American journalist Terry Anderson, the longest-serving Western hostage held in Lebanon and finally freed by Islamic extremists in 1991, died Saturday at his home in Greenwood Lake, New York, in the Hudson Valley. . He was 76 years old.
His daughter, Slome Anderson, said the cause was apparently complications from recent heart surgery.
After an early morning tennis match on March 16, 1985, Mr. Anderson, the Beirut bureau chief for the Associated Press, was dropping off his tennis partner, an Associated Press photographer, at his home when men armed with pistols arrived at his car. They forced the door open and forced him into the Mercedes-Benz. The same car had tried to cut him off the previous day as he was returning to work after lunch at his beachside apartment.
His kidnappers, identified as Shiite Hezbollah militants from Lebanon's Islamic Jihad Organization, beat him, blindfolded him and held him in chains for 2,454 days in about 20 safe houses in Beirut and the Bekaa Valley in southern Lebanon.
The militants, backed by Iran, were retaliating for Israel's use of US-made weapons in earlier attacks against Muslim and Druze targets in Lebanon. They also sought to pressure the Reagan administration to secretly facilitate illegal arms sales to Iran. This embarrassing scheme became known as the Iran-Contra Affair, as the regime secretly planned to use proceeds from arms sales to subsidize its interests. – Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
Mr. Anderson was the last of 18 Western hostages freed by the kidnappers. After his release, he married his fiancée, who was pregnant at the time of his abduction, and met his 6-year-old daughter for the first time.
He said he was not tortured during his captivity, but was beaten and chained. He reportedly spent about a year in solitary confinement on and off.
“There's nothing to hold on to, no way to fix your mind,” he said after the ordeal. “I try to pray every day, sometimes for hours. But there's nothing, just a blank space. I'm not talking to God, but to myself.”
Terry Alan Anderson was born on October 27, 1947 in Lorain, Ohio, where his father, Glenn, was a village police officer. When he was very young, his family moved to Batavia in western New York, where his father worked as a truck driver and his mother, Lily, as a waitress.
After high school, he was accepted and offered a scholarship to the University of Michigan, but decided to join the Marines instead. He served five years as a combat journalist in Japan, Okinawa, and Vietnam, and his last year as a recruiter in Iowa.
After leaving the hospital, he worked at a local television station while earning degrees in journalism and political science from Iowa State University.
He began a two-and-a-half year stint in Lebanon in 1983 after working for the Associated Press in Japan and South Africa.
After his release, he taught and ran unsuccessfully as a Democrat for the Ohio State Senate in 2004. He won a lawsuit against Iran in federal court, ultimately recovering approximately $26 million in damages from Iranian assets that had been frozen in the United States. That money lasted about seven years. He filed for bankruptcy in 2009.
“I had a problem and it took me a long time to start dealing with it. People ask me, 'Did you get through it?' I don't know! Ask your ex-wife — ask your third ex-wife. I don't know; I'm me. “
“I was more damaged than I realized, more than anyone realized,” he testified.
“Recovery will take as long as the time spent in prison,” Anderson said.