Oil for Food Linked Camelot With Saddam, Court Hears

UNITED NATIONS - A scion of the Kennedy administration, Theodore Sorensen, was retained by an agent for Saddam Hussein and wrote, in 1993, a United Nations resolution that later became a blueprint for the scandal-ridden oil-for-food program, a federal court heard yesterday.

An Iraqi-American businessman, Samir Vincent, who has pleaded guilty to acting as an unregistered agent for Iraq, shed new details about his involvement with Mr. Sorensen, who is one of the most revered members of President Kennedy's inner circle.

Mr. Vincent, who last year entered a guilty plea and agreed to cooperate in the federal prosecution of oil for food-related cases, spent yesterday testifying in Manhattan's U.S. District Court in the trial of a Korean businessman, Tongsun Park, who is charged with illegally acting as an unregistered foreign agent.

As The New York Sun first reported in September, the Volcker committee had already detailed the way Mr. Vincent retained the services of Mr. Sorensen while pleading Saddam's case in America and at Turtle Bay. In yesterday's testimony Mr. Vincent, whose narrative was accompanied by meticulously kept notes and other documents, relayed the chain of events that linked JFK's Camelot to Mesopotamia.

In 1993, after Iraq and its agents in America had failed to convince the first Bush administration to remove U.N. sanctions, Mr. Vincent and his partners believed that, if they gained support from Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali, the new Clinton administration in Washington could be convinced to lift the sanctions, the court heard. Mr. Park, according to Mr. Vincent, was the contact who facilitated two early 1993 meetings with Mr. Boutros-Ghali at the secretary-general's Sutton Place residence.

After one meeting in March 22, the Iraqi agents and the secretary-general agreed to "retain an independent attorney" who would help draft a new resolution acceptable to Iraq and the U.N. Mr. Vincent testified that his friend since attending Baghdad's Jesuit High School, Nizar Hamdoon, who by then was serving as Iraq's U.N. ambassador, told him he knew of one such figure with international law experience.

In the first week of April, Mr.Vincent and his partners met with the man, Mr. Sorensen. "We thought he would be a perfect guy for the project," Mr. Vincent told the jury. The agreement was that Mr. Vincent would pay the famed attorney's fees, while his sometime partner, the Texas-based oilman Oscar Wyatt, would supply the funds.

Mr. Sorensen was careful to distant himself from the Iraqi government, writing that it is his understanding that Mr. Vincent's activities are "not favorably inclined toward Iraq," according to a court document. Later on Mr. Sorensen suggested that it would be best if he was retained by the U.N. secretary-general as an outside counsel so he would not need "to register as a foreign agent" according to American laws, Mr. Sorensen wrote in another court document.

Mr. Sorensen was not hired by the United Nations, but the attorney's wife, Gillian Sorensen, was hired as special adviser for public policy to Mr. Boutros-Ghali. She has been active for many years since then with the U.N. Foundation, a pro-Turtle Bay organization founded by the founder of the Cable News Network, Ted Turner. In 1993 Mr. Sorensen wrote the draft, detailing how to sell Iraq's oil under U.N. supervision and use the proceeds to buy humanitarian goods.