Lessons from one hostage survivor

 Bill Knight column for 10-25, 26 or 27. 2021

The day a gang who’d kidnapped 17 members of a U.S. missionary group demanded $17 million for the release of the hostages, I visited a park where the Newspaper Guild union in 1989 planted a commemorative tree for another hostage. After admiring its gold/green leaves, dropping like crinkly feathers, I came home to locate a metal bracelet reading “Terry Anderson. Hebrews 13:30” and a signed copy of “Den of Lions,” Anderson’s memoir I got after meeting the journalist/author at a conference decades ago.

Anderson, the one-time, long-time hostage, is 74 this week; the bracelet’s scripture is timeless: “Remember prisoners as if you were in prison with them, and people who are mistreated as if you were in their place.”

During Anderson’s 2,455 days of imprisonment, many people tried to free him, especially his sister Peggy Say, but also the Reagan and Bush administrations, and journalists, hundreds petitioning Iran’s leaders, thought to have influence with his captors.

In ’89, the Journalists Committee to Free Terry Anderson was frustrated at so little action and dwindling attention to Anderson, an increasingly forgotten man.

“As long as the press is silent and the government does not feel the heat, they are not likely to do anything,” said National Press Club president Lee Roderick, committee coordinator. “Get angry.”

Anderson was the Associated Press Middle East bureau chief when he was abducted by Hezbollah, a Shiite sect seeking to expel Westerners, about 6 a.m. on March 16, 1985, during the Lebanese Civil War. One of several hostages kept by the group, he was held for six years and nine months. becoming a lens through which Americans saw that conflict.

Born in Ohio and raised in New York, Anderson was a U.S. Marine in Vietnam. After his 1970 discharge, he attended Iowa State University, graduating in 1974 with a B.A. in journalism and political science. After working in TV/radio news in Des Moines, he joined the Ypsilanti (Mich.) Post, then, for the AP, state editor, foreign-desk editor, broadcast editor, Tokyo correspondent, South Africa correspondent, Middle East news editor, and chief Middle East correspondent.

In Beirut since 1983. he was returning from his regular Saturday-morning tennis game when he was seized on the street, put in a car trunk, and taken to an unknown location – the first of more than 15 sites where he was caged. During his captivity, he was initially isolated, then imprisoned with others. Beaten, tortured and often blindfolded, he eventually was given materials to let him write.

Anderson was repeatedly told his release was imminent, but then just moved. His frustration grew so great that he once banged his head against a wall until it bled. Anderson never stopped living: He created games from whatever was at hand, learned French from hostage Thomas Sutherland (from American University in Beirut), and renewed his faith with help from hostage Lawrence Jenco (a Catholic priest)

In the 1980s – an era Time magazine called “the decade of hostages” – Anderson was one of 92 foreigners (including 17 Americans) held by groups like Hezbollah.

Perhaps as a result of stories about Anderson’s plight, Mideast kidnappings seemed to decline.

The last one released, Anderson was brought to Syrian officers on December 4, 1991, when he was driven to Damascus to face reporters, saying, “I’ll try to answer a few questions, although you’ll understand I have a date with a couple of beautiful ladies and I’m already late.” He was reunited with fiancé Madeleine Bassil and their daughter Sulome, born three months after his abduction.

Anderson wrote the best-selling “Den of Lions,” taught at Columbia, Kentucky, Ohio and Syracuse universities, and won a lawsuit against Hezbollah sponsor Iran, winning millions of dollars from frozen Iranian assets held in the United States. With those proceeds, he invested in the Blue Gator nightclub in Ohio, a restaurant in the Caribbean, and a horse ranch, but he filed for bankruptcy in 2009. Anderson also launched charities that continue, including the Father Lawrence Jenco Foundation and the Vietnam Children’s Fund with Vietnamese-American actress Kiều Chinh.

In 2004, Anderson ran as a Democrat for Ohio’s 20^th Senate District, losing to an appointed incumbent, Republican Joy Padgett, whose campaign accused Anderson of being “soft on terrorism.”

Through it all, Anderson has been somewhat of a free spirit, appropriately enough, living in Florida, Ohio and Virginia, and he seems to have shed the anger others sought to free him, ensuring his life is about more than unjust imprisonment. Family is important: Sulome is a “damn good journalist,” he’s said, and a second daughter, from his first marriage, is a lawyer.

His response to his ordeal is inspiring.

“I don't hate anybody,” Anderson’s said, often smiling. “I'm a Christian and a Catholic, and it’s really required of me that I forgive, no matter how hard that may be.”