Brogan, Patrick and Zarca, Albert. Deadly Business: Sam Cummings, Interarms, and the Arms Trade. New York: W.W. Norton, 1983. 384 pages.

Interarms (formerly Interarmco and officially the International Armaments Corporation) is the world's largest private arms dealer, and once had enough weapons in their warehouses to equip forty U.S. divisions. The sole owner is Sam Cummings, who got his start working with the CIA to procure weapons for the 1954 coup in Guatemala. By now he has left the spook biz far behind: "I'm glad to be out of it, and I prefer more humdrum deals. They'll throw you on the chopping block well before they throw themselves, and in the end they're just as dumb as you and I."

Interarms still has facilities in Alexandria, Virginia, where the first warehouse began in 1955, but since 1960 Sam Cummings has resided in Monte Carlo with a country place at Villars in the Swiss Alps. His major warehouse is in Manchester, England (Cummings finds the British arms-export regulations to be less vague than American regulations). About 20 percent of his exports from Manchester are sporting guns, and the rest go to foreign governments and armies. Whether Interarms still has CIA connections is open to question, and Cummings seems to enjoy such speculation. It probably gives him a slight competitive edge when dealing with Third World governments who wouldn't mind a piece of the CIA's covert-action largesse.
ISBN 0-393-01766-4

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