Vincent said that after a visit to Baghdad in February 1996, he signed agreements with Iraqi officials regarding the setting up of an oil-for-food program and that subsequently "several million dollars in cash" was sent by the Iraqi government to Iraqi officials in New York. "Several hundred thousand dollars of this money was given to me in Manhattan, and the rest was given to others, one of whom I understood was a United Nations official," Vincent said. He did not identify the U.N. official.

Between 1996 and 2003, Vincent told the judge, he continued to meet with Iraqi officials in Baghdad and New York to talk about how to persuade the U.S. government to ease sanctions against the Iraqi regime. It was during this time, he told the judge, that he "came to know a number of former U.S. government and U.S. intelligence officials who I understood had the ability to relay messages to policymakers." Vincent said he used his contacts with the former U.S. officials to pass messages back and forth between Washington and Baghdad.

In his court appearance, Vincent did not identify any of these contacts among former U.S. government officials. But Davis acknowledged that it was in the early part of Vincent's financial relationship with the Iraqi government that he first contacted Kemp and began dealing with the former congressman. Davis said that Vincent first called Kemp after reading a newspaper column that Kemp wrote in either 1998 or 1999 talking about his proposal to ease sanctions on Iraq in exchange for a return of "robust" U.N. weapons inspections. Vincent apparently discussed Kemp's proposal with Aziz and the Iraqi ambassador to the U.N. Kemp, for his part, raised it with Secretary of Defense William Cohen, who turned down the idea, according to Kemp and Davis.

Terror Watch, written by Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball appears online weekly

© 2005