Terry Anderson: The World is Fresh and Bright and Beautiful

Q. Did you ever know for sure who your kidnappers were?

A. We had our guesses. They would always deny being connected with the Hizballah ((Party of God)), but I don’t think it’s surprising that kidnappers should lie. We believed Hizballah was the umbrella organization, although it’s not a unitary group but an assemblage of factions or family-connected groups. All had different names.

It was very strange. There were Brian Keenan, John McCarthy, Frank Reed, Tom Sutherland and I, all in the Bekaa Valley in one underground secret prison, all of us being held under different names. We would laugh about it, wondering which hat they were wearing when they came in to talk to us. Was he going to wear the Islamic Jihad hat and talk to Tom ((Sutherland)) and me? Or was he going to wear the Islamic Dawn hat and talk to Frank Reed?

Q. Did you ever meet the person who seemed to be in charge of all the hostages?

A. Yes. There was a gentleman called the Haj who was the chief of our particular faction, and I guess one of the senior members of Hizballah. He was actually a very pleasant man.

He was a rather stocky man. I never saw his face, of course, was not allowed to, but my biggest impression is of his hands. He has big, thick hands, and he’s paunchy. He would come in, and he’d take my hand, and he’d say, “Essalamu alaykum ((Peace be with you)).” I’d say, “Wa alaykum essalam, Haj.” He’d say, “Keef halak ((How are you))?”

He was unquestionably in control. I mean, they jumped when he came. He almost always spoke softly, and he almost always seemed reasonable. He was not vicious to us, as some of the guards were, particularly when he wasn’t there.

Q. If he came into the room now, what would you say to him?

A. Ooh, that’s much, much too difficult. I have no reason to like the man. He was responsible for having me kidnapped and for chaining me to a wall. I don’t ( want to see him ever again, and I have no idea what I would say to him.

Q. You were with Terry Waite for a long time. What was he like as a fellow prisoner?

A. Terry Waite is a very positive man, a very strong personality. There were disagreements in the room. I have nothing bad to say about Mr. Waite. I think he’s a very, very courageous man, and I admire what he tried to do. About half the year we were together, he had extreme asthma, to the point where I thought he was going to die on us. He would hyperventilate himself to unconsciousness. It’s very difficult to live in a small room with a man who has got asthma, because you don’t get any sleep. He’s gasping all night long and having crises and attacks.

Q. What were the disagreements about?

A. You can’t lock five men in a room for 24 hours a day without fighting about something. Sometimes it would be something as small as “Stay off my cot, or my mattress,” or “I don’t like the way you play bridge,” or something like that.

Q. You were moved to different locations about 20 times. How did they move you?

A. Usually in the trunk of a car or quite often in a secret compartment built under the bed of the truck and bolted in. They would come in, and they’d take this wide plastic tape, shipping tape, and they’d tape you up. Then they would wrap a towel around your head this way and over your eyes. You were just like a mummy.

Q. How could you breathe?

A. They left your nose out. A couple of times I had fights with them. I had to struggle and buck and go “Mmmmm!” because I had a cold. I had to make them understand that they couldn’t completely cover my mouth, because I couldn’t breathe. You’d get exhaust fumes underneath the truck. I was deathly afraid during one move that I was going to vomit — I was very sick, and of course my mouth was taped up — and that I would choke to death on my vomit. When we went to South Lebanon, it was four or five hours underneath that thing.

Once they dressed me in a chador ((the head-to-toe veil of strictly religious Muslim women)) and put those little round spot Band-Aids on my eyes, and then they put the sunglasses on. Well, the Band-Aids came loose, and with the prescription sunglasses on, I could see perfectly well. So I was sitting in the back of the car with a guard sitting next to me, just kind of peering around.

Q. What do you think about the Iran-contra affair?

A. It was a bad mistake. Those kinds of bargains are not the way to deal with kidnappers. They only encourage more kidnapping. I think it made it very difficult for Reagan to convince the kidnappers that he was still a virgin, that he wasn’t going to bargain with them, because he had already done it once.

Q. During your years as a captive, you were constantly exposed to the beliefs of your kidnappers about themselves and the rest of the world. What were they saying?

A. They were radicals within the fundamentalist movement. The way they interpret their religion allows them to do things or to justify to themselves doing things that any normal reading of the Koran would find insane or evil. I’ve read the Koran; I’m not an Islamic scholar, but the words and the concept seem to me fairly plain, and they’re not all that different from Christianity at base.

They are paranoid in the way they look at the world. They see America as the Great Satan that does everything wrong, and yet it is all-powerful, and therefore all American acts must be deliberate; they can’t be the result of accident or misunderstanding, or simply stupid policy.

Q. Do you think Westerners understand this mentality?

A. No, not at all. Even many of the hostages after some years of it could not understand it, could not grasp it. We need to understand these people, we’ve got to understand their motives, how their minds work.

Q. What did they allow you to read in captivity?

A. At various times we did have a lot of books. The book I got first was the Bible, and I kept that almost throughout my captivity, though not the same copy. I read that over and over and over and over and over again and thought about it. That book was by far the most important to me and remains the most important to me.

We got westerns, we got science fiction, we got good books, we got some excellent books on political theory, college textbook stuff in paperback that was very interesting. Then when we moved to the Bekaa Valley, the books ended for some reason. They got us TIME and Newsweek and the Economist and, for some reason, FORTUNE and Business Week fairly regularly.

Q. Did your philosophical outlook change while you were a captive?

A. I was brought up a Catholic. I left the church and was an apostate for most of my life. I called myself an agnostic, which simply means I was too lazy to figure it out. I returned to the church, luckily enough, about six months before I was kidnapped. I believed in God, I believed in Jesus Christ, I believed in the things the Catholic Church believed in. Well, not all of them. I’m not sure the Pope would like me too much, but I am a Catholic, whether he likes it or not. And thinking seriously about my religion was providential, I guess, because I needed it very badly when I was kidnapped.

Q. After being away from the U.S. so long, what has struck you on your return?

A. I think it’s a better world, in general. Despite the events of the past few days, I think America is also making progress. I think it is a better place than when I left.

I had worked through in my head a lot about my life before I was kidnapped that I didn’t like. I thought of myself as not a good person. And prayer, and I think God’s touch, brought me back out of that, gave me a different way of looking at things.

Q. Do you have any bitterness toward the people who held you for so long?

A. I don’t have any time for it. I don’t have any need for it. It is required of me as a Christian to put that aside, to forgive them. I pray for them. I wish them no ill in their lives. My life is very, very busy — it is full of joy. The world is fresh and bright and beautiful.