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.[1][2] 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.[3]
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.[4]