Laser Weapon Firm Targeted

It ain’t easy pin­ning down Ionatron Inc., the Tucson, Arizona laser weapon firm.
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.
A cou­ple of months ago, Ionatron gave me a cou­ple of con­tacts in offi­cial­dom — guys who are sup­pos­edly team­ing up with the Tucson firm on laser projects. When I tracked these folks down, they said they really didn’t know much about Ionatron at all.
Maybe Ionatron’s research is so super-​​secret that nobody in gov­ern­ment will acknowl­edge its exis­tence. But if the work is so secret, why does Ionatron keep brag­ging about it to the media?
The company’s lat­est press release shouts that Ionatron just been fea­tured on the NBC Nightly News. In the state­ment, the com­pany quotes Brig. Gen. Joseph Votel, head of the Pentagon’s Joint IED Defeat Task Force as telling NBC, “The Ionatron sys­tem was just the type of out of the box, new tech­nol­ogy solu­tion we’re look­ing for, quite hon­estly.“
Now, I haven’t seen the tape of the seg­ment. But in the tran­script, nei­ther Gen. Votel nor the NBC reporter men­tions Ionatron by name. Odd.
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.

On May 9, he claimed that “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.”

A review of e-​​mails, nondis­clo­sure agree­ments, board memos, let­ters and other sim­i­lar doc­u­ments, all sup­plied by offi­cials at HSV Technologies, appear to sup­port the asser­tion of HSV’s pres­i­dent, Peter Schlesinger, that he and his board were hood­winked by a Raytheon offi­cial named Joseph Hayden.
Specifically, Schlesinger claims that in early 2002 he was approached by Hayden with what pur­ported to be an offi­cially autho­rized part­ner­ship and licens­ing offer from Raytheon Co. — con­tin­gent, of course, on Raytheon first being per­mit­ted to review HSV’s own directed energy research efforts.
Three sep­a­rate meet­ings fol­lowed at these meet­ings, Schlesinger says he and his col­leagues pro­vided the Raytheon peo­ple with an array of patented, con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion regard­ing HSV’s own directed energy devel­op­ment work.
Unfortunately, says Schlesinger, at the third and final meet­ing of the two groups, which took place on May 31, 2002, at a Raytheon mis­sile defense facil­ity in San Diego, Calif., the HSV offi­cials dis­cov­ered that Hayden had appar­ently been secretly pass­ing their infor­ma­tion along to an out­sider [Ionatron founder Robert] Howard.
Hayden, by the way, is now one of Howard’s employ­ees at Ionatron.

But a sneaky approach to intel­lec­tual prop­erty isn’t Byron’s only beef with Howard. The Post colum­nist calls the Iontration founder “a twice-​​fined Wall Street stock pro­moter who agreed to pay $2.9 mil­lion in penal­ties in 1997 in set­tle­ment of a Securities and Exchange Commission suit charg­ing him with mak­ing false and mis­lead­ing state­ments about another com­pany he founded and con­trolled, called Presstek, Inc.“
That’s one of the rea­sons, no doubt, that Byron has been so sus­pi­cious of Ionatron’s rises and dips on the penny stock mar­ket. As he noted on April 25:

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 offi­cials heat­edly denied that the firm was involved in any “pump-​​and-​​dump” schemes. And I’m inclined to agree. 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.

Byron only offers cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence to sup­port his claim; there’s no Enron-​​esque trail of dam­ag­ing e-​​mails that he’s uncov­ered. Nevertheless, Ionatron offi­cials wouldn’t com­ment on this or any of the alle­ga­tions that Byron has lev­eled.
THERE’S MORE: In-​​Q-​​Tel spokesper­son Gayle von Eckartsberg says Byrons alle­ga­tions about the 85-​​person employee (and ex-​​employee) invest­ment fund “are also false.”

Employees have no con­trol over the selec­tion of the invest­ments, nor over the tim­ing of the dis­tri­b­u­tion of the equity or pro­ceeds from the Fund… Participation by all employ­ees is manda­tory… Employees do not con­trol how much equity is pur­chased, or when, nor can they opt out of par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Fund or in any of its invest­ments. In other words, employ­ees can­not cherry pick. 

Besides, the few-​​million dol­lar kitty isn’t mak­ing any­body rich, von Eckartsberg notes. The largest share, about six per­cent, goes to In-​​Q-​​Tel CEO Gilman Louie. And he donates it all to char­ity.
But the cash is needed, she says, to “attract the tal­ent we need to do our job.” Getting ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists to do non-​​profit work isn’t easy. They need some incen­tive that there will be some kind of pay­off down the road. But so far, that hadn’t hap­pened, von Eckartsberg observes. “To date, employ­ees have put in more than they have received from the Fund.”

May 23rd, 2005 | Lasers and Ray Guns | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.