Word: khashoggi
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...sure, Ghorbanifar and Khashoggi insist that their intention in putting American and Iranian officials in touch was to bring about a diplomatic rapprochement between the two countries -- "the biggest historical opportunity of the decade for the free world," as Ghorbanifar modestly puts it. Not that the two were being entirely altruistic, even by their own account; they hoped eventually to earn enormous commissions by brokering trade of all sorts between the U.S. and Iran. To hear Ghorbanifar and Khashoggi tell the story, they raised money to set up the arms sales as a kind of opening wedge and then fell...
...money that Ghorbanifar and Khashoggi are howling for may have gone through, or perhaps stuck to, the hands of other, still more shadowy arms merchants. The Reagan Administration has said that North diverted some of the Iran arms money to the contras in Nicaragua. Presumably the funds went through a network of arms dealers, supposedly operating with private donations, who supplied weapons to the anti-Marxist rebels all through the two-year period during which Congress had forbidden direct or indirect U.S. military aid. As far as anyone can tell, the contras seem to have got very little...
Despite the prominence of Khashoggi and Ghorbanifar in the arms-to-Iran scandal, the world of weapons trading is a tripartite universe in which the private dealers occupy a relatively small part. One estimate puts global weapons exports in 1985 at just over $30 billion, not counting black- and gray-market transactions. About two-thirds of the more or less legitimate trade is conducted by governments selling to other governments, usually quite openly. Weapons-manufacturing companies take the remaining business, drumming up sales through their agents. The manufacturers require the approval of their governments, which...
...flew to Iran last May with a planeload of weapons, Ghorbanifar says, he chartered the jet and paid for the group's stay in Tehran. McFarlane says he does not know who paid but assumes the bill was split by the U.S. and Iranian governments. Ghorbanifar also charges that Khashoggi was cut out of several of the deals on orders from McFarlane. The former National Security Adviser replies that he never had anything to do with Khashoggi but did recommend, after meeting Ghorbanifar in London in December 1985, that the U.S. have no more dealings with any middlemen. Whatever...
...would get caught slipping arms to the Ayatullah's regime? In the byzantine world of the weapons dealers, it is as hard to determine what is truth and what is disinformation as it is to disentangle the mixture of visionary and conniver in the personalities of Ghorbanifar and Khashoggi. As investigators probe deeper into the scandal, Americans can only hope that Washington's policy does not prove to be as devious as the arms merchants say it was -- and as their own maneuvers often seem...