Jonathan Aotken recalls the life of Adnan Khashnoggi

Adnan Khashoggi was the Great Gatsby of the Middle East. His assiduously promoted image of himself as ‘the richest man in the world’ was complicated by paradoxes.

Behind the colourful headlines which for six decades chronicled his successes and scandals, his extravagances and his eccentricities, his deal-making and his power-broking, there are many mysteries which can perhaps be illuminated by me as a friend with a family connection, as I will explain later.

To begin near the end: AK, as he was often called, departed from this world on Tuesday in peace at the age of 81. I know this because a few days ago I went to his London hospital to say my farewells.

He was dying of heart failure, comparatively poor in financial resources but abundantly rich in family love. Gathered around his bedside in his final days were the three women who had been Adnan’s wives at different times, his eight children, four grandchildren and a handful of old friends.

I felt privileged to have been invited to see him, particularly as our conversation turned out to be almost the last one while he was still fully conscious and alert.

I amused Adnan by recalling some old memories from the days when we first met in 1972. At that time he was hailed as a Saudi plutocrat, riding high on the crest of the quadrupled oil price wave.

I was a young investment banker working for an industrial firm called Slater Walker. My chairman, Jim Slater — who built a reputation as a ruthless asset stripper — and his partner, the financier Jimmy Goldsmith who later became a billionaire Eurosceptic, were keen to meet AK because he was the only identifiable Saudi businessman who had a profile in the West. He was known to be the trusted confidant of three powerful Saudi princes.

Adnan hosted his meeting in Paris with Slater and Goldsmith in an unusual style. He greeted his guests at the door flanked by eight Korean bodyguards who hovered around him as if they were secret service agents protecting the President of the United States. This was an absurdity in a secure and palatial office near the Champs-Élysées.

However, with true British sang froid we three visitors from London pretended we noticed nothing unusual about the Koreans, or about the Khashoggi afternoon tea menu. It consisted of Beluga caviar piled high on golden dishes, carried to our plates by exquisitely pretty girls in micro-skirts.

I recall how at that meeting Jim Slater produced a plan for cornering the market in the world’s uranium. Khashoggi nodded enigmatically, withdrew, and then his personal secretary appeared to say that ‘The Chief’ liked the Slater plan, but would like to discuss it further with us on his yacht — which was anchored off Cannes.

Would we like to fly down with The Chief on his private plane? ‘You’ll find it very comfortable’ he said. ‘You’ve probably read about it in the new Harold Robbins novel The Pirate, which is all about The Chief [the book was indeed supposed to be based partly on Khashoggi].

It describes his plane’s interior very accurately.’

Joined by the colourful City figure ‘Tiny’ Rowland of the Lonrho mining conglomerate, once described by Edward Heath as ‘an unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism’ — who also had plans for the world’s uranium market — we did fly to Nice in Khashoggi’s sumptuous private jet, and embarked for dinner on his battleship-sized private yacht.

It is a mark of the lifestyle of Adnan Khashoggi that another yacht he had built, and named after his daughter Nabila, was to feature in the James Bond movie Never Say Never Again, in which Sean Connery prowled its decks — hence the appearance of the words ‘Thanks A.K.’ in the film’s end credits.

That 85-metre gin palace was eventually handed to the Sultan of Brunei to cover a loan Khashoggi had failed to pay back. The Sultan then sold it to Donald Trump in 1987 for a reported $29 million (£22.3 million).

The same year his yacht was sold to the current president of America, Khashoggi appeared on the front of Time magazine under the headline ‘Those Shadowy Arms Traders: Adnan Khashoggi’s High Life and Flashy Deals’.

Certainly that was how many regarded him, and indeed when I found myself on Khashoggi’s yacht that day in 1972, the business discussions grew ever more complicated, and included a secondary plan for Khashoggi to buy a quarter stake in Slater Walker Bank.

However, these dreams foundered when AK asked Tiny Rowland if he could borrow the funds to buy both the Slater Walker shares and shares in a uranium company from a bank controlled by Lonhro.

‘But you’ve already got a big unsecured loan from us,’ objected Tiny. Soon afterwards Goldsmith and Jim Slater — less than enamoured by his business credibility —made their excuses and left.

I only recall these discussions because they reveal vintage Khashoggi in his prime as a high-rolling entrepreneur.

Borrowing to the hilt was the norm for him, as was creating an ambience so opulent that it seemed impossible to question the credit-worthiness of the Khashoggi empire.

Adnan’s financial credibility was often further strengthened by his charm, intelligence and natural good manners.

His technique in those early days was to get any of his loan problems solved by resorting to the purses of those three Saudi powerful princes, Fahd (later King Fahd), Sultan and Talal. All three of them trusted him as their ‘Mr Fixit’ in the West, providing every service from buying their overseas houses to paying some of their debts. Adnan’s fortune was often said to have been built on arms dealing. He hated this description of his business.

But it was true, although not dishonourably so.

In the Sixties and Seventies, Saudi Arabia’s defences were perilously weak — in a region beset with rivalries and hostilities. Defence Minister Sultan was determined to modernise and re-equip his country’s army and air force.

He appointed Adnan as the go-between for purchases by his Ministry of Defence from U.S. corporations such as Lockheed and Boeing. Lockheed described him as ‘our one man Middle East marketing department’, and admitted to paying him more than $106 million (£82 million).

Was Adnan Khashoggi taking large commissions on these defence deals? Inevitably yes.

But did the money stay in his own pocket, or end up in the pockets of someone else? Was he, at least in the defence field, much more of a front man than a businessman? The answers to those questions are secrets he has taken to his grave.

Adnan was certainly a lavish host, a party-giver on a gargantuan scale, and a supreme hedonist who loved creating pleasure for others as well as enjoying plenty of it for himself. In the mid-Eighties, an article in the New York Times talked of AK’s 35 homes around the world, notably his ‘retreat at Marbella in southern Spain, an entire mountain with seven villas, a 1,300-acre hunting preserve and what we are told is the world’s largest outdoor marble disco floor’.

The piece also quoted a television documentary maker who described the 21st birthday party Khashoggi gave his eldest son in Vienna as ‘the most extravagant event in European history’.

The man himself also revelled in publicity. He drank deeply from the well of media juice. When building his colourful network of grateful guests, beautiful people and movie stars, he also acquired some enemies who were quick to pass judgment on him.

As the mood in the mosques of Saudi Arabia became increasingly puritanical, the AK image of extravagant bling and curvaceous blondes in bikinis became an embarrassment back home.

Yet even though he may have had his knuckles rapped once or twice for his excesses by both preachers and princes in Riyadh, he was not reined in.

This was because he was wise enough to turn away from the accumulation of wealth (after making at least $2 billion!) and to engage in the heavy lifting of international power broking which fascinated him far more.

One of Khashoggi’s unsung achievements was helping to organise and fund the top secret Operation Moses in 1984. This was the airlift of some 14,000 Ethiopian Jews from Sudan to Israel during the famine caused by the Ethiopian civil war.

Adnan hosted Israel’s Ariel Sharon and Sudan’s president at the Khashoggi ranch in Kenya, where the deal was struck.

The Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, previously a friend of Khashoggi’s, was so enraged that he ordered his assassination. But AK requested a meeting with Arafat, challenging him to carry out the assassination personally.

The meeting ended with an embrace and a resumption of their friendship. So the large community of Ethiopian Jews now flourishing in Israel owe their lives to AK and other clandestine helpers.

Another surprising friendship was with President Nixon. AK contributed generously to Nixon’s presidential campaigns in 1968 and 1972, and attended both his inaugurations. As a result the two men met regularly. Nixon (whose biography I wrote), told me he found Adnan ‘a highly intelligent and serious man who gave me many original insights into Mid-East politics’.

Despite all these friends in high places, there is no doubt the Khashoggi career was often singed by scrapes and scandals. There was trouble from his peripheral involvement in the Iran-Contra debacle in the mid-Eighties.

Khashoggi was said to have brokered a secret sale of weapons by the American government to Iran when that Islamic nation was supposed to be under an arms embargo. The then President Ronald Reagan’s administration triggered the sale as part of a complex deal that led Iran to release U.S. hostages it was holding.

The money from the arms sales was then used by the Americans to fund the uprising by the Right-wing ‘Contra’ rebels against the socialist government of Nicaragua.

Worse difficulties came with his arrest in Switzerland in 1989 and his subsequent extradition to the U.S. on charges of hiding assets of the deposed president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos, and his shoe-loving wife Imelda.

Adnan always claimed to be innocent of any wrongdoing, and was vindicated when a New York jury cleared him of all charges in 1990. However, the negative worldwide publicity damaged him.

In his later years, Adnan’s fortunes declined. The rising generation of Western-educated Saudi royals did not share their forefather’s admiration for AK’s flamboyant style or wheeler-dealing skills. He had difficulties with bank debts and property investment failures in the U.S.

Above all, the onset of heart and Parkinson’s disease weakened his health. But Adnan regarded his greatest treasure as his family. With them he retained much of his old charm and sparkle, as I saw when I visited him in hospital.

My connection with Khashoggi started because I went out in the Seventies with his ex-wife Soraya. She later became the mother of our beautiful daughter Petra. But for the first 18 years of her life neither Petra, nor I, nor anyone else knew who her father was because Soraya declined to say.

The only certainty was that Petra’s paternity could not possibly be attributed to Adnan because they had separated.

Nevertheless, because he was such a patriarchal figure, he welcomed Petra into his family, gave her his surname and treated her throughout her formative and teenage years just as if she was one of his own children.

This was the situation until 1999, when I volunteered to take a DNA test which revealed that I was Petra’s father.

When Adnan heard this news, he rejoiced. Petra later told me that he took her for a walk around Cannes harbour and said to her: ‘I am so happy that you have found your real father. Please know that nothing between you and me is going to change. I will always love you as a daughter.’

When I saw Adnan in hospital for the last time a few days ago, I thanked him for the generosity of spirit that he had shown to Petra. This led to quite an emotional dialogue between Petra’s ‘first father’ and her ‘real father’, as she called us.

Then Adnan and I walked down memory lane with much laughter about old scenes and characters we knew — from Jimmy Goldsmith to President Nixon and Mrs Thatcher, for whom I worked as an MP.

Eventually, he started to fade. One of his sons said: ‘Baba prays a lot . . . would you pray for him?’

So we two old sinners said our respective Christian and Muslim prayers and I took my leave.

There are those who will have less obliging things to say about this controversial billionaire. But as he is buried today in an unmarked grave in the holy city of Medina, I shall think of Adnan Khashoggi with affection as an iconic figure of his time.

And one who knew how to serve a tray of caviar with more than a little elan.