Alexandria Arms Dealer

A few years ago I read the novel Run by Douglas Winter – it was a gripping yarn about illegal Arms Dealers, the CIA, and East Coast gangs. In the novel Winter claimed that Alexandria, Virginia was the epi-center of the world’s legal and illegal Arms and Munitions trade. I always wondered if that was true or if Winter just pulled it out of his imagination.

I’ve been doing a little digging lately and I have stumbled across this interesting little Alexandria based firm called Wye Oak Technology (named of course after Maryland’s state tree the Wye Oak).

If you go to Wye Oak’s corporate web site they offer themselves out as a group of “engineering professionals” who offer various tech solutions to businesses. If you follow their offered services links you get the usual but then you get this.

Here’s an idea of the kinds of special projects this innocent looking tech solutions firm does for their various clients.

Seems Wye Oak is doing a little more than developing tacky websites for churches and supermarkets. Seems Wye Oak is an Alexandria VA based cover operation doing more than a little arms dealing.

In fact Wye Oak’s founder Dale C. Stoffel was murdered in Iraq last December after hinting at a kick-back scheme in the Iraqi Defense Ministry in which Wye Oak was contracted to refurbish old Soviet Era tanks for the new government. You can read all about the Stoffel mystery at this great blog or this independent media site that I stumbled upon in my research.

Or you can go to this other independent media site where they have Insurgent Communiques claiming that Stoffel was murdered for being the unofficial CIA Director in Iraq.

Either way you shake it, there is something fishy about Wye Oak. All it took was a good novel and a little curiosity to discover a front company for an arms dealer in my own backyard. I wonder what other Old Town secrets I can dig up?

UPDATE: Since the writing of this article two days ago Wye Oak Technology have taken their website offline. You can go to a cached version of it here.

Originally published on November 22, 2005.

This led to a paranoid few days where I thought I might get kidnapped or killed for exposing this. I found out about this because I was trying to find out who owned this awesome house that was always empty in my neighborhood. Wye Oak owned it and researching them lead to this story.

Note: This article was chock full of weblinks that lead to some amazingly weird supporting evidence for my story. Almost all of those weblinks are inactive in 2010. Too bad because everything I write about here sounds too crazy to be true, but it is. I uncovered this operation in my town and it quickly went offline.