The Murky World of Weapons Dealers

In any ordinary business, Manucher Ghorbanifar would cut an implausibly mysterious figure. Officially, he has been a shipping executive in Tehran and a commodities trader in France. By his own account he was a refugee from the revolutionary government of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, which confiscated his businesses in Iran, yet he later became a trusted friend and kitchen adviser to Mir Hussein Mousavi, Prime Minister in the Khomeini government. Some U.S. officials who have dealt with Ghorbanifar praise him highly. Says Michael Ledeen, adviser to the Pentagon on counterterrorism: "He is one of the most honest, educated, honorable men I have ever known." Others call him a liar who, as one puts it, could not tell the truth about the clothes he is wearing.

But in the fraternity of international arms dealers, this Janus-like profile does not make Ghorbanifar extraordinary. That shadowy netherworld teems with other characters who might seem too garish for a remake of The Maltese Falcon. Among them: Sarkis Soghanalian, a 300-lb. Turkish-born Lebanese citizen living in Miami who specializes these days in selling helicopters to Iraq and is said to receive jars of severed human ears from clients; and Sam Cummings, a wisecracking American-born British subject operating out of Alexandria, Va., who is unabashedly -- though so far unsuccessfully -- negotiating to peddle on the world market some $5 billion worth of U.S. weapons left behind when America pulled out of Viet Nam. The most prominent of all, of course, is Adnan Khashoggi, the sybaritic Saudi Arabian whose jet planes, opulent yacht, lavish parties and glamorous companions seem intended to promote his image as the world's richest man.

Khashoggi and Ghorbanifar have emerged as prominent back-channel figures in the series of hush-hush shipments of American-made weapons to Iran that has flowered into the U.S. scandal of the decade. Of all the dubious aspects of that affair, one of the most unsavory is that U.S. national policy became entangled with the maneuvers of private arms dealers. At best, President Reagan and some of his aides, prominently including Lieut. Colonel Oliver North, showed atrocious judgment by plunging into a devious policy without professional diplomatic guidance. At worst, the White House has laid itself open to the nasty suspicion that in the hope of freeing American hostages, it was lured into an operation designed by arms merchants whose motives were mixed at best.

To be 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 victim to American duplicity that cost them millions. "I have lost $3.7 million of my own money, my own hard-earned money!" screams Ghorbanifar, waving his arms wildly in an interview with TIME. "Be ki begam! Be ki begam!" That is a Farsi phrase meaning "Whom can I tell?" that he interjects virtually every two sentences.