Ex-General Targets Vietnam Business Potential : Asia: Richard Secord, who once flew missions against the country for the Air Force, wants a part in its untapped oil reserves.

Retired Maj. Gen. Richard V. Secord, who won notoriety for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan Administration, spent part of his Air Force career trying to bring this city to its knees.

Nowadays, instead of flying combat missions in tactical fighter aircraft at several thousand feet, he is pounding the pavement, trying to make business deals with his former adversaries.

His main interest is oil, which is the focus of the lion’s share of about $500 million in foreign investment committed here.

Oil was also much of Secord’s concern during the war when American bombers unleashed millions of tons of bombs, missiles and rockets in a failed effort to crack the morale of Hanoi as it fomented the insurgency in the South.

As American fliers zeroed in on North Vietnam’s ports, imported oil was spirited from Soviet and East European ships onto sampans, which in turn were dispersed into the vast canal network of the Red River Delta for safe hiding.

Now, 19 years after the end of the war, Vietnam wants to become a major oil producer. And Secord, like hundreds of other foreign oil men who have descended upon Vietnam in recent years, sees the country’s untapped petroleum reserves as a ticket to big bucks.

With its estimated 3 billion barrels of oil and huge gas reserves--which puts it in the same league as Malaysia and Australia--Vietnam has been the scene of a feeding frenzy among international exploration firms. That frenzy has grown more feverish now that American firms can participate fully.

“We are very interested because Vietnam is an emerging economy. It’s ramping up,” Secord said during an interview at the bar of Metropole, a restored colonial-era hotel that is this city’s new “power” hotel.

“We call it the Silver Dollar Saloon, because of all the guys that have come here seeking their fortune,” said a U.S. employee of the United Nations.

Secord’s new commercial venture in Vietnam follows years of military adventures--including helping to arrange arms sales--around the globe. Secord, formerly assigned to Iran as the major U.S. weapons-supply adviser for the Defense Security Assistance Agency, has said he played a major role in arranging $17 billion in military hardware purchases by the late Shah of Iran before his regime collapsed in the Islamic revolution.

Many members of the congressional committee investigating the Iran-Contra, arms-for-hostages affair concluded that Secord benefited financially from helping in the Iran-Contra weapons dealings. He was indicted by the Iran-Contra independent counsel on several felony counts related to his role in the affair; he pleaded guilty to one charge of lying to Congress.

Secord, 61, says he is now in Vietnam representing only private interests. He said he is president of American Recovery Corp., a McLean, Va.-based firm he founded four years ago to get involved in a variety of international ventures.

So far, he said, the firm has been most active in the Middle East and the former Soviet republics.

Secord said he began looking seriously at Vietnam’s potential after the first indication that the Bush Administration was looking for ways to lift the embargo. “I have been following events in Vietnam for many years because I spent a large part of life in the military worrying about Vietnam,” he said.

His company, he said, now represents several American and foreign engineering and construction firms seeking oil-related deals in Vietnam.

“All the other great commercial nations have been here for years, (so) we are starting way back on the power curve here, but I don’t think it is going to be as difficult to catch up as some observers expect,” Secord said.

One of Secord’s clients is reportedly the Ralph M. Parsons Co., a Pasadena-based oil services and engineering firm that did work in South Vietnam during the war. Neither Secord nor Parsons would confirm a relationship.

But a Parsons spokesman in Pasadena said the firm has submitted a proposal to PetroVietnam, the state oil company, to study means of expanding the port of Vung Tau. The port city south of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) is the hub for the country’s budding petrochemical industry and needs expansion to facilitate off-shore oil development.

Secord said he has made four trips to Vietnam in the past year. He was surprised on his first visit to the country since the war, he said. “I anticipated it was going to be eerie . . . even outright hostility,” recalled Secord, who was involved in some of the most highly criticized aspects of the war in Southeast Asia, including CIA operations and bombing campaigns in Laos.

That former adversaries appear willing to form new relationships, Secord said, may be “because a lot of time has gone by since we were out here. The majority of the people here don’t have much interest in the war--which was central to the lives of the men of my age--because the majority of the population was born after the war.”

Indeed, Secord is making contacts with former Vietnamese military men. Through his permanent representative in Hanoi, retired U.S. intelligence officer Ted Schweitzer, Secord is working on a number of deals, including one that would possibly include a retired North Vietnamese general whose qualifications include successful management of the oil pipeline that ran down the Ho Chi Minh Trail supplying materials to North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops in the South during the war. (The pipeline was a primary target for American bombing raids.)

Nguyen Vu Quang, a senior reporter with the Vietnam News Agency, said: “Many American servicemen have come back to the country, and they are welcome not only by officials but also by the people, even people who lost relatives during the war. . . . If you read Vietnamese history, you will know that Vietnam and China were at war for many centuries, but after the war, we shake hands and are good friends--this is the basic nature of the Vietnamese.”

Times staff writer Linus Chua in Los Angeles contributed to this report.