Hostages and Kidnapers Are Pawns : The Real Game Is the Great Struggle Between U.S. and Iran

A day may come when the full story of the hostage affair in Lebanon will be told. Historians will dispute the events that led to the release of some hostages and, possibly, the kidnaping of others. When the day for dispassionate reflection comes, the most poignant aspect to the tale can only be that Terry Waite and his fellow hostages will be remembered as minor players in a dramatic struggle between two nations, Iran and the United States. The two countries are united at this moment in history by their mutual dependence in political and strategic terms and their mutual hostility for domestic propaganda reasons. Between them, as pawns in a game of chess whose rules prohibit checkmate, stand not only the foreign hostages but the Lebanese kidnapers as well.

Since the autumn of 1984, the focus of attention has been on Terry Waite, a good man who began to play his role as hostage mediator on behalf of the Archbishop of Canterbury before most of those now being held had been kidnaped. Waite revealed himself at a press conference at the Inter-Church Center in New York on Sept. 24, 1984, 10 days after the release of the Rev. Benjamin Weir in Muslim West Beirut. It was Weir’s American Presbyterian Church that had called on Waite’s good offices, already amply demonstrated by the release of British nationals held in Iran in 1981.

“When Mr. Weir was released several days ago,” Waite told reporters, “it was decided to go public in the hope that a new breakthrough might be experienced in the situation.” Waite revealed that he had “established through an intermediary a contact with the captors in Beirut and (I) have been in communication with them on a regular basis for the past six months.”

He then appealed to Islamic Jihad (Islamic Holy War), a fundamentalist pro-Iranian group that had held Weir and was still holding three other Americans: “I asked them to let me meet with them face-to-face and hear clearly their requests for myself.”

This call to the kidnapers was the beginning of the road to, as now seems certain, his own detention. The public demand of Islamic Jihad was for the release of 17 men convicted of complicity in the December, 1983, suicide truck bombing of the American and French embassies in Kuwait, in which five people died. Two Iraqis and a Lebanese had been sentenced to death, while the other 14 received sentences ranging from five years to life. Neither the United States, which had suffered great loss of life through earlier bombings of the American Embassy and Marine headquarters in Beirut, nor Kuwait was willing to consider freeing convicted murderers.

It was at this time, according to Robert C. McFarlane, then President Reagan’s national-security adviser, that Israel approached the United States with the idea of selling arms to Iran. According to McFarlane, Reagan came to share the Israeli view “that we try, over time, to move away from hostility with Iran and back toward some condition of normalcy, if we could find anybody that was normal.”

While the United States began to deal with Iran, Waite, who in his earlier negotiations had never entered Lebanon, flew to Beirut on Nov. 13, 1985. There were several journalists, including myself, on the plane with him. He told us that the Druze (a secretive, independent and militant Muslim sect) would protect him, and their militia were at the airport on Beirut’s southern edge when we landed.

Typically, all was confusion when Waite arrived, a harbinger for much that was to follow. Militiamen belonging to the Shia Amal (a sometime Druze ally known for their anti-Palestinian fervor) picked him up and drove him away, much to the fury of the Druze. I learned the next morning that Amal had moved him to the Bristol Hotel, but then the Druze found him during the night and took him, much to the fury of the Amal, to the vacant apartment of one of the hostages whose freedom he was seeking, Terry Anderson.

Within a short time, Waite appeared to make contact with the kidnapers. Later he told journalists at the Commodore Hotel: “They are taking a risk in meeting me, just as I am taking a risk in meeting them. That’s why I say, please, everyone, give me a chance to do that. A wrong move and people could lose their lives, including myself.”

(Between December, 1985, and September, 1986, while the U.S.-Israeli initiative toward Iran was proceeding, Waite did not return to Beirut. On Nov. 2, 1986, another American hostage, David Jacobsen, was released, and immediately thereafter what has become known as the Iran-contra affair began to unravel.)

Waite refused to abandon what was from the beginning a humanitarian effort to set innocent men free. He planned to travel to Beirut to be with the hostages at Christmas, but Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, who would guarantee his security, was out of Lebanon. When he returned, Waite arranged to make his first trip to West Beirut (“a place that gives anarchy a bad name”) in more than a year, arriving on Jan. 12, 1987. For a week Waite held public meetings with individual Sunni and Shia Muslim politicians and occasional press conferences. He looked as optimistic and confident as ever, strolling with his Druze bodyguards along the corniche in front of the Riviera Hotel, where he was staying. He revealed that he’d had two short meetings with his “secret contacts,” presumably the captors or their representatives. Then, at 7:30 on the evening of Jan. 20, he set out for more secret meetings, asking his Druze security men, as always, to leave him while he met with Islamic Jihad.

Meanwhile, the pace of kidnaping foreigners escalated, with Americans, West Germans and Saudis being dropped down what David Hirst, the Manchester Guardian correspondent who narrowly avoided the same fate, called “that black hole.” Rumors flourished that Waite had been kidnaped, that he was held in the Bekaa Valley, that he was imprisoned in the Shia slums of southern Beirut. A senior PLO official, Abu Iyad, told reporters in Tunis that Waite had delivered $2 million for the release of David Jacobsen. A diplomat warned me, “If Waite’s negotiating for anyone at this stage, it’s probably for himself.”

No one knows where it will all lead, any more than we know for certain where Terry Waite and all the hostages he had hoped to set free are. What we do know is that the whole affair has been badly handled and that the countries whose nationals are held in Lebanon--the United States, France, Italy, West Germany--have all busily engaged in pursuing secret, separate arrangements with kidnapers who now have every reason to want to go on kidnaping.