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Father’s Death Brings Home Hostage’s Plight : Baghdad: Suddenly, an American realizes he is trapped. U.S. detainees are confused and frustrated.

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Gus Cero hardly felt like a hostage, although for 25 days he and thousands of other Americans had been forbidden to leave Iraq.

Cero and his colleagues had relaxed together at poolside. He had played the guitar. There had been good food and drink, and he had found solace in the affection that he built up with the Iraqi people over the eight years that he worked as a financial manager in this strange land.

Then, last Saturday, his father died. Word came by telephone from his home in New Jersey. It changed everything.

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“It was pretty sudden; he had a heart attack,” Cero, 37, told a reporter Monday in the diplomatic compound in Baghdad where he and 34 other Americans took refuge two weeks ago.

Just as suddenly, Cero realized that he cannot go home. He realized that despite the comforts, he is a hostage and utterly helpless.

It was a telling moment, not just for Gus Cero but also for many in the American community who are caught up in one of history’s more bizarre and ambiguous hostage dramas.

“We’re supposed to be blindfolded, locked in a cell and chained to the wall, but we’re not; we’re like Club Med hostages,” Tom, a friend of Cero’s who asked not to be further identified, said as the two discussed their plight beside the pool.

“But personal freedom? Yes, in that regard we are hostages. I have a life, I want to live that life, and I can’t. And Gus here can’t go home for his father’s funeral.”

The mood among the Americans here is an eerie mixture of confusion and frustration, of remoteness and isolation. It has spread beyond Cero’s tiny compound to the entire community. It is the human side of the military stalemate, and it is felt even on the grounds of the U.S. Embassy.

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The American flag still flies outside the embassy. But inside, the modern beige-brick buildings in the Masbah district have been stripped almost bare. For days, the paper shredders worked overtime destroying classified files.

“We’re down to one minute of burn time on documents,” an official said.

Of the 35 U.S. diplomats stationed in Iraq, only nine remain at the embassy. Even the six Marine guards have left, along with other “non-essential” personnel.

Not even the people left behind--to look after the American community and continue trying to negotiate the freedom of its members--are immune to the uncertainty. They and other Western diplomats here speak of “the endless psychological pressure” and of “the dark uncertainty of just how barbaric these people are.”

On the surface, the Iraqis, who officially refer to the Westerners as their “guests,” have been anything but harsh. Indeed, if the nearly 3,000 Americans trapped in Iraq and Kuwait are prisoners, they are in the largest and most luxurious jail in the world.

Little is known of the 2,500 Americans in Kuwait, but the 500 or so in Baghdad are free to move about the city as they please. None are known to have been harassed by Iraqi authorities, and most continue to express strong affection for the Iraqi people.

For 41 others, the ordeal is different. They were among what a diplomat here calls “soft targets”--principally oil workers who were rounded up from Kuwait’s desert oil fields when the Iraqi army overran the country Aug. 2, plus passengers on a British Airways flight that was on the ground in Kuwait at the time.

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The U.S. government knows who they are. Embassy officials met with all 41 every day at the two hotels where military authorities kept them until Aug. 16. On Aug. 17, the 41 simply disappeared, presumably transferred to strategic sites in connection with President Saddam Hussein’s “human shield” strategy.

“There’s no doubt we’re better off than those 41, but this is precisely what feeds the fear,” said Bob Vinton, a 58-year-old Baghdad-based executive of Johnson Controls International of San Francisco.

Vinton, who has become an outspoken advocate for the American community here, went on to say: “Why take 41 hostages and leave the rest of us? This is what no one can figure out. Saddam Hussein says it’s because they were in Kuwait and we’re in Iraq. But that could change overnight. It’s uncertainty that causes panic, and a few are starting to panic.”

As the international sanctions against Iraq begin to have an impact on the Iraqis, they will also have an impact on the foreigners living alongside them.

“It’s going to become increasingly difficult soon,” said Vinton, formerly of Laguna Beach, Calif. “Food is quickly running out. It’s going to be desperate times soon. People are going to start getting thin fast. They’d better do something quick out there to solve it, or there’s going to be very severe food shortages.”

Lines have already started forming for bread in the early mornings and late afternoons. Sugar and powdered milk are also in short supply, and a group of Americans met Monday evening to make contingency plans for getting food.

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The anxiety has affected the Americans in a variety of ways. Cero’s friend Tom--who narrowly escaped being taken hostage in Iran in 1979, having fled Tehran by bus a week after Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi fell--thinks the worsening situation justifies quick and massive military action by President Bush.

“I think confrontation is the best immediate possibility of getting us out of here,” he said. “In my mind, any confrontation is going to be strategic and decisive and successful in removing Saddam Hussein. If you remove the threat behind that fear by direct confrontation, then the bulk of the population will relax and so will the crisis.”

Tom shares Cero’s feelings about the Iraqi people, but there is another dimension to his position.

“I don’t want America to lose focus,” he said. “The focus should be on Kuwait, not on us. Not on me. I don’t want to be a hostage, but we’re a secondary issue. In the Carter Administration, we lost sight of what was happening in Iran and focused entirely on the hostages, and that was wrong.

“I’d like to walk across the border tonight, but, today, Saddam Hussein has crossed into Kuwait and he’s taken it, and that’s the reality the world must focus on.”

He said the hostages “have all these anxieties because we have all this information coming in.” And he added: “If we lose our balance, it will be because we’re inundated with information from all sides. The ordinary hostage is very strictly controlled in his access to information, and his keepers feed it to him gradually. I think that’s easier.”

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As Tom spoke, Cero listened, picking out chords on his guitar. But when Tom stopped talking, Cero began.

“OK,” he said, “it’s been kind of spooky for a week or two here, with two people with big armies shouting nose to nose at each other. But if you think about stuff like that, you go absolutely crazy.”

Clearly, though, he had thought it through, especially since the call about his father, and his conclusion is not like Tom’s.

“My overall feeling is, I don’t want to go home on an exit visa only. I want a re-entry visa attached to it. I like this country very much. My feelings have not changed. I’m still enjoying it now. I just hope that nothing changes. And I’m more than willing to sit it out and let diplomacy take its course.”

For Vinton, the businessman, such feelings are not only understandable--they are largely mutual.

“There isn’t an Iraqi I’ve met who doesn’t like an American,” he said.

Yet, he said, he cannot help but agree with Tom.

“I think America’s really got to take a hard look at the options and do something very quickly,” he said. “First, there are the food shortages and, second, we’re going to see a hostile Iraqi community that’ll turn fast against the Americans, and then things will be totally unpredictable.”

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Vinton paused for a moment, reflecting, and then added: “But, you know, it’s almost unbelievable, really. It’s all just an incredible adventure.”

U.S. HOSTAGE DEATH: An unidentified American reportedly died in Iraq. A11

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