Paper Trail Gets Hoosier Out of Iraq

Dick Clay, a burly German-Irish Hoosier with mustache and beer belly, doesn’t look much like a Filipino. But he made a daring escape from Kuwait disguised as one--with fake Philippine documents ingeniously forged by a loyal friend.

Clay, 46, managed to slip across the Iraqi-Jordanian frontier last week with 34 Filipino employees by pretending he was one of them. He had to hide for three days in the Iraqi capital--swarming with Saddam Hussein’s secret police and their army of informers--and tough out a heart-stopping encounter with Iraqi border guards.

His one-page travel document was a masterpiece of fakery. A Filipino instrument technician spent 10 days duplicating the Philippines Embassy seal and a creating a long inscription in tiny English characters.

The stamp was fashioned from a rubber shower sandal; the black ink was made purple by diluting it with milk.

On paper, the American construction manager Richard Eugene Clay became Ricardo Erazo. His hometown of Bloomington, Ind., where his wife Claudia and three children were waiting, became Batangas City in the Philippines.

Clay’s appearance posed problems.

Filipinos tend to be small and slender, dark-eyed and dark-haired. But Clay’s face is a great red expanse of rugged terrain, with a prominent sunburned nose and distinctly European eyes. And he has a large U.S. Navy tattoo on his right hand.

In Kuwait, Clay supervised 500 Filipino and Indian workers at M. W. Kellogg, a U.S. contractor that maintained two oil refineries in the emirate. He accounted for all but four of them and then prepared to escape himself.

“When everything else was ready, I told ‘em to go out and steal two buses,” Clay said.

His small convoy made it to Baghdad after two traffic accidents and some close shaves on the border. At each roadblock, Filipino friends stood in the bus door and passed out his papers.

The group was stuck in Baghdad for three days, which Clay spent huddling between the others in a car or hiding in three hotel rooms with 128 others.

He rented another bus for the equivalent of $5,000 for the seven-hour drive to the Jordan border. By then, his party had grown by 25 Filipino women.

The tough part was getting out of Iraq. Clay cleared every hurdle, finally garnering the treasured exit stamp on his false travel document. Then, at a last check before entering Jordan, an Iraqi guard stuck his head into the bus.

He glared at Clay and said: “Marine?”

“Filipino,” said Clay.

The Iraqi took him off the bus for six hours of interrogation.

But his friends rallied around him. They piled their luggage across the road, insisting that if Clay was returned to Baghdad, they’d go too.

They scuffled with Iraqi guards swinging truncheons. Finally, one woman barged into the border office, wailing that she could not be separated from her uncle.

Finally, the stern-faced Iraqi handed back Clay’s document and waved him onward.

With a trace of a smile, he said: “Goodby, Marine.”