The JIN: Too good to be true

“Police Foil Massive Terror Plot,” the headlines screamed last August when British authorities arrested some two dozen suspects and charged that they were planning to “simultaneously blow up as many as 10 U.S.-bound airliners using explosives smuggled in carry-on luggage.” A lobbyist for several defense companies told me that within 24 hours, he was contacted by a desperate official from the Department of Homeland Security who asked him if any of the firms he represented was working on anything–anything at all!–that could help defend America from the scourge of shampoo bottle bombs. If so, federal money could be made available, and fast.

And so goes security policy in the post-9/11 era, as government officials dole out piles of taxpayer dough in response to threats both real and imagined. There's often been little to show for the money that's been dispensed, other than increased revenues for selected defense contractors.

Consider here the case of Ionatron, a homeland defense firm with operations in Arizona and Mississippi, and which has sought to cash in on the understandable concern about the use by insurgents of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which have killed so many American soldiers in Iraq and are an increasing threat in Afghanistan. In late 2003, the Pentagon established an IED task force, with a $3 billion budget, which was charged with researching and developing projects to reduce the toll of roadside bombs.

Ionatron had been created the previous year, out of the shell of a bankrupt lawn-care company called U.S. Home & Garden Inc. The firm's founders include Robert Howard, whom the New York Post has described as “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.” (Howard, who became the company chairman, no longer holds a position with the firm.)

Ionatron's website says it designs and manufactures “directed-energy weapons” that work like “man-made lightning,” and are able to “disable people or vehicles that threaten our security.” One of the products the firm developed was a lightning bolt to target cars, trucks and boats; a second system was called “portal denial” (to my ear, that sounds like a fancy name for a door) that is designed to stop intruders “with a lethal or non-lethal electrical discharge”; and a third was its Joint IED Neutralizer (JIN), which was intended to destroy roadside bombs.

In 2003, Ionatron was awarded its first government contract. Curiously, that was the same year that Ionatron retained the services of the Blank Rome lobby shop, whose chairman, David Girard-diCarlo, is a major fundraiser for President Bush and for Tom Ridge, the former Pennsylvania governor who became the first Secretary of Homeland Security. Blank Rome hired at least two aides to Ridge to lobby for the firm, and several of its clients have won favors and contracts from DHS. In the last four years, Ionatron has paid Blank Rome hundreds of thousands of dollars in lobbying fees.

Ionatron has also been shelling out for political contributions. Company officials and employees have donated $54,500 to political candidates and committees, with $19,000 of that going to Congressman John Murtha, the Democrat's pork king on the defense appropriations subcommittee, and $5,000 for Congressman Hal Rogers, the first head of the homeland security appropriations subcommittee.

Since its creation, Ionatron has received tens of millions of dollars in federal money, of which at least $12 million was awarded for its JIN device. The JIN, a bizarre looking armored vehicle with what appears to be a giant needle sticking out its front end, would supposedly be able to remotely detonate IEDs.

It sounded too good to be true, but in July of 2005, Ionatron suggested that the JIN was just about ready to be deployed. Mark Carallo, a company spokesman, made clear that it was patriotism, not profits, that was motivating Ionatron's principals. “There is nothing more terrifying to a soldier than going out on patrol and not knowing what's out there,” Carallo said. ”This is going to allow our soldiers to have confidence that when they go out on patrol that the threat of IEDs is going to be significantly reduced.” (At one PR event, the JIN's exterior was covered in the colors of the American flag.)

Later that year, Inoatron CEO Thomas Dearmin said the JIN had ”exceeded expectations” during testing and that the Pentagon had “determined the units have military utility.” The military was so excited, he said, that it was asking “for pricing proposals for JIN production quantities of 50, 500, 1,000 and 2,000 units.”

Meanwhile, the media had a brief but passionate love affair with the JIN as well. In mid-2005, USA Today, NBC News and Fox News all did puff-pieces on the product. In February of 2006, the Los Angeles Times asserted that a JIN prototype had “destroyed about 90% of the IEDs laid in its path during a battery of tests” but had not yet been sent into battle, “prompting charges that Pentagon bureaucracy is slowing the effort to protect American troops in Iraq.” (In a rare skeptical look, the Washington Post in 2005 noted that Ionatron faced an old problem in seeking to utilize lightning as a weapon: “It is notoriously difficult to control. Making it go straight and far requires breaking down the air, like drilling a path through wood for a nail. Creating this path for any more than a few feet presents a formidable challenge.”

In fact, the JIN never was dispatched for combat in Iraq, and despite the hype, it seems it's not suitable for deployment. In May 2006 Inonatron announced that the government had determined that the JIN was not combat-ready. Ionatron stock plummeted more than 39 percent over the next four days and now trades for less than $5 a share, about two-thirds off its high. This prompted a shareholder suit, which claims that the company's public declarations about the JIN were overly optimistic and that insiders had sold shares worth more than $18 million in the roughly six-month period preceding the stock collapse. (David Scott, a lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said he could not comment on the lawsuit because most of it is filed under seal.)

Ionatron doesn't talk much about the JIN these days. The only reference I found in a statement it released a few weeks ago came in explaining why revenues fell sharply last year. That was due in part, said the statement, to “the completion of certain Ionatron government contracts initiated and performed in 2005 and substantially completed in early 2006 related to our counter-IED technologies.” As for as the shareholder lawsuit, Kevin McGrath, an Ionatron spokesman says, “That's not a paramount concern of the company.” Meanwhile, Ionatron still touts other “directed energy” products and continues to receive federal support and funding. “We're prepared to take security into the future—through the War on Terror and beyond,” the company says on its website.

But it turns out that despite its unimpressive history, the JIN quietly lives on. The Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory tested a new model in February and Ionatron is anxiously awaiting word back from Corps officials. “The primary issue [with the first model] was the stability of the platform in the field,” McGrath told me. “It's a pretty rugged environment, even more in Afghanistan than Iraq, so we've substantially reworked the system.”

Hence, while the JIN is not likely to be taking out IEDs in Iraq any time soon, Ionatron, with the help of its lobbyists and political contacts, may be poised to zap taxpayers once again.

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