Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 16, 1990 TAG: 9003162481
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: JAMES BARRON THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
On the mile-long drive home to take a shower, he was pulled out of his car by men with 9mm pistols and shoved into their green Mercedes, the same one that had cruised past the tennis court while he was swatting backhands and forehands.
The kidnapping was over in 45 seconds. Then the real ordeal began.
In the 1,826 days since then, hostages who have been freed say, Anderson has been held somewhere in the rubble-strewn Lebanese capital, sometimes chained to furniture and blindfolded, sometimes taped from head to toe like a mummy and taken in a coffin to another hiding place.
Sometimes, the freed hostages say, he pounded on his cell door to demand a radio from his captors.
Sometimes he fashioned chess pieces out of tinfoil cheese wrappers. Sometimes he practiced French or Arabic, or he read the Bible.
Anderson, the chief Middle East correspondent for The Associated Press, has been held captive longer than the 17 other Westerners who are hostages in Lebanon.
He is now 42. He has never seen his 4-year-old daughter.
In 1985 he was a broad-shouldered hard-driving former Marine, a fan of Linda Ronstadt and Hank Williams Jr. who covered the Lebanese war wearing a Marine Corps belt buckle.
Colleagues at the AP say he had just given up smoking, had taken up jogging and had lost 20 pounds on a low-carbohydrate diet - strawberries and cream, but no rice or vegetables.
A year later, his Moslem captors released photographs of a grim, emaciated-looking man.
He spoke to the world last in a videotape in 1988, not long after he marked his 1,000th day as a hostage by ramming his head against the pale yellow plaster of his 10-foot-by-10-foot cell until he bled.
Hostages who have been freed say that as the days turned to weeks, the weeks to months and the months to years, Anderson went on hunger strikes and gave his captors defiant, satirical salutes.
Now, as they tear another page off the calendar, Anderson's relatives and friends can only guess at how the five years have changed him. They know how it has changed them.
His sister, Peggy Say, dropped out of college to spend her life trying to win his release, first behind the scenes, later publicly, demanding that the government do something.
She has logged thousands of flight miles, meeting with Ronald Reagan when he was president, as well as Lt. Col. Oliver North and anyone else she thought might help - from ambassadors and foreign ministers to the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Say has been the target of hate mail for her criticisms of the Reagan administration and its handling of the hostage situation.
Diplomats told her she was only prolonging her brother's ordeal, but she remains Terry Anderson's most determined advocate.
"I may never know that anything I've done has made a difference, but it's important to me that the five years not be for nothing," Say said Thursday in a telephone interview from Washington, where she was preparing for today's noon "ceremony of hope" in Lafayette Park.
The celebrity-studded rally is being put on by disillusioned relatives of hostages, who hope to increase public pressure on the U.S. government. As many as 30 family members are expected to attend.
Anderson's partisans are determined that he not be forgotten in the rush of headlines from a changing world.
"Once you get past a day like Friday, everybody says, `We've done our bit,' until the next anniversary, the next videotape or bad Polaroid is released," said Bill Foley, who worked with Anderson and is now a photographer for Time magazine.
What Anderson knows about how the 1980s played themselves out and the 1990s began is an open question.
When Anderson was kidnapped, Mikhail Gorbachev was just coming to power in the Soviet Union. Wall Street was climbing to new altitudes. The air pockets that sent the Dow Jones average plummeting were years away.
"So much has happened in the world since he was taken," said Don Mell, an AP photographer who was Anderson's tennis partner that morning.
"Our lives have gone on, people have been married, divorced, broken up with our girlfriends - that sort of thing. We've all had these things happen, but Terry's life has been on perpetual hold."
He may or may not know that for his 40th birthday, a Washington-based humanitarian organization, No Greater Love, circulated a birthday card designed by the "Doonesbury" cartoonist, Garry Trudeau.
The group sent a photograph of the card to news agencies in Beirut. The original is waiting to be delivered to Anderson when he is freed.
He may or may not know - the freed hostages think he does not - that his father, Glenn R. Anderson, and a brother, Glenn R. Anderson Jr., died in 1986.
His brother died of lung cancer on an airplane flight from Batavia, N.Y., to his home in Ocala, Fla., four days after making a videotape plea to his captors.
"I made a vow I would not die until I saw Terry," Glenn Anderson said. "That vow is very close to an end. Please release him. I wish to see him one more time. Please release him."
The first thing Terry Anderson's friends tell people who for five years have known him not as a byline but as a pale, drawn face on grainy videotapes is that he had been in the Marine Corps.
He was a combat correspondent in Vietnam and a reporter, anchor and station manager for the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service in Japan.
He began his career not in the Middle East but in the Middle West. Born Oct. 27, 1947, in Lorain, Ohio, he graduated from Iowa State University and worked as a radio and television reporter at KRNT and KCCI-TV in Des Moines before taking a temporary assignment with The Associated Press in 1974.
He left after five months to work as an editor at The Ypsilanti (Mich.) Press.
He rejoined the AP in Louisville, Ky., several months later, worked as an editor on the news agency's foreign desk in New York, as a reporter in Tokyo and as news editor in Johannesburg.
He first went to Lebanon on temporary assignment in mid-1982 to help cover the Israeli invasion.
In October, the AP assigned him there permanently and he was named Beirut news editor. A promotion to chief Middle East correspondent came 11 months later.
By then other reporters were agonizing about whether to leave town as the bombs landed closer and closer to home.
Not Anderson. By 1983 or 1984 the once-swaggering press corps at the Commodore Hotel bar was behind steel doors, playing Trivial Pursuit by gaslight. But Terry Anderson stayed on.
The morning Anderson was abducted, Mell said, began like any other day. The fighting had quieted and there was "time to do things like play tennis and not worry about what was going to happen next."
"The only difference that morning was that he seemed a little aggravated," Mell said. "He seemed a little nervous. That early in the morning, I run perpetually late, and Terry's a very punctual man. I came downstairs and the only thing he said to me was, `I don't like waiting around in front of your house, I don't like the people in your neighborhood.' I said, `They're fine, don't worry about it.' "
But at the tennis court Mell noticed the green Mercedes driving by. He saw the car make a second pass while they were playing tennis. And then, there it was again on their way home.
"I was going to take a shower, he was going to take a shower, pick me up, take me to the office," Mell said. "We were discussing these mundane things, and as we were talking I noticed that same car and the minute I saw it I knew something was going to happen and I said to Terry, `I don't like this - get out of here!' "
One of the gunmen crossed the street, Mell said, "to make sure nobody interfered with this."
A second had his pistol trained on him. The third wrestled Anderson from one car to the other. "This was a situation where, unlike TV or movies, you don't kick the gun out of the guy's hand," Mell said. "I wasn't going to put up a fight. I started to walk toward them, but the guy waved me away with his gun."
The Mercedes was gone. That was the beginning of Anderson's years of monotony, terror and false hopes about an early release.
"The first time I saw him was through a crack in a clothes closet, a man chained to a bed," said the Rev. Lawrence Martin Jenco, a Roman Catholic priest who was freed in 1986.
Jenco said Anderson constantly pumped their captors for information about the outside world, for better conditions, for more reading material than what they brought - some Dickens novels, George Orwell's "Animal Farm," Albert Camus' "The Plague."
Jenco said: "He'd demand things. I'd say probably the easiest thing was just be quiet, especially about the radio. But he'd pound on the door to get the radio because we could only have it for 15 minutes a day, and then they'd get angry with us and not give it to us for three days.
"I said to Terry, `All this anger, pounding on doors. We win all these moral victories but we don't get the radio.' And he looked at me, and he was so angry."
And then there were the cards. A poker player, Anderson made deck after deck from scraps of paper - the guards would take them away because they considered them a sacrilege.
Anderson just made more so the hostages could play. "He accused me of being vindictive," Jenco said, "but he was always winning."
In mid-1988 Anderson's hopes soared. He and a French hostage, Marcel Fontaine, were taken to a carpeted apartment. Anderson was given a new suit. He wore it every day, surmising that freedom was imminent.
One night a guard told him to get ready, and he was taken away. Hours later, Fontaine realized that he was the one who was being let go.
The AP, which has helped cover Say's expenses and has sent executives abroad with her, says that, until Terry Anderson comes home and executives have a chance to talk with him, no decisions will be made on when and where his next assignment might be.
"If I know Terry, that's about the first question he'll ask me," said Louis D. Boccardi, The AP's president and general manager. "So much will depend on his own wishes and what this ordeal has done to him."
But first must come his release.
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