U.S. adviser to Kurds stands to reap oil profits

By JAMES GLANZ and WALTER GIBBS New York Times

OSLO, NORWAY — Peter Galbraith, an influential former U.S. ambassador, is a powerful voice on Iraq who helped shape the views of policymakers like Joe Biden and John Kerry. In 2005, he was also an adviser to the Kurdish regional government as Iraq wrote its constitution — tough and sensitive talks not least because of issues like how Iraq would divide up its vast oil wealth.

Now Galbraith, 58, son of the renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith, stands to earn perhaps $100 million or more as a result of his closeness to the Kurds, his relations with a Norwegian oil company and constitutional provisions he helped the Kurds extract.

Galbraith has always described himself as an unpaid adviser to the Kurds, although he has spoken in general terms about having business interests in Kurdistan, as the north of Iraq is known.

So it came as a shock to many last month when Norwegian journalists at the newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv began publishing documents linking Galbraith to a Norwegian oil company with major contracts in Iraq.

Galbraith received the rights after he helped negotiate a potentially lucrative contract that allowed the Norwegian oil company DNO to drill for oil in the promising Dohuk region of Kurdistan, documents show. He says his actions were proper because he was at the time a private citizen deeply involved in Kurdish causes.

As the scope of Galbraith's financial interests in Kurdistan become clear, they have the potential to inflame some of Iraqis' deepest fears, including conspiracy theories that the true reason for the American invasion of their country was to take its oil. It may not help that outside Kurdistan, Galbraith's view that Iraq should be broken up along ethnic lines is considered offensive to many Iraqis' nationalism.

Biden and Kerry, who do not advocate such a partitioning of the country, were not aware of Galbraith's oil dealings in Iraq, aides to both say
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