Sarkis Garabet Soghanalian (; February 6, 1929 – October 5, 2011), nicknamed the Merchant of Death, was a Syrian- Lebanese-Armenian international private arms dealer who gained fame for being the "Cold War's largest arms merchant" and the lead seller of firearms and weaponry to the former government of Iraq under Saddam Hussein during the 1980s.
Soghanalian was contracted by the Central Intelligence Agency to sell arms to help Iraq during the Iran–Iraq War. With the encouragement of the Reagan Administration and the backing of American intelligence agencies, he oversaw the transaction of several significant arms deals. Aside from Iraq, he also sold weapons to groups in Mauritania, Lebanon, and Latin America.
On the eve of the Persian Gulf War, Soghanalian spoke publicly about his activities during the Iran-Iraq War. This led to a federal indictment by the Justice Department. He was found guilty and sentenced to jail. He was given an early release when he helped the Clinton administration to attempt break up of a counterfeiting ring in Lebanon. In 2001 he was arrested once more by the US government on bank fraud charges, but was released a year later after revelations of further weapons transactions deals between the CIA and Peru.
Early life
Soghanalian was born to an Armenian family in what was then French mandate Syrian Iskanderun (now part of Turkey). In late 1939, his family moved to Lebanon. Due to the poor economic conditions his family lived in at the time, he decided to drop out of high school and joined the French Army and served in a tank division. It was from his experience in the military that brought him into the world of weaponry and, in his words, he "adapted to it from childhood and kept going".
Soghanalian later took up a job as a ski instructor in Lebanon, where he met and married his American wife.
Initial arms deals
Beginnings
Soghanalian was introduced to the world of arms trade in the beginning of the 1970s. He sold his first consignment of firearms in 1973 (mainly consisting of American weaponry). However, he was soon able to procure weaponry from a number of Eastern bloc countries including Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland. The arms consisted largely of small arms and infantry weapons. After the Lebanese Civil War, he branched out his arms operations to other countries, supplying the Christian Phalange militia in Lebanon, various factions in Ecuador, Mauritania and Nicaragua, and Mobutu Sese Seko's Zaire, to Argentina during the Falklands War, and to Saddam Hussein. He was even able procure an American C-130 Hercules transport plane to Libya's Muammar al-Gaddafi.
Iraq
According to an interview he gave years later, the United States was fully aware of Soghanalian's operations when he began obtaining weapons for Iraq. He quipped "The Americans knew what I was doing, every minute, every hour. If I drank a glass of water, they were aware of it and what kind of water it was." He had struck up and maintained a largely cordial relationship with the United States ever since the Lebanon crisis of 1958. American intelligence officials had described him as a cooperative and reliable source in Lebanon, making him an ideal candidate to conduct the arms deal with Iraq. With the beginning of the Iran–Iraq War in 1980, he began to sell weapons to Iraq with the blessing of the United States. Since there was an arms embargo placed against Iraq, the weapons were funneled through various countries. His most significant deal came when he procured French 155mm self-propelled howitzers (valued at an estimated $1.4 billion).
Iraqi leaders had initially approached the Reagan administration to purchase American 175mm artillery, but had been turned down. They were, however, encouraged by American officials to procure the weapons through private arms dealers. The Iraqi officials appealed to Soghanalian, then based in Miami, Florida, who in turn approached several European governments. He found French leader François Mitterrand inclined to conducting the transaction so long as the deal was kept secret, since Iran was holding French hostages at the time, and France did not wish to antagonize it. The U.S. encouraged Mitterrand to approve the sale, nicknamed the "Vulcan," as it passed through a complex set of transactions.