Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 17, 1995 TAG: 9507180015
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Secretary of State Warren Christopher said, however, that the United States had promised nothing in exchange for Iraq's sudden decision to release the two men, William Barloon and David Daliberti. Saddam released them after Rep. Bill Richardson, D-N.M., appealed to Saddam in a one-hour meeting on Sunday morning to free them on humanitarian grounds.
Richardson, who has adopted the role of a globe-trotting troubleshooter over the last two years, had consulted closely with the Clinton administration before making the trip to Baghdad. He said in a statement released by his office that ``there were no deals made in the meeting; there was no quid pro quo or concessions.''
Barloon, of New Hampton, Iowa, and Daliberti, of Jacksonville, Fla., seemed relaxed and healthy when they appeared at the Milya-Mansour Hotel on Sunday in Baghdad alongside Richardson. In early May, both men complained of chest pains and stress and were taken to a Baghdad hospital, where doctors said Barloon had some possible scarring of tissue in his heart.
In their brief public appearance on Sunday, Daliberti would say only that it was ``a wonderful day.''
Barloon's brother, Edward, said in a telephone interview from his home in Rosemount, Minn., ``This was a very, very pleasant surprise to wake up to on a Sunday morning.'' He said that not only had he not known about Richardson's trip before Sunday, but that he had never heard of Richardson.
A spokesman for Richardson said the congressman had left Baghdad by car on Sunday with the two men and that they would arrive in Amman, Jordan, early today, after what was expected to be a 10- to 12-hour drive through desert.
In March, an Iraqi court sentenced Barloon and Daliberti to eight years in prison for illegal entry, although Iraqi officials often accused the two men of being spies.
The two men, who worked for American aircraft maintenance companies in Kuwait, insist that they made an innocent wrong turn across the Iraq border on March 13 when they were seeking to visit a friend at a U.N. outpost in northern Kuwait, just south of the Iraq border.
U.N. officials acknowledged that their guards had mistakenly allowed them to cross the border.
The detention of the two men aggravated the bitter relations between the United States and Iraq. American officials often said it was uncivilized to jail two people for what the administration described as innocently straying into another country. Iraqi officials asserted that the Americans could not have accidentally stumbled into their country and could have entered it for just one reason: to spy.
The men's wives said they were overjoyed to learn that their husbands no longer would have to spend their days in Abu Ghraib Prison near Baghdad, where they shared a six-by-eight-foot cell and often had just rice and water for meals.
``Obviously, I am absolutely elated and can't believe this ordeal is coming to an end,'' Barloon's wife, Linda, who is on a business trip in Singapore, told CNN.
White House officials said Iraq had sent messages for months through intermediaries that it wanted something in exchange for releasing the Americans. The Iraqis called for unfreezing Iraqi assets, easing U.N. sanctions and obtaining millions of dollars in food and medicine.
U.S. officials said they refused to provide a quid pro quo because they did not want to negotiate directly with Saddam over the issue, or to lend his government international legitimacy by dealing with it.
by CNB