The New York Times
October 6, 2011 Thursday
The New York Times on the Web
Sarkis G. Soghanalian, an Arms Dealer Who Aided U.S. Intelligence, Dies at 82
By SCOTT SHANE
Sarkis G. Soghanalian, a larger-than-life arms dealer who provided
weapons to Saddam Hussein and many other dictators and rebels, worked
closely with American intelligence and later told his story on
television, died early Wednesday in Hialeah, Fla. He was 82.
The cause was heart failure suffered at Hialeah Hospital, his son,
Garo Soghanalian, said. He lived in Miami.
In a career that might have provided material for a shelf of
thrillers, Mr. Soghanalian (pronounced SAHG-ah-NAY-lee-an) became a
major arms supplier to Mr. Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war in the
1980s, operated a fleet of cargo planes around the world and owned
homes in a dozen countries.
In 1981, he pleaded guilty to fraud in the sale of .50-caliber machine
guns to Mauritania. But a judge granted him probation, saying the case
”involved international affairs conducted by the State Department.”
In 1993, he was sentenced to six and a half years in prison for
smuggling 103 helicopters to Iraq in violation of United Nations
sanctions. But he managed to have his sentence reduced to two years
after informing American officials of a place in Lebanon where
high-quality counterfeit $100 bills were being printed.
Mr. Soghanalian was charged with wire fraud a few years later. But he
was released after being held for 10 months in order to travel to
Jordan to assist in another investigation, of the former Peruvian
intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesinos. In return for his help, a
judge sentenced him to the time he had already served.
He worked with the Central Intelligence Agency off and on for years;
after a falling out with that agency, he cooperated with the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, drawing on a huge stock of information about
the dark corners of the global weapons trade, said Lowell Bergman,
professor of investigative reporting at the University of California,
Berkeley, and an acquaintance of his for more than 30 years.
”He’s one of those characters who emerged out of the cold war and
played a critical role in clandestine activities on behalf of the
United States, while providing deniability,” said Mr. Bergman, a
reporter who produced reports about Mr. Soghanalian for ABC, the PBS
program ”Frontline” and ”60 Minutes” on CBS.
Mr. Bergman recalled sitting in Mr. Soghanalian’s Geneva office for a
day in 1985, watching as a parade of American officials, Israelis,
Palestinians and representatives of Lebanon’s Amal militia visited Mr.
Soghanalian.
After he settled in Florida in the 1990s, United States Customs
officials would occasionally raid his hangar at Miami International
Airport, looking for contraband, Mr. Bergman said.
”And then the case would go away,” he said, as Mr. Soghanalian
called on friends elsewhere in the government to come to his defense.
”He could be infuriating and totally self-absorbed,” said Mr.
Bergman, who has also reported for The New York Times. ”What was
always amazing was how much he knew.”
An American official who worked with Mr. Soghanalian years ago
confirmed his work with both the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. He said he
recalled sitting with Mr. Soghanalian and listening as he called
United States senators, members of Jordan’s royal family and leaders
of Hezbollah, the Lebanese-based militant group that the United States
regards as a terrorist organization.
”They’d all take his calls,” said the official, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about
his former contact. ”You’d find out he was telling you the truth,
even if he was kind of gilding it in his favor.”
Despite his long history of supplying weapons to brutal governments,
the official said, ”he was able to do good things for the United
States.”
Sarkis Garabet Soghanalian was born in Iskenderun, then part of Syria
but now in Turkey, on Feb. 6, 1929, into an Armenian family. After his
father’s death, the family moved to Beirut, where Sarkis quit school
and went to work, his daughter, Melo Hansen, said. He married Shirley
Adams, a teacher at a school in Beirut, in 1958, and they moved to
Binghamton, N.Y., where they lived for a decade before returning to
Lebanon. They were divorced in the 1970s.
His son said Mr. Soghanalian was fluent in English, French, Armenian,
Turkish and Arabic and ”could make himself understood” in Spanish
and Italian. ”There’s been enough said about ‘merchant of death’ and
all that,” his son said. ”But all the way back to the ’60s and ’70s,
his goal was to help the United States. There was a deep-seated root
of patriotism that often gets overlooked.”
Mr. Soghanalian was a citizen of Lebanon and never took American
citizenship, his son said. ”He liked to be independent, and it gave
the U.S. an element of denial: ‘He’s not one of ours.’ ”
In addition to his son, who lives in Miami, and his daughter, who
lives in Salt Lake City, Mr. Soghanalian is survived by his sister,
Anahis Hartz; his brother, Zaven; three grandchildren; and four
great-grandchildren.
Despite the wealth his arms sales produced, the end of the cold war
cut off many of his business contacts, his son said. ”The world
changed around him,” Mr. Soghanalian said. By the time of his death,
”he was broke.”
From: A. Papazian