Quotes from Andrew Feinstein

The Second World War signalled the creation of the military-industrial complex in Britain and elsewhere. This militarized economy, born out of an imperial system and expanding to vast proportions during the war, largely remained in place into the Cold War.

With arms embargoes quickly imposed on the region, each side had to scramble for whatever arms they could find – a veritable feast for daring arms dealers. Croatia, seeing the likelihood of war, started to equip itself as early as January 1991.

Britain's industry was kept buoyant by the decline of Empire, for as countries gained their independence they sought arms to enhance their status and security. From 1945 to 1955, Britain sold arms worth over $2bn to private traders and $1.7bn to foreign governments, excluding warships.42

Merex produced police equipment – binoculars, bullet-proof jackets, radios and so on.

As the Cold War extended and British influence diminished, so the Americans moved into traditional British areas in response to Soviet threats and the Soviet Union's growing arms industry. By the early sixties, the United States was by far the biggest exporter of arms, forcing Britain to compete more desperately for her markets abroad.

Chinese authorities coveted a powerful and accurate 120mm cannon produced by the huge German conglomerate Rheinmetall. Mertins acquired the plans of the cannon and provided them to NORINCO.67 Such are the morals of the arms dealer: developed and nurtured by German Intelligence as the arms dealer of choice for shadowy transactions, Mertins was willing, only a decade later, to undermine the military capacity of his fatherland so as to support communist China.

His most glorious creation was the Mirage jet, famed for its Delta wing and rocket booster. It became one of the most successful of all French exports and a major factor in French foreign policy. With his immense wealth, dominance of the French arms industry, political connections and newspapers, Dassault became a one-man military-industrial complex.

Mertins's correspondence with Zhao Fei made clear that Merex had engaged in arms deals with China that flew in the face of US policy, despite his connections to American Intelligence. The correspondence also revealed that Saddam Hussein was a potential Merex customer only two years before the Iran–Contra scandal, in the middle of the Iran–Iraq War.

While during his campaign and the early months of his presidency, Barack Obama talked tough on the need for fundamental change to the way the defence industry and the Pentagon operate, the reality is that there has been only very small, peripheral change.

A key ambiguity about large defence contractors: they are pillars of the free market economy whose shareholders are supposed to provide oversight, while receiving extensive state support which insulates them from market vagaries and meaningful oversight.

By allocating so much public sector work to private companies, the Bush administration created a condition in which the nature and practice of government activities could be hidden under the cloak of corporate privacy. This severely limits both financial and political accountability.

A] former Pentagon aerospace design engineer, Pierre Sprey, described Lockheed Martin as "always the sleaziest [of the defence contractors] and they make crappy airplanes. The F-35 is a total piece of crap, far worse than the planes it's replacing.

The US and the UK, who are party to laws and agreements obliging them to consider human rights before agreeing to arms exports, are blind to the kingdom's autocratic, oppressive and misogynistic rule when it comes to selling weapons. Human rights abuses are frequent. The practice of any religion other than Islam is illegal and political parties are outlawed.

The vote reflected both the power of the Israel lobby and scepticism over Saudi support for the US following an American air strike on Libya, with some US politicians fearing Saudi Arabia might divert weapons to 'terrorists'.16

Unwilling to borrow substantially from abroad, the Saudis' profligate arms spending was under threat. Some of the equipment bought under the first phase of Al Yamamah was intended to be sold on to Iraq but the end of the Iran–Iraq War in 1988 left the Saudis without a buyer.

The arms industry and its powerful political friends have forged a parallel political universe that largely insulates itself against the influence or judgement of others by invoking national security. This is the shadow world.

In September 1952, he travelled to Egypt to participate in a bizarre project that was to provide an entrée to the world of arms dealing. In 1948, the Egyptian army had been humiliated in a war with the newly created state of Israel. The response of the then Egyptian ruler, King Farouk, was to hire a number of ex-military Germans to assist in training his troops, allegedly with the tacit support of both the CIA and Gehlen Org. When

The arms trade – an intricate web of networks between the formal and shadow worlds, between government, commerce and criminality – often makes us poorer, not richer, less not more safe, and governed not in our own interests but for the benefit of a small, self-serving elite, seemingly above the law, protected by the secrecy of national security and accountable to no one.

The use of oil as the medium of exchange for the Al Yamamah contracts made bribes easier to hide, allowed Saudi Arabia to bypass OPEC's restrictive quota guidelines and enabled the Saudi Ministry of Defence to continue to purchase weapons with no scrutiny.

The whistle-blower handed over bank records, 'which were the key to revealing an entire global money laundering system, an enormous worldwide network of secret cash payments amounting to literally billions of dollars that had gone on for years with the connivance of the British government'.62

Disparate groups emerged within countries or without any national affiliation in the case of religious extremism, seeking power or to cause maximum disruption for a diversity of reasons – the promise of ethnic utopia, economic advantage or religious expression. For the smaller arms dealers operating in the shadows, these new clients were fertile ground.

For while a weapons capability is clearly required in our unstable and aggressive world, the scale of defence spending in countries both under threat and peaceable results in the massive diversion of resources from crucial social and development needs, which in itself feeds instability.

high-level diplomacy between London and Washington resulted in a joint offer being made to the Saudis. In December 1965, the Saudis accepted the joint offer, which from the British side comprised forty-two BAC Lightning Fighters and an AEI radar system, with Airwork providing training. It was announced as Britain's biggest ever export deal.

To cover these massive commissions, BAC inflated the price of each Lightning jet by £50,000, listing the cost as 'Agency Fees'. The commissions went not only to Gaith Pharaon but also to five Saudi princes.