Friends said the men were trying to bring attention to the suffering of ordinary Iraqis under the sanctions, which had squeezed food and medical shipments to the nation's 26 million people.
Wyatt and a former business associate, David Chalmers, whose company was mentioned in the CIA report, were primarily interested in Iraq for business reasons, friends and analysts said. They bought Iraqi oil in a market that came to be characterized by shadowy middlemen and kickbacks, backroom deals and high-stakes showdowns.
Wyatt said through a spokesman last week that all his transactions in Iraq complied with applicable laws. Chalmers, Vincent and Khafaji did not respond to attempts to contact them or their companies.
None of the men has been accused of breaking the law by trading oil with Hussein, a process overseen by the U.N. between 1996 and 2003 as part of its oil-for-food program.
Many companies, including firms run by Wyatt, Vincent and Chalmers, were on a list approved by the U.N. to buy oil from Iraq under the program, which was designed to use the proceeds from oil sales to provide humanitarian aid for the Iraqi people.
The legality of oil sales to individuals, however, is suspect, congressional investigators said. Hussein abused the U.N. program by personally issuing oil vouchers to high-ranking political figures worldwide to win friends and wage a propaganda war to lift the sanctions, according to the CIA report by special weapons inspector Charles A. Duelfer.
Hussein's vouchers entitled the bearers to a certain quantity of oil. The holders could then sell their coupons to middlemen, who would in turn sell the oil to companies. Sometimes the vouchers were gifts; sometimes they were contracts to buy oil at a specific price.
Such vouchers are at the heart of what has become one of the gravest corruption scandals at the United Nations since its founding in 1945. The oil-for-food program generated an estimated $67 billion legally and $11 billion illegally, with top U.N. officials and officials from China to France to Russia implicated as having received such vouchers.
Wyatt, Khafaji and Vincent are the only Americans on the list of recipients, which was obtained from records kept by Iraq's State Oil Ministry and recovered by U.S. troops. Five U.S. companies were also named: Chevron-Texaco, Exxon Mobil, Wyatt's Coastal Corp., Vincent's Phoenix International, and Chalmers' Bay Oil.
