Word: ghorbanifar
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...commission members flew off one Wednesday to Paris and interviewed Arms Trader Manucher Ghorbanifar for more than five hours in the elegant chambers of the Hotel Plaza Athenee. Then they walked down the avenue a few blocks to see Adnan Khashoggi, the Saudi sybarite, in the pillowed splendor of his apartment...
...Lieut. Colonel Oliver North deliberately bypassed the State Department when he distributed special intelligence reports on Iran to selected Government officials in September 1985. A few months later, however, North provided intelligence reports on the Middle East to Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian merchant who was the middleman for negotiations between the U.S. and the Islamic nation...
...begin with the first time McFarlane mentioned to the President the subject of arms sales to Iran. The then National Security Adviser visited Reagan at Bethesda Naval Hospital shortly after the President underwent surgery for colon cancer in July 1985. According to Regan, the President questioned the credentials of Ghorbanifar, the contact with Iran. Says the Senate report: "Regan testified that McFarlane defended Ghorbanifar on the basis of Israeli assurances, and the President authorized McFarlane to explore the channel...
McFarlane, however, told the Senators that he did not bring up Ghorbanifar at Bethesda, adding that he did not even learn of the arms merchant's identity until December of that year when he first met him in London. Yet McFarlane did mention Ghorbanifar in a cable to Secretary of State Shultz calling for renewed ties with Iran. The message was sent on June 14, 1985, a month before the Bethesda meeting. McFarlane explains that if he did use Ghorbanifar's name in the cable it was because he thought it was the identity of an aide to Iran...
...American group returned home empty handed. The U.S. later delivered TOW antitank missiles directly to Iran, instead of through Ghorbanifar and Khashoggi as had been done before, and reduced the price from $12,000 to $8,000 each. An angry Rafsanjani called Mousavi to declare, "Your friend Ghorbanifar is a thief." Ghorbanifar, feeling betrayed and threatened by a CIA frame-up, then freed his Iranian associates to leak the news that created the scandal...