39 Hostages Freed, Start Home : Land Tired but Happy in Germany

Thirty-nine American hostages arrived safely here early today after gaining their freedom in Beirut on Sunday, traveling to Syria in a Red Cross convoy and finally flying out of the Mideast in a U.S. Air Force plane.

Looking tired but happy, the men filed down the steps of the C-141 Starlifter that brought them to the U.S. Rhein-Main Air Base in Frankfurt from the Syrian capital of Damascus. Reaching the tarmac, some embraced waiting relatives and some wiped tears from their eyes.

Most of them raised their arms to the waiting crowd in a sign of triumph.

Conwell Offers Thanks

“We have a long list of people to thank,” hostage Allyn B. Conwell of Houston had said late Sunday, speaking for all of the hostages at a news conference held in Damascus to express their gratitude to Syria’s President Hafez Assad for helping to obtain their release. “I just wish they would all line up; I’d kiss every one of them.”

Conwell said that none of the hostages seeks “retaliation or revenge” for the hijacking, which began June 14 when two fundamentalist Muslim gunmen hijacked TWA Flight 847 on a flight between Athens and Rome. The next day they murdered one of the American passengers.

He called for a “deeper understanding of the circumstances that led up to people taking a desperate act.”

On hand to greet the hostages here was Vice President George Bush, who had broken away briefly from a seven-nation European tour to arrive in Frankfurt from Paris half-an-hour earlier than the hostages.

“You endured this cruel and painful experience with courage,” Bush said. “America is proud of you.”

Speaking into a microphone decorated with a yellow ribbon tied in a neat bow, the vice president said, “You are back, and America did not compromise her principles to get you back. Friends and neighbors joined to help your families in their terrible ordeal of waiting, showing the best of America. And today, as news of your release fills the air, we join your families in welcoming you.”

The freed Americans shook hands with Bush and with a group of four U.S. senators, who had traveled to Frankfurt from Geneva where they have been consulting with U.S. arms control negotiators.

Many relatives of the freed hostages and the vice president’s wife, Barbara, clutched small American flags.

The lone hostage to break away from the group and talk briefly with reporters on the tarmac was Ralf W. Traugott, 32, of Lunenburg, Mass.

“I haven’t slept in days and days,” Traugott said. But he added quickly that he felt “good, very good.” When asked if he believed his government had acted correctly during the crisis, Traugott answered, “I don’t know really what they did.”

Travel to Wiesbaden

After Bush’s greeting, the freed hostages traveled in buses to an Air Force hospital at Wiesbaden, 20 miles away.

In Damascus, the hostages were so jovial and polite that their Sunday news conference took on the flavor of a service club banquet, rather than the first moments of freedom for 39 presumably desperate men.

They were reluctant to criticize publicly even the hijackers who killed Robert Dean Stethem, a Navy diver, or the radical Shia Muslims who sequestered four passengers--those said to have “Jewish-sounding” names or U.S. military connections--until immediately before the group left Beirut.

In an interview with ABC News, however, one of the four, Robert G. Brown, said he was kept blindfolded in an underground prison. “We moved to what we called the bunker, . . . two flights down,” said Brown, 42, of Stow, Mass. “It was a prison. There were actually other prisoners there. We don’t know who they were because they kept us blindfolded most of the time.”

Iran Crisis Recalled

The arrival of the hostages here brought to an end one of the longest hijackings in the history of civil aviation and concluded the longest hostage drama since revolutionary Iranians held 52 Americans, most of them members of the U.S. Embassy staff in Tehran, prisoner for 444 days ending in January, 1981.

The hostages had lived through not only the slaying of one passenger, but also threats by the hijackers to blow up the plane; moves in and out of safehouses in chaotic Beirut, and a last-minute hitch that prevented their release Saturday.

Resolution of the hostage crisis came after complex secret negotiations involving the United States, Syria and Israel over the hijackers’ demand for the release of 735 Lebanese prisoners held by Israel at Atlit prison near Haifa.

The United States and Israel insisted Sunday, as they have throughout the crisis, that no deals were struck to gain the release of the American hostages. But Syria, which had a crucial role in the resolution of the crisis, claimed with equal force that it has received “undertakings” and expects the Lebanese prisoners to be released.

In Jerusalem, Israeli government sources said a plan for the release of the Lebanese prisoners must still be presented to the government’s “inner Cabinet” of its 10 most senior ministers. That could apparently happen as soon as today and the phased release could start later this week, the sources said.

The hostages’ long day started when 12 cars and station wagons flying Red Cross flags pulled away from an assembly point in a Beirut suburb, escorted by a dozen heavily armed escort vehicles carrying militiamen of the Shia Muslim Amal organization and the Druze Progressive Socialist Party. The Druze are members of an offshoot sect of Islam.

With the freed Americans smiling and waving at crowds of photographers, reporters and television crews, the convoy headed out of Beirut for the Druze-held mountains east of the Lebanese capital and a four-hour drive to Damascus.

“It’s great! It’s great!” they yelled repeatedly at reporters asking how it felt to be going home.

Militiamen in the escort said the convoy snaked through the Druze-held mountains to the village of Sofar, 12 miles east of Beirut, where Syrian troops took charge. When the convoy of white Peugeots reached the Syrian border, Syrian soldiers fired their machine guns into the air in a noisy show of jubilation.

Earlier, Nabih Berri, the Shia Muslim leader who acted as mediator in the resolution of the crisis, told a news conference his Amal militia was sending the hostages to the Syrian capital after receiving unspecified guarantees from Syria, the United States and local, regional and international powers.

“After tiring contacts with the concerned parties . . . and pledges by America and President Assad, we have decided to dispatch the 39 hostages to Damascus,” said Berri, who early in the crisis had assumed responsibility for the safety of the Americans.

“All I have is promises from Syria and Mr. Assad that they (the Israelis) will release the prisoners, . . . but we don’t know when or how. We don’t have any details. We have the principle. . . . This is a happy, peaceful end.”

Berri made the announcement shortly after the four isolated Americans were brought to his home and then driven swiftly away by Amal militiamen to join the rest of the hostages.

The four were believed to have been held by the radical Shi Muslim group Hezbollah (Party of God), which has close ties to Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Hezbollah’s failure to hand them over to Amal on Saturday delayed the expected release of all 39 Americans.

Addressed by Clergyman

All the hostages later assembled in a heavily guarded suburban schoolyard. Witnesses said a Shia clergyman addressed the Americans and was applauded. The cleric, a leading Amal official, then handed them copies of the Koran, the Muslim holy book.

In Beirut soon after the convoy left, two hooded hijackers ended their occupation of the hijacked TWA Boeing 727 at Beirut airport and held a news conference in which they shouted, “America is the great Satan!”

The gunmen, who spoke in Arabic, vanished after the news conference, and authorities did not attempt to stop them.

Although the two hijackers who seized the TWA jetliner originally have never been identified, they are believed to be members of Hezbollah.

The two took control of the TWA aircraft with pistols and hand grenades that they had somehow smuggled aboard the plane. They diverted the plane first to Beirut, then forced it on to Algiers, the capital of Algeria, then Beirut again, back to Algiers and then finally to Beirut.

Four Held Apart

Soon after the hijacked plane landed in Beirut for a third and final time, the hostages, except for the three crew members, were removed, most of them into the custody of Berri’s Amal militiamen. It was not clear for some time what had happened to the four hostages held by Hezbollah.

At the hostages’ news conference in Damascus, one of the four, Jeffrey Ingalls of Woodstock, N.H., said they were not mistreated in any way.

Their Hezbollah captors appeared to like the American people, Ingalls said, but “I think it’s the American government they object to.”

Ingalls said that he was a friend and Navy colleague of Stethem, the murdered American, but that he tried to keep that knowledge from his captors.

Speaking for All 39

Conwell, speaking for all of them with a mellifluous voice and ready smile, thanked the Syrians, the airline crew and the International Red Cross, which sent observers to see the hostages during their captivity and provided drivers and the protection of its flag Sunday to take the hostages overland to Damascus.

“We’re well aware that the negotiations that led up to our release were very, very complex,” Conwell said at the Damascus news conference. “For anyone and everyone who has prayed for us, talked for us, waited for us and hoped for us, we thank you all from the bottom of our hearts.”

Despite their obvious sadness over the murder of Stethem, a number of the hostages spoke in positive terms about Berri’s Amal organization and its cause.

“It’s been a real learning experience for me,” Ingalls said. “I have seen the other side of the story being here (in Lebanon).”

John L. Testrake, the plane’s pilot, said that “we found out things about our fellow human beings on the other side of the world that we didn’t know.”

At the news conference, one of the hostages clutched protectively at a beer bottle, presumably his first taste of beer after 16 days among Muslims, to whom alcohol is forbidden.

Tyler Marshall reported from Frankfurt and Charles P. Wallace from Damascus.