[2011 Dec] Newt Gingrich, Marianne and the Arms Dealer:  A Buried FBI Investigation By Joseph Trento   Gingrich was at the center of a U.S. Justice Department criminal investigation in the late 1990s for a scheme to shake down the arms dealer for a $10 million bribe in exchange for Gingrich using his influence as Speaker to get the Iraq arms embargo lifted so Soghanalian could collect $54 million from Saddam Hussein’s regime for weapons he had delivered during the Iran-Iraq War.

[2011 Oct] The Death of The Merchant of War  his New York Times obituary, which had him working with the CIA. He never did. His case officers came from the Defense Intelligence Agency and White House. .....In one of his many moments of candor, he told me that no arms dealer can operate successfully without working with a major power. In Soghanalian’s case, it was largely the United States and France that backed his secret operations – rarely at the same time.  During the Iran-Iraq War, Israel supplied weapons to Iran as Sarkis and the United States supplied Iraq. They deliberately fueled a war that killed a million people and kept two dangerous countries busy killing each other for a decade.