Adnan Khashoggi

Adnan Khashoggi (1935 – 2017) was a Saudi deal-maker whose billion-dollar commissions on Western arms sales to Riyadh made him, for a time, the world's best-paid broker, a fixture of Cold-War intrigue and celebrity society. His network overlapped — sometimes through yachts and sometimes through money management — with media tycoon Robert Maxwell and later with financier Jeffrey Epstein, creating a chain of relationships that still fuels investigations into how cash, intelligence services, and influence moved among the elite.¹²

  Profile Snapshot

  Business, Intelligence & Legal Footprint

Khashoggi earned eight-figure "marketing fees" for arranging sales by Lockheed, Northrop, Raytheon and BAC to the Saudi MOD; funds were routed through offshore vehicles that later appeared in the Iran-Contra paper trail.²⁴ He bankrolled deals for Imelda Marcos to shuttle looted Philippine assets into Swiss accounts, prompting a U.S. indictment that ended in his 1990 acquittal.⁴ By the mid-1990s cascading debt forced asset sales, yet he stayed active — e.g., a failed Genesis Intermedia pump-and-dump cited by the SEC in 2006.⁶

  Robert Maxwell Links

Maxwell's 180-ft yacht Lady Ghislaine was built for — and briefly owned by — the Khashoggi family, mirroring Maxwell's admiration for the Saudi's floating status symbol.⁵ Both men used yachts as sea-going boardrooms where arms deals and media projects mingled; contemporaneous press noted joint appearances at New York society events in 1989 while Maxwell sought Gulf investment for his debt-laden Mirror Group.⁷⁸ Intelligence authors have later argued that Mossad cultivated each tycoon as parallel assets, a claim repeated in John Preston's 2021 Maxwell biography.⁸

  Jeffrey Epstein Links

After leaving Bear Stearns in 1981, Epstein told associates he ran International Assets Group to recover dictator-loot and that "one of my clients is Adnan Khashoggi," an Iran-Contra middleman. New York Magazine traced that quote to early-1980s associates and reproduced it in its dossier of Epstein contacts.⁹

Khashoggi's own fortune moved through Swiss and Austrian accounts; prosecutors found in 2019 that Epstein carried an Austrian passport listing Saudi residency, consistent with those mid-80s trips.¹⁰ Former Epstein mentor Steven Hoffenberg likewise testified that Epstein "handled money for Khashoggi" before latching onto Leslie Wexner.⁵

  Selected Timeline of Overlaps

  Network Matrix

  Reading the Web

Khashoggi's story illustrates how arms-trade fortunes meshed with media, real-estate, and covert finance, producing durable connective tissue across decades. The Maxwell link is tangible through shared hardware (their yachts) and reported Mossad courtship. Epstein's link is primarily financial: multiple contemporaries — and Epstein himself — placed the Saudi broker on his client list, and prosecutors flagged Saudi documentation in 2019 that echoed those early ties. Together the three men chart a path from 1970s oil-boom kickbacks to 2020s sex-trafficking investigations, with yachts, passports, and offshore entities marking the trail.

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  References

  Footnotes

1. Adnan Khashoggi obituary, The Guardian ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Adnan Khashoggi BAE files, The Guardian ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Richest arms dealer story, Gentleman's Journal ↩ ↩²

4. Khashoggi's Fall, Vanity Fair ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

5. Epstein link to Trump and Clintons, Politico ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

6. Khashoggi arms deals funded wealth, Independent ↩ ↩² ↩³

7. Lady Ghislaine originally built, The Observer ↩

8. Fall by John Preston review, The Guardian ↩ ↩² ↩³

9. Epstein high society contacts, New York Magazine ↩ ↩² ↩³

10. Epstein jet flew to Riyadh, Business Insider ↩ ↩² ↩³

11. The Talented Mr. Epstein, Vanity Fair ↩