Too Horrible to Tell : ...

The world changed while Terry Anderson, Terry Waite and Brian Keenan languished in fear and filth and boredom in the dungeons of Lebanon. Every day, as the last half of the last decade passed, their horizons began and ended with the walls of makeshift cells. Their only dawn was the light from low-wattage bulbs. But they counted the days nonetheless: 1,597 for Keenan; 1,763 for Waite, 2,454 for Anderson. And each of those days they would find escape in memory or imagination, only to have some small but terrible fact destroy their composure. “We exhaust the strategies of denial,” writes Keenan in “An Evil Cradling.” “Reality slowly but surely overcomes our attempts to hold it at bay.”

Keenan, a poet originally from Belfast, captures with terrible precision the quotidian details of horror. Allowed into a larger room alone one morning to take some exercise, he sees brown bloodstains on a pillow and the floor, and a pair of pliers obviously used to torture someone who had been there before him. “I thought: There’s no point in dwelling on this, but you think what you can do with a pair of pliers.”

In Anderson’s account, “Den of Lions,” there are scenes of personal horror passed over so quickly by the veteran Associated Press correspondent that one imagines they were too painful to recall. Repeatedly he is transported from Beirut to the Bekaa Valley or back again, trussed up like a mummy in packing tape, barely able to breathe and stowed in a secret compartment in the floor of a van. The water on the road drenches him. The exhaust fumes suffocate and nauseate him and as the bile rises in his gorge so does the terror that he will choke to death on his own vomit. “It was not a pleasant trip,” is all he can say of one such journey.

Waite, the hostage negotiator taken hostage himself, is tortured physically. But it is his isolation and what it reveals about him that have the most profound effect on his psyche. “Four years--four years alone. I can hardly believe it. I have not had a proper conversation with anyone for over 1,400 days,” he writes in “Taken on Trust.” He appears as a man who always sought, through his job, his travel, his fame, a kind of escape from his overweaning self. And here he is with no one else. “I look back over the years of my captivity. I have no great thoughts, no illuminating inspirations. Better men than myself would have been able to dig deeper into their inner experience. All I seem to have done is keep afloat and withstand the storms.”

Faced with the enormity of the crime committed against them and the silent, sullen people who held them captive, all three men turn to describing in great and revealing detail the vermin--the literal vermin--that surrounded them.

“We were prisoners, unwanted, unworthy and according to our jailors’ convictions, unclean. They would not enter a place which we had used to wash or relieve ourselves,” Keenan writes, describing his once-a-day visits to the toilet. “The place was alive with cockroaches, large and shiny. Their hard body armour and their claw-like legs made loud scratching noises as they moved. They scurried rather than crawled. Their speed and the hardness of their shells made it impossible to crush or kill them. The toilet was their nesting place. I remember once trying to drown them in the water of the toilet hole and to my horror watching them climb unscathed from this pit of excrement and dart glistening around my feet again.” Keenan is conscious of his metaphor and soon tells us, “how much like one of those hateful cockroaches I had become. Crawling every day, fearful and half-blind, to the toilet hole and back to my corner.”

Terry Waite’s vision is twisted through the narrow lens of his ego. “I” and “me” and “my” recur in his text like a mantra. So a cockroach “moves towards my mattress. Its antennae wave back and forth as through it senses my presence. I hate cockroaches. They bite my feet when I sleep and threaten me with disease. I fasten all my anger and frustration on this solitary insect and kill it with an enormous blow from my plastic slipper.”

Terry Anderson grapples with the idea of love--for a woman, for his two young daughters, for his God, from his God. But the hard-drinking, hard-living reporter who was captured in 1985 is a brittle Samaritan, now nursing his fellow inmates, now cursing them, now turning on himself. At one point he finds rodents easier to relate to than men:

“I’ve been feeding a tiny mouse that appears in the dead of night occasionally. I call her Mehitabel. She will sit for a while under Frank’s bed, absolutely still, before dashing at an incredible speed to the foot of mine, then almost teleporting herself to the ledge beside the cots and finally close enough to snatch the little piece of bread I place next to my head on the pillow, usually while I’m dozing. When the hamsters (his jailers) sealed up the cracks in the wall with more concrete blocks and cement, she disappeared. Tom and Frank tried to convince me she was sealed up in the wall, but I refused to believe it. She must have gotten away.”

In total, at least 88 foreigners were forced into this world of loathsome creatures after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 turned that country’s civil war into a terrorist free-for-all. Some of the hostages were murdered. At least one, French researcher Michel Seurat, died a long, terribly painful and terribly lonely death from cancer in this captivity. Uncounted thousands of Lebanese were victims as well. The enforced claustrophobic intimacy of Keenan, Waite and Anderson with their captors, their parasites and each other was merely longer than most.

Not surprisingly, none of the hostages reveals much sympathy for the men holding them. Chains and steel plates, strips of cloth around the eyes, language and culture and incandescent hatred blinded them to the lives and backgrounds of their jailers even after years of proximity. So the captors are reduced to ironic nicknames like “Trust Me” Ali or “the Shuffling Acolyte” or “hamsters.” French hostage Jean-Paul Kauffman, released in 1988, described his jailers afterward as “petits epiciers,” an epithet that connotes not only “small-time grocers,” but mean-minded philistines and petty mercenaries. Probably that is closest to the truth. It is precisely their lack of imagination, the dull and determined stubbornness of stupid men thrust into a situation they constantly fear will spin out of their control, that seems to have characterized the hostage-takers.

Their first aims were to win freedom for fellow terrorists--often relatives--in the jails of Europe or the Middle East. They wanted to liberate Shiites imprisoned by Israel in South Lebanon, many of whom were as innocent as the Western captives. Imad Mugniyeh and the Hamadi Brothers, the main hostage takers, were “security men” for Hezbollah, the Iranian-funded Party of God. They were paid thugs, not ideologues. Their main loyalty was to their clan, not to a revolution. But their desperate acts launched them from the dark alleys of Beirut onto the world scene. And like all kidnapers, they found it easier in the end to snatch their victims than to ransom them. During the last two or three years of the Lebanese hostages’ story, one has a sense that the hostage-takers themselves were cornered almost as much as their captors.

By then too many powerful parties had a piece of the action. The kidnapers could never have sustained themselves without at least tacit acquiescence from Syria’s intelligence services, and senior Iranian officials were involved in the hostage-taking from the beginning. But the interests of governments, even those branded state sponsors of terrorism, are rarely identical with those of terrorists themselves. Eventually there were so many major players involved--Iran and Syria, Iraq and Israel, the United States, France, Germany, all with differing goals and strategies--that the hostage-takers’ own demands were almost beside the point, and they risked becoming more expendable than their captives.

The conflicted motivations and contradictory demands were not only on the side of the kidnapers. One of the first American victims was CIA Station Chief William Buckley. He was close to CIA director William Casey, and to free him from his torturers the Reagan Administration broke all its own rules about dealing with terrorists. It was for Buckley, not the others, that heaven and earth were moved, and missiles given to Iran. When Reagan’s men realized Buckley must be dead, however, they continued trading arms for hostages with the strong encouragement of Israel, which had its own motives for supplying covert arms to Teheran. Meanwhile, some of Reagan’s renegades in the National Security Council figured they could fund the Nicaraguan contras with the proceeds.

By 1987, after the Irangate scandal broke and Waite was taken, the overlapping interests in the hostages had become so complex that there was no way to free everyone at once. The French cut their own deal in 1988. Germany negotiated on a different track. But the situation of the British and Americans looked hopeless. In the end, in 1992, it was not so much the diplomatic skills of U.N. negotiator Giandomenico Picco that liberated them; it was only time and luck. The world changed so much in five years: Ayatollah Khomeini died, Communism crumbled and Syria lost its Soviet backers, Kuwait was invaded by Iraq, Iraq was crushed by the United States, Israel’s security worries moved from its neighbors to the uprising in its Occupied Territories. There were so many new calculations to be made about so many new relationships on all fronts by all the players involved that the hostages finally became a relatively minor concern, even a nuisance, to those who controlled their fate. “This tactic is not useful. We will not do it again,” one of the jailers told Anderson on his 2,454th, and last, day of incarceration.

Most of the hostages were never equipped to write about this broader context for their story, and of these three, two chose not to.

Keenan’s upbringing on rough Belfast streets gave him strong instincts about history and political strife. But his talent as a writer and observer lets him create a taut drama of men under duress. What went on outside his little fearsome world was, for the purposes of his book, relatively unimportant.

Waite, as he presents himself, is an unimaginative man who lives his life by checklists. He is well-meaning, certainly, and one wants to believe in him as a globe-trotting guardian angel on call wherever people are in need. But he tells his story like a run-of-the-mill boor. He went to so many places working for the Archbishop of Canterbury (“I am reminded of a trip to Burma. . . .”), freed so many people in Iran or Libya before the Lebanese trap, read so many books in captivity--each of which he insists on reviewing for us, usually with more pretense than perception. At the critical moment, when his negotiations in Beirut were revealed as a front for the arms-for-hostage trading of Irangate, he seems to have been quite oblivious. In fact, he insists on his ignorance, notwithstanding the way he followed Oliver North’s lead around the Middle East.

After freedom in 1992, it was only the reporter, Terry Anderson, who tried to find out much more about why he was taken and who was behind it. He tells us that Hezbollah, as early as 1982, had set up a special operations unit known as “Ali’s Center” to gather information on Westerners. “With nearly 400 people working out of a computer-equipped building in West Beirut, the center began compiling lists of names.” But it kept getting its facts twisted, and the least association with suspect people could lead to fatal accusations of guilt. Thus, Anderson writes, “Ali’s Center would list me as the ‘second man’ in the CIA in Beirut.” The center targeted the president of American University of Beirut for assassination because he, too, was deemed a spy. According to Anderson, it used a woman double agent to seduce Buckley and set him up for kidnaping.

This is interesting material, and might have been useful to understand what really happened in Lebanon. But all of it is relegated like an afterthought to the footnotes of Anderson’s book. There seems to have been an editorial presumption that readers would get lost in the cacophony of Arab names, the parade of mullahs. Perhaps it was assumed Americans just couldn’t be bothered. Or that they wouldn’t want to know.

To lay out the story behind the story of the hostages is to explore all the ambiguities inherent in the conflicting agendas of the United States, its friends and its enemies. One would have to look at the world as a maze of nuances where there are no certainties. And that’s not the world as Americans have grown used to seeing it. Our instinct is to simplify the universe, especially the Islamic universe, to the level of apocalyptic confrontations. We vilify Khomeini or Saddam Hussein or Farah Aidid, as if that was all that one needed to know to deal with Iran or Iraq or Somalia. Or we withdraw and try to forget about these people, these places, altogether.

But the taking of hostages forces us to deal with the world as it is. The faces of the victims become familiar, their pain goes on so long, and their liberation always carries with it understandings. Americans are still puzzled and horrified by the 444-day ordeal of the Teheran hostages 13 years ago. The captives in Lebanon were like a chronic disease plaguing the American conscience for eight years, and the recent television images of U.S. Army Pilot Michael Durant, captured in Somalia, conjured up all the horrid memories again, causing something like panic in Washington.

The specter of an American held hostage haunts the thinking of American policy makers and the American people every bit as much as the ghosts of Vietnam. It forces all of us to acknowledge the power we do not have. Day by day it exhausts our strategies of denial.