Free Sleeping With The Devil by Robert Baer Page A

the minister said loudly enough for half the restaurant to hear. “Give
    them anything they ask for.”
        Before the maître d’ could get away, the minister grabbed him by the
    arm. “And for my American friend, your best bottle of Bordeaux.”
        For a split second, I considered telling the esteemed oil minister that
    while the Amir might be able to buy and sell the U.S. Treasury, our air force could still turn
    his sandbox into molten glass. I couldn’t, though; I had to think about my guests. A tussle
    over the check with the minister of petroleum would have caused them problems for years on end.
    As for the Bordeaux, halfway through dinner, I faked my own trip to the bathroom to check the
    wine list. It set back the Sabah something like $5,200, hardly worth a blink in Kuwait City.
        Saudi Arabia’s seduction of Washington worked the same way: They paid,
    we took, and everyone politely averted their eyes. It all began with a lesson the Saudis
    learned at San Clemente, California, after the 1968 presidential election: America might be the
    most powerful nation on earth, but its leaders couldn’t say no.

        ADNAN KHASHOGGI is almost a cartoon of the Saudi wheeler-dealer: a
    sometime venture capitalist and arms middleman, ridiculously rich (in fits and starts), and
    unapologetic for it. One day Khashoggi turns up in the newspapers accused of obtaining $64
    million in illegal loans from the collapsed Bangkok Bank of Commerce. The next day he’s in the
    New York society columns, attending charity balls in the Hamptons and donating millions to help
    American farmers.
        The son of the personal physician of Ibn Sa’ud, who founded the modern
    Saudi kingdom in 1932, Khashoggi was serving by the mid-1970s as middleman on an estimated 80
    percent of all arms deals between the United States and Saudi Arabia. From Lockheed alone, he
    pocketed $106 million in commissions from 1970 to 1975. Other defense contractors contributed
    hundreds of millions more during the decade. Northrop officials told a Senate subcommittee
    looking into foreign payments by U.S. corporations that it had given Khashoggi $450,000 to
    bribe Saudi generals into buying the company’s wares - an allegation that didn’t prevent the
    Reagan administration from using Khashoggi as its own middleman during the Iran-Contra fiasco.
    (Having served as basically a pimp for the Shah of Iran in the 1970s, Khashoggi knew how to cut
    a dirty deal as well as anyone.)
        In the late 1970s Khashoggi made a splash by trying to donate nearly
    $600,000 to three prestigious Philadelphia-area colleges - Swarthmore, Haverford, and Bryn Mawr
    - to establish a Middle East studies program that would create understanding and sympathy for
    the Arab point of view. That plan fell apart after the Northrop bribe charges surfaced.
    Undeterred, the civic-minded Khashoggi jumped back into higher education in 1984 with a $5
    million gift to American University, on Massachusetts Avenue in D.C., halfway between the White
    House and the Beltway. AU had planned to honor Khashoggi’s money by naming the school’s new
    sports center and convocation hall after him, but administrators changed their minds in the
    wake of the Iran-Contra hearings. Even universities have consciences, apparently.
        By January 1987, when Time put Khashoggi on its cover as the
    prototype of the new international operator, he was a regular at Marbella, the jet-set-hot
    retreat on the Spanish Riviera, where he maintained a five-thousand-acre estate. Other
    addresses included Paris, Cannes, Madrid, the Canary Islands, Rome, Beirut, Riyadh, Jeddah,
    Monte Carlo, a 180,000-acre ranch in Kenya, and a $30 million, thirty-thousand-square-foot
    apartment on Fifth Avenue in New York with a pool overlooking the spires of Saint Patrick’s
    Cathedral. To get to and among his many homes, Khashoggi had his choice of the 282-foot yacht Nabila , the same one used in the James Bond movie