Adnan Khashoggi
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Adnan Khashoggi was a Saudi arms dealer and a middleman in the Iran-Contra affair. John Kiriakou uses him as a benchmark for what the CIA notices: Khashoggi was mentioned "all the time" at the agency and was "extremely public" throughout his life, whereas Kiriakou says he never heard the name Jeffrey Epstein mentioned at the CIA, which he takes as telling about how Epstein operated. He spells out the specific role Khashoggi played in Iran-Contra: the CIA used Khashoggi's yacht to arrange the transfer of arms to Iran, with the resulting money then transferred to the Contras in Nicaragua.

"Mr. 10%"

In a fuller account of the Iran,Contra mechanics, Kiriakou describes Khashoggi as the instrument by which Oliver North, the Pentagon's designate to the National Security Council, went around the 1983 congressional ban on arming the Contras. Arms were sold to Iran, itself illegal, through Khashoggi; he took payment into his own bank account in Cyprus, kept ten percent, "he was Mr. 10%", and transferred the balance to accounts controlled by North, John Poindexter and Admiral Richard Secord, which then bought grey-market weapons for the Contras. Kiriakou's summary of the consequences is brief: "It was all illegal. Everybody was indicted. Nobody really was punished", and Khashoggi "just took his money and smiled and got back on the yacht."

He characterises Khashoggi as a fixer without allegiance, comparing him to Marc Rich: he would deal with the Israelis, the Americans, the Libyans or the North Koreans indifferently, "anybody who had money, anybody who could pay." That is also the reason he was discussed constantly at Langley, "he could do anything and he was willing to do anything so long as there was a nice fat paycheck for him at the end." Kiriakou describes him in that period as a Saudi "man about the world, fixer, friend of kings and presidents and prime ministers," very close to the Saudi leadership, and the uncle of the murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

He also identifies Khashoggi as the plausible point at which Jeffrey Epstein entered this world: asked whether the Iran,Contra period is where Epstein could have been recruited, Kiriakou answers "Absolutely."

Kiriakou separately illustrates the scale of Saudi financial influence in the U.S. around the same period he was tracking figures like Khashoggi: as of roughly 2010, when he was teaching college, he says the Saudis owned about seven percent of the U.S. economy.

Why the CIA used him

Kiriakou's 2025 account of Iran,Contra explains the selection as a matter of camouflage rather than access. The CIA brought Khashoggi in "because he was was an old friend of the organization he became a billionaire by selling arms around the world what better person to do something like this somebody who already has a lot of money somebody who's not going to raise eyebrows by transferring hundreds of millions of dollars somebody who's going to use foreign Banks just as a matter of course."

The mechanics ran through Cyprus: Khashoggi took the Iranian cash, placed it in a Cypriot bank, and moved it on to international arms manufacturers, whose weapons the CIA then flew to the Contras on unmarked, unlicensed and unregistered aircraft. What made him reliable, in Kiriakou's account, was character as much as position, "Adnan koki was someone who the CIA could trust to keep his mouth shut take his 10% commission and do as he was told."

See also

- Iran-Contra
- Jeffrey Epstein
