High winds blew over an oceanside bluff on the afternoon of October 13, 2005, as a caravan of government vehicles with agents from the FBI and Air Force descended on a stately home overlooking Uaoa Bay on Maui’s North Shore. Fifteen agents divided into two teams wearing standard raid gear—khaki pants, body armor, holstered sidearms—took positions at the sides of the house while another group approached the front door.
Special Agent James Tamura-Wageman, the search team leader, knocked. He watched through a window as a woman with a dog approached. Tamura-Wageman, from the agency’s Honolulu office, was part of a foreign counterintelligence squad. For over a year, the team had been monitoring the property—a luxury Mediterranean-style four-bedroom with a blue tiled roof and ocean and cliff views in the hamlet of Haiku, worth some $3.5 million. Tamura-Wageman himself had taken trips in a single-engine airplane to snap aerial photos and had examined a floor plan of the residence. The investigation was led by Special Agent Thatcher Mohajerin, a nine-year veteran of the bureau, who was currently waiting with the interview team down the driveway.
Tamura-Wageman took a step back as the door opened. He recognized the woman standing inside from photos he’d seen as Cheryl Gowadia, the wife of an engineer and defense contractor named Noshir S. Gowadia. He explained that the agents had a warrant to search the home. “Can you take a step outside?” He asked where he could find her husband.
Alarmed, Cheryl pointed through the house toward the lanai in the back, where Tamura-Wageman could see two men standing. One was a worker there to install a pond in the garden. The other, holding a garden tool, was her husband, the man the agents had come to see.
Gowadia was 65 years old with suntanned skin, a broad face with a prominent lower lip, arched eyebrows, and large brown eyes. “We have an important matter of national security to discuss with you,” Tamura-Wageman said. “Would you please accompany us around to the front of the house?”
As agents filtered through the residence securing rooms and executing the search warrant, Tamura-Wageman reached for the handcuffs on his belt. He didn’t have the authority to arrest Gowadia, but he could use his discretion to restrain him during the search. Gowadia stepped back. “No,” he said softly. Tamura-Wageman noticed that Gowadia’s hands were trembling. He appeared nervous, shocked but calm. Tamura-Wageman put the cuffs away.
The walls of fate were closing in on Gowadia. He was a brilliant engineer, reportedly earning the equivalent of a PhD at 15 years old. But he was also self-aggrandizing and, at times, embittered and reckless. He had spent two decades at the aerospace and defense contractor Northrop (now Northrop Grumman) where he was instrumental in designing the stealth propulsion system for the B-2 Spirit bomber, one of the most revolutionary military technologies in generations. He once had top security clearance and taught university classes in advanced aeronautical principles.
He was also, the agents believed, a spy.
On March 11, 2024, during the 14th National People’s Congress at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, Lieutenant General Wang Wei, deputy commander of the Chinese Air Force, took questions from a journalist, a rare exception for a Chinese military official of his rank. During the annual weeklong series of parliamentary meetings, Communist Party officials spoke about the manufacturing sector, real estate reform, and environmental protection, but a reporter from the Hong Kong Commercial Daily wanted to ask Wang about China’s secretive stealth bomber, the H-20, nicknamed “Water.”
The H-20 had been announced back in 2016, but little was publicly known about the project. Rumors had surfaced that the Chinese military had experienced developmental hurdles and the project was delayed. But at the Great Hall, in an interview that was likely choreographed, Wang denied the rumors. He said the production of the bomber would proceed “very fast” following test flights. “There are no technical difficulties,” he said. “It’s coming soon, just wait.”
China had provided only glimpses of what its stealth bomber might look like. A series of promotional videos and documentaries released by state-owned companies and media in recent years featured a mockup of a flying-winged aircraft without vertical tail fins. Experts noted that the aircraft bore a striking resemblance to the American B-2 Spirit bomber and its successor, the B-21 Raider, which made its first flight in November 2023 and is expected to enter service in the next few years. The B-21 is the most sophisticated stealth aircraft ever built, a crucial addition to an aging bomber fleet, and a potential deterrent to Chinese aggression in the Pacific.
If the H-20 proves similar to its American counterparts, it would represent unfathomably rapid advances in China’s development of stealth technology. Those gains could well have been aided, at least in part, by Noshir Gowadia, a little-known engineer who became the focus of one of the most significant espionage investigations in decades. Gowadia was born in 1944 in Bombay, India (now Mumbai), and arrived in the United States in the summer of 1963 to study aeronautical engineering. He became a U.S. citizen on July 25, 1969, and about a year later he landed a job at Northrop, the aerospace and defense company.
Gowadia joined the defense industry as the U.S. military was ramping up its efforts to develop stealth fighter jets and bombers. During the 1950s and ’60s, the Soviet Union deployed a sophisticated air defense network with surveillance radar and advanced anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) and surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). The U.S. Air Force was increasingly vulnerable—during the Vietnam War, thousands of aircraft were shot down by AAA, SAMs, and fighter interceptors. Then, in 1973, during a 10-day stretch amid the Yom Kippur War, Israel lost 30 percent of its aircraft to advanced air defenses. The U.S. Air Force concluded that if the U.S. were to experience that level of loss in a potential war against the Soviets, its entire aircraft fleet would be gone in two weeks.
In the early 1970s, the Defense and Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), a research wing of the U.S. Department of Defense, launched a program to figure out how to reduce aircraft radar detectability. That included reducing an aircraft’s radar cross section (RCS)—the area of a target seen by radar—and developing radar-absorbent materials, exhaust cooling, and windshield coatings. It also focused on reducing infrared signature, which is the thermal radiance of an aircraft that is visible to infrared sensors.
In 1974, DARPA sent out a quiet inquiry to five aircraft manufacturers, including Northrop, McDonnell Douglas, Grumman, and Lockheed, to assess their ability to build an undetectable aircraft. Northrop and Grumman both had a long history of manufacturing aircraft for the U.S. military, including the WWII-era P-61 Black Widow, the first airplane designed as a night fighter, and the F-14 Tomcat, the most advanced and costly fighter of its time. Meanwhile, the defense contractor Lockheed had already worked on several classified spy planes for the CIA, which were designed to take photos of military operations over the Soviet Union. Among the legendary planes it produced were the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, which could fly up to 70,000 feet and took its maiden flight in 1956, and the A-12 Oxcart, a precursor to the SR-71 Blackbird, which could reach 90,000 feet and was fully operational by 1965. Their work was so secret that even DARPA didn’t know about it.
In 1975, both Northrop and Lockheed were each awarded $1.5 million to build a full-scale model of a stealth aircraft in just four months. The two models would then be tested against a real radar, and the plane with the lowest radar cross section would move on to the next phase, during which the winner would have the opportunity to build and fly two prototypes, according to the book Stealth: The Secret Contest to Invent Invisible Aircraft, by Peter Westwick. Lockheed won the contest, and the result would become the first stealth aircraft, the F-117.
Although Northrop had lost out to Lockheed, both DARPA and Northrop knew that this wouldn’t be the last contract awarded for stealth planes. To keep Northrop focused on stealth development while Lockheed was busy with the F-117, DARPA granted Northrop a new contract for the Battlefield Surveillance Aircraft-Experimental (BSAX). This stealth plane would be designed to fly undetected above Soviet airspace, where it would use an internal radar to locate Soviet tanks long before they would arrive at the front lines.
The result of the project was Tacit Blue, Northrop’s first and little known stealth plane, which made its first flight in 1982. Compared to the sleek design of the Lockheed F-117, and later Northrop’s B-2, the Tacit Blue looked like a watercraft with wings or, as Westwick puts it, “an upside-down bathtub.” Though Tacit Blue was ended by the Air Force in 1985, its design had one major implication that would define the B-2 bomber: curved surfaces.
With a chip on its shoulder after losing out to Lockheed, and the experience of building Tacit Blue, Northrop was prepared when the Air Force sent another proposal for an “Advanced Technology Bomber.” The requirements were vague, but the specific request was clear: build a stealth bomber with the lowest possible RCS, equip it with a large payload, and make it capable of flying long distances.
This time the request went only to Lockheed and Northrop, and in 1981 Northrop won the contract to build the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. The company pulled from an old flying-wing concept that had first been developed 50 years earlier by aeronautical designer John Knudsen Northrop, the company’s founder. This, in combination with the curved surfaces of the Tacit Blue, set the B-2 up to be unlike any stealth plane to ever fly.
The flying-wing (or all-wing) design, which dates back to Northrop’s 1929 Model 1 aircraft, resembles a boomerang, combining the wings and fuselage into a single structure that houses the crew, fuel, and all necessary equipment to fly the plane. The wings, in other words, are the aircraft. In the end, according to Westwick, it was the remarkable aerodynamics of Northrop’s design, along with its stealth capabilities, that helped the company prevail. An aerodynamic plane meant a greater range and a greater payload. The B-2 contract, at $36 billion, was a hundred times bigger than the F-117 contract.
The B-2’s biggest technological leap was its reduction of radar cross section. It’s the most crucial element of stealth technology, and the most important factors of RCS are shape and materials. Radar waves and light rays reflect similarly, bouncing off a surface at the same angle at which they hit. To avoid radar detection, designers needed to avoid all perpendicular surfaces. The B-2’s flying-wing design reduced the number of angles and eliminated vertical stabilizers that reflect radar waves and increase RCS.
At Northrop, Gowadia was part of a then-classified program tasked with developing a unique propulsion system for the B-2 that reduced the jet’s infrared, visual, and radar signature. He worked on developing the bomber’s tailpipe for seven years, a revolutionary project that made the plane virtually impossible to track using not only conventional radar, but infrared too. “The entire geometry came from me,” Gowadia later said. His code name while working on the project was “Blueberry Milkshake.”
The B-2 was designed to perform missile strikes far behind enemy lines. Its two internal bomb bays had less radar visibility than other bombers, which mounted their ordnance externally. It was armed with nuclear cruise missiles and was capable of carrying 40,000 pounds of ordnance. With a 172-foot wingspan and a maximum gross takeoff weight of 336,500 pounds, the bomber could perform attack missions at altitudes of 50,000 feet and had a range of 6,000 nautical miles. It could fly a total of 10,000 nautical miles—almost half the earth’s circumference—with just one midair refueling.
One drawback to the flying-wing design is that it makes the plane unstable and hard to pilot. But the advent of fly-by-wire controls in the 1940s that regulate an aircraft’s flight-control systems by computer made that less of an issue. (The Concorde, which debuted in 1969, was the first production fly-by-wire aircraft.)
The B-2’s surfaces are curved and rounded to deflect radar beams and suppress reflections from large features such as the engine inlets. Its carbon-composite airframe absorbs radar waves and turns their energy into heat. And the exterior is covered with a dark gray anti-reflective paint, which blends into the sky at 50,000 feet. To keep that pricey coating in pristine condition, the Air Force stores B-2s in special $5 million air-conditioned hangars.
Gowadia and other engineers working on the B-2 developed a series of designs and technologies to reduce the heat from its engines and exhaust, something that enemy radar can use to find the plane. Most visibly, they tucked the engines deep inside the fuselage and routed the exhaust across the top of the wing through wide, flat nozzles that help it mix with cool outside air faster, further reducing the infrared signature. Finally, to make the jet’s contrails less visible, they came up with an ingenious system that injects chlorosulfonic acid directly into the exhaust, which helps absorb heat and makes those long trails of condensation almost invisible.
“The B-2 has the radar signature of a frisbee or a dinner plate,” Westwick says. “That’s a really remarkable accomplishment.”
The new B-21’s radar signature is rumored to be even smaller.
Given the cutting-edge technology it was developing, Northrop instituted an extraordinary level of secrecy around the B-2’s development, adding as much as 10 to 15 percent to costs. According to Westwick, the radar group worked in a top-secret vault, and employees on the shop floor were barred from talking to them. Still, two engineers working on the bomber were caught selling B-2 secrets to the Russians in the early 1980s.
Work on the plane would take nearly two decades before the B-2 finally entered service in 1997. It was first used in combat to drop conventional bombs during the Kosovo War in 1999, flying nonstop from its base in Missouri to Kosovo and destroying 33 percent of all Serbian targets in the first eight weeks of operations. It flew dozens of missions during Operation Iraqi Freedom and was later deployed in Afghanistan and Libya.
Over a career with Northrop lasting nearly 20 years, Gowadia worked on a number of classified research projects involving low-observable propulsion systems for aircraft and missiles. (A stealth missile works in much the same way as an aircraft, employing stealth technology—radar-absorbing material, smooth surfaces, and a flat exhaust system—to make it less observable to radar, sonar, infrared, and other detection methods.) He had two children during that time, one from his first marriage and another with Cheryl, an American citizen from Texas.
In 1986, at 42 years old, Gowadia was informed by a doctor that he had developed a rare genetic blood disorder and that he could die if he didn’t reduce his workload, according to the 2015 book Operation Shakespeare: The True Story of an Elite International Sting by John Shiffman. He left Northrop and launched his own defense consulting firm in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Gowadia was able to maintain his top-security clearance, and in the years that followed he consulted on several secret projects, including on next-generation CIA reconnaissance aircraft and nuclear weapons at Los Alamos. He also did security assessments on the F-22 stealth fighter and Air Force One.
In 1993, Shiffman writes, Gowadia became angered over a project with DARPA. The contract involved technology to eliminate aircraft contrails, and Gowadia was paid $45,000 to produce a report. But the agency decided to move on to the next phase of the project without Gowadia, who believed he would be part of an estimated $2 million contract. Gowadia was furious. “I was one of the fathers of the U.S. Air Force Northrop B-2 Stealth Bomber, and its entire propulsion system was conceived and conceptually designed by me,” an embittered Gowadia wrote to a relative. In 1997, his security clearance was terminated.
In 1999, he founded a new consulting business, N.S. Gowadia Inc., and also taught a course in which he allegedly used classified information from the Air Force. The same year, he bought the hillside property in Maui overlooking the ocean and received a construction loan to build a $1.8 million home for himself and Cheryl. Prosecutors would later argue in court that the mortgage was $15,000 a month and he was “desperate” for a way to pay the mounting expenses.
Gowadia began to aggressively solicit business abroad. It did not take long to find international customers for his services. On October 23, 2002, Gowadia sent a fax to a government official in Switzerland with a proposal to develop infrared-reduction technology for the TH-98 Cougar, a twin-engine multipurpose helicopter developed by Eurocopter, now Airbus Helicopters. The proposal alone contained top-secret-level classified information about a U.S. defense system, according to the grand jury indictment. Two years later, on November 22, 2004, according to the indictment, Gowadia sent an email to a contact in Israel with a similar proposal. He also solicited business in Australia and Singapore.
Those deals never materialized. But across the Pacific in China, Gowadia soon found a more receptive clientele for his services.
In 2004, while Gowadia was communicating with foreign customers, the FBI launched an investigation into an engineer in California named Chi Mak. Mak had emigrated from Hong Kong to the U.S. in the late 1970s and worked since 1988 for the defense contractor Power Paragon, based in Anaheim, California. The FBI believed Mak had been passing military technology secrets to China for years, and its high-stakes investigation became one of the agency’s biggest counterintelligence investigations ever, eventually uncovering a Chinese spy ring operating in the United States.
The investigation into Mak, who was convicted in 2008 and sentenced to 24 years in prison, shed some light on Chinese efforts to obtain U.S. military secrets. According to Isaac Stone Fish, CEO and founder of Strategy Risks, a consulting firm that helps clients manage geopolitical exposure, especially in China, the Chinese government has two primary means of practicing espionage abroad. It works directly through the efforts of the Chinese Communist Party and institutions under it, such as the People’s Liberation Army (the party’s armed wing), or groups like the United Front, a Party organization that seeks to weaken the Party’s enemies. It also conducts espionage via a broad ecosystem of entities, including private businesses, that have some ties to the party but that mostly have profit-driven motives.
When targeting individuals for information, the Chinese often use financial incentives and appeal to vanity, both of which appeared to apply in the Gowadia case, according to Stone Fish. “A lot of this is about ego,” he says, “making people feel their expertise is really valued, that they’re not appreciated in their jobs but they will be in China.”
China was working on programs for stealth cruise missiles and a stealth bomber and was eager to get its hands on America’s stealth technology. During the Kosovo War, when America’s first stealth jet, the F-117, was shot down, Chinese agents were sent to scour the land, buying up parts of the plane from local farmers. Experts believe the parts gathered were reverse engineered to help develop China’s first stealth fighter, the Chengdu J-20, which made its maiden flight in 2011 and entered service in 2017.
The stealth bomber was the next front, and by the turn of the century the Chinese were far behind. While the B-2 bomber was flying undetected over Serbian airspace, Chinese engineers struggled to overcome a lack of aircraft design experience, since much of its fleet was based on Soviet airplanes from the 1950s and ’60s.
A stealth bomber would have been of particular interest to Chinese intelligence. It was symbolically important for China, a direct response to the B-2 that would signal the Chinese military’s ability to stay on par with the U.S., at least in appearances. The H-20 is believed to have the capability of traveling 4,970 miles with 10 tons of bombs, putting U.S. territories—including Guam, home of Andersen Air Force Base—within striking range.
On July 28, 2003, Gowadia made the short trip from Hong Kong to Shenzhen to cross into the People’s Republic of China (PRC). He was accompanied by two men, Henry Nyo and Tommy Wong. Wong was Gowadia’s handler in China, according to the trial testimony of an FBI agent. He worked for the Chinese government’s foreign exports bureau, while Nyo had facilitated a meeting in Hong Kong to pitch Gowadia’s services to the Chinese. (Both Nyo and Wong were listed as unindicted coconspirators in the Gowadia case, but little is publicly known about the two men or how Gowadia came into contact with them. Neither Nyo or Wong were charged with any crimes.) Although China was developing its own stealth aircraft at the time, the Chinese had another goal in mind: developing a cruise missile with stealth capabilities.
At the Shenzhen border crossing, Wong had arranged for Gowadia to enter the country without registering his passport in order to conceal his travel. From there, the group traveled to Chengdu, a city of more than 16 million in central China’s Sichuan province and home to a center for the research and development of Chinese fighter aircraft and cruise missiles. In Chengdu, according to the government indictment against him, Gowadia delivered a presentation, aided by a PowerPoint file, to Chinese officials about low-observable technologies—propulsion systems, in other words, that would make the missiles difficult to track through radar, infrared, and other detection technologies, similar to the kinds of systems he worked on with the B-2. His presentation included information and data that the U.S. government had classified as secret, according to the indictment.
It was Gowadia’s first trip to China, and he spent about a week in the country. Before departing, Nyo paid him $15,000 in cash for his services, according to the indictment. When Gowadia flew back to Hawaii on August 12, 2003, he told U.S. customs officials that the cash had been intended to purchase an antique desk overseas. At the time, Gowadia was reportedly struggling to cover the $15,000 monthly mortgage on his Haiku home, investigators believed.
According to the prosecution, over the next few months, Gowadia and Wong emailed back and forth to discuss payment and what information Chinese officials were looking to obtain from Gowadia before they would commit to further fund his work for them. Wong wrote in an email, submitted in court, that if Chinese officials agreed to move forward, “they will send someone meet u again with me next trip to discuss the detail what u design and their requirement.”
In late October 2003, Gowadia again traveled to China through Hong Kong. In Shenzhen he met with government officials and was shown test data for an exhaust nozzle that China was developing for its cruise missile, according to the indictment. Gowadia provided an assessment of the data and offered his suggested design fixes. During the meeting, Gowadia and the Chinese officials discussed Gowadia’s proposal to design and help develop a low-observable exhaust nozzle, which would reduce infrared signature, for a Chinese cruise missile.
Over the next few months, Gowadia and Wong exchanged emails where they haggled over the price of Gowadia’s services. An FBI agent testified at trial that they created alias email accounts and used code names; Gowadia was “Catch a Monkey” and Wong was “Fly Monkey King.” “There is a lot of work required, many iterations, to make a design for a real system,” Gowadia wrote, according to the indictment. In order to bolster his case, he shared with Wong secret documents with classified information that he had access to. “Not many people have this strong a resume. I am not sure your people appreciate, maybe just think I am like any other expert,” he wrote. Wong eventually agreed to Gowadia’s price, and on April 15, 2004, he sent an invoice for $19,500 for his work on the cruise missile nozzle.
That same month, according to the indictment, Gowadia flew from Honolulu to Hong Kong for the third time. He traveled into mainland China without having his passport stamped, and in Shenzhen he met with Chinese engineers who shared with him cruise-missile system requirements and other data. He took the information back to Hawaii. He invoiced Wong for another $20,000 and instructed him to wire the money to his company bank account at UBS in Switzerland.
Over the next few months, using the information he had obtained in China, Gowadia designed a low-observable exhaust nozzle for reduced infrared heat signature for Chinese cruise missiles, according to the indictment. An FBI agent testified at trial that Gowadia analyzed the lock-on range of the modified cruise missile against U.S. air-to-air missiles, and put the data in a PowerPoint presentation he titled “Study 1.” He made several more trips to China to work on the missile project, and on November 27, 2004, traveled to Beijing to watch the testing of the exhaust nozzle, the indictment further stated.
For the next year, Gowadia continued to communicate with Wong and travel to China, aiding in the development of the exhaust nozzle and sharing information classified as secret with Chinese officials. He also allegedly shared classified information regarding lock-on range for infrared missiles against the B-2, and other undefined classified information about the B-2.
The government alleged that Gowadia received around $110,000 for his visits to China over the three years. In order to hide the money he was being paid by the Chinese, he used offshore accounts and set up a Liechtenstein charity purportedly for the benefit of children. In reality, he never donated money to any charity through the foundation.
In the spring of 2004, Gowadia landed on law enforcement’s radar. A furniture container addressed to Gowadia arrived in Honolulu, and when Customs and Border Patrol agents opened it, they found a box of documents that included contracts and information about aircraft infrared-suppression technology. In April and again in June, Gowadia was flagged at the airport before outbound flights and searched for documents. He argued that the searches were unreasonable and violated his fourth amendment right, but the documents were seized regardless and handed over to FBI Special Agent Thatcher Mohajerin.
The FBI spent more than a year gathering information on Gowadia, combing through the documents seized by border officials, surveilling his property, and conducting a forensic analysis on his finances. By October 2005, the agency had enough information to obtain a warrant to search his house.
As agents from the FBI and Air Force searched Gowadia’s home on October 13, 2005, removing boxes and stacks of files, Special Agent Tamura-Wageman walked down the property’s driveway to fetch Special Agent Mohajerin, the investigation’s leader. He told him the house was secure and that he could now speak with Gowadia.
For more than a year, Mohajerin, who had black hair and dark eyebrows and was an attorney before joining the FBI in 1996, had been working with the FBI’s Field Intelligence Group in Honolulu to analyze and interpret the documents seized from Gowadia at the airport. They also analyzed Gowadia’s financial data that Mohajerin had obtained and were able to link transactions to his activity in China. Between 1999 and 2003, Gowadia’s engineering consulting business, N.S. Gowadia Inc., declared nearly $750,000, the New York Times reported in 2005.
Up the driveway, Tamura-Wageman introduced Mohajerin to Gowadia. “You are not under arrest. You are free to leave. But we do have to search your premises pursuant to this warrant that we have,” Mohajerin explained.
According to Mohajerin’s testimony in court, Gowadia seemed excitable and confused and wanted an explanation about what was going on. “This is just a giant mistake,” he said. The afternoon sun was beaming down and the temperature had reached 85 degrees, so Mohajerin suggested they speak in a shaded area. Gowadia agreed. (Mohajerin and the Department of Justice declined to answer questions for this article, and Gowadia could not be reached for comment, but during the trial, prosecutors described the events in court documents and testimony.)
Gowadia led Mohajerin through his garage, where a Jaguar and a Honda were parked, into a room with the table and chairs that the FBI had already cleared. Gowadia was wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and a gardening hat, which he removed when they sat. Mohajerin found Gowadia eager to talk. “This is all a mistake,” Gowadia insisted. “You shouldn’t be here.”
Gowadia spoke rapidly. Another agent took notes, but the monologue was difficult to follow. Gowadia said it was all a misunderstanding, fueled by a vindictive plot by one of his competitors. He railed off a number of technical terms and names so rapidly that the agent was having a hard time taking notes of the conversation.
“We’d be more than happy to discuss this,” Mohajerin said. “But Mr. Gowadia, you need to slow down.”
The agents gave Gowadia some paper to write a statement. He wrote that he was declining an attorney, was willing to cooperate, and had been read his rights by the agents. He went on to describe his business and finances and stated that he had no classified documents in his home.
They spoke until after 8:30 p.m. Mohajerin believed he had developed a good rapport with Gowadia and said they could continue speaking the next day. They walked through the house into the backyard to the lanai overlooking the ocean where other agents were waiting. At some point Cheryl Gowadia cooked her husband some eggs.
The search lasted until 11:25 that evening. By then the agents had reportedly discovered 500 pounds of evidence, 40 boxes in all, including U.S. and foreign documents visibly marked classified, six computers, thumb drives, and other electronic media containing classified and restricted information.
The next morning at around 9, Mohajerin called Gowadia and asked if he would be willing to meet. Gowadia agreed, and he met with agents outside a Sears store an hour later. They bought Starbucks coffees and drove to the Maui Police Department to speak in an interview room.
“How are you doing? How’s Mrs. Gowadia doing? Are you guys doing okay?” Mohajerin asked as they sat in the interview room.
“Yeah, we’re doing fine,” Gowadia replied.
Mohajerin thanked him for his time and for his cooperation. Then he told Gowadia that there appeared to be classified documents in the material seized the day before, and that perhaps he hadn’t been truthful with them when they spoke. Gowadia dropped his head.
The interview lasted until after 5 p.m., interrupted only by bathroom breaks and a McDonald’s lunch. By the time they were finished, Gowadia had written and signed a second statement. Over the next 13 days, in interviews in Maui and Honolulu—where Mohajerin booked Gowadia into hotels using the agent’s alias “Thatcher Steele”—Gowadia would write and sign several more statements. He acknowledged both retaining classified information and sharing it with individuals in at least eight foreign countries, including the People’s Republic of China.
On October 22, 2005, Gowadia wrote and signed his final statement: “On reflection what I did was wrong to help the PRC make a cruise missile. What I did was espionage and treason because I shared military secrets with the PRC.”
Four days later, on October 26, Gowadia was arrested and charged with one count of sharing national defense information to a foreign nation. Then, on November 6, a federal grand jury in Honolulu delivered an 18-count superseding indictment against the engineer.
Because of the sensitive nature of the case, Gowadia’s trial took more than three years to begin while lawyers and the court discussed which national-security-related documents could and could not be presented in court. Gowadia was kept in a federal detention center throughout. During a pretrial hearing in November 2009, the defense argued that Gowadia suffered from narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) and was unfit to stand trial. Defense attorney Birney Bervar said Gowadia was uncooperative and difficult to communicate with. “We have had a lot of difficulty trying to relay concepts to Mr. Gowadia, trying to discuss factual matters,” Bervar said in court. “It feels like we are saying one thing or asking questions about one thing, and he’s telling us another.” (Bervar did not respond to requests for an interview.)
Richard Rogers, PhD, a psychology professor at the University of North Texas and who appeared on behalf of the defense, said Gowadia’s NPD made him incompetent to stand trial. Lisa Hope, a clinical and forensic psychologist for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, testifying for the prosecution, said Gowadia had a “grandiose sense of self” and believed that he was better than others. Hope said he had told her that he thought his work had saved thousands of American lives, and that his mind worked faster than a computer. But while she agreed that he suffered from narcissistic personality disorder, Hope did not believe he was unfit to stand for trial. Judge Kevin S.C. Chang agreed, and the trial was scheduled for the coming spring.
Opening statements began on April 12, 2010, and testimony continued for over four months. Special Agent Mohajerin testified for days. He described his various meetings with Gowadia, observing him as a “brilliant man.” He said he was shocked when Gowadia freely acknowledged sharing secrets with China. “That was a surprise, because I remember, on a personal note, I got goosebumps realizing what I had just stepped into.”
Despite Gowadia’s written statements, during the trial Gowadia’s attorneys argued that his confessions were coerced. They claimed Gowadia made them while he was tired and under duress, and that agents had threatened him with the death penalty and said they would arrest his children as coconspirators, which Mohajerin denied under oath.
Gowadia also insisted that he had only shared information that had already been declassified. The defense called several witnesses—including high-level scientists with GE and Northrop—who said that they did not believe Gowadia could have sold secret documents to China because he had left Northrop in 1986, before the B-2’s test flights. Even some of the documents discovered by law enforcement during searches at the airport, the defense argued, had been assessed as unclassified by the government.
But the jury found the prosecution’s evidence overwhelming. On August 9, 2010, after 41 days of trial and six days of jury deliberation, Gowadia was convicted on 14 of 17 counts of violation of the Arms Export Control Act and the Espionage Act for unlawfully disclosing classified information on the design of the B-2 and other classified government projects to China and other countries. Ashton Gowadia, Noshir’s son, told reporters at the time that the jury had been barred from seeing documents that would exonerate his father, and that his father’s defense team would appeal the verdict. “My father would never, ever do anything intentionally to hurt this country,” he said “We hope the convictions will be overturned and he’ll be able to go home.”
On January 24, 2011, Gowadia was sentenced to 32 years in prison. He appealed, but three years later, on July 28, 2014, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed his conviction and 32-year sentence.
Today, Gowadia has traded his picturesque views over Uaoa Bay for a cell in USP Florence ADMAX, a supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, sometimes known as the Alcatraz of the Rockies. Other inmates include cartel kingpin Juan “El Chapo” Guzman, 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, and the Shoe Bomber, Richard Reid.
Ashton Gowadia says that when he is able to visit his father, Gowadia is kept chained and behind glass, reminiscent of the prison-visit scenes in Silence of the Lambs. Ashton Gowadia maintains his father’s innocence. “The reality of the case was that the jury didn’t really get to see any of the evidence. Everything they got to see was redacted,” he says. “The entire narrative was controlled by the FBI.”
During Gowadia’s trial, prosecutors alleged that he had financial motives for selling secrets to China and other nations, because he couldn’t afford to pay the mortgage on his home in Hawaii. But in one of his written statements during his interviews with the FBI, Gowadia may have hinted toward another motive when he lashed out at Special Agent Mohajerin and the government he represented, which is now Gowadia’s jailer.
“These allegations are hurtful in light of 30 years of extraordinary service to the nation. I am extremely well respected around the world, except in my own country for which I have done so much and put my life and liberty on line for 30 years,” Gowadia wrote. “I now work with other countries because I want to help others to a certain point and also being respected.” He added: “There are people who believe B-2 would have not happened without me.”
Additional reporting by Johnny Liesman
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