Edited by Lauren Harper
February 23, 2015
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 502
The Merchant of Death’s Account Book: Declassified Documents Reveal More Information on Government’s Opportunistic Relationship with World’s Biggest Arms Smuggler, Sarkis Soghanalian
Washington, DC, Posted February 23, 2015 — Documents posted for the first
time — in a collaboration between the National Security Archive and VICE
News — provide insight into the U.S. government’s paradoxical and
opportunistic relationship with arms dealer Sarkis Soghanalian, whose
larger-than-life deals were so well known that he was an inspiration for
Nicholas Cage’s character Yuri Orlov in the 2005 film, Lord of War.
Sarkis Soghanalian was the Cold War’s largest arms dealer, made over $12
million a year at his peak, and had his hand in seemingly every major
conflict across the globe — with the U.S. government’s tacit approval. His
largest weapons deal was a $1.6 billion sale to the Saddam Hussein regime at
the outset of the Iran-Iraq War that included U.S. helicopters and French
artillery, and he sold arms to groups in Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, and
Peru from the 1970s through the 2000s. Soghanalian was nicknamed the
"Merchant of Death" for arming so many conflicts, a moniker he dismissed by
arguing Alfred Nobel was called the same for inventing gunpowder, “and then
they named it the Nobel Prize.” At one point the U.S. government indicted
Soghanalian for, among other things, wire fraud and violating United Nations
(U.N.) sanctions, but then freed him another once he provided useful
intelligence.
The U.S. relied on Soghanalian’s unique intelligence so much that it kept
him out of jail — for the most part. In 1982 he was sentenced to only five
years probation for wire fraud in connection with reneging on a 1977 $1.1
million machine gun deal to Mauritania, and a federal judge dismissed all
charges against him in 1986 after he was arrested at the Miami International
Airport for possession of — among other things — two unregistered rocket
launchers. Despite his oftentimes illegal arms trade, the longest prison
term Soghanalian ever served was two years in connection with the 1983 sale
of 103 Hughes helicopters and two rocket launchers to Iraq in violation of
U.N. sanctions. The initial sentence was six and a half years, but was
reduced after Soghanalian helped Americans infiltrate a sophisticated
counterfeiting operation into his native Lebanon. Soghanalian said, “When
they needed me, the U.S. government that is, they immediately came and got
me out.”
After his 2011 death, the Archive filed a series of targeted FOIA requests
for documents on Soghanalian to the FBI, the U.S. Central Command, the
Defense Intelligence Agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Border
Patrol, and the Department of State. The hard work of archivists and
declassifiers at these agencies resulted in the declassification of nearly
2,500 pages of documents on the notorious arms dealer, and today the
National Security Archive is posting the ‘top 10’ documents from this trove.
Check out today’s posting at the National Security Archive -
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