Hostage Outcome Offers Lessons for Extremists

Nine years after the first American was grabbed off the anarchic streets of Beirut, the release of journalist Terry A. Anderson on Wednesday marked the end of an era that held the country captive and converted the yellow ribbon into a national symbol as familiar as baseball and apple pie.

And U.S. officials and counterterrorism experts, while warning that new outbreaks of hostage-taking are possible and other forms of terrorism are likely to continue, suggested that the long, tortuous experience in Lebanon may give pause to some political extremists and help American policy-makers deal with future outbreaks of violence.

“There are some very obvious messages to come out of this for all extremist groups,” declared one U.S. specialist.

First and foremost, some officials and outside experts said, the climax to the Lebanon saga was a dramatic illustration of the fact that, in a rapidly changing world, the benefits of holding hostages may no longer outweigh the costs to extremist groups.

“In the end, they were throwing out hostages like dog meat--one, two, three,” said an official familiar with the mediation effort that ultimately freed the Lebanon hostages.

“They wanted to get rid of them. They were willing to give them up even before getting the small gains they expected,” specifically the release by Israel and its supporters of about 250 Lebanese prisoners and a prominent Lebanese cleric, he said.

In addition to the lesson other extremists may draw from the Lebanon experience, the hostage ordeal eventually led to the formulation of an imperfect but sustainable American policy for dealing with the sensitive issue of hostage-taking, in which the instinct for toughness often collides with the impulse for compassion.

After the Reagan Administration secretly swapped arms for hostages, Washington shifted from a strategy of compromise or outright concession to a policy that combined law-and-order measures with low-key diplomacy.

It enacted new counterterrorism laws allowing the United States to try to pursue foreign terrorists overseas, for example, and worked to isolate states believed to sponsor terrorism--such as Iran, Syria and Libya--both politically and economically. “What we are doing is narrowing the options for terrorist groups, making it tougher for them to operate and showing them they will eventually pay a price for their acts,” a counterterrorism official said.

Added Robert Oakley, a former State Department official who dealt with terrorism problems, “The Administration has followed a course designed to be firm, but quiet, to keep a low profile, to use legal means and to stress international cooperation.”

The result was what has amounted to an undeclared low-intensity war pitting Iran’s zealots and its Lebanese allies against the United States. And it ended, less because of ideological changes than because of economic exigencies, Middle East specialists agreed.

Tehran’s leadership, after the death of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, recognized that to keep its revolution alive, the economically strapped country had first to survive, which meant integrating Iran back into the world community.

Similarly, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Syrian President Hafez Assad recognized that rapprochement with the West was an economic necessity, which was reflected in Damascus’ decision to participate in Operation Desert Storm.

Some analysts see the present outcome as something close to outright defeat for the Lebanon terrorists.

“When this whole thing started, the Shiite groups wanted publicity for their cause and to force the West out of the Middle East. Instead, they gained only infamy, and the West is now the singular influence in the region,” the official close to the negotiations said. “They lost.”

Not all U.S. officials or specialists in counterterrorism are prepared to go that far. While quietly celebrating the long-awaited release of the last of the Americans held hostage in Lebanon, some warned against assuming that hostage-taking or state-sponsored terrorism have ended for good. “We’re headed in the right direction but we still have a long way to go. The war isn’t over,” one Administration official cautioned.

The United States, for example, so far has made no progress in gaining the release of Arvey Drown, an American businessman abducted in the Philippines on Oct. 19, 1990, in northern Cagayan, the official said. Drown is believed to be held by the rebel New People’s Army. And six Americans have been killed in terrorist incidents in Greece, Turkey and El Salvador this year.

“We’ll continue to see episodic cases in which Americans are the target,” this official said.

Nor do all experts agree that the Lebanon hostage-taking ended in unqualified defeat for the Muslim extremists.

“Unfortunately, terrorism has its own momentum and it ticks to its own clock,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism specialist at the RAND Corp. “The release of the last American hostage is something to exult over, but the terrorists also have a victory, as they got what they wanted out of it. Ten years ago, who knew about the (Shiites) in Lebanon? Today, there are very few people in the world who haven’t heard of Islamic Jihad.”

Indeed, most analysts concede that virtually every party to the crisis lost something in the end.

For its part, although the United States backed away from any direct concessions to the hostage-takers after the calamitous 1985-86 arms-for-hostage swap with Iran, Washington tacitly had to approve--even encourage--a “no-deal deal” negotiated by the United Nations to get the last Americans out.

“The bottom line is that terrorism can pay, because there’s usually some deal somewhere along the line,” Hoffman said.

Similarly, Tehran--by supporting and financing the Shiite extremist groups--delayed for more than half a decade the rapprochement with the West that it needed to obtain the financial credits, expertise and technology necessary for rebuilding war-ravaged Iran.

To meet its new five-year plan, Iran’s budget calls for $25 billion in foreign investment, almost none of which has been forthcoming thus far. European countries have been reluctant to move as long as American and European captives were still held by pro-Iranian groups.

“Iran has not changed its spots at all. It’s just changed its tactics in response to a world that is very different than when this all began,” said Geoffrey Kemp, a National Security Council Middle East specialist in the Reagan Administration.

Syria, too, paid a price. Because it remained on the State Department’s list of state-sponsors of terrorism, Damascus was ostracized by the West during a period when it urgently needed Western help to offset cutbacks in aid from Moscow.

“Nobody really won in any significant sense. It’s just over,” said Augustus Richard Norton, a Middle East expert and former U.N. observer in Lebanon.

Yet Norton’s assessment suggested that, for would-be hostage-takers, the overall lesson of the Lebanon experience may be sobering.

“It’s been trying to end since 1989. The way it ended showed that getting rid of hostages is a lot harder than seizing them in the first place and that translating public attention gained by hostage-taking to significant gains is damned hard,” he said.

Still, experts said, any gains for the United States on terrorism in the Middle East are rooted in shifting circumstances, not fundamental ideological changes. They note the continuing links between both Iran and Syria and extremist groups.

There are still 16 extremist groups, including Palestinians, Turks, Armenians and Kurds, in the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, according to Hoffman. Several have offices in Damascus. And a French court recently handed down an indictment of an Iranian government official for the August assassination of former Iranian Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar in Paris.

“State-sponsored terrorism is just another instrument of foreign policy in both countries that will be used when it is in their interest, and won’t be when it isn’t in their interests,” Hoffman said.

With the Anderson release, “One chapter is closed,” he added. “But terrorism is a never-ending saga.”

Remaining Hostages

Still unsettled in the Mideast hostage situation:

HELD BY ISRAEL

Israel holds several hundred Lebanese and Palestinians, although 91 were released recently. Israel wants information on seven servicemen missing in Lebanon; there has been confirmation that three are dead.

Sheik Abdel Karim Obeid, 35, a Shiite Muslim mosque preacher and a member of Hezbollah, or Party of God, has been held since Israeli troops took him from his home on July 28, 1989. Israel has said Obeid masterminded the kidnaping of U.S. Marine Lt. Col. William Higgins in February, 1988, and organized terrorist attacks on Israel’s self-designated “security zone” in south Lebanon.

HELD BY ARAB GROUPS

TWO GERMANS. Heinrich Struebig, 50, and Thomas Kemptner, 30, who worked for relief groups in Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon, were kidnaped May 16, 1989. No group has claimed responsibility. They have apparently since been handed over to Shiites seeking the release of two Arabs imprisoned for terrorism, brothers Mohammed Ali Hamadi and Abbas Hamadi.

ONE ITALIAN. Alberto Molinari, 72, a businessman who lived in Beirut, was kidnaped Sept. 11, 1985, and Shiite Muslim sources in Beirut have said he is believed dead.

ISRAELIS. Ron Arad, 33, navigator of an Israeli plane that crashed over southern Lebanon on Oct. 16, 1986. He is the only one of four Israelis missing in Lebanon still believed alive.