‘Stubborn’ Cicippio Outlasts His Ordeal

When Joseph J. Cicippio was ambushed and kidnaped by gunmen at the American University of Beirut five years ago, the only traces left behind were bloodstains from a pistol-whipping and a pair of broken eyeglasses.

Both were evidence, friends said, that the strong-willed Pennsylvanian had put up a good fight. And they were not surprised.

“Joe Cicippio was not the sort of guy to go quietly,” a colleague then told reporters in Beirut.

It was apparently that kind of feistiness--stubbornness even--that took Cicippio to Lebanon seven years ago. It also might inadvertently have contributed to his abduction. And certainly, his brother Thomas Cicippio said, it might have helped him survive more than five years in the hands of the Revolutionary Justice Organization, one of Lebanon’s most notorious terrorist groups.

“My brother is a very, very strong person,” the brother said a few hours after the release of Joseph Cicippio on Monday. “He has a very strong personality.”

Described as “stubborn” by his Lebanese wife Ilham, Cicippio was the one member of his large family to leave his hometown of Norristown, Pa. The move came after his first marriage dissolved in the mid-1970s. Leaving behind a career as a bank manager, Cicippio went overseas.

He lived in Saudi Arabia for four years while working with a ship servicing company and then in London, where he worked with an oil company headquarters office.

After a brief return to Norristown in 1983, where he had difficulty adjusting, he eagerly accepted an offer from the American University of Beirut. Dismissing family concerns about the risks of living in Lebanon, he moved to Beirut in 1984. “He didn’t look at it as dangerous, because he had an offer to work at the American University. . . . AUB was regarded as one of the safest tracts of land in the Middle East,” Thomas Cicippio said.

By 1985, kidnapings of Americans and Europeans had became an almost common occurrence, and his wife--30 years his junior and an employee at the American Embassy in East Beirut--began urging him to flee. But, she recalled, “he always refused to leave.”

Apparently Cicippio believed that his conversion to Islam and his marriage to Ilham made him immune to anti-Western reprisals. But on Sept. 12, 1986--a day before his 56th birthday--Cicippio was accosted by gunmen as he was leaving his faculty apartment on campus.

Little was heard of Cicippio until three years later, when the Revolutionary Justice Organization announced in August, 1989, that it would execute him in reprisal for the July 28 kidnaping by Israeli commandos of a prominent Shiite Muslim imam in South Lebanon. His life was declared spared only after a round of frantic diplomatic maneuvering.

Again, there was little word of him, except for the occasional release of photographs by his captors. As the years passed, those photographs showed that his black hair had turned gray and his bearded face had become gaunt.

When he was finally released on Monday, family members saw an up-to-date image of him for the first time in a brief televised broadcast from Damascus. He looked even more frail than before, they said. Questions about his health were raised in Germany.