Deep Intel on the Smugglers Who Keep Iran's F-14s Flying

between 1972 and 2006 U.S Navy F-14 Crews shot down five enemy aircraft during that same time Iranian Air Force F-14 Crews scored 159 kills and that was coming from a depleted regime under heavy sanctions at times flying no more than a few dozen planes isolated from western parts of Technology Iran desperately needed to keep its Fleet of f-14s flying and so they turned to a network of Smugglers spies and black market profiteers some of them within U.S borders but before we explore that Network let's quickly review how Iran the only other country ever to operate the Tomcat besides the United States got the F-14 in the first place in the early 70s the Shah was feeling threatened by his neighbors to the west and the north namely Iraq and Russia he wanted a modern fighter that was more capable than the F4 Phantoms that his Air Force had his good friend and Ally President Nixon offered him whatever he wanted and the choice came down to a fly off at Andrews Air Force Base between the f 14 Tomcat and the F-15 Eagle the shaw wound up ordering 80 Tomcats along with 714 long-range Phoenix missiles and 10 years of Maintenance support from American technicians the U.S also agreed to train Iranian Tomcat Crews so beginning in 1974 those Crews traveled to NAS Miramar in San Diego to learn from the U.S Navy instructors as regular viewers of the channel know we use a lot of acronyms here so here's another one VPN which stands for virtual private Network and in this case the VPN I'm referring to is this episode's sponsor Atlas VPN top sniper security Specialists and I.T Engineers created Atlas VPN to make the internet accessible and secure for everyone right now you can join the more than 6 million users worldwide by taking advantage of the best VPN deal on the market 1.83 per month plus three months extra and all with a 30-day money-back guarantee let's say you're on a business trip or vacation and your location won't let you watch your favorite show on Netflix Atlas VPN allows you to tailor your access regionally regardless of where you actually are in the world atlas VPN also lets you search the web without Google or other search engines tracking your activity it also blocks all the malicious links ads and trackers and notifies you when someone is trying to steal your data and Atlas VPN protects all your devices with a single subscription protect your privacy and get all the other benefits of Atlas VPN for the ridiculously low price of a dollar 83 per month plus three months extra and all this comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee so click the link in the episode description below and also pin to the top of the comments and hurry because this is a limited time offer those Crews return to Iran as what would be considered the Vanguard of their country's Air Force but in 1979 the shaw was overthrown the Ayatollah Khomeini took control and the Islamic Republic of Iran seized the U.S embassy in Tehran holding 52 Embassy staffers hostage for more than a year initially the Ayatollah didn't trust his Elite fighter pilots he ordered the fr 14s grounded and jailed many of the crews but in September of 1980 Saddam Hussein invaded Iran sending six divisions of troops across the border supported by his Air Force Iraq's soviet-made aircraft began pummeling positions across Iran and at that point the Iranian clerics figured out that the Shah's well-trained fighter pilots and radar intercept officers shouldn't be sitting in jail while Grumman had given the Iranian ground Crews hundreds of hours of training on the F-14 maintenance the manufacturer had deliberately withheld some information following the revolution many ground crewmen had defected and American technicians sabotaged some of the Phoenix missiles on their way out but in spite of that the Iranian Tomcats were flying the first ever combat kill in an F-14 was scored on September 7 1980 when an Iranian Tomcat gunned an Iraqi mi-25 helicopter as the war continued in the late 80s Iranian f-14s dominated the Iraqi soviet-made mig-21s and mig-23s but in spite of that air superiority until sources show that as the war of attrition war on the Iranian Air Force suffered from a supply chain that came apart slowly and then quickly remember as I've described in great detail on a number of episodes on the channel the F-14 is at once a technological Marvel and a maintenance challenge it has a lot of moving Parts the wings not only have flaps slats and spoilers they sweep the engine inlets have variable geometry ramps the canopy requires a Charged nitrogen bottle to open and close the crew's breathing system requires liquid oxygen bottles the 3000 psi flight control system is finicky and prone to hydraulic leaks and the Pratt Whitney tf-30 engines designed for the Air Force F-111 and shoehorned into the Tomcat as a pentagon cost saving measure are notoriously unreliable and demand A well-stocked parts bin to keep them working safely at first the Iranians managed to keep 60 of their 79 airframes in basic operational condition but soon that number was more like 40 in 1982 Iran declared a self-sufficiency Jihad recruiting engineers and technicians to build simpler Parts like brake discs and tires but the f-14's AUG 9 radar and other unique avionics required components that were beyond what the self-sufficiency jihadas could conjure up domestically ironically one of the earliest suppliers to the Iranian Air Force were Israelis in spite of the fact that the Iranian regime had cut off all ties with Israel in 1980 and publicly referred to Israel as a Zionist entity still in the early 1980s independent Israeli arms Brokers were able to flip F-14 Parts they'd secured from American dealers at high prices to Iranian customers Iran was also sponsoring Hezbollah a fundamentalist militia based in Lebanon and when Hezbollah began firing rockets inside Israel's borders the Israeli Channel closed and if an Israeli supplier was a strange betfellow the second supplier was even stranger the Reagan Administration part of the infamous Iran Contra Scandal where Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North who is working on president Reagan's staff secretly diverted money earned in the sale of arms to the Iranian regime to fund a secret and illegal effort to overthrow the government of Nicaragua included providing F-14 parts to the Iranian Air Force once the Scandal broke in the news in 1987 Colonel North was fired President Reagan went on national TV to do damage control and Iran's F-14 supply chain was cut off again now out of secret foreign government sources Iran turned to a network of underground arms dealers and Smugglers who exploited a market for military aircraft parts that was surprisingly unregulated enter two Americans who assumed responsibility for enforcing the U.S aircraft Parts embargo San diego-based David panchetti who was part of the defense criminal investigation service and U.S customs agent Wendy dwart in a recent Popular Mechanics article writer Stephen Witt describes the pair as the Mulder and Scully of the Iran embargo pinchetti and dwart became aware of the illicit trade as early as 1998 and from the start panchetti was a star astonished by the stupidity of the U.S military surplus disposal approach most parts were disposed of through public auctions run by an obscure Federal agency called the defense reutilization and marketing service the Navy had all these very expensive components panchetti told wit they're not really flying the Tomcat anymore but they still put them into the system and the only country that is flying the Tomcat was Iran in March of 1998 the agents arrested iranian-born parvis Lobby in his home in Long Island charging him with attempting to buy up spare parts for the tf-30 engines and ship them to Iran via the Netherlands Lobby got five years in prison plus a 125 thousand dollar fine later that year an aircraft Parts vendor in San Diego told the agents that some guys in California had requested price information for the parts used only on the F-14 as a result they arrested saheed humayuni a naturalized Canadian from Iran and Yu Ling Fung a Malaysian citizen Homa uni worked a quiet job at the low local Oil Company in Bakersfield California in his spare time he faxed requests to aircraft Parts Brokers seeking price quotes for military components when the parts arrived humauni would sign for them using the Alias Sid Hamilton Parts he ordered included F-14 air duct intake seals a harness for an F-14 fuel indicator components for the ejection seat and even a portion of an F-14 canopy to the agent's Eternal frustration deliveries often came with an official Federal warning that the part was under export control panchetti endorse investigation revealed that humauni's brother saroosh based in London was shuttling money between Bakersfield and Tehran using a front company called multi-core limited but sharous was clumsy and he'd been investigated by U.S customs before in Bakersfield Shaheed humayuni had been more careful and may have been operating the scheme for years after securing a part humayuni would scrub off any labeling that would identify its military Origins and then then place it in a storage locker using a rented mailbox he'd then shipped apart to Singapore while filing a false customs declaration claiming the parts were either low value civilian Aviation components or simple consumer electronics from there the parts made their way to Iran with the assistance of sharous singapore-based girlfriend panchetti and Duart arrested Homa uni in December of 2000 after watching him for almost two years evidence against him included discarded faxes that dewart had retrieved from homo Uni's trash at the time of his arrest homo uni had two storage lockers that were full of aircraft components a subpoena of his bank records showed that over the course of a single 13-month period he'd ordered more than two million dollars worth of military aircraft parts and then in what Whit describes is an unforgettable flourish of bureaucratic incompetence after the FED seized aircraft parts from homo Uni's Locker another part of the government had auctioned those parts back to the public pinchetti complained to his higher absolutely be executing a search warrant somewhere else and he'd come up crossed F-14 parts that they'd already seized many of them labeled with old evidence tags homo uni ultimately served two years in prison and was deported but panchetti was never able to determine whether he was a spy or just a profiteer then in September of 2003 the team nabbed Iranian sherzek avasapien in a South Florida hotel as part of a sting operation the agent showed Ava Sapien several F-14 Parts worth eight hundred thousand dollars and then arrested him after he offered to buy the components the next guy in pinchetti and dwarz crosshairs was Arif durani a Pakistani arms dealer who was first convicted of selling missile parts to Iran in 1986 he claimed the sale was authorized by Oliver North following his imprisonment and deportation durrani moved to Mexico immediately south of the U.S border and opened a restaurant and was frequently seen wearing a bomber jacket and aviator sunglasses durrani began recruiting Americans to purchase aircraft Parts on his behalf including a retired Department of Defense intelligence officer Ronnie was less organized than Homa uni and he kind of improvised armed deals on the Fly William Cole a former U.S prosecutor who brought one of the cases against Irani told writer Stephen Witt about how The Smuggler used a network of brokers who never saw the part at all they just get the order and they'd go find it somewhere else for instance if they needed nozzles for F-14 engines they'd find them in a shop in New Jersey and then get some other shop to do whatever modification was necessary to meet Pratt and Whitney specks and then sell the result for a huge profit upwards of 20 times what it cost for the parts and durani did all of this without ever leaving his restaurant in Mexico in 2005 durrani was caught in an unrelated immigration Dragnet run by Mexican authorities and ordered back to Pakistan U.S authorities convinced The Mexican government to Route durani's flight home through LAX and he was arrested at the airport and charged with conspiracy during the trial he tried to tell the jury that his company known as Aerospace Logistics was actually a Furniture business durrani was found guilty and sentenced to 12 years by the mid-2000s the job of enforcing the Iranian embargo grew panchetti and dwart's office to about a dozen agents including intelligence analysts and Liaisons with the CIA but even as the office grew Manpower wise and got more resources pinchetti couldn't figure out whether the smuggling networks were ultimately coordinated by Iranian intelligence as Witt writes in the article sometimes pinchetti felt like he was running down an organized spy Network and other times he felt like he was chasing junkyard Hustlers panchetti got a big clue about which of those it was in 2006 when he took a case involving the resale of high-grade accelerometers from the manufacturer Hamilton substrand the accelerometers cost about a hundred and ten thousand dollars a piece and they're specced out to incredible g-forces vincetti told Whit basically they can go into space and the Iranians wanted them really really bad probably to make icbms using two informants from a previous case pinchetti ran another sting on the buyer who turned out to be a guy named homsed hasemi a internal in the Iranian military hasemi operating out of Bangkok was too smart to set foot in the United States but after panchetti's informants convinced him to wire seventy thousand dollars to an American bank account as down payment he was arrested by Thai authorities and thrown in prison about the same time in 2006 the U.S Navy retired its last f-14s leaving Iran as the airplane's only operator which heated up the parts war and caused the ages to take some dramatic steps which included seizing four intact f-14s in California three museums and one belonging to the producers of the military-themed TV show Jack charging that the f-14s had not been properly stripped of useful parts that could wind up in Iranian hands Congress was furious at the Pentagon for its lacks handling of the Tomcat parts and they passed a bill specifically Banning any trade in F-14 components to Iran or any other entity then President George W Bush signed that into law in 2008. the concern about Parts falling into Iranian hands was so great that the Pentagon was all also ordered to dismantle crush and Shred more than 100 f-14s that were lined up at the Boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona which is something that no lover of legendary Fighters wants to see by 2008 Iranian Colonel hasemi had spent almost two years in a tie jail while Iran and the U.S fought a heated legal battle over his extradition finchetti delayed his retirement so he could travel to Thailand and lay eyes on his adversary of sorts panchetti only saw kasemi in a Thai courtroom and he described the Iranian as a tall man in his 50s with what he called a hardcore attitude a True Believer in the Islamic revolution in September of 2008 the American extradition request was denied for a final time and hasemi returned to Tehran where he was promoted to General in early 2014 the U.S Department of Homeland Security investigated another Israeli arms dealer saying that they had twice tried to send a 14 spare parts to Iran and in what is maybe the weirdest part of the story in late 2016 an aviation expert from Dallas named Eric Johnston discovered the hulks of two old f-14s on private land in Temple Texas according to the Houston Chronicle those Tomcats somehow wound up there in the late 1980s after the government paid a contractor to scrap the two Jets and while Iran's Aviation Focus lately has pivoted from fighter jets to killer drones which oh by the way are built with embargoed American components including semiconductors and weapons-grade inertial measurement units the Iranian Air Force has kept flying the F-14 and in 2015 an Iranian news agency released photographs of the overhauled f-14s Clan claiming that the self-sufficiency Jihad had been effective according to Iranian sources their Engineers even managed to recreate the long-range Phoenix missile rebranding it the fakur the sensitive avionics and computer components were also apparently re-engineered and an image emerged that same year that had to warm the heart of any Tomcat fan regardless of national Allegiance a pair of f-14s were seen over Syria escorting a russian-made tu-95 on a bombing run but as long as the Iranian Air Force's flying Tomcats even with a self-sufficiency Jihad or whatever the Underground Market for Tomcat parts will exist instead of work for the U.S agents who followed pinchetti at dcis and dward at Customs continues all right that's going to do it for this episode if you're not already a subscriber click the button and ring the bell so you don't miss anything going forward if you'd like to help support the Channel please consider using the super thanks the heart icon below or become a patron at patreon.com word Carol and in the meantime I look forward to talking to you again very soon [Music] foreign [Music] foreign

Channel: Ward Carroll

Views: 833,164

Keywords: Ward Carroll, F-14 Tomcat, Iranian Air Force, Iran, DCS World, Top Gun

Id: WNP_ifehr9E

Length: 17min 2sec (1022 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 12 2023