Utah native a familiar fixture in the corridors of power

WASHINGTON — All last week, a stocky white-haired man could be seen prowling the corridors of the Capitol, a can of Diet Coke stuffed in his coat pocket, an American flag made of safety pins on his lapel. As he lumbered about, mingling with senators and reporters, he evoked an air of familiarity, as if he had been there a long, long time.

The man is Tom C. Korologos , confidant of senators and presidents and, for decades, one of Washington's most influential Republican lobbyists. Yet Korologos, who is such a fixture on Capitol Hill that he is often called the 101st senator, was not representing the usual corporate clients.

Rather, he was doing the bidding of the White House on Iraq.

In May, the 70-year-old Korologos (pronounced kor-roh-LOH-gohs) retired from Timmons & Co., the firm he co-founded in 1976, to become senior adviser to L. Paul Bremer, the American administrator in Iraq. He spent four months in Baghdad, tutoring Bremer on the ways of Congress and escorting lawmakers on fact-finding trips. Then he returned to Washington to help wage an intense lobbying effort to persuade Congress to approve President Bush's $87 billion emergency spending request for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yet Korologos' transformation from high-priced corporate advocate to Pentagon employee — he has the identification tags to prove it — has created some suspicion in Washington, where lobbyists do not ordinarily take pay cuts out of the goodness of their hearts. Some wonder if he or his former Timmons clients like Boeing, Unocal, AT&T and the American Petroleum Institute might benefit later from his new Iraq connections.

"It seems to me there are a lot of potential clients that he has worked for in the past who certainly would have a stake in the Iraq economy right now," said Frank Clemente, director of Public Citizen's Congress Watch, a watchdog group. "He now has the inside track. He knows Bremer, he knows what's going on on the ground. Maybe he's going to set up a little boutique operation."

He would not be the first. A close friend of Bush, Joe M. Allbaugh, former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, now advises clients seeking business in Iraq. But Korologos says he has severed all financial ties with Timmons and has no intention of profiting from his Iraq experience.

"I'm not going to start a company," he said. "I'm 70 years old. I'm not going to run a marathon when this is over."

He said this last Thursday, over a Diet Coke and a tuna fish sandwich that he had bought at a Senate snack shop. The shop had not been serving, but Korologos knew all the counter clerks, so he had no trouble getting something to eat. Then, lacking an office, he ushered a reporter to a bench in a sunny corner of the Capitol.