Getting Their Buzz On

For a pro-military conservative blogsite Defense Tech is doing its best to deflate the Chancellor's Future Combat fantasies.

Hot buzz among the defense procurement management crowd:

...DRS Technologies, Inc. announced that it has signed a long-term strategic agreement with Ionatron, Inc., located in Tuscon, AZ. DID has covered Ionatron's plasma weapons and its anti-IED systems before, including the Laser-Guided Energy (LGE) and Laser-Induced, Plasma-Channel (LIPC) directed-energy weapon systems.

Under the agreement, the companies will engage in the cooperative development and selected application of these technologies U.S. military market, and their integration with the energy management systems and platforms of its DRS Test & Energy Management unit in Huntsville, AL. In addition, the company's DRS Training & Control Systems unit in Ft. Walton Beach, FL will investigate its own application of Ionatron's LIPC technology in marine applications relating to shipping ports and dockside protection...

Except... DRS might not have noticed that Ionatron seems to have taken some dancing lessons from other private contractors- and lifted some of their Top Secret technology as well. Last year, for example:

Company execs say they're working on a real-life ray gun which uses femtosecond lasers – light pulses that last less than a ten-trillionth of a second – to carve conductive channels of ionized oxygen in the air. Through these channels, Ionatron's blaster supposedly sends man-made lighting bolts, frying anyone unfortunate enough to step into their path, up to 800 meters away.

The feds have given the company $12 million to chase these ray gun dreams. But good luck finding anyone in the Defense or Energy departments who will publicly endorse Ionatron's ray gun work. Or even say they're passingly familiar with it...

But there's one media outlet where Ionatron's name has been mentioned a whole lot, lately. That would be the New York Post, where business columnist Christopher Byron has been on a one-man jihad against the ray gun company. His most recent strike came last week, as he accused Senate Appropriations Committee chief Thad Cochran of steering millions in congressional discretionary funds Ionatron's way – in return for $9,000 in campaign contributions, and a promise to relocate to Cochran's home state of Mississippi.

"Inside the Beltway, it's business as usual," Byron says of the alleged tit-for-tat (the story is buried in the Post's pay-for-play archives). His other allegations go beyond the garden variety, however. Click here to read 'em.

"...accumulating evidence now suggests that at least some of the technology that Ionatron claims to possess may actually belong either to Waltham, Mass.-based Raytheon Co., which has been conducting its own government-funded 'directed energy' weapons research for years, or to a small California tech company rival called HSV Technologies, Inc., or perhaps to both...

"...Shares in a high-flying penny stock called Ionatron Inc. had been climbing for months… [when] suddenly, on March 18, with Ionatron's shares having climbed to a high of $10.41, the company's stock was hit with an avalanche of insider selling, as more than 50 Wall Streeters privy to Ionatron's innermost secrets bailed out of nearly every share of stock they held, knocking more than 30 percent off the price in the days that followed.

"Another cautionary tale from the pump-and-dump annals of the penny stock market? In fact, it's a lot more than that, for… nearly every one of the more than four dozen insiders who dumped their Ionatron shares on March 18 have now been identified by The Post as employees of a secretive, Arlington, Va., investment group that is owned, operated and financed out of the black box budget of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency."

Byron's talking about In-Q-Tel, the non-profit investment arm of the CIA that put money into Ionatron when the company was young...

In-Q-Tel isn't like other venture capital firms. It's more like an incubator for spook-friendly technologies. Getting a big financial return on investment doesn't seem to be a big motivation. And if making money isn't that important, why bother with insider trading?

What seems more plausible is that In-Q-Tel's employees, officially separated from their employer, may have been less scrupulous -- in Byron's words, "stag[ing] an end-run around In-Q-Tel's not-for-profit legal status [to] benefit personally from the fund's investments."

They accomplished this by buying shares for themselves in a separate and parallel "for profit" entity called the "In-Q-Tel Employees Fund LLC."

Using the cash contributions from the employees, the LLC thereupon took equity stakes on their behalf simultaneously in each of the three companies in which the not-for-profit fund was itself buying shares - an arrangement almost identical to the so-called "Raptor" partnerships through which top officials at Enron Corp were able to cash in personally on investment activities of the very company that employed them.

When this story emerged a year ago, no one would have dreamed of accusing Porter Goss's CIA of banal chicanery like this. Christopher Byron's story went nowhere. Before Dusty Foggo met Nine Fingers at the Watergate, anyway.