Banker, Safe in Newport, Calls Escape Pure Terror : Freedom: An Ontario man was confronted by Iraqi soldiers on his desert gamble but bluffed past them.

Three weeks and one aborted escape after Iraqi soldiers seized his neighborhood in Kuwait, Southern California banker Abdalla (Tony) Touny thought his gamble for freedom would explode, literally, in his face.

It was shortly after 3 a.m. on Aug. 21 and Touny, a friend and two men he described as Bedouin “guides” were driving northwest through the desert, bound for the safety of Jordan.

“They stopped us,” Touny said, referring to a unit of Iraqi soldiers. “They almost killed us. They surrounded us with machine guns. They were checking for Americans and Kuwaitis. I told them (in Arabic), ‘I’m a bookkeeper, I’m a clerk.’ I told them I was Egyptian.”

After a few more harrowing minutes, the Iraqis relented--and Touny was headed toward becoming one of only a few Americans in Kuwait to escape the grip of Saddam Hussein.

“It scared the hell out of me,” Touny said Friday during an interview in his temporary Newport Beach apartment.

His race to freedom almost ended at another point when one of the Bedouins fell asleep at the wheel, and the group’s Chevrolet sedan careened off the road, sideswiping a fence. Touny said the two right-hand doors were crushed, but no one was hurt.

At about 10 that same morning--aided by goodwill cigarettes he passed to Jordanian border guards and the savvy and cachet of the Bedouins, whom Touny said he paid a $750 fee--the group at last made it into Jordan’s capital, Amman.

Over the next week, he obtained a new U.S. passport and flew to Cairo, where he was debriefed by a military attache to the U.S. embassy there.

Touny said the Bedouins who are spiriting Westerners out of Kuwait are the new entrepreneurs of the Mideast, “taking advantage of the situation.”

Still, Touny said, his $750 was well spent: “I felt I wanted to get the hell out of there at any cost. . . . There were a lot of other people I know who tried to cross, and none of them made it.”

Finally, in the first minutes of Friday morning, Touny was reunited at Los Angeles International Airport with his wife, 13-year-old daughter and 18-year-old son. The family owns a home in Ontario.

A few hours later, Touny recounted his odyssey to freedom.

Touny, 46, provided a uniquely informed perspective on the Persian Gulf crisis. An Egyptian by birth but a U.S. citizen since 1974, Touny earned his master’s degree at New York University and for the last three years has been the chief manager of operations for the Bank of Kuwait and the Bank of the Middle East.

Touny said he has personally supervised the accounts of members of the Kuwaiti royal family. The palace of the emir of Kuwait, he said, was on grounds directly behind the rented villa where Touny lived.

Based on his relationship with members of the royal family, Touny said, he thinks the Kuwaitis would be willing to pay Hussein “whatever money he wants” to withdraw.

Touny’s brush as a captive was tinged with no small amount of irony. The Touny family had been spending the summer in Newport Beach, as they try to do every year, when he returned by himself to the tiny Middle Eastern nation Aug. 2.

“I was exhausted,” Touny recalled. “I had not slept for about 24 hours. So, when I got to my villa (at about 2 a.m.), I went to bed.”

But two hours later, the phone rang. It was his wife, Abla, watching TV half the world away in Newport Beach.

“She told me there was a war,” Touny said. “I couldn’t believe it.”

By daybreak, Touny had no doubt. He could hear explosions and see flashes.

“I ran to the ATM machines (at the bank), and they were closed,” Touny said, adding that he had flown to Kuwait the night before with the equivalent of just $36 U.S. dollars in his pockets.

After borrowing money from friends, Touny said, he was part of a surge of immediate panic buying. He said he stood in line two hours that first day to buy canned goods, rice, bread, powdered milk and cheese.

Because of the proximity of the emir’s palace, Iraqi troops were quickly a presence in his neighborhood, looting homes and controlling access in and out at gunpoint.

“There were a lot of Iraqi actions in my neighborhood,” he said. “I tried to be low-key and stay out of their sight.”

About a week later, when he and friends tried to escape by car to Saudi Arabia, Iraqi troops stopped and ordered them back to Kuwait city. By that point, he had long since lost phone contact with the United States and his family.

“We kept calling the State Department every single day,” said Abla Touny, a chemist who had hoped to return to her job at Kuwait University. “I was really going crazy. I mean, it was just a nightmare.”

Meanwhile, Tony Touny said he and other Americans kept in daily contact with the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait, whose officials warned them not to try another escape through Saudi Arabia.

Until the time he fled Kuwait, Touny said, he saw the results of car bombings and other anti-Iraqi, guerrilla-type activity.

“There was a lot of Kuwaiti resistance, even right before I left,” Touny said.

From his perspective, Touny said, Hussein’s motive for invading and occupying Kuwait is “simple”: Iraq is “a bankrupt country. They’re looking for someone to bail them out. They want the money. And they want access to the (Persian) Gulf.”

By Friday afternoon, Touny was still trying to put his life back in order. With all of his identification behind in Kuwait--he could not risk being identified as an American during his escape--Touny headed to the Department of Motor Vehicles. Then it was off to a shopping mall, because the only clothes he brought home were those he wore.

And, with summer almost over, Touny, his wife and children were moving back to their permanent residence in San Bernardino County, from where Tony Touny said he would seek a safe, stateside job.

“I can’t risk my life any more,” he said. “I’m glad it’s over. I just pray and hope everybody else gets out OK.”