Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Mines by Leonardo English.
The show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things
about the world at the same time as improving your English.
I'm Alistair Bunch and today we are going to be talking about a man called Adnan Kishoggi.
He was a businessman, a hyper-connector, a lavish spender and an arms dealer, who made
his fortune through facilitating connections between the West and Saudi Arabia, earning
himself the nickname of the great Gatsby of the Middle East.
His was a fascinating, if not controversial life, and I'm thrilled to tell you more about
it today.
But, before we get right into today's episode, I want to remind you that you can become
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OK, then, let's get started and talk about the life of Adnan Kishoggi.
Between the years of 1984 and 1995, there was a popular American TV show called Lifestyle
of the Rich and the Famous.
The show involved, as the title suggested, a look inside the lives of rich and famous
people.
And in one of the first episodes from February of 1985, the show opened like this.
Helllavish a lifestyle would you lead if you were the richest man on earth.
In this world-exclusive edition of Lifestyle, we'll explore the fabulous private domains
of Adnan Kishoggi, whose globe-prolling existence is so unbelievably lush, it has inspired
blockbuster movies and novels which only pale in comparison to the true story you will
see in the next 60 minutes.
In case you didn't get that, the host said, how lavish a lifestyle would you lead if you
were the richest man on earth?
In this world-exclusive edition of Lifestyles, we'll explore the fabulous private domains
of Adnan Kishoggi, whose globe-prolling existence is so unbelievably lush, it has inspired
blockbuster movies and novels which only pale in comparison to the true story you will
see in the next 60 minutes.
The next 60 minutes went on to describe the mysterious mogul, how excessive his life
was, the houses, the yachts, the private airplanes, the royal friends, and how he had an estimated
wealth of $10 billion, making him the richest man on earth.
This was in 1985, so $10 billion is around $30 billion in inflation-adjusted terms.
In today's age of tech billionaires, he would only just sneak into the top 50 richest
people in the world, but back in 1985, this would have put him firmly in first place.
But just a year later, he was said to be down to his last few dollars, with creditors
chasing him for everything from unpaid jet fuel to staff at his houses complaining that
they hadn't been paid in weeks.
And this all begged the question, where did the money go?
Was he ever the richest man on earth?
Or was it all one great lie?
Batman Kashoggi was born in 1935 in Mecca, in Saudi Arabia.
When he was born, Saudi Arabia was a poor country, for the most part an agricultural subsistence
economy.
In 1938, three years after Kashoggi was born, oil reserves were discovered, but this
didn't mean that the country's economy went from poor and underdeveloped to swimming
in oil cash overnight.
It took a long time, with the majority of the country not seeing the benefits from the
oil until the late 20th century, debatably even the start of the 21st century.
But Adnan Kashoggi was not born into a regular Saudi society.
His father was the king's personal doctor, and the young Kashoggi was afforded privileges
and opportunities that most of the kingdom citizens did not enjoy.
He was educated in Alexandria, in Egypt, at an exclusive private school, where his classmates
would include the future king of Jordan.
It was at this exclusive school, where he rubbed shoulders with the sons of the region's
rich and powerful, that he would come to understand the power of connection, of brokering
a deal between two parties.
Going to his obituary on his personal website, it was at school that Kashoggi first learned
the commercial value of facilitating a deal, bringing together a Libyan classmate who's
father wanted to import towels with an Egyptian classmate whose father manufactured towels,
earning $1,000 for the introduction.
Now whether this is folklore or not, a carefully curated story that served to plant the idea
of Kashoggi having some god-given ability to create advantageous deals, that is anyone's
guess.
What does seem to be true is that this is how he would make most of his money, becoming,
if you believed him, the richest man in the world.
He went to university in the United States, but left before he graduated.
After all, there was money to be made, and Kashoggi sensed that this was his time.
To quote his personal website again, in one of his first big deals, a large construction
company was experiencing difficulties with the trucks that it used on the shifting desert
sands.
Kashoggi, using money given to him by his father for a car, bought a number of Kenworth trucks,
whose wide wheels, like a camel's foot, made traversing the desert considerably easier.
Kashoggi made his first $250,000, leasing the trucks to the construction company, and became
the Saudi Arabia-based agent for Kenworth.
That $250,000 would be something like $3 million in today's money, by running a desert-based
car rental company, essentially.
If this story is to be believed, it must have seemed almost too easy.
Kashoggi was in this unique position not only of having powerful contacts in Saudi Arabia,
but of speaking fluent English and understanding Western business culture.
He crafted this reputation for himself as a man who could straddle both cultures, who
could put Saudi buyer and Western seller together, taking a small percentage for himself, of
course.
A small percentage, when we are talking about deals worth tens or hundreds of millions
of dollars, well, these end up being quite significant.
And deals for towels or deals for large debted trucks.
Well, these can be large, but Kashoggi would later discover something that was more expensive,
and therefore more lucrative than anything you would need for a good night's sleep
or for crossing the desert.
War, or rather the threat of war.
Let's return to his obituary again, and remember this is on his personal website.
Kashoggi became an advocate and negotiator for the defence relationship between Saudi
Arabia and the West.
Kashoggi provided advice, strategy and structures for government defence contracts.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Kashoggi helped develop the Saudi defence sector during a period
in which the young kingdom felt threatened by the rise of nationalist movements in the region.
Now defence, in this context, is somewhat of a euphemism for arms, weapons, guns, bombs,
planes, tanks, everything that a country needs to defend itself from attack, or if it
so desires to attack another country.
Saudi Arabia didn't have the capacity to make its own arms, but there were plenty of
western companies with great expertise in the area that were more than willing to supply
the Middle Eastern Kingdom with the goods that it needed.
And this was something encouraged by western governments as well.
After all, Saudi Arabia had and still has vast oil reserves, so it was in Western interests
for the Kingdom to remain a close ally and a stable one at that.
So who did the Kingdom turn to?
Or rather who did Western arms companies turn to sell their wares to the Saudis?
The man who had made a name for himself as having impeccable connections and a foot in
both camps.
Adnan Kashoggi Kashoggi became the agent for a variety of different
western corporations, representing them in deals with the Saudi government.
One is a company that is still around today, and you may have heard of Lockheed Martin
as it would become to be known.
Kashoggi was deeply involved with the company, becoming its agent in the region when he was
a mere 26 years old, selling billions of dollars of weapons and equipment to Saudi Arabia
in the 1970s.
And it made him a very rich man.
His commission varied from 2.5% up to a reported 15%.
And he ended up earning $150 million from the company, as Saudi Arabia went on an arms
buying spree after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.
If there was ever an example of the value of connection, of putting two parties together,
now this was it.
Now Lockheed would say that this was simply a commission, a price the company was willing
to pay for someone to sell its goods and services in a different market.
But for all of this money, $150 million for it all to go to one person, one individual,
it seemed excessive.
It would turn out that this money would go through Kashoggi, but it wouldn't all end up
in his pocket.
In 1975, when forced to testify in front of a US Senate subcommittee about bribery, the
chairman of Lockheed was forced to admit that a proportion of Kashoggi's fees would
be imapped for bribes to high-ranking Saudi officials.
In other words, Lockheed would pay Kashoggi.
Kashoggi would transfer Saudi officials a kickback, a bribe, into their Swiss bank accounts,
and they would sign off on the multi-million dollar arms purchases.
And the money wasn't the only perk of doing business with Kashoggi, and this is where
the story is going to get slightly sorted, I'm afraid.
He was married, he had five children of his own, but he kept a dozen or so pleasure wives,
mistresses who would be taken around the world and put up in five-star hotels lavished
with gifts and a five-star lifestyle.
But part of the deal was that they would need to acquiesce to Kashoggi's every wish,
which would often include sleeping with his business associates and government contacts.
This might be gross and immoral, it might be a dereliction of his duty and of the duty
of the corrupt officials and businessmen.
You could even argue that it resulted in a build up of arms in the region.
But for many years, it was great business.
It was great business for Lockheed, the arms company.
It was great business for the Saudi officials who received huge bribes for choosing Lockheed,
and it was great business for the man in the middle, Adnan Kashoggi.
Kashoggi took this money and invested it all over the world, speculating in real estate
and oil refineries, car rental companies, all and any commercial enterprise that he could.
The problem was, according to someone who would later do business with him, Donald J. Trump.
Kashoggi was a rubbish businessman.
He was great at facilitating connections.
He was great at bringing people together, as well as cultivating his own brand as a hyper-connector
and power broker.
But when it came to investing and operating businesses, this wasn't where his skills lay.
Trump got to know Kashoggi, at least from a business perspective, after he bought his yacht.
Kashoggi had bought this yacht in 1980, and it cost a reported $100 million to build,
almost $400 million in today's money.
It was the peak of luxury, complete with its own participatory, even hospital with an
operating theatre.
And of course, it had all of the usual toys and features of the ultra-rich, helipads,
cinema, and large enough fridges and freezes to carry a three-month supply of food for
a hundred people.
It was so opulent that it even featured in the James Bond movie, Never Say Never again.
For Kashoggi, it was a tool of business, and he would use it to entertain business executives
and government officials, prospective clients, far away from the prying eyes of the media.
On one occasion, there were a reported five heads of state being entertained on it, at
the same time.
It was a business expense, helping Kashoggi seal deals, but it was a serious expense.
After he ran into financial difficulties in the late 1980s, he was forced to sell it.
And this is where he came into contact with Donald Trump, who would go on to buy the
yacht.
According to a story that Trump would happily tell anyone he asked, Trump managed to get
a million dollars knocked off the asking price, because Kashoggi didn't want Trump to continue
using the yacht's original name, Nabila, because it was Kashoggi's daughter's name.
Not Kashoggi didn't think about it, or didn't know.
And this was what Trump thought made him a bad businessman, was that Trump had no intention
of keeping the original name.
If there is anything anyone knows about Donald Trump, it's that he likes to stick his name
on everything he owns, and sure enough, he took the one million dollar reduction in price,
and immediately changed the name to Trump's princess.
Now back to Kashoggi.
If you remember the start of the episode, the program claimed that he was the richest
man in the world, with a fortune of 10 billion dollars.
How did he get there?
You might be asking yourself, if he was a lousy businessman and made his money merely
as a facilitator between Western companies and Saudi government officials, taking a small
percentage in commission.
The simple answer is, most probably, he didn't.
He never had anywhere near the riches that he said he had.
Kashoggi never was the richest man in the world, far from it, but he was exceptionally
talented at making people believe that he was.
Sure, he was very rich, but a lot of what he said he owned was either paid for with credits
or rented.
He would be given large loans, people would extend huge credit lines to him.
After all, he was good for it.
The richest man in the world always paid his bills, did he not?
It turned out that even making huge commissions on arm sales was not enough to pay for a lifestyle
that was, at one point, costing him a reported $250,000 every single day.
And from his heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, things started to go downhill for Adnan Kashoggi.
He was forced to sell the planes and yachts and to revise his spending.
He was even arrested in 1988 in Switzerland on charges of racketeering and conspiracy,
with US federal prosecutors claiming that he had helped the former president of the Philippines
and his wife run away with over $100 million that they had stolen from the country.
He fought the extradition order and only agreed to be extradited when the more serious charges
were dropped.
But the good days were over for this international playboy.
He never officially declared personal bankruptcy, but he would be chased by his creditors
for the rest of his life, before dying in 2017 at the age of 81.
Now you've heard the story of Adnan Kashoggi and how a man became spectacularly wealthy
or at least managed to live a life of vast luxury as a middleman between the West and the
Middle East.
You might also recognise his surname Kashoggi because of Jamal Kashoggi, the Saudi journalist
and dissident who was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018, with the CIA
concluding that this was done on the orders of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.
Jamal Kashoggi and Adnan Kashoggi are not, in fact, strangers that share a common surname.
They were related.
Adnan Kashoggi was Jamal Kashoggi's uncle.
As you might remember, the then US president Donald Trump was under pressure to publicly
criticise Saudi Arabia for the murder of the distant journalist, especially after his
own government agency concluded that this was a state-sponsored murder.
But he did not, instead citing the value of US weapons sales to the country.
Adnan Kashoggi died in 2017, a year before his nephew, Jamal.
But the two men couldn't have been more different.
One spoke out against the Saudi regime's weapons purchases and military intervention.
The other facilitated it.
One sold his yacht to Donald Trump.
The other was metaphorically abandoned at sea by him.
One partied with kings and queens in Monte Carlo and died peacefully in a London hospital
at the age of 81.
The other ended up cut into pieces with a bone saw.
There are certainly a few conclusions that you can draw from that.
OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Adnan Kashoggi, a controversial but certainly
colourful character.
As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
This show is actually quite popular in Saudi Arabia.
So for the Saudi Arabian listeners, what do you know and think about the life of Adnan Kashoggi?
For the members among you, you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.linarnoenglish.com
and get chatting away to other curious minds.
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You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Mines by Lee and Adnan English.
I'm Alistair Budge, you stay safe and I'll catch you in the next episode.
