Iraq Frees U.S. Oilman After Senator Visits Baghdad : Persian Gulf: American was held for 205 days. Boren denies trip means any change in U.S. policy.

An American oilman who spent 205 days of an eight-year prison term in Iraqi jails was freed by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein on Monday after a U.S. senator went to Baghdad to appeal for his release.

Kenneth Beaty, an exploration expert for the Dallas-based Santa Fe Drilling Corp., ranked among America’s least-known prisoners abroad through nearly seven months of quiet diplomacy that ended after U.S. Sen. David L. Boren (D-Okla.) met with Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tarik Aziz on Sunday night.

“No one should read into my visit any change in American policy,” Boren told reporters in Baghdad before accompanying Beaty to Amman, Jordan.

Arriving in Amman, Beaty carried a U.S. flag. He and Boren had traveled six hours by land to the Iraqi-Jordanian border, where a Jordanian army helicopter picked them up.

“I’m very pleased, as you can imagine,” a smiling Beaty told a crush of reporters. He later boarded a jet for Washington.

The 45-year-old Beaty, a resident of Mustang, Okla., who was captured by Iraqi soldiers while inspecting an oil well near the border with Kuwait on April 25, called his internment “a difficult experience.” But in a brief meeting with reporters in Baghdad, he had only praise for his captors.

“I have no complaints whatsoever,” said Beaty, who was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. He has a heart condition and described as “excellent” the care he received from the Iraqi doctors and prison staff.

Beaty was the sixth foreigner to be freed from Iraqi prisons in two months by personal order of the Iraqi president.

The state-run Iraqi News Agency, monitored in Nicosia, said Hussein’s decision to release Beaty went beyond Boren’s visit. The agency stated that similar appeals had been made in letters to the Iraqi president signed by 16 U.S. politicians, among them former President Jimmy Carter and the governors of Texas and Oklahoma.

Hussein had already released three Swedes after months of captivity on the offense of illegally entering Iraq; Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustav had written a letter of appeal to Hussein. A Filipino and a Moroccan were freed earlier after clemency appeals from their heads of state. All six men, working under contract with the Kuwaiti government, were apprehended in separate incidents by Iraqi border guards after straying over the ill-defined desert border.

Several Middle East analysts said the timing of Beaty’s release appeared to be connected to Monday’s opening of Iraq’s negotiations with the U.N. Special Commission in charge of destroying Iraqi chemical, nuclear, biological and long-range ballistic weapons programs. The talks in New York are aimed at ending more than three years of harsh economic sanctions against the oil-rich nation.

The Iraqi regime insists it has permitted the destruction of all such weapons and last month provided the United Nations the names of key weapons suppliers. It hopes that the United Nations will now agree to lift the embargo.

Compliance with the weapons-destruction program is a key demand of the United States, Britain and other Western nations before the U.N. Security Council lifts the sanctions.

Among the Iraqi officials scheduled to meet with the United Nations later this month is Aziz, whose meeting with Boren in Baghdad on Sunday night climaxed seven months of quieter efforts on Beaty’s behalf by Polish diplomat Jan Piekarski, who has been under contract to the U.S. State Department to represent America’s interests in Iraq since the U.S.-led war.