Anderson Sues for U.S. Files on Hostage Ordeal

Former hostage Terry Anderson filed suit against 13 government agencies Thursday, claiming all had withheld records covering the years he was held captive in the Middle East. Some bureaucrats, he says, won’t release the papers without permission from his terrorist kidnapers.

Anderson says the documents are his by right under the Freedom of Information Act.

“The files probably contain some secrets I shouldn’t know and I don’t want those,” Anderson told a news conference in his lawyers’ office. “But I can’t believe that everything in those files is vital to national security, not two years after the whole episode has been over.”

Anderson was Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press when he was kidnaped in Beirut in 1985. He was released in 1991 and has since written a book that he says would have been far different had he had access to the official files.

The 13 agencies include the CIA, which, the lawsuit said, “would ‘neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence’ of any responsive records.” The State Department contended files on some terrorists would cause “a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy,” the suit said, noting that U.S. privacy law applies only to U.S. citizens.

Phone calls seeking comment were not immediately returned.

Withholding the documents, the suit said, deprives Anderson of the ability to “fully understand his experience, to place it in the proper context, and to broadly disseminate that information to the general public.”

Anderson said his efforts have met with stubborn resistance by “a culture of secrecy” in the government. He said he received only copies of publicly available press releases, news stories and pages rendered unreadable by huge blocks of blacked-out material.

Anderson contended that the Freedom of Information Act has been violated repeatedly in spirit and letter.

“This is not peculiar to me,” Anderson said. “I don’t think they have anything against me. This is coming to everybody who attempts to gain information through the FOIA.”