Families of 2 Held in Iraq Try to Suppress Anger, Fear

The memory haunts him. It was a grainy pencil sketch of two American men in a Baghdad courtroom, one slumped over as if in considerable pain. It flashed briefly the other day on his television screen. Could that be his son?

Raymond Daliberti does not know. He may not know for some time. He may never know. And for two weeks he has had to hold his temper, lest his anger incite the unpredictable Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein.

A former career Navy man who knows the might of the U.S. military, Daliberti wishes to himself that the Pentagon would order a mission to scale the walls of the Abu Gharib prison in a Baghdad suburb and free his captured son, David.

“If I were 20 years younger and Arnold Schwarzenegger,” he said, “I’d grab an AK-47 and parachute in there myself. But I’m 71, and I’m mad at the whole situation. And I’m mad that there is nothing I can do about it.”

So the Daliberti family sits in Jacksonville, Fla., as official Washington slowly maneuvers along a course of “quiet diplomacy.”

Equally frustrated is the family of William Barloon, who along with David Daliberti was captured after crossing the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border on March 13 and sentenced to eight years in prison.

Barloon’s brother, Edward, is a Vietnam War combat veteran. He works now as a Veterans Administration instructor in Minneapolis. But he too stops short of calling for a Marine invasion of Iraq.

Instead, he defers to diplomatic rhetoric and swallows the horror of his brother sitting in a notorious Iraqi prison.

“As each day goes on, it becomes more stressful,” he said. “More and more stressful as each day turns into another day.”

In Washington, the Clinton Administration finds itself at yet another crisis point where a seemingly harmless incident has turned into one more international standoff. Much like the tensions of last year, when a U.S. aviator crashed over North Korea, the capture in Iraq of the two American aircraft engineers has increased the pressure on already-strained relations between the United States and a hostile state.

Baghdad has condemned Barloon and Daliberti as spies. Washington has labeled the charge “preposterous.”

Iraq suggests that maybe now there is room to ease the economic sanctions against the country. The United States counters that it will not relent as long as Iraq holds two Americans behind bars.

On the sidelines, a growing number of critics in the United States, including two GOP presidential hopefuls, are urging the Administration at least to threaten Hussein with military retaliation.

On Tuesday, the Senate voted, 99 to 0, to condemn Iraq and called on the White House to take all appropriate action to win release of the men.

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And, as the diplomatic world turns, for the families of two men, the frustrations mount.

“Please use e-mail, the telephone or good old U.S. mail to contact your Congress person and your senator, and the White House,” Kathy Daliberti said in a message posted Monday on the Internet. “Tell them that you will support them in their efforts to get Iraq to send my husband and Bill home.”

Raymond Daliberti last heard from his son the night before his disappearance.

On March 12, David called home to express sorrow over an aunt’s death and to chat about his trip. His father said his son was planning to visit some American friends along the demilitarized zone between Kuwait and Iraq--a story that lines up with what the Administration has said officially.

The next call to the Dalibertis was from the State Department.

Daliberti said the family was told that the two men were driving a white, four-wheel-drive vehicle--similar to those used by United Nations forces along the border area--and that several guards, apparently mistaking them for U.N. personnel, waved them through at least two checkpoints near the southern Iraqi town of Umm al Qasr.

He also said the family was told that stories were inaccurate that the men somehow drove their vehicle through a 10-foot-deep, 16-foot-wide trench along the border area and drove carelessly into Iraq.

Both men had been in Kuwait for several years and were well versed in the restrictions on movement in and out of the border area.

“He had friends in the U.N. compound,” the elder Daliberti said. “They’d been there before. But these checkpoints are in the middle of the desert, and there are few signs, and at the second checkpoint they were waved right on through.”

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State Department officials told the family that the men had gone less than a mile before realizing they were in Iraq. They turned the car around, but were stopped before they could get back through the Kuwaiti checkpoint.

They were seized, he said, in full view of the U.N. border guards.

“The U.N. is at fault here,” Raymond Daliberti said.

The younger Daliberti, 41, grew up in Tennessee and Florida. He fell in love at an early age with race cars and working on engines, and he loved to visit his father’s naval base and “climb into the airplanes.”

He was hired three years ago by Kay & Associates, a defense contractor from Chicago, as an aircraft maintenance engineer under contract to the Kuwaiti government.

Barloon, 39, the son of a farmer from New Hampton, Iowa, also took to mechanics at an early age. After a six-year stint in the Navy, he joined McDonnell Douglas.

He was sent to the Middle East to work on F-18 aircraft sold by the U.S. government to Kuwait.

With three young children, he and his wife, Linda, lived in the company compound in Kuwait city.

“He felt they were in a very safe and secure area,” said his brother, Edward.

And then there is the crude hand-drawing of two men on trial Saturday in the Baghdad court.

Edward Barloon could not positively make out his brother on the television screen.

But Raymond Daliberti was worried that the figure scrunched over in the drawing is his son.

“It looked like David was having trouble sitting or standing,” he said. “Like they weren’t letting him sleep. Like they were making him sleep on a concrete floor. For all I know, they’re beating him in the kidneys.

“I’m his father,” he added. “But what can I do? Give me an alternative.”