Marine Had Not Been Concerned About His Safety : Chief ‘Had to Be in the Field,’ U.N. Aide Recalls

When William R. Higgins grew up as a boy in Kentucky, his friends never thought of him as brash enough to become a Marine. “I think people were kind of surprised when he went into the Marines,” Rudy Fischer, an old school friend, said some months ago. “You think of the Marines as being macho types, and he really wasn’t like that.”

Yet he not only joined the Marines, Higgins also proved courageous enough years later to seek a dangerous assignment in southern Lebanon and then to spurn suggestions that he stick close to headquarters for safety.

And in the end, Higgins’ bravery may have led to his kidnaping by pro-Iranian Shiite Muslim extremists 17 months ago--and their macabre boasts Monday that they had hanged him.

The report of the hanging of the 44-year-old Marine officer provoked waves of shock and revulsion Monday in the headquarters of the United Nations forces in southern Lebanon.

Lt. Col. Higgins had been commander of a small unit of unarmed U.N. truce observers for barely a month when he was kidnaped on Feb. 17, 1988, on a road south of Tyre. A group of Shiite gunmen who call themselves the Organization of the Oppressed on Earth claimed responsibility for the abduction.

Higgins’ experience in Lebanon was recalled in a phone interview by Timur Goksel, a Turkish national and a U.N. civil servant who worked closely with the Marine officer. Goksel is spokesman for the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, a peacekeeping group of almost 6,000 soldiers from nine countries that shares a compound with the smaller U.N. truce observers’ force in Naqoura in southern Lebanon.

“He was aware of the danger. He was not naive,” said Goksel. “He was advised that he should keep closer to headquarters. He could not accept that. As the chief, he had to be with the men in the field. He said, ‘As long as I am the chief, I am going to go out.’ It was perfectly understandable.”

Nevertheless, Goksel acknowledged, many of his associates believe that Higgins might have been more careful on the day he was kidnaped after conferring with a leader of the pro-Syrian Amal militia in Tyre. The Amal leader, Abdel Majid Saleh, said later that he and Higgins were discussing efforts to free foreign hostages in Lebanon. Higgins, following standard U.N. procedure for truce observers, traveled unarmed and unguarded.

Goksel said that Higgins had traveled alone in a car followed by two officers in a second car. It might have been wiser, the U.N. official said, for him to have traveled with at least a second officer in his car.

“He was a colleague, a friend,” Goksel said. “But he could have been more careful. With hindsight, we all felt that way. But, maybe even if he had not been alone, it still would have happened. We are just guessing.”

Goksel described Higgins as an outgoing type. “The job requires you to be an extrovert,” Goksel said. “You have to hold everyone’s hand and let them cry on your shoulder. That was the job. He was good in those things. He was very comfortable in that role.”

According to a Pentagon official, Higgins, who had been on the staff of then-Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger, “actively sought” the Lebanon assignment after several years of duty in Washington. His wife, Marine Maj. Robin Higgins, remained behind in the Pentagon public affairs office.

There are 75 observers from several countries in the southern Lebanon unit of the U.N. Truce Supervisory Organization, part of the oldest U.N. force in the Middle East. Under an agreement with the United Nations, command of the unit is rotated between an Australian officer and an American officer. Higgins joined the unit in June, 1987, and took over from an Australian lieutenant colonel as commander about six months later.

A week after the abduction, his kidnapers, who vilified him as an intelligence agent, released a 70-minute videotape in which Higgins was shown reading a statement demanding that then-President Ronald Reagan “take responsibility for the crimes he has committed against the oppressed people in the region.” The prisoner, who wore a dark green sweater, was unshaven and grim. Much of the statement was in poor English and obviously written by his captors.

Despite the report of the execution, the town of Lancaster, Ky., where Higgins spent summers as a youth, was still bedecked Monday with yellow ribbons, fluttering from trees, homes, churches and schools. The signs of sympathy for the hostage and his family had been arranged months ago by Julian Moss, a childhood friend of Higgins.

“We just hope that, maybe, what we’re hearing is not a fact,” Moss told journalists Monday.

Higgins was born in Danville, Ky., but grew up near Louisville. When he was graduated from high school in Louisville, he listed as his ambition: “For my family to always be proud of me.” Although he was a good enough student to win an appointment to West Point, he decided instead to study at Miami University of Ohio on a Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps scholarship.

But Higgins discovered that the Navy did not suit him well. He suffered severe seasickness on a summer cruise to Scandinavia and decided to join the Marines after graduation. After receiving his commission as a second lieutenant, he earned master’s degrees in human resources management at Pepperdine University and in political science at Auburn University. He was graduated from the National War College in 1985.

Higgins served in Vietnam, Okinawa, Quantico, Va., and Camp Lejeune, N.C., before his assignment to Washington. Both his parents have died.

Robin Higgins, the colonel’s second wife, had continued to work at the Pentagon press office, despite her ordeal. In a Memorial Day ceremony on the cemetery at the Quantico Marine Base last May 30, she told a crowd of 500 people that she now wears a bracelet with an inscription from the Bible that says in part, “Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them.”

“This is my shield,” she said.