Waite Story Larger Than Hostage Role : Diplomacy: Experts think church envoy, both altruist and self-promoter, was linked to Iran-Contra scandal.

The release Monday of Terry Waite, the negotiator turned hostage, from 1,763 days of Lebanese captivity brings an end to Beirut’s most notorious political kidnaping.

Other hostages have been held longer--most notably Terry A. Anderson, chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press, who has been held captive for six years and eight months. But none was better known worldwide than Waite, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s envoy who disappeared into Beirut’s labyrinth on Jan. 20, 1987, while seeking the release of other kidnap victims.

Waite’s release also ends one of the last, saddest chapters of the Iran-Contra scandal. Experts on Lebanon’s tangled politics believe that his ordeal was almost certainly connected to his dealings--unwitting dealings, he insisted--with U.S. officials who negotiated the controversial arms-for-hostages trades during the Ronald Reagan Administration, most notably former Lt. Col. Oliver L. North.

A complex figure--a mixture of altruist and self-promoter--Waite is revered by many hostage families who speak of his “enormous integrity,” his “incredible patience and sensitivity” and his “diplomatic skills.”

Carol Weir remembers Waite as the “gentle giant”--the 6-foot-7, 220-pound bearded humanitarian who helped free Benjamin Weir, her missionary husband, in September, 1985, after 16 months of captivity.

Critics, on the other hand, accuse him of overstating his role in hostage releases and say that he ultimately used his negotiator’s role as a vehicle for seeking personal fame and glory.

“Terry became a self-promoter,” said a knowledgeable U.S. source. “He developed ambitions that transcended being an assistant to the Archbishop of Canterbury. He wanted to be world famous. He wanted to be knighted. Most of all, he wanted to win the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Indeed, in his quest for the prize, associates say, he went as far as to draft a long letter for the archbishop to sign, endorsing his nomination.

But even his harshest critics did not doubt Waite’s courage and tenacity that led him to risk his life in some of the world’s most hostile territory to win freedom for those held captive.

Born May 31, 1939, the son of a village police officer in northwestern England, Terence Hardy Waite spent most of his adult life working on church-related humanitarian projects in the Third World. It is a line of work that almost inevitably includes risk. In 1972, for example, while working in Uganda, he and his wife, Helen, then eight months pregnant, were briefly held by soldiers of Idi Amin, then that nation’s dictator. The Waites, who now have four children, were released unharmed.

In 1980, after a stint working for the Vatican, Waite returned to Britain to take the post of secretary for communion affairs, the Anglican Church’s liaison with affiliated churches overseas. That year brought Waite fame when he volunteered to fly to Tehran on Christmas Day to deliver a message from then-Archbishop Robert A. K. Runcie to the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, seeking the release of three captive British missionaries.

Along with negotiators from the Swedish Embassy, Waite eventually succeeded. In early 1981, the three were released, turning Waite into a British national hero, honored by Queen Elizabeth II in a Buckingham Palace ceremony in the summer of 1982.

In 1984, Waite met Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi seeking a Christmas release of four Britons held in Libya. Sitting on the richly carpeted floor of Kadafi’s tent for hours of talks, Waite struck up a relationship with the mercurial Libyan leader who agreed, two months later, to set the British hostages free.

“The approach I always take in negotiations is to try to build trust and to bring out the best side in people,” Waite once said in an interview. “If you give them a chance to display the best side, they sometimes take it.”

As Waite’s renown spread, the Presbyterian Church and the family of Presbyterian missionary Weir asked him in mid-1985 to try to gain Weir’s release and that of other hostages in Beirut.

“He stressed from the beginning that this was a venture of the church and that he was an independent agent with no connections to any government,” Carol Weir said. “The context was his own Christian faith.”

But the record is, and probably always will be, considerably less clear about what role Waite played in the release of Weir and two other hostages, Father Lawrence M. Jenco and David P. Jacobsen, who were released, respectively, in July and November, 1986.

Weir, Jenco and Jacobsen each were set free after Waite went to Beirut to negotiate with people claiming to speak for the hostage holders. The White House publicly credited Waite with winning the release of Weir and Jacobsen.

Waite, himself, said when Jenco was released that it was “not a coincidence” that he was in the Middle East when Jenco was freed. But only later did the world learn that all three men had been released in exchange for a shipment of U.S. arms to Iran.

After the arms-for-hostages scandal became public, along with the news that Waite had met with North, who helped him with communications and logistics, many observers concluded that Reagan Administration officials had duped Waite into serving as a convenient cover for their clandestine arms-swap strategy.

No evidence has surfaced to prove that Waite knew what North was up to, and both Waite and his associates have denied that he did.

“I’m conscious of the fact that the minute you step into these waters, you run the risk of being used by a dozen different parties,” Waite said at a London press conference in November, 1986, after word of the scandal broke and two months before he disappeared. But, he insisted, he had “nothing to do with any deal.”

“We sought meetings to get maximum information on the hostages,” said Canon Samir Habibi, a Lebanese-born associate of Waite’s who lives in Greenwich, Conn. “North never mentioned the arms-for-hostage deal.”

But it is clear that in Lebanon, many people believed that Waite was more closely connected to the U.S. government than he was admitting. After his capture, reports--never confirmed--surfaced that his captors claimed to have found a U.S.-made listening device in his hair. Militants in Beirut charged that Waite was actually a CIA spy, a charge the CIA denied.

Adding to such suspicions was Waite’s increasing taste for technically sophisticated equipment commonly associated with intelligence activities. In particular, U.S. sources say, by the time of the 1986 disclosure, Waite was making use of American spy technology.

“He loved gadgetry,” said a top counterterrorism official. “He began asking us for stuff.”

He made frequent use of an MX-360 walkie-talkie, which has a voice-scrambling device, as well as other equipment, to maintain contact with Americans, the source said. Waite once joked with a Druze militia member that he wore a plastic watch so that captors would not suspect him of wearing a bug.

And his public actions sometimes reinforced the risky image. In one reported incident, Waite picked up a phone in front of witnesses at an American hospital compound in Germany and said, “Get me Poindexter,” referring to John M. Poindexter, then the White House national security adviser.

Waite himself was aware of the fallout of the Iran-Contra revelations. “The personal danger to me has increased. That’s for sure,” he told an interviewer weeks before returning to Beirut.

Nonetheless, despite repeated and specific warnings from U.S. and British intelligence that he was a target, Waite returned to Lebanon on Jan. 12, 1987. In part, said those who had worked with him, he was driven by a desire to prove that he could gain the release of a hostage on his own, without U.S. machinations.

Waite’s association with the Archbishop of Canterbury was also nearing an end, and, friends say, he was seeking to establish credentials to get a new job with a major British charity. This time, Waite told reporters, he would seek the release of the two longest-held Americans, Anderson and Thomas M. Sutherland.

On Jan. 20, accompanied by bodyguards supplied by one of Lebanon’s many armed factions--the Druze militia headed by Walid Jumblatt--Waite left Beirut’s seaside Riviera Hotel for an evening meeting with a Lebanese intermediary and representatives of one of the Shiite Muslim groups believed to be holding the hostages.

A Druze militia source involved in protecting Waite recounted part of a final conversation with the envoy. “On the day of his appointment with the go-betweens, Waite said, ‘I need only a leather jacket and sunglasses.’ He thought he might be going to the Bekaa Valley (in eastern Lebanon) and it was cold then. So we got them for him.

“He thought he had succeeded and was going to see the captors,” the source said. “That coincided with his urge to show off. We never had conclusive proof that he was working for North. But everyone took it for granted that he was no longer the same Waite who came (to Lebanon) before.”

Waite dismissed his bodyguards, telling them, “You’ve done your mission, and I’m on my own now,” the Druze source recalled.

Until Monday, he was not seen outside of captivity again.