With Release of Terry Anderson, U.S. Hostage Ordeal Ended in Lebanon

By Donald Neff

It was four years ago, on Dec. 4, 1991, that the agony of America's hostages held in Lebanon finally came to an end. The moment arrived with the release of newsman Terry Anderson, 44, after 2,454 days in captivity—the longest confinement suffered by any of the hostages.¹

At least four Americans had been kidnapped in the mid-1970s, early in Lebanon's civil war. All eventually had been released unharmed, and there was relatively little media attention given to these seemingly random events.

That was not the case with the total of 17 Americans kidnapped after early 1984, when five were taken. Four more were captured in 1985, three in 1986, four in 1987 and one in 1988. After 1988, the kidnappings ended in large part because Americans essentially had been chased out of Lebanon.

Three of the American hostages were killed or died in captivity: CIA Station Chief William Buckley, Marine Lt. Col. William R. Higgins and librarian Peter Kilburn. The remains of Buckley and Higgins were left on Beirut streets in the three weeks after Anderson's release and brought back to the United States for burial.² Kilburn's body had been similarly found in 1986. ³

Three escaped: Charles Glass, Jeremy Levin and Frank Regier. Three were ransomed in the Reagan administration's Iran arms-for-hostages scandal: David Jacobsen, Lawrence Jenco and Benjamin Weir. Two were released in 1990: Robert Polhill and Frank Reed. And six were released in the final four months of 1991: Joseph Cicippio, Thomas Sutherland, Alann Steen, Edward Tracy, Jesse Turner and Anderson.

The 1980s kidnappings were part of a highly successful campaign by Shi'i Muslims belonging to Hezbollah (Party of God) and supported by Iran to rid Lebanon of all Americans. It began in retaliation for Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon with the massive use of U.S.-made weapons and accelerated after Washington's decision to use U.S. warplanes and ships of the U.S. Sixth Fleet against Muslim and Druze targets in late 1983.

Early Hezbollah attacks included the bombing in 1983 of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, with the loss of 63 lives including some of the CIA's top Mideast experts, and the bombing of the Marine barracks at Beirut Airport, with the initial loss of 241 lives.

On Jan. 18, 1984, President Malcolm Kerr of the American University of Beirut, a distinguished scholar of the Arab world, was gunned down outside his AUB office.⁴

At that point Hezbollah openly proclaimed its goal was to "drive all Americans from Lebanon." ⁵

This seemed an unlikely prospect at the time, since Americans had a long and well- established position in Lebanon's educational, business and international refugee relief communities. The American University of Beirut had been founded in 1866 by U.S. missionaries and Americans had been intimately involved with it ever since. Yet by the end of 1988, Hezbollah had won and the U.S. presence in Lebanon essentially was gone.

In reality, Hezbollah was successful against the United States.

The first major retreat was by the 1,400 U.S. Marines then stationed in Lebanon as a result of Israel's invasion nearly two years earlier.⁶ President Reagan on Feb. 5, 1984 made one of his stand-tall speeches, saying that "the situation in Lebanon is difficult, frustrating and dangerous. But this is no reason to turn our backs on friends and to cut and run." ⁷

However, the next day Prof. Frank Regier, a U.S. citizen teaching at AUB, was kidnapped. The day after that, Reagan suddenly reversed course and said that all U.S. Marines would shortly be "redeployed," a euphemism for total withdrawal.⁸All the Marines except those guarding the U.S. embassy were gone by Feb. 26, never to return.

The Marine retreat began a series of strategic withdrawals of the official American presence in Lebanon. On Sept. 20, 1984, 24 persons, including two Americans and seven other employees of the U.S. embassy, were killed when a Hezbollah suicide bomber drove a car laden with explosives into the East Beirut annex of the U.S. Embassy.⁹

The next month, on Oct. 21, Washington announced it was reducing the official roster of American staff at the U.S. embassy in Beirut from 45 to 30, with further cuts to come.¹⁰

The next major step came on July 1, 1985, when the United States imposed a ban on travel by Americans to Lebanon in retaliation for the skyjacking of a TWA flight on June 14. The State Department declared: "Beirut International Airport has become a source of danger to all air passengers. The United States has been singled out for air piracy and can no longer permit such actions to go unpunished. As of today, the U.S. will initiate efforts with all countries concerned to stop flights to and from the said airport; the U.S. will attempt to influence Lebanon's neighbors to stop providing air information on flights passing through Lebanon's airspace; the U.S. will attempt to cut off all aviation fuel from reaching Beirut."¹¹

One Threat Realized

The only one of those threats that was fully realized was to keep Americans from traveling to Lebanon.

The final withdrawal came on Dec.2, 1988, when Washington announced that all U.S. military representatives with the United Nations observer team in Lebanon had been withdrawn over the previous several days because of danger to their safety.¹²

The 16 Americans had been assigned to the U.N. Observer Group in Lebanon, the same group to which Lieutenant Colonel Higgins had belonged when he was kidnapped by Hezbollah the previous February and later hanged. The officers routinely patrolled southern Lebanon where troops of the U.N.'s Interim Force in Lebanon, UNIFIL, sought to keep the peace between Israeli, Lebanese and Palestinian fighters.

UNIFIL had been created in 1978 after Israel's earlier invasion of southern Lebanon that year and its establishment of a "security zone" on Lebanese territory.¹³

It was as a result of this expansion by Israel into Lebanese territory (the "North Bank," as critics of Israel's expansionist policies called it) and then its 1982 invasion that caused the establishment of Hezbollah that same year with the help of Iran to rid Lebanon of Israel's occupation.¹⁴

On Feb. 16, 1985, Hezbollah issued a statement of its ideology called an "Open Letter to the Downtrodden in Lebanon and the World." It said the "first root of vice is America...Israel is the American spearhead in the Islamic world and must be wiped out. All plans, including even tacit recognition of the Zionist entity, are rejected." It identified as other enemies the anti-Muslim Maronite Christian Phalange, and France.¹⁵

In reality, Hezbollah failed in its larger purpose of ending the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. However, it was successful against the United States. The withdrawal of the U.S. military officers in 1988 removed almost all vestiges of the American presence. About the only American officials then left in Lebanon were the few members of a skeletal and secluded embassy staff, while the U.S. ambassador was forced to spend most of his time in Cyprus because of fears for his safety. Even in late 1995 Americans still are prohibited by the State Department from traveling to Lebanon and the official U.S. presence there is minimal and low-key. The Israeli occupation, however, continues.

This humiliating U.S. defeat in Lebanon was one of the hidden costs of Israel's 1982 invasion. Although the media have never bothered counting up these damages, they have been high for America: the assassination of AUB president Malcolm Kerr, the kidnappings of 17 Americans and deaths of three of them, the bombings of the U.S. Embassy and its annex and of the Marine barracks, with a total loss of more than 300 lives, and the final chasing out of Lebanon of Americans after a presence of more than a century.

As a final irony, Americans then essentially paid for Israel's invasion expenses. This came about thanks to special legislation by Congress that turned Israel's aid into non-repayable grants and hefty increases in total aid to Israel, including the notorious 1984 Cranston Amendment that stipulated economic aid to Israel each year must at least equal Israel's annual repayments (principal and interest) of its debt to the United States. In other words, after the invasion Israel was assured that it would always receive more than enough U.S. aid to cover its debt payments to America. Or put another way, henceforth Congress agreed to use U.S. taxpayer money to pay Israel's debt.

RECOMMENDED READING:

Chomsky, Noam, The Fateful Triangle, Boston, South End Press, 1983.

Cooley John K., Payback: America's Long War in the Middle East, New York, Brassey's (U.S.), Inc, 1991.

*Fisk, Robert, Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon, New York, Atheneum, 1990.

*Friedman, Thomas L., From Beirut to Jerusalem, New York, Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1989.

*Randal, Jonathan, Going All the Way , New York, The Viking Press, 1983.

Sherif, Regina S., United Nations Resolutions on Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: 1975-1981, Washington, DC, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1988.

Woodward, Bob, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1987.

NOTES:

¹William Claiborne, Washington Post, 12/5/91.

²Dana Priest and Nora Boustany, Washington Post , 12/28/91.

³White House announcement, 4/18/86.

⁴New York Times, 1/19/84.

⁵New York Times, 4/16/84; Cooley, Payback, p. 75. For a chronology of attacks against Americans in this period, see the Atlanta Journal, 1/31/85.

⁶See Donald Neff, "Middle East History: It Happened in March," Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 1995.

⁷ New York Times, 4/16/84. Also see Cooley, Payback, p. 111; Fisk, Pity the Nation, p. 565.

⁸Fisk, Pity the Nation, p. 533.

⁹Cooley, Payback, p. 102; Fisk, Pity the Nation, p. 533; Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem, p. 220. The text of Reagan's report to Congress on the Marine mission is in the New York Times, 2/16/84.

¹⁰Washington Post , 9/21/84. For good background, see Cooley, Payback, pp. 104-8.

¹¹New York Times, 10/22/84.

¹²Fida Nasrallah, "The US Travel Ban on Lebanon: in No One's Interest," Middle East International, 4/28/95.

¹³Associated Press, Washington Post, 12/2/88.

¹⁴UNIFIL was created by Security Council Resolution 425 of March 19, 1978. The text is in Sherif, United Nations Resolutions on Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, p. 184.

¹⁵Cooley, Payback, pp. 81-83, p. 228.

¹⁶Godfrey Jansen, "Hezbollah, Rabin's Main Target," Middle East International, 8/6/93.

¹⁷David R. Francis, Christian Science Monitor, 10/23/84. Also see Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle, p. 10; "U.S. Assistance to the State of Israel, Report by the Comptroller General of the United States," GAO/ID-83-51, June 24, 1983, U.S. Accounting Office.

*Available from the AET Book Club.

Donald Neff is author of the recently published Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy Towards Palestine and Israel Since 1945 (see review on page 68). It, along with his Warriors trilogy on U.S.-Mideast relations, is available through the AET Book Club.