15 Facts About Manucher Ghorbanifar

Manucher Ghorbanifar is an expatriate Iranian arms dealer and former SAVAK agent.

The CIA director William Casey believed that Manucher Ghorbanifar was an Israeli agent.

Manucher Ghorbanifar re-emerged in American politics during the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq during the first term of President George W Bush as a back-channel intelligence source "in order to report on any interaction and attempts at negotiations between Iranian officials and US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad".

Manucher Ghorbanifar was linked to the Niger uranium forgeries which were forged documents initially released by SISMI that would later be used partly as justification for the Iraq War.

Manucher Ghorbanifar knew Israel's military attache in Tehran, Yaakov Nimrodi, who helped build SAVAK.

In 1980 Manucher Ghorbanifar was the liaison between the Shah's last Prime Minister, Shahpour Bakhtiar, in exile in Paris, and conspirators in the Iranian armed forces organising what is sometimes known as the Nojeh Coup.

Manucher Ghorbanifar had owned a shipping company and headed the logistics branch of the Niqab network which organised the civilian part of the plot.

Manucher Ghorbanifar had been recommended for the role by Bakhtiar.

Some Iranian sources later accused Manucher Ghorbanifar of leaking information to the Iranian government which helped thwart the coup plot.

In December 1985 Adnan Khashoggi said in an interview that Manucher Ghorbanifar was head of European intelligence under Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

In 1981 Manucher Ghorbanifar was the source for the Washington Posts stories about Libyan hit squads targeting President Reagan and other senior US figures; in 1986 he said he had created the story "To hurt Libya, an enemy of Israel".

Oliver North later claimed that Manucher Ghorbanifar had given him the idea for diverting profits from TOW and HAWK missile sales to Iran to the Nicaraguan Contras.

Iranian officials suspected Manucher Ghorbanifar of passing them forged American documents.

Manucher Ghorbanifar has been suspected of being a former French DGSE informer, and allegedly accompanied Jean-Charles Marchiani, the right-hand man of former French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, during his meetings with the deputy Iranian foreign minister to negotiate the release of the French hostages in Lebanon in the mid-1980s.

Manucher Ghorbanifar has emerged as the probable origin of the information cited by Congressman Curt Weldon's book, Countdown to Terror: The Top-Secret Information that Could Prevent the Next Terrorist Attack on America.