THE IRAN--CONTRA HEARINGS : Abrams Details His Hard Sell to Brunei

WASHINGTON — Using the alias “Mr. Kenilworth,” Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams last summer secured $10 million for Nicaragua’s contras from the Sultan of Brunei after delivering a hard sell for the donation in London’s Hyde Park, Abrams told congressional investigators Tuesday.

Brunei officials were “visibly shaken” when told later that the millions had never shown up in a Swiss bank account whose number had been provided by former White House aide Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, Abrams said.

Officials since have said that two digits of the account number were transposed and that the sultan innocently deposited the $10 million in the account of an anonymous Swiss businessman.

Fawn Hall Typed Number

Abrams told House and Senate committees investigating the Iran-contra scandal Tuesday that he had been given the account number by North’s secretary, Fawn Hall, who typed it on a note card. Hall’s attorney, Plato Cacheris, said Tuesday that she “doesn’t know she mistyped the number” and believes that she accurately relayed the code North had given her.

Under sharp questioning, Abrams maintained that he believes the donation was to be spent for humanitarian aid, the only category of contra aid that U.S. officials were legally allowed to solicit.

He also denied knowing that the Swiss account, that of a Panama company named Lake Resources, was in fact a slush fund used by North to finance deliveries of weapons and other military goods to the contras.

Abrams spun a detailed and sometimes comical story of the Brunei donation. By his account, the notion arose at a May, 1986, meeting of the National Security Planning Group, a White House panel attended by President Reagan and Vice President George Bush.

List Narrowed

From a list of potential donors, officials later struck all pro-Soviet and “right-wing dictatorship(s)” and nations that were dependent on U.S. aid, poverty-stricken, or uninterested in Nicaragua.

Two countries remained.

“Venezuela, I thought, would not do this,” Abrams told chuckling lawmakers. “You’re down to Brunei.”

Secretary of State George P. Shultz at first was chosen to solicit the $10 million, and Abrams gave him Hall’s note card with the Swiss account number. That June, en route to Brunei on a state visit, Shultz elected to merely raise Central America issues with the sultan and let someone else ask for cash, Abrams said.

The someone was Abrams, who telephoned Brunei officials in London on Aug. 9, using the alias “Mr. Kenilworth” out of suspicion that phones were being monitored.

Abrams and an unnamed Brunei official later took a walk in Hyde Park, apparently to avoid eavesdroppers, where Abrams said that he made a boilerplate speech on the contras.

When asked by the Brunei representative what “concrete” benefits a donation would bring the sultan, Abrams testified, he said that it would only secure the President’s gratitude.

Limited Traveling Money

“He said that they’d have to . . . do it from Brunei because they didn’t have access to that kind of money when they were traveling,” Abrams told the panels.

Later, he said, he asked North several times whether the money had been deposited in the Swiss account and became increasingly worried when North said it had not.

In late October, “I actually drafted up a cable (to the U.S. ambassador in Brunei) that used the word ‘embezzlement’ because I could not figure out what happened to this money,” Abrams testified.

The cable was never sent. In December, in the heat of the Iran-contra scandal, Shultz quietly asked that the sultan be told not to deposit the $10 million in the Swiss account. But the U.S. ambassador replied that the money had long since been dispatched and that a Brunei official was “visibly shaken” when told it had not been received.

State Department spokesman Charles Redman said Tuesday that Brunei is taking steps “pursuant to Swiss law” to recover the money. United Press International reported that the Swiss businessman who received the cash will return it but is balking at surrendering $250,000 in interest that the money had earned.

When asked about current U.S.-Brunei relations, Redman said: “They’re still very good.”