Treatment of Captives in Lebanon Has Improved, Those Just Freed Say : Conditions: Experts say the captors would have little to gain by continuing to treat hostages badly.

Morning tea. Radio shows and occasional videos. Enough--or even too much--to eat.

While uncertainty still clouds the future of American hostages in the hands of Muslim fundamentalists, reports from released hostages John McCarthy and Edward A. Tracy provide assurance that treatment of the captives is better than it once was.

Hostages who were shackled in roach-infested cells, beaten and starved in the mid-1980s seem now to have more freedom to move around, greater opportunity to socialize with fellow captives, and at least minimal access to medical treatment and other necessities.

“For the last two years at least, food and living conditions have improved greatly,” McCarthy, the British television journalist, told reporters after he was released last week.

The former hostages continue to provide additional details of these improvements. Tracy, a 60-year-old adventurer and bookseller, has told how his captors gave him coffee once or twice a week, tea every morning and allowed him card games each day.

Once or twice a week, he saw a video. And, he said of his captors, “Some of them can cook really good.”

Indeed, hostages Terry A. Anderson, Terry Waite and Thomas Sutherland, who are being held jointly by the group called Islamic Jihad, “are frantically exercising,” Anderson’s sister, Peggy Say, said after talking to McCarthy. “They want to look good when they come out, and they’ve become a little obese.”

The three men have a shortwave radio that can pick up news reports, McCarthy said, and it is particularly useful to Sutherland, an agricultural professor who is fluent in French.

Other recent reports have indicated that the hostages, who were often chained in darkened cells in the earlier days of their captivity, are now kept in large rooms that are partitioned into cells and joined by common rooms where they can spend time together.

The hostages are sometimes blindfolded but apparently not shackled for long periods. Jerome Leyraud, the French relief official who was kidnaped last Thursday and released Sunday, said his captors were so casual about hiding their identities that they merely asked him to avert his eyes.

McCarthy reported that Terry Waite, the Anglican envoy, has asthma and was taken out of his cell to a doctor on at least one occasion. All suffer from lack of dental care, McCarthy said.

Yet, when McCarthy emerged from five years in captivity last Friday, former hostage Robert Polhill saw him on television and remarked, “He looks so hale and hearty--he looks like he’s coming off the 18th green.”

Other recently released captives have also reported a greater solicitude from at least some of their captors. Brian Keenan, an English teacher and Irish national who was released last August, reported that his captors had brought him fresh fruit and an occasional video and “asked if I wanted anything more.”

The guards were not always so thoughtful. When Anderson was first seized in March, 1985, he spent the first three weeks of his captivity chained to a bed and was threatened with death if he spoke a word. In the next months, he was beaten, kicked and tormented with comments that his government and family had abandoned him.

Father Lawrence Jenco, a Roman Catholic priest, and David P. Jacobsen, a hospital administrator, were also beaten badly, and several hostages were nailed temporarily in coffins when their captors wanted to move them. William Buckley, a U.S. Embassy officer widely reported to have been a CIA operative, died of pneumonia after 19 months of torture.

Experts believe that there are a number of possible explanations for the improvement in the hostages’ treatment.

Captors who are about to give up hostages want them to appear well-treated so that Western governments will be more likely to give up Arab prisoners--and less likely to launch military missions against the terrorists.

“Without the hostages, the abductors become potentially vulnerable,” said Bruce Hoffman, terrorism expert with the RAND Corp. think tank in Santa Monica.

As time has passed, the abductors have probably found it easier to provide for the needs of the prisoners and feel less pressure to treat them like CIA spies who should be sweated for secrets, said Brian Jenkins, terrorism expert at Kroll & Associates in Los Angeles.

“After all those years, what valuable information could they have left?” he asked. “Pressuring them becomes irrelevant.”

For the captors, the hostages are “assets--investments, and have to be treated well for that reason,” Jenkins said. “If you expect to obtain something on their release, you can’t have damaged goods.”

Sutherland, Waite and Anderson are said to be held by the group called Islamic Jihad, and university controller Joseph J. Cicippio is supposedly a captive of the Revolutionary Justice Organization. But the two groups “are really the same organization,” said Jenkins.

Terrorism specialists say that, despite the apparent improvements in the hostages’ lives, the physical and emotional toll of their captivity should not be underestimated.

The close confinement without sunshine, fresh air or easy free movement, combined with frightful uncertainty, leaves prisoners physically weak and emotionally frail, as Tracy’s appearance demonstrated Sunday.

Studies of hostages show that they can quickly develop circulatory problems, nervous disorders and twitches, as well as a variety of psychic wounds, Jenkins noted. “Stress can have incredibly corrosive effects on physical health,” he said.

“A hostage is a man hanging by his fingernails over the edge of chaos and feeling his fingers slowly straightening,” former hostage Keenan said last August, after he was released.