1980, where they serve today as general staff officers in Gorbachev's Technology Wars. Aimé Richardt's "Soviet client" is thus no more nor less than a stand-in for the GRU and the KGB. Its principle task: help the Soviet military industrial establishment catch up to the West, by stealing Western technology secrets.

The Microetch ion engraver seized at Luxembourg's Findel Airport was indeed part of a much larger order, as Richardt pointed out to the French Customs. Contract number 56-08/5254/134 between Les Accessoires Scientifiques and V/O Technopromimport concerned an entire "bubble memory production facility" to be built in the USSR. But there is nothing innocent about "bubble" memories. On the contrary. These ultra-miniaturized, high-speed integrated circuits have absolutely no civilian applications. Since the late 1970s, military computers running on bubble memories have been used in NATO's MLRS multiple rocket launcher, its MILSTAR communications satellites, and the GRID tactical battlefield computers which have been purchased in large quantities by the U.S. Army. Bubble memories have several advantages over conventional computer chips which make them highly sought after by Western weapons developers. Besides their inherent ruggedness (a GRID laptop computer using bubble memories can be dropped off the back of a truck by a careless soldier and continue operating), they are nuclear "survivable," a quality which goes a long way toward explaining their presence on the Pentagon's Militarily Critical Technologies list - and why the Soviets are so keen on acquiring them. In the immense heat and Electromagnetic Pulse radiation given off by a nuclear explosion, conventional silicon chips simply melt down. The only computers, communications systems, or weapons which can "survive" a nuclear war are those built around bubble memories. And it is precisely this little-known fragility of conventional computer chips which led the Pentagon to develop bubble memories and, more recently, an even higher performance chip based on gallium arsenide. The Soviets lacked both these technologies... until the deliveries of the Frenchman, Aimé Richardt. Today, with Richardt's help, the Soviets today can manufacture both.

For Special Agent JD of the U.S. Customs Service, Richardt is a master in his trade. "Sure, there are other people currently operating and under investigation in France, but there's noone else in this country who could shine Richardt's shoes. No one is as professional, or as clean. You'll never see Richardt getting prosecuted under Article 80, Section 2-3 of the penal code [ie, espionage] When he signs a deal, he simply flies to Moscow., It's all out in the open. He's a brilliant businessman."

A Russophile among the Americans

Who is Aimé Richardt? French and American intelligence sources, who have been monitoring his activities for several years, admit that they have doubts as to his veritable identity, and speak of "enormous holes" in his past. Born the isolated foothills near the German border in 1934, Richardt left virtually no traces behind him until 1959, when he returned to marry the daughter of a local notable. "Richardt has no parents, no brothers or sisters that we can find; nor apparently has he done his military service," French government sources said. "His past appears as if erased by the Second World War," when Hitler's forces occupied the region where Richardt was born, falsifying, destroying, and altering the local archives. "As far as we are concerned, Richardt emerged from total obscurity in 1959."

For his few friends, Richardt appears somewhat less mysterious. "He's a self-made man," one of his wife's cousins who lives near him said. "He moved to Paris with his mother very young, and stayed to do his studies and to work." Richardt himself enjoys entertaining the mystery. Once the French newsweekly l'Express exposed his activities in a cover story dated October 16, 1987, he began to distill conflicting versions of his past in interviews with other French journalists. To a Le Figaro reporter, for instance, he explained that he came from a working class family, and "only discovered [his] vocation for science while in the military." And yet, neither friends nor family can recall Richardt having served in the French army, and this at a period - the colonial war in Algeria - when a young man's military service was not likely to go unnoticed.

Corpulent, a lover of good food and a teller of coarse stories, Richardt has all the trappings of the French provincial notable. And yet, the obscurity of his past continues to cast a shadow over his local notoriety. "Who is Aimé Richardt?" wondered a personal friend interviewed close to Richardt's residence in Luxeuil-les-Bains. "I've known him for fifteen years. But in the end, I don't know him at all. He's the type of person who never reveals himself. When we see each other, he tells jokes, he speaks of minor things. But never of business. He keeps his secrets to himself."

What secrets? To begin with, the key to his network of mailbox companies, in France and abroad. But also, the key to his personal fortune, which his banker, interviewed in Luxeuil-les-Bains, admitted was "considerable." Besides the "chateau" of Varigney, where he lives and domiciles his companies, Richardt also owns a four-storey townhouse in the provincial capital of Luxeuil, an apartment in Paris, and a yacht which he keeps on the French Riviera.

Richardt began his career as the European salesman of an American firm, specialized in high-technology fluids. At the age of 35, he enrolled in the University at Lyons, and later presented a doctoral thesis in Nuclear Physics. At least, this the version of his early career he offered to a French journalist, Philippe Hervieux, shortly after the L'Express cover story.

In fact, Richardt's connection to Inland Vacuum Industries Inc, of Churchville, New York, began much later. Why the falsification? "Aimé has a habit of saying such things, trying to increase his importance," a former boss, Steve Goldschine, believes. "He tends to alter the details to fit his purpose." Similarly, Richardt told the court in Luxembourg that he had been "President of Veeco France from 1958 to 1975," when in fact, Veeco France wasn't even incorporated until 1967! Before then, Richardt worked as a simple salesman for Veeco in Europe. If the money was not the best, it gave him first-hand experience of the high-tech marketplace which would prove invaluable later on. Richardt also speaks several languages, including excellent English and passable Russian, which he claims to have learned on his own - part of the self-man image he so carefully cultivates.

With the technological advances of the 1960s, Veeco soon specialized in micro-electronics manufacturing equipment, a rapidly expanding field, and Richardt followed them every step of the way. In 1967, Veeco set up its French subsidiary, and hired Richardt as a full time salesman. Business was so good that Richardt was able to move from his rented flat and build his own house in a residential suburb of Paris.

But in 1975, Veeco fired Aimé Richardt. Why? Steve Goldschine prefers not to go into the details: the Luxembourg case, in which his company was directly involved, left a bad taste in his mouth. "Let's just say that Richardt did not leave us in glory. Aimé has had a rather chequered career."

While at Veeco, Richardt made many trips to the U.S., and was able to familiarize himself with the U.S. semi-conductor industry. By the time he was fired by Veeco, he knew who made which type of specialized equipment, and how to go about purchasing it without arousing undue suspicions. It was precious knowledge for someone who was to supply one of the VPK's best "collectors," V/O Technopromimport.

Court documents in Luxembourg show that Richardt began working for the Soviets around 1973, when he organized the export of Veeco micro-electronics manufacturing equipment through a French company, La Physique Appliquée Industries (LPAI).

The date is worth noting. According to a well-known U.S. computer expert working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Dr. Lara Barker, this was precisely when the Soviets first realized they had a "computer gap" with the West, and were seeking "to close the technological gap between themselves and the U.S. in the integrated circuit/microcomputer industry."

According to Dr. Barker, the first Soviet attempt to illegally acquire semi-conductor manufacturing equipment occurred in 1974-75. It was orchestrated by a pair of German businessmen whose names have since become indelibly associated with the term "technobandit": Richard Müller and Volker Nast. Müller's exploits have been the subject of numerous newspaper articles and books Believed by many counter-espionage experts to be an "illegal" Soviet agent infiltrated into the West, Müller's last known attempt to procure embargoed Western technologies was broken up in 1983, when a delivery of VAX 11/782 mainframe computers was seized in Sweden. At his peak, Müller operated some 60 front companies in half a dozen countries, and travelled on any of a variety of passports. When things got hot in one place he would simply pick up stakes and set up shop in another country. So far, both he and his partner, Volker Nast, have eluded arrest.

Another high-tech ring mentioned by Dr. Barker in his Senate testimony was led by Werner J. Bruchhausen in 1978-80. Working with suppliers in California's Silicon Valley, Bruchhausen set up an entire computer chip manufacturing plant in the USSR for Elektronorgtekhnika (Elorg) V/O, another Soviet "buying office." On the run for years, thumbing his nose at U.S. Customs during surrealistic television interviews on the BBC, Bruchhausen was finally arrested in May 1985 and extradited to the U.S., where he was sentenced to 15 years in jail on March 30, 1987.

"We delude ourselves if we think the Soviets enter the black market in search of strategic components in a helter-skelter style, buying up dual-use commodities without rhyme or reason," Dr. Barker told the U.S. Senate. "The truth of the matter is that the Soviets and their surrogates buy nothing they don't have specific, well-defined needs for. They know exactly what they want - right down to the model number - and what they want is part of a carefully crafted design."

In the case of Bruchhausen and Müller, that design was "the purchase of semi-conductor manufacturing plants," absolutely essential if Soviet weapons development was not to fall irremediably behind the West.

What Barker did not say - and, in 1982, probably did not know - was that the Frenchman Aimé Richardt was selling precisely the same type of equipment to the USSR at the same time as Müller and Bruchhausen and other notorious "technobandits." Court documents show that Richardt first began to deliver ion implanters used in semi-conductor manufacturing in 1973 - and with French government approval, to boot! - and did not stop for more than fourteen years. His "BIF-1" and "BIF-2" contracts with Technopromimport involved entire production lines which, in 1986, were supposed to lead to an $80 million project to build a large-scale bubble memory factory for the Soviet military. As Dr. Barker put it, the Soviets "showed no interest in purchasing production equipment that was not state of the art. They showed very good taste." And that taste was evident in the equipment delivered by Aimé Richardt.

The biggest difference between Richardt and Richard Müller or Werner Bruchhausen is that Richardt has managed to act with impunity. Some believe he has benefitted from active complicity within the French government. This is why his case is sometimes referred to as "the French Scandal."

Burlingame

On April 23, 1986, the U.S. Customs struck again. Acting on inside information, they seized a second Richardt cargo headed for the USSR via France, this time at Burlingame airport in California. The equipment seized was worth a mere $233,000. But it had the effect of getting Richardt, LAS, and his subcontractor, LPAI, on the Department of Commerce Denial List. This meant that any American company caught selling U.S. technology to Richardt could be prosecuted under U.S. law. It was an effective deterrent.

"We got a temporary denial order issued against Richardt," said Mark Menafee, a strategic export controls officer at the Department of Commerce. "This procedure is designed to counter the threat of an immanent export control violation and can only be renewed if we prevent serious evidence." The two-month temporary denial order against Richardt was renewed six times starting on April 23, 1986. The Frenchman's case was considered "extremely serious" by the DoC. But because he had not been brought to trial in the U.S., he could not be permanently black-listed. Officials would not rule out the possibility of a sealed warrant against him which would make Richardt liable to arrest if he ever set foot on U.S. soil - a mistake Richardt has been careful not to make.

Black list, clean rooms

Before Richardt was blacklisted, he was one of the best customers of a California manufacturer of semi-conductor manufacturing equipment, the Quad Group. He also bought sophisticated U.S.-built equipment from Pacific Western, Rudolph Research Corporation, Veeco, and Technics. Since the Burlingame seizure, he was forced to go elsewhere.

Richardt's relationship with the Quad Group went back many years. Documents made available during this investigation show that he was already negotiating major contracts with this Santa Barbara company in 1980. On October 1, 1981, Richardt signed a contract with Quad for "a modular production unit" for bubble memories, which he billed to Technopromimport for $4.2 million.

Quad was the primary supplier for this pilot production plant. According to the contract, Quad served as Richardt's "agent" in the U.S., and for more than two years contacted U.S. manufacturers on his behalf, buying embargoed microprocessor manufacturing equipment, and shipping it over to France. In France, Richardt and his primary accomplice, LPAI, changed the documents and altered the equipment, then shipped the embargoed goods on to the USSR without a care.

In 1983, Richardt began negotiations with the Russians for the second phase of the bubble memory plant. This contract, known as "BIF-2," covered four more Class 100 "clean rooms," mini-production cells where highly-specialized workers manufactured computer chips in a dust-free environment. For $6 million, Richardt supplied the VPK with bubble memory production equipment which is today in use in the USSR - exclusively by the Soviet military.

Richardt went to Moscow on May 17, 1984 to sign the BIF-2 contract with Technopromimport. The Soviet intention was excessively clear: to acquire not only the equipment, but the know-how necessary to begin bubble memory production. Before each new phase of the contract, Soviet technicians were supposed to come to France for advanced training, which Richardt billed at $187,000 per four week session. The "classes" were held in a high-tech center on the outskirts of Grenoble, at the headquarters of LPAI. This was such an integral part of the technology transferred by Richardt to the Soviets that one of the four BIF-2 clean rooms was initially installed in France to train the Soviet technicians. Because of the relatively high-cost of the program, Richardt claims the Soviets cancelled the training segment in 1987. In fact, French counter-espionage sources say, they stopped only after the DST tried to recruit visiting Soviet "technicians" in Grenoble.

The fact that the Quad Group was obliged to cut of its lucrative commercial arrangement with its excellent French client, Aimé Richardt, in June 1986, was only a momentary problem for the Frenchman. As he explained himself, when contacted in Paris after returning from one of his numerous business trips to Moscow, "the main result of this affair is that we have stopped buying equipment in the United States. Now we buy in Europe. The League of Concerned Scientists - which certainly cannot be suspected of pro-Soviet sentiments - has estimated that U.S. business loses $9 billion every year because of this stupid COCOM policy. I couldn't care less. I have already made my decision. We don't buy anything from the Americans any more. Not even a pencil!"

Despite the lapidary formulation, Richardt's statements strayed far from the truth. He would continue to buy from the U.S., but in a far more roundabout fashion than before.

On the copy of the BIF-2 contract made available to the author, Richardt or one of his associates had already pencilled in alternate sources for the equipment previously supplied by Quad. On page 1, Quad Group was replaced by the French subsidiary of the Japanese company, Rigaku. On page 2, Semy Engineering of Montpellier replaced Pacific Western (Semy would later go bankrupt largely because of its connections to Richardt). Other "new" suppliers pencilled onto the contract were LPAI, Quantronix-France, Veeco S.A. (which continued to import U.S. equipment), Nikon-France, Hitachi France, Ferrofluides (West Germany), Karl Suss France, and Tempress France. Asked to explain his continued business with the USSR by L'Express, Richardt replied smugly: "I work for a large French bank. My job is to export."

And Richardt continued to export, despite increasing problems with Customs and the COCOM regulations. It wasn't because the complexity of the regulations confounded him. On the contrary. Richardt spent nights poring over the COCOM rulebooks, examining court cases involving technobandits convicted in the U.S., searching for loopholes which would allow him to continue his lucrative business with the USSR. To their astonishment, the French counter-espionage agents who raided Richardt's headquarters at Varigney in 1987 discovered box after box of obscure public documents on American technology security policy Richardt had acquired through the Freedom of Information Act. This was a legal procedure used to declassify government documents which was so complex that few American journalists even mastered it. And yet, here was a French businessman who had clearly used it to procure information which he found useful for his high-technology trade with the VPK. The DST also discovered that Richardt had an on-line computer link to U.S. high-tech data bases such as the DoD's ELISA, which provides daily updates on high-tech export license applications.

Going through the U.S. documents, Richardt discovered numerous tricks for bypassing the COCOM rules. One of these was exposed in the Luxembourg case, when Richardt's principle front company, LAS, acted as a French importer of U.S. equipment (which was totally legal), then re-exported it without declaring its U.S. origin (which was not). Later, when the French authorities began to get wind of this sleight of hand, LAS would sell the equipment to other companies controlled by Richardt or by his powerful partners at Sogexport, a trading company owned by the State-controlled bank, Société Général. Their mission was to change the labels on the equipment and alter the documents to disguise the U.S. origin, before shipping the equipment on to the USSR. These complex, and costly, procedures fooled French Customs for years, and gave rise to the expression "the Richardt Nebula" within the French administration, to describe the complex mix of front companies and official complicities which allowed Richardt to continue his traffic virtually unhindered.

The Network

On April 13, 1975, shortly after leaving Veeco-France, Richardt began laying the groundwork for his Network. With a small core of associates which has scarcely varied until today, he set up his first company, Les Accessoires Scientifiques, which he ran out of his home in the Paris suburb of Fontenay-les-Briis. Among the associates were André Noirot, who serves today as a director of Sogexport and of several other Richardt companies; Roger Locrai, who heads LPAI in Grenoble; an accountant, Christian Duverdier, who first met Richardt at Veeco in 1967 and still works for him today; and an American named Raymond D. Mathis, from Long Beach, California.

LAS, as it was generally called, was for many years the center of the Network, and was set up from the start as a trading company for scientific equipment and instruments and related services. In 1987, the company statutes were expanded to include "all industrial, commercial, or financial operations" relating to scientific equipment. In other words, LAS could not only buy and sell high-tech equipment, it could buy and sell companies trading in high-tech equipment as well, making it a perfect front in what was to become an elaborate shell game.

Two years after he set up LAS in 1975, Richardt created a second trading company with a different American partner. Inland Europe SARL, incorporated on November 29, 1977, was set up as an equal partnership between Richardt and Michael H. Meyer, the President of Inland Vacuum Industries of 35 Howard Avenue, Churchville, New York. Besides marketing scientific equipment, the new company was a chartered sales agent for Inland's wide array of high technology lubricants, including silicone fluids and greases. On the surface, it was an innocuous activity. But because of the extreme purity of the lubricating oils needed for the high temperature ovens used to "bake" silicon wafers, many of Inland's products were embargoed under COCOM items IL 1702, IL 1755, etc. Hence, Aimé Richardt's interest in gaining unhindered access to them Without these oils, even the best chip manufacturing equipment in the world would grind to a halt.

In 1982, Richardt's wife inherited the family Chateau in Varigney, a five-hour drive from Paris - and even further from the prying eyes of COCOM. In July, Richardt transferred his companies to his new home, registering them at the local courthouse in the provincial sous-préfecture of Lure.

At the same time, Richardt expanded his contacts with the Société Général's export branch, Sogexport, and succeeded in bringing Sogexport director, Christian Amalric, onto the LAS Board the next year. Winning the official cover that only a state-owned bank could provide was a stroke of genius on Richardt's part. And the need was urgent: in June 1983, a U.S. Customs attaché from Paris travelled down to Varigney and visited Richardt's chateau, asking him to provide information on his contracts with Technopromimport. Feeling the heat, Richardt hired a U.S. attorney, Robert A. Blackstone, known as a skilled defender in other COCOM-related cases, to plead his cause with the Department of Commerce. He also lodged a complaint with French Customs, which up until then had defended his Soviet business. By winning the Société Général to his cause, Richardt believed he would be protected by an impenetrable shield. Any U.S. move against him would quickly escalate into an affair of state.

Nevertheless, Richardt hedged his bets. In 1985, he sold LAS for a handsome profit to Sogexport, and became a well-paid Commercial Engineer for the state-owned export house. In the meantime, he bought up a series of other shell companies which could be used for various business deals with the Eastern block. These included Neyco SARL, Decrona SA, and Sedame SA, which were purchased from 1984-87. Richardt's principle associates in all of these were Amalric, the Director of Sogexport, and two other Sogexport Board members, André Noirot, and a French baroness of Russian descent, Axelle de Saint-Affrique (née Tikhmenev).

When LAS was put on the Department of Commerce black list in 1986, for instance, Richardt simply transferred the Soviet contracts to the other shell companies, which at that time were unknown to the U.S. authorities. To keep business discrete, he appointed his 23-year old daughter as General Manager of one of the companies, Neyco, which took over the most lucrative contracts. From Soviet sales which Richardt announced at nearly $40 million, LAS's turnover shrank to barely $1 million by 1988. The rest had been farmed out to Neyco, Sedame, and Decrona.

Shortly before LAS was blacklisted, Richardt received an American visitor at his home in Varigney. Concerned by the Luxembourg seizure, the American rushed over to France to settle accounts with one of his customers. His name was Ken Purser, and he ran a company called ION-X in Newbury, Massachussetts. He drove the five hours from Paris to the Haute Saone in a rented car and spent the night.

ION-X was one of the Network's best suppliers of ion engravers. When Richardt was forced to break relations with the Quad Group in California, for instance, ION-X came to the rescue. Later, Ken Purser would even testify in Richardt's favor before a Grenoble court, presenting himself as a University Professor specialized in micro-electronics (and not as one of Richardt's suppliers).

But despite the court cases, the black-listing, and the sudden exposure of his dealings with Technopromimport, Richardt's business continued to boom. So at least he wanted the press to believe. Speaking to journalists as he entered a Grenoble courtroom on February 28, 1989, where he stood accused of COCOM violations by the French Customs, Richardt claimed that he had just returned from Moscow where he "withdrew commercial bids worth $50 million" at the request of the Société Générale. Things were beginning to get hot.

Gallium arsenide, the summum of Western military technology

And for good cause. U.S. intelligence had learned that Richardt had concluded a major new contract with Technopromimport, which would make his previous deals look pale. If it went through, the VPK stood to get one of the most sensitive strategic technologies of the 1980s, whose secret had been preciously guarded by the West - essentially, the U.S. - until then. It concerned a new type of computer chip based on a substrate called gallium arsenide, which the Pentagon hoped would make it possible to build faster, smaller, and more powerful computers than ever before. GaAs research was heavily subsidized by the Pentagon because of it was believed to hold the key to President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative.

One of SDI's major stumbling blocks was the so-called "battle management" software which had to coordinate hundreds of orbiting satellites, sensors, and thousands of rockets - and make them work - during an all-out Soviet missile attack. With existing technologies, the computer software would require millions of lines of programming, taking millions of man-hours to develop - without ever being certain that it would function correctly. To convince sceptics that the battle management problem could be licked, General James Abramson, head of the SDI Organization, liked to show up for Congressional hearings with a specially-designed attache case. Inside, he said, was a technological marvel that would make the software problem a thing of the past. It was a revolutionary main-frame computer with enough memory to contain the entire battle-management program in its hardware, in a series of simple commands. Dozens of these ultra-miniaturized computers would be lifted into space where they would control their own satellites and missiles independently of any central system. The secret of this new marvel: gallium arsenide chips.

In November 1986, instead of appearing before the 7th Criminal Court of Luxembourg, as he was scheduled to do, Aimé Richardt was in Moscow negotiating the gallium arsenide deal with the Institute of Solid Physics of the University of Lvov, one of the many research laboratories working for the Soviet military-industrial complex.. Pentagon officials acknowledged that Richardt was getting ready to deliver the Soviets a technology "of immense military and strategic value." Technically known as Molecular Beam Epitaxy, or MBE, it was the mass production process (the chronic Soviet weakness) for gallium arsenide wafers. Once the DIA learned of Richardt's new contract, it began a race against the clock to keep this vital state-of-the-art technology from falling into Soviet hands. For once they had the wafers, the Soviets could "engrave" GaAs chips.

The DIA telexed its French counterparts shortly after the crucial stage of Richardt's negotiations in November 1986. This telex, which was made available to the author, warned that the first phase of the contract, signed in March 1986 and worth $7.2 million, had probably already been implemented. This concerned a "pilot production unit for the study of gallium arsenide" and the "manufacture of small quantities of custom-designed computer chips." The French were taken aback. At first they thought the DIA was referring to U.S.-built equipment sold to Richardt by ION-X, and for which Richardt had applied for export licenses for the USSR. But they were wrong.

Gallium arsenide technology was so new, and so secret, that America's NATO's partners were peeved that the U.S. had never shared it with them. In June 1987, the French Armaments Directorate convened a conference of European R&D officials in Paris, and proposed they jointly invest some $80 million in GaAs research as part of the Eureka European technology initiative. Until then, only a handful of American firms possessed GaAs technologies, and they were the all among the Pentagon's top contractors: TRW, Rockwell, Westinghouse, Honeywell, and Hughes. It would be several years before GaAs would have civilian applications. Even so, the world market for GaAs was expected to reach several billion dollars/year by 1992. If Richardt succeeded, the Soviets would be in a good position to master this new, strategic, and potentially lucrative technology.

Although Richardt and his "boss," Christian Amalric, initially denied they had exported GaAs to the USSR when confronted in interviews, Richardt later nuanced his position. "We have just presented the [Industry] Ministry with a request to export this type of material," he told the Est Republicain on October 19, 1987, but "I have never received a reply." The French licensing officers interviewed shortly afterwards exploded. "You'd better believe he never received a reply! Richardt wanted us to go to COCOM on this one. Can you imagine? We would have been hooted right out the room!"

Where did Richardt think he could acquire GaAs technology? The DIA was on his trail, he had only recently been dropped from the DoC blacklist. His name was well known to both the U.S. and French licensing authorities. It was not going to be easy for him to approach American high-tech companies without being recognized.

But Richardt had no intention of turning to the U.S.. His "source" - or at least, so he hoped - was a 48-year old French researcher of Vietnamese heritage, who had worked on a GaAs project for Thomson-CSF. His name: Linh T. Nuyen. And it was Linh himself who offered the following account of how Aimé Richardt was hoping to use his services to equipment the Soviet Armed Forces with the equipment needed to break NATO's most secret radar codes..

A French source

In 1979, Linh headed a research team at Thomson's Central Research Laboratory in the outskirts of Paris, which succeeded in developing a gallium arsenide chip called a high mobility transistor, or HEMT. Like many brilliant researchers eager to cash in on their success, Linh soon became frustrated working for an industrial behemoth. He dreamed of "living an American-style adventure," and struck out on his own in February 1986 along with two fellow researchers. With the blessings (and a small grant) from the French Armaments Directorate, the three semi-conductor wizards set up their own company in the Paris suburb of Les Ulis, which they called Picogiga. Today, Picogiga employs twenty persons and sells its gallium arsenide wafers to chip manufacturers. In the first five months of 1989, the new company did more than a million dollars worth of business.

"It's true that Richardt approached me," Picogiga President Linh Nuyen said. "I've known him for a couple of years. He used to be one of our suppliers of high technology oils and accessories when I was at Thomson. Richardt came to see me sometime at the end of 1986, shortly after we started up Picogiga. He said he wanted to market our products in the Soviet Union. I told him: go ahead, just make sure you have an export license first. I never believed he would get one."

Did Linh encourage Richardt's commercial instincts, or merely play along? "I gave him spec sheets and a price list for our products - no secret about it. Richardt said the Soviets were more interested the gallium arsenide wafers themselves than in the manufacturing process, which was fairly complex. He still hopes to export them to the USSR. He calls me from time to time telling me that with perestroika we ought to start up a joint venture with the Soviets. Who knows?"

Linh Nuyen is no naif. He is fully aware of the strategic value of gallium arsenide, and voluntarily admits that "in the Soviet Union, there is absolutely no civilian application for this type of technology. Not one." He has worked as a subcontractor for the Pentagon's vast MIMIC (millimeter wave microwave monolithic integrated circuits) program. His company was awarded a prize for excellence by the American jury for its work on GaAs at COMDEF '88 in Washington, where the most advanced defense electronics companies in the West get together to define the state-of-the-art in their field. "One of the most critical applications for GaAs technology is in military radars," Linh said, "where you need higher and higher frequencies to keep the enemy from detecting your emissions. With GaAs, you can get frequencies of several gigahertz, whereas today you're talking in the megahertz range."

The military interest in GaAs radars - a critical "stealth" technology - is therefore enormous. The greatest weakness of today's combat aircraft derives from their very sophistication. The moment they turn on their radar sensors (to detect enemy aircraft, or to "lock-on" to a target) they reveal their position, like someone shouting in a cave. The high frequencies obtained with gallium arsenide make the radar emissions more discrete: they turn the shout into an ultrasonic whistle, which only a similarly tuned ear can pick up. Once the Soviets master this new technology - with Aimé Richardt's help? - NATO stands to lose one of the most important components of its "qualitative edge" over the Warsaw Pact: its overwhelming superiority in battlefield radars.

The Grenoble caper

Since the seizure in Luxembourg, Richardt's troubles with Customs have only increased. But he has fought them tooth and nail ever since. After fourteen court appearances stretched over nearly three years, Richardt's lawyers got criminal charges against him dismissed on December 3, 1987. Still, the court upheld the Luxembourg Customs decision to seize the Microetch ion engraver Richardt was trying to ship to the USSR, because of its "strategic" nature.

Other men would have called it a day. Not Aimé Richardt. He sent his lawyers back to their books, and on April 11, 1989 they won a decision from the Luxembourg Appeals Court which not only lifted the seizure order, but condemned Customs to pay LAS extensive damages. Customs appealed, and the case continues to drag on. At this rate, Richardt's machine could remain in a Luxembourg Customs shed for some time to come.

In January 1988, the French administration finally moved against Richardt, acting on direct orders from the Minister of State for Economy and Finance, Edouard Balladur (Prime Minister Jacques Chirac's right-hand man). With pusillanimous discretion, Customs opened proceedings against Richardt for strategic export control violations... and leaked the news to the press only hours before a high-level COCOM meeting was scheduled to start in Versailles, where a tense U.S. delegation had come intending to call the French to order on Richardt and Forest-Liné. .

Sources within Balladur's cabinet said the file against Richardt was "incredible. We've got documents up to the ceiling." But despite the fact the French Customs code was beefed up in March 1988, for the first time providing a three-year jail sentence for export control violations, the case was allowed to drop.

One case which was not dropped was developed by a small, local Customs unit in the town of Saint-Egrève, near Grenoble.

On December 23, 1988, the freight-forwarder Calberson International submitted a "definitive export form," No 424761, to the Saint-Egrève customs on behalf of their client, Neyco S.A. Neyco was a full-fledged member of the Richardt "network," officially managed by Richardt's daughter. Once again, the equipment Richardt was trying to ship was related to computer chip manufacturing, and once again the Soviet client was V/O Technopromimport. As far as Neyco was concerned, the "particle accelerator" it had sold the Russians for some $741,000 was "free for export." But Aimé Richardt could see the writing on the wall.

"As an additional precaution," his lawyer later told the court, Neyco's export declaration was accompanied by reports from two "independent" experts intended to prove that the "particle accelerator" was not subject to strategic export controls. One of the experts was Richardt's American supplier, Ken Purser, the President of Ion-X company of Newbury, Mass. Another was a distinguished French researcher Richardt had come to know through his commercial activities on behalf of American firms.

But this time, the procedure backfired. Instead of reassuring the Customs officers, the expertise made them suspicious. They impounded Richardt's equipment on the spot, and hauled it to a nearby Army camp. Four days later, the crates were opened in Richardt's presence, and a long legal battle began.

Richardt was not like other "ten percenters," as U.S. Customs officials liked to call them. Instead of fleeing confrontation, or moving from country to country once his operations attracted the attention of the local authorities, he chose to fight the system through the Courts. In Grenoble, his lawyers disputed the "strategic" nature of the machine that Customs seized, and called in a bevy of technical experts to determine whether it was a "heavy ion generator" (which was embargoed by COCOM), or a "particle accelerator" (which was not) . Richardt claimed to have downgraded the machine to meet the export rules.

He had good reason to do so. From May to October 1986, Richardt made no fewer than eleven export license applications, worth some $50 million, to ship embargoed ion implanters to micro-processor manufacturing plants in the USSR. So extensive was the business, one French licensing official said, that "Richardt has become the Soviets' principal source of ion implanters." Most of these machines were probably intended for the third phase of the BIF contract, the large capacity bubble memory production plant Richardt hoped to build in the USSR - the same bubble memories that Steve Bryen said were being used by the Soviets to upgrade the guidance systems of their ballistic missile fleet..

When the licenses were rejected, Richardt came up with a solution: he had his American suppliers, Tanditron and Ion-X, directly apply to the Department of Commerce in Washington. As luck would have it, the DoC approved a sale of normally-embargoed ion implanters to Richardt in August 1987, despite his presence on the Denial List only three months earlier. Waving this paper, Richardt went to see the same officials who had turned down his earlier applications. "When we saw that DoC paper, we were pissed," one French COCOM officer said. "What do you want us to do, be more royalist than the King?"

Political support

The Richardt case is considered something of a "national shame" by the high-ranking French officials who handle COCOM affairs. "As long as Richardt runs free, he continues to damage our credibility," one official said. "He's definitely a thorn in our side," said an official in another ministry. Without exception, the men whose job it is to police French strategic exports consider Richardt to be a prime target for their enforcement efforts. He has been taken to court by Customs, investigated by the DST, his export license applications are closely tracked by the Ministry of Industry, the Quai d'Orsay, and the Ministry of Defense. And yet, he continues to slip through the net. Why?

"Technobandits like Richardt," said Dominique Lamoureux, who heads the Strategic Export Control unit at the French defense electronics giant, Thomson-CSF, "tend to cloud the real issues facing COCOM. These are technical, economic, but also political. I wonder whether all the publicity this affair has received isn't in fact intended to destabilize the real efforts undertaken by the French government to set up a balanced and efficient system of controls."

In other words, the more headlines Richardt's disputes with the COCOM authorities receive, the less credible the regulations seem. And the more other potential technobandits may be tempted to follow the same path.

Already in 1987, the Quai d'Orsay formally asked Richardt "to reorient his activities, because they do not coincide with the international obligations of France," officials said. But Richardt continued nevertheless. For instance, his most recent project, which was submitted to the French authorities for approval in early 1989, concerns building an assembly line in the USSR for French-built microcomputers.

How does he do it? First of all, Richardt is a skilled bureaucratic fighter, who knows how to profit from the ambiguities in French and European export control legislation. And he is stubborn. Anyone else would have given a sigh of relief at the end of 1987 when the Luxembourg court exonerated him of criminal wrongdoing in the Microetch case, and considered changing the focus of his business activities. Not Aimé Richardt.

Richardt has also taken to harassing journalists. Shortly after l'Express exposed his relations to Technopromimport in October 1987, Richardt's lawyers sued the magazine for more than $1.3 million. Although he lost the first leg of the suit, Richardt has already appealed, and the case could drag on for many months to come. But whether he wins or loses is of lesser importance than the lawsuits themselves. Richardt's principle aim is to discourage the publicity-shy enforcement authorities, and to deter the press.

Some, such as Special Agent JD, believe that Richardt's intentions are even more nefarious. "Richardt's real aim is to attack COCOM, to weaken the control regime itself and strike a blow against the fragile web of solidarity uniting the Western countries" on the touchy subject of strategic export controls. At the French Ministry of Industry, which regularly refuses Richardt's export license applications, his case is considered unique. "This is the first we've ever had someone like this directly attack the export control system."

Richardt has actively sought approval for his activities in French political circles. Anti-American sentiment can be found from left to right of the French political spectrum, and Richardt has played it to the hilt. The U.S. uses COCOM as an instrument of economic warfare, he argues, to sabotage French exports to the USSR. Richardt's backers are so well-placed, he brandishes them like a calling card. "If we have succeeded in obtaining [political] support," he casually remarked in one interview, "it's a sign that our politicians are more intelligent than our bureaucrats."

Interestingly enough, it is the French right which most actively supports Richardt in his battle against the French administration. For instance, Roland Nungesser, an RPR Deputy with links to former rightist Premier Jacques Chirac, personally decorated Richardt on October 6, 1986 for his contributions to the French export economy. Nungesser, who also happens to be the President of the Franco-Soviet Chamber of Commerce, has helped Richardt in his struggle with the French administration. Support has also been forthcoming from the France-USSR Friendship Society, which regularly sponsors tours of the Soviet Union for politicians, journalists, and businessmen.

Another right-wing politician who has actively come to Richardt's aide is Robert-André Vivien, also an RPR Deputy. Vivien's brother-in-law once worked as a freight-forwarder for Richardt, and Vivien himself has championed Richardt's cause in an appeal presented before the French Supreme Court in 1986, intended to free up export licenses blocked by the administration. According to government sources directly involved in the Richardt case, Vivien "personally intervened in Richardt's favor.with our office on several occasions. Other times he did so through intermediaries."

Richardt's "friends" have also big-footed at the Quai d'Orsay, the lead agency for COCOM policy in France. This time Richardt's guardian angel was a member of Finance Minister Pierre Bérégovoy's cabinet, who went so far as to attempt to force the premature retirement of "Richardt's worst enemy" at the Quai. After months of coming under fire, the official was forced from Paris to a foreign posting, far from COCOM responsibilities.

Richardt likes to deny responsibility for any wrong-doing under the pretense that all his activities have been "covered" by his current employer, the state-owned bank, Société Général. And he is right.

But the truth goes much farther. Richardt's "cover" is also provided by French politicians, even judges, in pivotal positions. So troubling, and inexplicable, is Aimé Richardt's continued impunity that many of those investigating his relations with the USSR believe he is not the simple French businessman that he pretends.