Scrambling to Freedom

For more than eleven months, he was blindfolded when in the presence of his captors. They had taken his glasses, so the view from his window was mostly a blur. He left his room on the top floor of a two-story apartment house only to visit a bathroom next door, always under the eyes of armed guards. At night he was chained either to a radiator or a wall. He knew only that he was somewhere in the Middle East and wondered if he would leave the building alive.

Finally, last week, Jeremy Levin, 52, Beirut bureau chief for the Atlanta- based Cable News Network, saw his chance. There was slack in the chain that bound him, just enough to wiggle free. “I got the chain off,” he said. “It’s the usual cliche. I tied three blankets together, climbed out the window onto the balcony and went down the blankets.”

Once on the ground, Levin ran from the villa, which was high on a mountain in Lebanon. As he scrambled downhill in the dark, wearing only pajamas, a sweater and socks, he could hear what “must have been a hundred dogs barking all the way down the mountain. My heart was in my mouth.” Levin hiked for two hours before reaching a main highway. There he heard “a dog and human voices. I thought my kidnapers were at my heels, so I hid under a truck. But when I saw it was Syrian soldiers, I gave myself up.”

The Syrians led him to an army encampment near Baalbek in the Bekaa Valley of eastern Lebanon. Then he was taken to a Syrian intelligence office, where he described his capture by a lone gunman on the streets of Beirut last March 7. Next Levin was driven to the Syrian Foreign Ministry in Damascus, where he was turned over to William Eagleton, the U.S. ambassador in Damascus. Said Levin, as tears rolled down his cheeks: “The Orwellian year of 1984 was not a very good one for me, but 1985 is starting out a hell of a lot better.”

Islamic Jihad, the radical Shi’ite Muslim group that has claimed responsibility for a number of terrorist acts, including the October 1983 bombing that resulted in the deaths of 241 U.S. servicemen in Beirut, had said repeatedly that it was holding Levin. Last week it issued a statement contending that it had decided to release him because “we have established that the American correspondent was not involved in any espionage or subversion against Islamic forces.” The militants denied that Levin had escaped. Syria went along with the contention that Levin had been released. Ambassador to the U.S. Rafiq Jouejati said in American TV interviews that the Syrian government had persuaded Levin’s captors to free him. The area in Lebanon where Levin had been held is occupied by Syrian forces, although the Baalbek region is also patrolled by a 400-man contingent of Iranian Revolutionary Guards, who provide help to various local Shi’ite groups.

The U.S. State Department suggested in background briefings that Levin’s “escape” may have been a disguised release. The department’s aim was to encourage Syria to help find and free four other Americans who are believed to be held by the same Shi’ite group, possibly in the very building where Levin was detained. Levin reported that other prisoners were in the building, but he could not hear their voices well enough to know whether they were the four Americans: William Buckley, 56, a U.S. diplomat who has been missing since March 16; the Rev. Benjamin Weir, 60, a Presbyterian minister who disappeared May 8; Peter Kilburn, 60, a librarian at the American University of Beirut who was last seen Dec. 3; and Father Lawrence Jenco, 51, head of the Catholic Relief Service office in Beirut, who was abducted Jan. 8. A caller to a Beirut news agency, claiming to represent Islamic Jihad, said one of the four “has been sentenced to death.”

Levin, in surprisingly good physical condition, was flown to Frankfurt at week’s end. There he was reunited with his wife and family, who had made the trip from Washington aboard a special military jet.