Covert Finance: Khashoggi and Ghorbanifar

Ghorbanifar and Khashoggi, two wealthy foreigners and sometime C.I.A. assets, were both involved in the October Surprise. They both were involved in the preliminary plans for the deal between the Republicans and Iranians. Both would play important roles in other important events and were involved in BCCI, one of the most corrupt enterprises of our day. The Kerry Committee report said both were US agents in the Iran/Contra scandal, Khashoggi as a banker and Ghobanifar as an arms dealer.

Ghorbanifar, and Saudi billionaire and arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, according to Wayne Madsen, had economic ties to George H.W. Bush and the Bin Ladens through Potomac Capital, a C.I.A. front which Bush established in Geneva in 1976. It was to be the template for BCCI. After that bank’s demise, Potomac again becme important and is in the same building as Ghobanifar’s Panamanian corporation, TopazLiberty, Inc. It was tied to BCCI and deeply involved in US operations in Central America in the 1980s. Ghorbanifar, an Iranian exile, has close ties with Iranian dissidents and the Neoconservative who want to invade Iran. He is considered a long-time Mossad agent of influence. Today, Ghorbanifar seems to be largely discredited due to the bad information he provided prior to the US invasion of Iraq.

Potomac was later investigated for possible imvolvement in Iran/Contra transactions. Some intelligence men complained that Bush sometimes used Potomac to fund domestic political operations.

Arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi would turn up time and again in major events. Khashoggi ( 1935- ) is a Turkoman Saudi billionaire who is a socialite in the West and Middle East and has been involved in arms dealing, legitimate business, and intelligence activities. His business career began in the 1950s, while a student at Chico State College, when he sold a fleet of US trucks to Mohammed bin Laden. His father was the Bin Ladens’ physician. There was an early connection with Barrick Gold in Canada. It was a spin-off of Barrick Resources International, a C.I.A. shell corporation set up by Kermit Roosevelt. Khashoggi brokered billions of dollars worth of arms deals for the Saudi government. His main firm seems to be Triad Holding Company. He runs the firm, but his two brothers are partners. There are other firms he has named Triad, including one chartered in Ohio. He has invested in real estate, oil, broadcasting, and any number of other ventures.


His greatest importance for this work flows from his ties to US intelligence operations. He clearly was a major C.I.A. asset, and probably worked for the Mossad as well. Beginning in the 1960s, he made made payoffs on behalf of the C.I.A. in the form of kickbacks from arms contracts.

Khashoggi became owner of the famous Safari Club in Kenya. Former Saudi intelligence chief openly talked about another Safari Club which met at this location in Kenya. It was a meeting of US, British, French, and Middle Eastern intelligence people who met there to discuss covert activities that were difficult to pull off as a result of the Watergate scandal.

Khashoggi admits he started the ball rolling in the October Surprise. He told Belgiam HUMO in 1987, "I am still convinced that it was all based on a grand idea. I cannot think of it in any other way: after all, I started the ball rolling.” In 1992, the Senate report on BCCI described him as one of the “principle foreign agents of the U.S.”

On September 24, 2007 , a Gulfstream II crash landed 40 miles from the capital of Yucatan. It was carrying 5.5 metric tons of cocaine from Venezuela was downed in Mexico. Ownership has been tied to Khashoggi and his lieutenant Wally Hilliard. Mohammed Atta and a colleague took flying lessons at Hilliard’s school. Hilliard was tied to the C.I.A. through Myron DuBain, who had worked for the OSS and C.I.A.. Du Bain became chairman of Fireman’s Fund, which took over a Hilliard company in the eighties. Later the European of Safety of Navigation investigated the matter because it was believed the same plane was used by the C.I.A. in renditions of suspected terrorists.

One of his business partners was Mario Renda of the Luchesse mafia family. Another business partner was former Chechen First Deputy Premier Khozh-Akhmed Nukhaev, who entered politics after a successful career in organized crime. His political philosophy is indistinguishable from that of Osama bin Laden. Another partner was banker Guillermo Hernandez-Cartaya who has been accused of involvement in arms for drugs trading through Columbia and Cuba and a botched kidnapping.

In 1983, Khashoggi established Five Star Trust to manage the assets of Ferdinand Marcos, but came under the control of the Bush family and was established on the Isle of Man in 1989. Some say the Bushes got Marcos’ gold and assets in return for granting him asylum. In the 1980s, he was a middle man for Oliver North’s deals with the Iranian mullahs. He borrowed much of the money for his part in the transactions from the notorious BCCI. The senior Bush pardoned him for his role in the Iran/Contra scandal. In 1983, Khashoggi established Five Star Trust to manage the assets of Ferdinand Marcos, but came under the control of the Bush family and was established on the Isle of Man in 1989. Some say the Bushes got Marcos’ gold and assets in return for granting him asylum. The senior Bush pardoned him for his role in the Iran/Contra scandal.

Counterterrorism expert Jean-Charles Brisard and British reporter Greg Palast write that Khasoggi attended a May, 1996 meeting at which Saudi Arabia bought off Osama bin Laden, in return for protecting his homeland. Turki al-Faisal, then head of intelligence, wass there as well as an unnamed bin Laden brother. Businessman Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, who bailed out George W. Bush’s Harken Energy was also present along with a representative of the Saudi Defense Ministry.

In the same year, Khashoggi represented Saudi Arabia in the Tashkent, Uzbekistan meetings on the formulation of twin pipelines through Afghanistan which was to involve Enron and Unocal. A 1991 Pentagon study, declassified in 2004, listed him as being involved in the drug trade with thee Columbians. He was described as a “narco-terrorist.”

He was also involved with the C.I.A. in the 1990s in efforts to support Bosnian Muslims. He has also entertained Muslim radicals believed to be tied to violence in Russia. In 2008, Indian press reports claim that he has given hundred of millions of dollars to businessman Hassan Ali Khan, who some think was tied to Dawood Ibrahim, the underworld kingpin who could have been behind the bloody attacks on Mumbai. Ibrahim was once a C.I.A. operative; his recent activities might be seen as an effort to settle old scores.

In the early 1960s he worked with Democratic National Chairman Edwin Pauley who was a partner of George H.W. Bush in Zapata Oil. Pauley taught Bush and Khashoggi how to launder money through Mexico, and this system was used by Bush to launder money for the Nixon campaigns of 1968 and 1972. He visited President Nixon several times.

Gus Greenspun, who had run guns for Israel in the late 1940s, provided Khashoggi with contacts that enabled him to do business with the State of Israel. There after, he was able to serve the C.I.A. as a “cut-out” for it in joint opertions with Israel. Cut-outs are necessary when the agency desires to engage in operations that are illegal or forbidden.

He made heavy contributions to the contributions to Nixon and Reagan.campaigns. In 1972, he secretly gave Nixon $1 million. Presumably he “accidentally” left the cash behind in a suitcase after visiting the president. He also left several million in Rebozo’s bank to be drained by the president’sw close friend. Beebe left $200,000 in the account. Al Ahram editor Mohammed Haykal claimed that Arabs pumped between $ 10 and 12 million into that campaign.. Teresa LaPore, deputy elections supervisor of Palm Beach County, who was moonlighting as a stewardess on Khashoggi’s private airplanes in the 1980s, designed the famous butterfly ballot that confused thousands into inadvertently voting for Pat Buchanan rather than than Albert Gore 2000. Some have reported that Khashoggi probably servd as a conduit for a great deal of off-shore money finding its way into the 2004 George W. Bush campaign.

Khashoggi is a resident of Monaco and a close friend of neoconservative leader Richard Perle, who also has a residence there. Adnan was the uncle of Dodi Fayed, After the death of Aristotle Onassis, Jackie Kennedy was briefly involved with him. He has invested in real estate, oil, broadcasting, and any number of other ventures. Once the richest man in the world, he is now down to his last $50 million and spends much time in Spain fighting litigation against him.

On July 4, 1999, an interesting meeting took place at his villa in Beaulieu , near Niece. Present were representatives of the Yeltysin crime family and people from the United States, Columbia, Venezuela, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Germany. Peter Dale Scott believes they comprise the “meta-group” that controls the international drug trade. They represented Al Qaeda, the revolutionary FARC in Columbia, the Turkish military, the Kosovo Liberation Army, Cuban and Russian military intellience, Saudi intelligence, and the C.I.A.. The first postwar meta-group was BCCI, and this group has some ties to its historical predecessor. BCCI inherited from American agent Kheshoggi the ability to broker deals with partners all around the world. Before, 1977, the US used him arrange trans-global transactions and move money. Congress, in that year, made it illegal for American corporations to make payments to foreignofficials. BCCI emerged to carry out that function and to laundere drug and intelligence money.

The meeting at Kheshoggi’s villa is claimed to be where a vew men also planned the Russian 9/11, the bombings of 1999. This story need not concern us. An American scholar at the Hoover Institution believes it was planned by people in the Putin administration to make him more popular. The Russian version, attributes the work to Russians tied to Far West Ltd. who happened to be anti-Putin. The firm is now known as Far West DDC and has headquarters in Dubai. They are part of what Russians call OPS, Organized Crime Society.

Since the early 1990s, then OPS, with the help of elements in the Russian military, have been moving drugs from Afghanistan to Europe. Some of the drug dealing tied to this group finances Islamic insurrections in Russia. Macedonia, and Kosovo. A reason for this may be that it is easier to move drugs in areas where governments are weak. From 2000 on, they have also moved Columbian drugs to Europe via Novorossiysk and St. Petersburg. So much heroin has been moved into Russia, that the government has had to act against OPS, resulting in a truce, sharing of profits, stabililization of the situation in Chechnia, and killing of some troublesome ethnic leaders.

Seven days after the 1999 meeting, Russian paratroopers seized the Pristina, Kosovo airport. The action was taken without the knowledge of the Russian Defense minister. The official position of the Russian government was to support Serbia against the Islamic extremists in the KLA. After some debate, the Russias troops were permitted to remain until 2003, and that airstrip was for that time the main outlet for Russian drugs. Anton Surikov, a Russian scholar with C.I.A. ties and links to Putin’s opponents, comfirmed in 2006 that the seizing of the strip had been planned at the Beaulieu meeting and arranged in conjunction with the KLA.