Convicted of conspiracy

A former B-2 bomber engineer Noshir Gowadia was found guilty by the US federal jury of selling military secrets to China, conspiracy and money laundering on August 9, 2010, according to reports in the Indian media two days later. Gowadia who has been in federal custody since October 2005 faces life imprisonment. His son Ashton Gowadia told The Associated Press that an appeal is already in the works but cannot be submitted until his 66-year-old father is sentenced in November.

Five of Gowadia’s alleged criminal offences are related to him helping the Chinese Communist Party design a stealth cruise missile. The low signature missiles have exhaust systems that make them undetectable by conventional infrared missiles, and hence difficult to destroy. The prosecutors alleged he pocketed $110,000 that helped pay $ 15,000 a month mortgage on a multimillion dollar ocean view home he built on Maui’s north shore. The Maui resident was convicted on further three counts of providing classified technical information, illegally keeping defense information and filing false tax returns, reported Epoch Times of August 10.

"The US entrusts people with important and sensitive information critical to our nation’s defense. Today’s verdict demonstrates that there is a serious consequence to betraying that trust,” declared the US attorney for the district of Hawaii Florence Nakakuni after the 40-day trial in Hawaii.

Noshir Gowadia (left) and the B-2 strategic, long-range bomber that can fly more than 6,000 miles before refueling

According to Ashton who lives in Laguna Beach, California, the jury ignored exculpatory evidence (evidence favorable to the defendant in a criminal trial, which clears or tends to clear the defendant of guilt. It is the opposite of inculpatory evidence, which tends to prove guilt. In countries like the United States, police or prosecutor must disclose to the defendant any exculpatory evidence they possess. Failure to disclose can result in the dismissal of a case) that should have cleared his father. He referred to three witnesses with long experience in the US military industry who testified that the information Gowadia Sr provided to China was publicly available: "They literally got out the textbooks and they matched the stuff from the government’s evidence to textbooks, one published in 1935 and another one published in 1969… We were so confident that the truth would get out and that he’d be exonerated, especially when we had such high-profile witnesses.”

India born Gowadia had migrated to the US for postgraduate work in the 1960s. In 1968 he joined the defense contractor Northrop Corp, now Northrop Grumman Corp. When Northrop won the contract for B-2 Gowadia is supposed to have come up with the conceptual design for the aircraft which according to Kenneth Sorenson, assistant US attorney who prosecuted the case, can be described as "our nation’s most important strategic asset.” He became a US citizen in the 1970s and retired from Northrop in 1986, two years before the B-2 made its public debut. After leaving Northrop he set up his own contracting business and continued to work on US defense projects, reported The Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

In 1992 the government’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency awarded him a contract to try to find ways to reduce the visibility of water vapor trails left by jet engines. When the government expanded the project without him, Gowadia was angry and wrote letters to government officials to bring him back on the project, reported Sorenson. This was disputed by the defence lawyer David Klein who said Gowadia "wanted to help his country.” But Sorenson maintained that Gowadia was angry because he felt "disrespected in this country.”

The indictment alleges he made six trips to China from 2003 to 2005, conspiring to conceal some of his visits by getting border agents to leave immigration stamps off his passport. He is also accused of attempting to sell classified stealth technology to the Swiss government and to businesses in Israel and Germany. He was allegedly using three foreign entities he controlled including a Liechtenstein charity purportedly for the benefit of children to disguise the income he received from foreign countries, according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice.