Leftist Philippine Rebels Free U.S. Hostage : Ordeal: Colorado gold hunter, held more than 20 months, is released to priests deep in the jungle.

Colorado gold hunter Arvey Duane Drown, the last known U.S. political hostage abroad, was unexpectedly released to three local priests deep in a northern Philippine jungle after more than 20 months as a captive of Communist insurgents.

Drown, 64, was turned over to U.S. Embassy officials Tuesday at the Catholic archbishop’s residence in Tuguegarao, a provincial capital 250 miles north of Manila, and immediately flown with his wife by an embassy plane to the U.S. Navy hospital at the Subic Bay Naval Base for debriefing and medical tests, said embassy spokesman Morton Smith.

A source close to the archbishop said Drown appeared exhausted from the 3 1/2-day hike out of the dense jungle and rugged, war-torn mountains where he was held for months in a bamboo and wooden cage. “He’s sort of in a state of semi-shock,” said the source. “He was in such an obviously different environment for so long.”

Drown told his rescuers that he was “knocked about” but not tortured by his captors and had lost weight on a jungle diet of rice and fish. “We’re talking lean cuisine,” said the source. “This guy was in the Hanoi Hilton. . . . They don’t eat Eskimo Pies.”

Lt. Cmdr. Al Twyman, a Subic Bay spokesman, said late Tuesday that Drown was being treated for athlete’s foot and a toothache and had not complained of any major problems. He said Drown, who grew a shaggy white beard during his captivity, had refused to use an ambulance at the airport, riding a Navy van to the hospital instead.

“He looks in pretty good condition,” Twyman said. “He smiles sometimes. He’s glad to be back.”

Drown was abducted at gunpoint Oct. 19, 1990, at a roadside checkpoint run by Communist guerrillas outside Bagnag village at the far tip of northern Luzon. The New People’s Army rebels initially accused Drown, a Korean War veteran, of helping the Philippine military’s anti-insurgency campaign but cleared him of the charges during a jungle “trial” last October.

Two attempts to win Drown’s release failed. The first collapsed last Christmas when fighting erupted during a cease-fire. A second attempt foundered in April over demands that the military withdraw from most of the eastern Cordilleras, a rebel stronghold during the rebels’ 23-year struggle to establish a Marxist state.

This time, the three Tuguegarao priests carried a “mercy mission” of food and medicine. It took Drown and his captors two days’ walk through the combat zone to reach the priests, and then another day and a half hiking to reach a town where they could board a truck to Tuguegarao.

“We just went there, and they gave us Arvey without any conditions,” Father Rick Baccay told the British news agency Reuters. “From what I saw, he looked good and healthy.”

There was no indication that Drown’s release was linked to Tuesday’s inauguration in Manila of President Fidel V. Ramos, who succeeded Corazon Aquino.

Drown’s wife, Ruth, 54, who has lived at Archbishop Diosdado Talamayan’s house in Tuguegarao since December awaiting her husband’s release, was also undergoing medical tests at Subic Bay, Twyman said. The Drowns are from Berthoud, Colo.

Drown told two Philippine reporters who hiked into the jungle last Christmas that he was moved at least nine times and that he was locked in the cage after he repeatedly ran away.

U.S. Embassy officials say they still are not sure what Drown, a convicted con man who once served three years in prison for mail fraud, was doing when he was kidnaped. His wife told The Times in March that her husband was in the Philippines looking to invest in gold mines and other ventures.

Officials in Tuguegarao said they believe that he was seeking buried treasure supposedly left by Japanese troops in World War II.