Man nicks F-35 stats to try smuggling to Iran

The technical information on the joint strike fighter was intercepted before reaching its intended recipient overseas. And the culprit, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was arrested this month before he could flee.

According to a court papers, U.S. authorities began investigating Mozaffar Khazaee in November 2013, when he attempted to send a shipment from Connecticut to the Iranian city of Hamadan. When agents inspected the cargo, they found boxes of documents consisting of sensitive technical manuals, specification sheets, and other proprietary material for the F-35. Those documents came from Pratt & Whitney, an engine manufacturer that Khazaee had last worked at in August 2013.

The shipment included thousands of pages, “including diagrams and blueprints of the high-tech fighter jet’s engine. Some of the information was marked as being ITAR- and export-controlled information,” DefenseNews reports.

Khazaee was detained Jan. 9 at Newark International Airport after the first leg of a trip to Tehran. He was charged with transporting, transmitting and transferring in interstate or foreign commerce goods obtained by theft, conversion, or fraud.

DefenseNews notes that, “in early 2013, government officials acknowledged that hackers, most likely Chinese in origin, had stolen information about the fifth-generation fighter, which is expected to be the backbone of American air superiority over the next several decades. “

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