Seven of Clubs  

Ronald Sugar
CEO and President Northrop Grumman

Makers of the B2 stealth bomber, you'd think this company could stay under the radar. But they're dogged by scandals-from bribing Saudi princes to charges of sexual harassment in the White House. Above board, their job is simply selling death.

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2002 CEO Salary: $1.5 million
War contracts in the last three years: $23.5 billion (including TRW)

This company makes B-2 stealth bomber, the F-14 fighter, the unmanned Global Hawk and amphibious assault ships. In 1972 Northrop was caught bribing the head of the Saudi air force and a Saudi prince to buy F-5 military aircraft. A Northrop employee at the Clinton White House was suspended for donwloading hard-core porn and sexually harassing interns.

Former Northrop Grumman Electronics Systems chief James Roche served as George Bush's Secretary of the Air Force for two years. Since September 11th, Roche emphasized the need for more spending on intelligence systems, specifically mentioning Northrop Grumman's Airborne Warning and Control Systems (AWACS), a control center and a huge radar disc mounted atop a Boeing 707, which serves "as the airborne nerve center for a military air campaign."

Northrop Grumman is also responsible for ALQ-15 jamming device, used to protect jets from enemy radar-guided missiles. As David Steigman, senior defense analyst for the Teal Group, boasts, "Northrop Grumman's role is supplying the command control communications and the intelligence surveillance systems to find the bad guys and bop them in the head."

A recent aquisition of Northrop is Vinnell corporation, founded by the late A. S. Vinnell in 1931 to pave roads in Los Angeles. Since then the company has handled a number of large domestic as well as government projects. The company was the major contractor for US military operations in Okinawa, overhauled Air Force planes in Guam in the early 1950s, and sent men and equipment onto the battlefields of the Korean War.

Now based in Fairfax, Virginia, the company has been controlled in the past through a web of interlocking ownership by a partnership that included James A. Baker III and Frank Carlucci, former U.S. secretaries of state and defense under presidents George Bush senior and Ronald Reagan respectively.

Perhaps the most important military contract Vinnell landed was in 1975 when the Pentagon helped the company win a bid to train the 75,000 strong Saudi Arabian National Guard, a military unit descended from the Bedouin warriors who helped the Saud clan impose control on the peninsula early in last century.

An article in Newsweek at the time described the company's first recruitment efforts with the aid of "a one-eyed former U.S. Army colonel named James D. Holland" in a cramped office in the Los Angeles suburb of Alhambra to put together "a ragtag army of Vietnam veterans for a paradoxical mission: to train Saudi Arabian troops to defend the very oil fields that Henry Kissinger recently warned the U.S. might one day have to invade."

"We are not mercenaries because we are not pulling triggers," a former U.S. Army officer told the magazine. "We train people to pull triggers." One of his colleagues wryly pointed out: "Maybe that makes us executive mercenaries."

Since 1994 the company has been paid $800 million for training and construction alone according to a Freedom of Information Act request conducted by U.S. News and World Report. In return Vinnell has constructed, run, staffed, and written doctrine for five military academies, seven shooting ranges, and a healthcare system, as well as training and equipping four mechanized brigades and five infantry brigades.
In 1997 Charles Hanley, a special correspondent for the Associated Press newswire, got a rare glimpse inside the Saudi operation where he described 300 American military veterans in the desert hills overlooking Riyadh with yellow "Vinnell Arabia" patches on their khaki-and-olive-drab uniforms training young Saudis in the operation of new General Motors light armored vehicles and other weaponry while supervising supply operations, operating a hospital and updating the Guard's data processing, among other functions.

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