Ghalam, Shariar
aka Shariar Meshkin-Ghalam
aka Shariar Meshkin-Ghalam
aka "Jack" Ghalam
823 hours of combat2.mp3
shot down over Iraq, captured, and rescued by Kurdish rebels.mp3
CRIMINAL HISTORY OF SHARIAR GHALAM (aka "JACK" GHALAM):
Colorado criminal records show repeated arrests for theft since 1989,
including two convictions:
Case # 1989 M 003091
Theft under $50 on 12/11/89
Dismissed 12/11/89
Case # 1990 M 000594
Theft under $300 on 3/6/90
Dismissed 3/6/90
Case # 1994 M 000282
Carrying a Conceled Firearm on 1/22/94
Theft by Receiving $100+ but <$400 on 1/22/94
Warrant issued for Failure to Appear 2/23/94
Pre-trial conference on 3/28/94
Dismissed on 4/7/94
Case # 1998 M 000901
Theft under $100 on 3/6/98
Pled Guilty 4/28/98
Case # 2004 M 004128
Theft under $100 on 12/15/04
pled Guilty 3/16/05
Warrant issued Failure to Comply 5/20/05
Failed to Appear 6/29/05
Sentenced 6/29/05:
Jail 20 days
Probation (unsupervised) 12 months
Completed Petty Theft Seminar on 7/9/05
======================================================
Claims he was a 1st Lt. F-5E pilot who "did 823 hours of
combat" against Iraqi fighters with "62 aerial kills"
(two of them by 20mm cannon).
Ghalam also claims that he did contract work for the US military in
post-9/11 Arabic translation and intel analysis.
He has given numerous interviews and public speeches highlighting his
air force combat claims, the first of which below was videotaped:
American Patriotism: An Immigrant's Perspective. 9/26/01, 7pm at CU
Boulder
"At age 18, [he] flew F-5 fighter jets solo into combat, dropping a
half dozen 1,500-pound bombs
a day on Iraqi targets and shooting down enemy fighters."
(Originally reported in 1999 by Wayne Laugesen of the Boulder Weekly.)
"Also, former Iranian fighter pilot . . . returns to the show to .
. ."
"A combat vet of the Iran/Iraq war (as both an F-5 fighter pilot
and as an infantryman), . . ."
Ghalam has claimed to many people over the years that his F-5E was shot
down over Iraq by surface-to-air missile (SAM), that he was captured and
tortured by Iraqi military, dramatically rescued by Kurdish rebels, then
shot in the knee during a harrowing escape across the mountains.
From there, he claims that he volunteered for the "special
forces" (because alleged back trouble kept him from flying again,
though somehow this injury was not serious enough to keep him out of the
"special forces").
In Ghalam's own recorded words just two weeks after 9/11:
_________________________________________________
"When I became a lieutenant, walking down the street, uh, all I had
to do was have my uniform on and you were respected.
"Uh, I did 823 hours . . . of [air] combat after 13 hours of solo.
"We fought for eight years, the first four years of that war I was
involved in, I, uh, flew, uh, an airplane . . .
"I would strap myself into 17 tons of steel and titanium and
aluminum . . . push this little lever and I can take out a whole part of
a city . . .
"In 1984 . . . I was shot down over Iraq, captured, and, uh, they
showed me a bit of Iraqi hospitality. And, um, thank God the, uh,
uh, Kurdish rebels in the mountains of Iraq, uh, posing as officers,
came in and rescued me. And, uh, over the 24 hours
there was just a flashback of crash . . . come in, beat you until you
can't move, officers come and take you away . . . for interrogation, and
on the way to interrogation they said they were Kurdish rebels and they
brought me back.
"They brought me back to the Iranian border, handed me over.
Too many injuries, they said, you can't fly for a while . . . the
spine's had too much damage . . .
"[Then] I volunteered for the Special Forces so that I could find a
way to go toward the border [to escape] without getting caught . .
."
(audio excerpts from his 26 September 2001 talk given to CU students in
Boulder, Colorado)
American Patriotism: An Immigrant's Perspective
_________________________________________________
According to Ghalam, he fled Iran in 1984 to France ("I worked for
the U.S. Ambassador to France for about
six months as a translator . . ."), and then in 1989 to America.
Using his purported combat background, Ghalam not only immigrated to the
USA but became a citizen in 1994.
Ghalam has further parlayed his unsubstantiated fighter pilot claims
into a position with Frontier Astronautics:
http://frontierastronautics.com
-- a Wyoming rocket engine and attitude control system manufacturing
company . . . where he has shed his Iranian first name for
"Jack":
"Jack Ghalam, one of Bendel's business partners, recounts the story
of..."
======================================================
(April 24, 2007, Update: Shariar Ghalam's credibility as a source is in
serious question. I apologize to my readers for unintentionally
conveying information regarding Ghalam that I now regard as dubious.
-- Ari Armstrong)
These websites of Iranian fighter pilots do not list Shariar Ghalam for
even a single aerial kill, much less 62 of them.
"Air power did not play a dominant role in the Iran-Iraq war,
because both sides were unable to use their air forces very effectively.
Fighter-vs-fighter combat was rather rare throughout the entire course
of the Iran-Iraq war."
"During the course of the war more then 100 Iraqi fighters would be
brought down in Air to Air combat."
Since Ghalam claimed 62 aerial kills, that means he was not only seven
times more deadly than Iran's top ace Col. Jalal Zandi (9 confirmed
kills), but furthermore allegedly responsible for about half of all of
Iran's aerial victories during the entire war.
Curiously, nobody from the Imperial Iranian Air Force Association (http://iiaf.net)
seems to have heard of Shariar Ghalam, the self-proclaimed multiple ace
and heroic POW escapee.
This "Red Baron of Iran" is no where mentioned in the below
seminal book on the Iran-Iraq War, though he audaciously claimed to be
one of the F-5 pilots pictured on page 79:
Iran-Iraq War in the Air: 1980-88
by Tom Cooper & Farzad Bishop
Schiffer Military History Book (2000) ISBN 0-7643-1669-9
"What you make yourself to be is what you should be judged
for."
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NPRC could locate NO MILITARY RECORD
