ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, February 19, 1996 TAG: 9602190144
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: ALEXANDRIA
SOURCE: CHARLES J. HANLEY ASSOCIATED PRESS
A gray-haired gentleman, paunchy, a bit bent with age, has been haunting the bargain shelves at a bookstore here, a harmless type hunting for best buys in ``History.''
You ought to write your own, his wife tells him. He laughs. ``That'd be fit stuff only to line garbage cans.''
Modesty, for Sam Cummings, is yet another weapon in the arsenal, a ploy, a diversion. The immodest truth is that people have been interested in his ``stuff'' for years, from the CIA, which recruited young Sam to arm a secret invasion, to John Le Carre, who drafted old Sam for a 1993 novel.
Almost a half-century has passed since the genteel Philadelphian first dabbled in guns, and more than a generation since he rose to the top of the global small-arms trade. His career is the resume of an era: a long run of wars, coups and revolutions, from the '50s to the '90s, that his company, Interarms, helped equip - sometimes on both sides.
Cummings, 69, looks back without apology for his role in the century's mayhem. In an earnest, crackly voice, during an interview at his offices here, he recited the well-worn credo of arms dealers everywhere:
``People claim, `If you went out of business, then those weapons wouldn't be shipped.' What they don't say is 10 other people would drop into these shoes.''
No excuses. Few regrets. And one final obsession: A mother lode of surplus firepower sitting in Russia that Sam Cummings wants, badly, as the crowning deal in a dealmaker's life.
The deals began small, after World War II, with helmets and other military surplus the young Army veteran traded around Washington, D.C. Once he moved up to weapons, the Central Intelligence Agency took notice and signed him on to analyze arms captured in the Korean War.
His break came when he was sent to Europe, in the guise of a Hollywood producer, to buy up tens of thousands of leftover World War II weapons, to arm the Chinese Nationalist army for an invasion of communist China.
But the Korean War wound down, and the invasion never happened. When he established his International Armament Co. in 1954, however, his contacts paid off: One of his first deals was supplying M-1 rifles, bought in Britain, to the victors in a CIA-organized coup in Guatemala.
In a decade of dictators, business boomed. Cummings sold arms to Haiti's Duvalier, the Dominican Republic's Trujillo, Cuba's Batista. When Batista fled Cuba before a shipment of his Armalites arrived, Cummings flew to Havana to demonstrate the assault rifles for a new customer.
``Fidel Castro picked up that Armalite and knew what to do with it immediately,'' he recalled.
Washington soon squelched his relationship with Castro. But an even greater disappointment came a decade later, in 1972, when Britain blocked a huge Interarms deal with Libya's Moammar Gadhafi.
``My life has been a `boulevard of broken dreams,''' Cummings said with a grin.
But not enough broken dreams to keep him and his Swiss wife from living in jet-set comfort - in a 14-room apartment in tax-haven Monaco and a sprawling chalet 4,000 feet up in Switzerland's Bernese Alps. Though born an American, Cummings has been a British subject since 1972.
Interarms, which has more than 200 employees and an inventory of almost a half-million guns, operates from a warehouse in Manchester, England, that delivers military arms worldwide, and from a complex of converted tobacco warehouses beside the Potomac here, where Interarms imports handguns and hunting rifles for U.S. gun shops.
Cummings, on Virginia visits, reigns from a warren of offices decorated with antique weapons and military art, from Napoleonic victories to Vietnam War sketches.
Le Carre spent several days soaking up atmosphere at the Manchester hub when he was writing his best seller about arms trafficking, ``The Night Manager.'' In the end, though, his villainous trader bore scant resemblance to the affable Cummings, who insists he plays by the rules.
Dealers are the jobbers of the arms trade, operating under government license to fill gaps on the small stuff, between government-to-government deals for warplanes, tanks and the other capital goods of combat.
The military side was Cummings' big moneymaker, but the end of the Cold War seems to have changed that, undercutting the market with cheap surplus weapons from the old Eastern bloc. Sources in the secretive industry say he is not the predominant player he once was.
Still, ``we're continually doing little deals,'' he said, such as the recent sale of .50-caliber machine guns to Sri Lanka.
He is continually probing the market, traveling, lunching, staying in touch, even with ``pariahs.'' He will soon meet with Serbia's arms makers, for example, to restore an old relationship. He would also like to join the U.S. effort to re-equip the Bosnian army.
But when asked about Washington's strategy to achieve a Balkan ``balance of power'' this way, he scoffed: ``It won't work. ... It's a dream, because someone will always put his thumb on the scale and throw the `balance' out of kilter.''
But even an arms trader has dreams. Cummings' lies in Tula, Izhevsk and other arsenal cities of Russia, where he estimates 25 million Kalashnikov assault rifles and other weapons, post-Cold War excess, lie unused.
He is talking to the Russians about modifying the weapons and importing them as cut-rate hunting rifles for Americans. Moscow'sTheir price demands frustrate him. ``It's almost a dialogue of the deaf.'' And he knows he would have trouble with gun controllers at the U.S. end. ``This kind of thing panics this White House.''
LENGTH: Long : 104 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Sam Cummings, president of Interarms, has helped armby CNBfactions and nations in wars from the 1950s through the 1990s. In
some cases, he has helped both sides of the same conflict.