Terry Anderson, the American journalist who was the longest-held Western hostage in Lebanon when he was finally released by Islamist militants in 1991 after more than six years of captivity, has died in private home in Greenwood Lake, NY, in the Hudson Valley. . He was 76 years old.
His daughter, Sulome Anderson, said the apparent cause was complications from recent heart surgery.
Mr. Anderson, the Associated Press bureau chief in Beirut, had just dropped his tennis partner, an AP photographer, at home after a tennis match in the early morning of March 16, 1985, when the players A man armed with a pistol tore open his car door and rushed in. pushed him into a Mercedes-Benz. The same car had tried to block his path the day before as he returned to work after lunch at his beachfront apartment.
The kidnappers, identified as Shia Hezbollah fighters of the Islamic Jihad in Lebanon, beat him, blindfolded him and chained him in about 20 hideouts over 2,454 days in Beirut, South Lebanon and Bekaa Valley.
The militants had hoped to pressure the Reagan administration to secretly facilitate illegal arms sales to Iran – a shameful scheme known as the Iran-Contra Affair because the administration planned plan to use proceeds from arms sales to secretly subsidize the powerful Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
Mr. Anderson was the last of the 18 Western hostages released by the kidnappers. After his release, he married his fiance, who was pregnant when he was kidnapped, and met his 6-year-old daughter for the first time.
He said that although he was not tortured during his imprisonment, he was beaten and chained. He said he spent about a year, going back and forth in solitary confinement.
“There was nothing to hold on to, no way to anchor my mind,” he said after the ordeal. “I try to pray every day, sometimes every hour. But there was nothing there, just emptiness. I was talking to myself, not God.”
“I had a lot of problems,” he continued, “and it took me a long time to start solving them. People ask me, ‘Did you get over them?’ I do not know! Ask my ex-wife – ask my third ex-wife. I do not know; I’m myself.”
Mr. Anderson served as a Marine Corps combat journalist in Vietnam for five years before joining The AP. He worked in Beirut for two and a half years before being captured by rebels.
A full obituary will follow.
