Meaner Than a Junkyard Dog
Oilman Oscar Wyatt reveals how his world really works—from freeing the hostages in Iraq to doing deals with China and keeping up with his jet-set marriage.
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Saddam indicated that Connally was correct. Wyatt told Saddam that he had been trading with the Iraqis for nineteen years and “deeply regretted” that Iraq and America were on the brink of war. “I have brought my plane to Amman, and it is my hope that we can take as many Americans home with us as we can,” Wyatt said. Then he mentioned that fifteen tons of medical supplies had been uploaded and given to an Arab relief organization.
“Thank you for your generosity to our needy people,” said Saddam, who then removed his pistol from his waist and laid it on the table. Connally took that as a hopeful sign. “We have here two lists of people,” said Connally, “but we can take home between one hundred and one hundred and fifty people.”
A few moments later Connally and Wyatt stood to leave. Connally was the first to shake hands with Saddam, who said, “Your plane will not go home empty.” Then Connally stepped back, and Saddam broke into a broad smile as he reached for Wyatt’s hand. He placed both of his hands on Wyatt’s right hand and told his cabinet officers, “You see there are Americans who tell the truth. They are not diplomats.” Utterly speechless, Wyatt turned and left the room, wondering when he had ever felt so exhilarated and so worried.
Then the scramble began. Five hours after the meeting, Wyatt got word in his hotel room that Saddam had decided to not just free Wyatt’s hostages but all of them. The X factor had been more successful than even he had dreamed. Samir Vincent assumed the job of trying to get exit visas for the hostages. One of the hostages, Jack Stewart, a 68-year-old engineer who works for Houston-based M. W. Kellog, was being held in a small village about three hours north of Baghdad. Wyatt told Vincent, “We don’t leave until we get Jack Stewart out. Tell all the bureaucrats to get a move on.”
Around noon on Saturday, December 8, Wyatt got a telephone call in his hotel suite from an Iraqi government official. “We think you should get your people on the airplane and leave immediately,” the caller said, and he added that Coastal’s 707 would be filled with Iraqi fuel. “Just hurry,” he said. Five minutes later, one of Wyatt’s Iraqi friends telephoned with the same message. “Get your people and depart,” the caller advised. While Wyatt never knew exactly why he was being rushed, Vincent was told that there were rumors of some kind of military activity on one of the borders, and the Iraqis wanted to be rid of the Americans. Within thirty minutes Wyatt and Connally had left the hotel and scrambled to the airport, where they waited until seven that evening before Vincent rounded up 24 hostages and loaded them on the airplane.
Wyatt paced up and down the tarmac at Baghdad airport. Allen Lawson, a mud engineer from Huntsville who was held 128 days by the Iraqis, told me that he heard Wyatt arguing with Vincent. “We’ve got to go,” Vincent said. “Let’s wait for some of the others,” Wyatt told him. The American embassy, which has ignored Wyatt and his group, had asked on Thursday to put three of its employees on the Coastal airplane. “Okay,” ordered Wyatt, “but only if you get your ass moving and clear some of these other civilians for release.” One civilian got on the airplane at the last minute without a passport or any papers. He was dressed in a T-shirt and blue jeans and didn’t have a dime in his pocket.
Finally, at eight o’clock, the plane lifted off the ground in Baghdad. Inside, the cabin shook with the cheers of hostages. Some of the crew began to make chili in a crockpot. Soon Wyatt told the hostages over the loudspeaker, “Welcome home, but don’t cheer too loud until we get over the Mediterranean Sea. Then we’ll be safe.” About twenty hours later, the airplane arrived in Houston. After years of public displeasure, Wyatt found himself basking in public adoration. Hundreds of people hugged him, but it was Ryan Parker, the 23-year-old son of hostage Bobby Gene Parker, who brought Wyatt to tears when he handed him a single red rose and said, “Thank you, sir, for bringing my daddy home.”
THE WAY THE REAL WORLD WORKS
At seven-thirty on the morning after Wyatt’s speech to the Corpus Christi Chamber of Commerce, he walked into the lobby of the Stouffer’s Hotel in Houston with Tasa on a leash. None of the staff in the hotel lobby looked twice as the stout man in the white shirt and dark pants—his hair still slick from his morning shower—led the German shepherd to the bank of elevators. Wyatt routinely brings his dog to breakfast meetings in a private room at the hotel, which is adjacent to his corporate headquarters.
“I feel great,” said Wyatt, pouring himself a cup of black coffee. “I ran two miles this morning, and from what I hear, the speech got mixed reviews. Some people hated it. Others loved it. Oh, well. They asked for my opinion, and I gave it to them.”
I asked Wyatt what alternative Bush had after Saddam invaded Kuwait on August 2. Could the U.S. afford to sit idly by and allow Saddam Hussein to capture control of the world price of oil? “Baby”—Wyatt calls everybody baby or lover—“you don’t know enough about the question to even ask it.” Then he proceeded to answer it for the next thirty minutes. To begin with, he said, Saddam couldn’t control the price of oil without expanding into Saudi Arabia. “The president was correct in moving those first one hundred thousand troops into Saudi,” Wyatt said. “That told Saddam, ‘See here, you bastard, step one foot onto Saudi soil, and we’ll blow you away.’” The trouble, in Wyatt’s view, was that the U.S. had sent Saddam mixed messages about invading Kuwait—indeed, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq told Saddam last July that the U.S. had no opinion on his “border disagreement” with Kuwait—and then when Kuwait was overrun, Bush hit the roof. “The absolutely worst thing you can do in the Arab world is overreact to aggression,” said Wyatt. “That just tells the other guy you’re afraid of him, and you wind up suffering more than he does.”
During breakfast the telephone rang, and his secretary told him that he had a call from Amman, Jordan. “Put him through,” Wyatt said. There was no direct communication inside Iraq, so all messages had to be sent by courier from Jordan. The man on the telephone was one of Wyatt’s couriers. Wyatt listened for a long time, but said nothing. After about five minutes the caller must have expressed some concern for his personal safety. “What are you afraid of?” Wyatt screeched. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. I’ll talk to you in a few days.”
Several minutes later he got another telephone call, this time from someone in Washington. Wyatt did most of the talking. “Please tell the president to use my commercial relationship with Iraq to his advantage,” Wyatt told the caller. “We’ve got to stop this war before it goes to the ground. Saddam wants a ground war. He wants a bloodbath.”
Then he outlined for the mysterious caller what it would take—from Saddam Hussein’s point of view—to bring about a cease-fire. “He wants his pre-Iranian border back,” said Wyatt. “He wants safe access to the sea. And he wants the Kuwaitis to behave in OPEC. He’s got eighteen million people to feed, and he’s tired of the Kuwaitis ripping him off.”
In the end, Bush didn’t use Wyatt’s connections in Iraq. Wyatt did everything he could—including writing a letter to the Iraqi ambassador to the United States that was hand-delivered on January 8, begging Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait—but nothing within his power could stop the war. Yet the X factor had enjoyed his own measure of success. If Wyatt had not negotiated the release of the hostages, Saddam might have killed them or used them to some tactical advantage. Wyatt clings to his prediction that Bush will win the war but lose the peace in the Persian Gulf. “We’ve still got huge numbers of the Arab masses mad as hell at us,” Wyatt told me after the cease-fire, “and the only people who are really happy with us are these monarchs who are going to prove to be very difficult to keep propped up politically.”
Still, I felt the back of my neck tingle as Wyatt conducted foreign policy on the telephone. When he finished the conversation, I asked him, “Who the hell elected you to anything?” Wyatt looked at me pityingly, as though I were as naïve as a baby chicken just hatching from an egg. “I’m not negotiating anything,” Wyatt said. “I’m just trying to save the lives of four hundred and fifty thousand Americans. Surely there’s nothing immoral about that.” Then he stood up to leave, and Tasa was instantly as his heels. “Besides, baby” he said in a resolute voice of a man certain of his own authority, “this is the way the real world works.”
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