‘Hostage’ Recalls Tangled Web of Lebanon Crisis

Perhaps it is easier now, with conflicts in Somalia, Bosnia, and now Kosovo in memory, to make peace with the confounding international quagmire that was Lebanon in the 1980s. The world has grown sadly accustomed to the need to turn a hose on obscure conflicts in countries few people can find on a map when they threaten to burn across their borders.

But few rescue missions left as enduring a wound as Lebanon, where a well-meaning peacekeeping deployment and America’s tacit backing of Israel’s 1982 invasion of the tiny Middle Eastern country cost the U.S. the lives of 241 servicemen killed as the result of a 1983 car bombing, the Iran-Contra political scandal that consumed the latter Reagan years. Probably more confounding than any foreign crisis of the last three decades was the disappearance of an ever-growing number of Western hostages into the hands of shadowy Muslim kidnappers in the slums of Beirut.

In a three-part PBS documentary scheduled to begin tonight, “Hostage,” producers Tim Pritchard and Mick Gold attempt a final retelling of one of the most excruciating chapters in modern American diplomacy, the crisis that for nearly a decade left the world’s premier superpower helpless against an unknown band of militants more determined than the West was strong.

Here, in his first lengthy television interview, United Nations diplomat Giandomenico Picco tells of his tense, furtive meetings with a man he believed to be the lead hostage-holder and master terrorist, Imad Mughniyah, shrouded in a black ski mask in a white-sheeted room.

“My own objective was to free those people no matter what. And when I said no matter what, I meant exactly what I said,” Picco relates of leaving himself open to being taken hostage himself in order to free the Western captives. “That I would not be taken by somebody who said, ‘We are prepared to sacrifice ourselves for our cause.’ I could look in their eyes and say, ‘So am I.’ ”

The Oregon Public Broadcasting production takes viewers directly into the heart of the hostage shadow land, going back to the same neighborhoods in West Beirut where the hostages were mostly held captive, the dark parking lots where negotiators were snatched away to secret meeting locations, dank and putrid cells like those where hostages like AP correspondent Terry Anderson, Anglican church envoy Terry Waite and Irish poet Brian Keenan lived out years of their lives.

Anderson, Waite and Keenan have all told their stories in books published after their release; leaders of Hezbollah, the Iranian-supported Party of God that was the political arm of the Islamic Jihad kidnapping group, have all given interviews to Western journalists about their moral support for the hostage-taking.

What “Hostage” does, as well as any television documentary to date, is weave the widely disparate parts of the incredible story into a coherent, suspenseful narrative that, taken as a whole, sheds light on the poignant story of lost lives and the diplomatic fiasco that was the attempt of the U.S., Britain and France to regain the hostages. Waite speaks movingly of being buoyed by his own subconscious, seeking refuge in dreams that were inexplicably cheerful. David Jacobson talks of his imaginary drives down Beach Boulevard in his hometown of Huntington Beach, envisioning in memory each gas station and mini-mart along the way.

Vowing never to negotiate with terrorists, the governments of France and the U.S. are seen doing exactly that, with Oliver North relating the tragicomic story of the U.S. arms delivery to Iran, whose real goal, the freeing of former Beirut CIA station chief William Buckley, was thwarted by Buckley’s death in captivity.

In the end, it was a confluence of international events that no one, least of all the kidnappers, could have predicted that left the hostages essentially superfluous to their captors. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait freed the 17 Lebanese Shi’ite prisoners in Kuwait that had been Islamic Jihad’s main bargaining demand; the death of Ayatollah Khomeini left more moderate leaders in Iran open to new overtures from the West; Syria, the main occupation force in Lebanon, lost its backing from the former Soviet Union. President Bush’s national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, is allowed to go unchallenged in his assertion that America’s rescue of Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War produced enough widespread trust of America in the Arab world that there was no longer any need to hold the hostages.

It was quite possibly thinking like that--ignorance of the extent of Arab rage over American support of Israel in the Middle East--that led to the hostage crisis to begin with. Trust of America is one of the commodities in shortest supply in the Arab world these days. And until that changes, there may always be new Lebanons around the corner.

* Part I of “Hostage” airs tonight at 10 on KCET-TV. Part II and Part III air at 10 p.m. Oct. 4 and 11, respectively.

Kim Murphy, formerly a Times foreign correspondent in the Middle East, is now the Times Seattle bureau chief.