The former director of the intelligence unit, David W Landersman, a civilian, is facing federal conspiracy charges for allegedly orchestrating a mysterious scheme to equip Navy commandos with hundreds of untraceable AK-47 rifle silencers.
A new wrinkle in the case, however, has recently emerged in US District Court in Alexandria, Va., where prosecutors have suggested that Navy officials from the intelligence unit also sought to funnel military equipment to rural Hudspeth County and set up a secret training base near the Mexican border.
Even more unusually, two of Landersman’s former subordinates have testified that when they were not working full time on intelligence matters at the Pentagon, they moonlighted 1,600 miles away as reserve deputy sheriffs in Hudspeth County, a desolate, Connecticut-size jurisdiction east of El Paso.
Also serving as deputies to Sheriff West were Landersman, his son, and the husband of one of the Navy intelligence officials, according to two Pentagon officials and others familiar with the case.
Why so many Pentagon officials and their relatives were working on the side as sheriff’s deputies in Texas has not been explained in court, where much of the evidence has been sealed to protect national security. What a training base would have been used for there is just as murky.
A secret base, Pentagon intelligence officials and their family moonlighting as deputies, and a court case with a lot of sealed evidence..