Navy SEAL accused of smuggling illegal weapons from Iraq .

An Australian soldier test fires an AK-47 used by Afghan soldiers in Mirwais, in the southern state of Uruzgan.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Navy SEAL is accused of trying to sell powerful weapons fresh off Iraqi battlefields
• SEAL Nicholas Bickle due to look in romance in San Diego, California
• Agents got information from an informant, the complaint indicates
• SEALs are alleged to spend same strict checks entering U.

  . as other troops, officials say

Washington (CNN) - The apprehension of a Navy SEAL accused of trying to sell weapons smuggled from Iraq or Afghanistan has raised questions about how he managed to get 80 high-powered weapons into the U.S. through military transport.

The questions were buzzing Friday inside the ranks of the U.S. military in the heat of an accusation that a Navy SEAL, one of America's elite warriors, was at the eye of a weapons smuggling ring.

The 18-page criminal complaint from the U.S. attorney's office in Las Vegas, Nevada, reads like a paperback thriller - full of machine guns, cash, threats and bravado, a lot of it told to federal agents by a cooperative informant who had been facing domestic battery and robbery charges.

The AK-47 rifles are described as fresh off the battlefield, marked with the Arabic letter that signifies they were split of the Iraqi Army arsenal - or as one of the supposed conspirators said: "There is still Iraqi sand in this [expletive]."

The Navy SEAL is identified as Nicholas Bickle. He talked tough, according to the complaint.

"If you ever [expletive] with me you love who we are. We're the government, we'll see you," he told one person.

From what little information could be gleaned from the Pentagon and Bickle's Naval Special Warfare Command in San Diego, California, he's 33 years old, enlisted in 2004, and pinned on the SEALs' trident insignia in 2005. Bickle deployed twice to Iraq, according to Kate Wallace, a spokeswoman at Naval Special Warfare Command.

Bickle was to look in a San Diego federal court on Friday.

The military rules are clear: Everyone gets searched before heading home from deployment. Military screeners are trained by Custom and Border Security officials and they cover the people, the luggage, the train and the cargo, according to Wallace.

"Our special forces members don't have special waivers for customs inspections. They're subject to all the same rules and restrictions as anyone else in uniform," said Wallace.

But the rules seem to turn a picayune for special operations forces.

"The regular guys go through a more robust search, but it's just a perfunctory search for limited forces guys," one individual with insider knowledge of military procedures told Pentagon Correspondent Chris Lawrence,

A special forces team might go with far more equipment, including classified hardware, have a shorter deployment, and might come and provide on a far different and less formal schedule than regular troops.

Rank-and-file military get still more rigorous treatment than civilians might look in an airport line: Put the duffel on the conveyer belt, have it X-rayed, and then dump the contents out on a table and let it picked over. And then take it up and make it X-rayed again before heading to the flat and home.

Outside, before troops get to the military screeners, there are so-called "Amnesty Boxes," a final opportunity for a military man or woman who might "forget" to give in that battlefield souvenir or might receive an extra live round in a pocket. They can drop items in the box with no questions asked. And the rules are rigid about not bringing back weapons, apart from those assigned and supplied, which are located in the aircraft hold.

"To get any sort of war trophies back, you get to go through a process," Pentagon spokesman Col. Dave Lapan said Friday. Asked what might be the apprehension of Bickle, Lapan would just say, "Too soon to tell."

There are cases of troops taking unauthorized equipment from the battlefield, but nearly all of those involve smuggling items home as personal souvenirs, according to the Defense official.

"This seems to go way beyond that. We have dangerous gangs operating just over that Southwest border, and here we give a SEAL arming the real guys we could be fighting," the Defense official said.

The Naval Special Warfare Command is cooperating with the union officials, but it is not conducting its own investigation into how Bickle allegedly smuggled in all the weapons as a SEAL.

"If it's determined we want to reassess procedures in order to make certain our members are not transporting items stateside, then we'll certainly do that," Wallace said.