THE ANGELS –
Terry Anderson, the globe-trotting Associated Press correspondent who became one of the longest held hostages in the United States after being kidnapped from a street in war-torn Lebanon in 1985 and held for nearly seven years, has died at age 76.
Anderson, who chronicled his kidnapping and torturous imprisonment at the hands of Islamic militants in his best-selling 1993 memoir “Den of Lions,” died Sunday at his home in Greenwood Lake, New York, said his daughter, Sulome Anderson.
The cause of death was unknown. Her daughter said Anderson recently received medical attention for heart problems.
“He never liked to be called a hero, but that’s what everyone insisted on calling him,” Sulome Anderson said. “I saw him a week ago and my partner asked him if he had anything on his wish list, something he wanted to do. He said, “I have lived a lot and done a lot.” I am happy.'”
After returning to the United States in 1991, Anderson led a peripatetic life, giving public speeches, teaching journalism at several prominent universities, and, at various times, running a blues bar, a Cajun restaurant, a horse ranch, and a gourmet restaurant. .
He also battled post-traumatic stress disorder, earned millions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets after a federal court found the country played a role in his capture, and then lost most of it to bad investments. He declared bankruptcy in 2009.
Upon retiring from the University of Florida in 2015, Anderson settled on a small horse farm in a quiet rural area of northern Virginia that he had discovered while camping with friends. `
“I live in the country and it’s reasonably good weather out here, it’s quiet and it’s a nice place, so it’s going well for me,” he said with a laugh during a 2018 interview with The Associated Press.
In 1985 he became one of several Westerners kidnapped by members of the Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah during a time of war that had plunged Lebanon into chaos.
After his release, he returned to AP headquarters in New York to a hero’s welcome.
Former hostage Terry Anderson, center, surrounded by New York media at JFK International Airport in New York, December 10, 1991.
As AP’s chief Middle East correspondent, Anderson had been reporting for several years on the growing violence gripping Lebanon as the country waged war with Israel, while Iran funded militant groups trying to overthrow its government.
On March 16, 1985, a day off, he had taken a break to play tennis with former AP photographer Don Mell and was dropping Mell off at his house when armed kidnappers pulled him from his car.
He was probably attacked, he said, because he was one of the few Westerners still in Lebanon and because his role as a journalist aroused suspicion among Hezbollah members.
“Because, in their terms, people who go around asking questions in uncomfortable and dangerous places have to be spies,” he told the Virginia newspaper The Review of Orange County in 2018.
What followed were nearly seven years of brutality during which he was beaten, chained to a wall, threatened with death, often held to his head, and often held in solitary confinement for long periods of time.
Anderson was the longest Western hostage Hezbollah had held over the years, including Terry Waite, a former envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had arrived to try to negotiate his release.
According to his accounts and those of other hostages, he was also their most hostile prisoner, constantly demanding better food and treatment, arguing about religion and politics with his captors, and teaching other hostages sign language and where to hide messages so they could communicate in private.
He managed to retain a quick wit and a biting sense of humor during his long ordeal. On his last day in Beirut he called the leader of his captors to his room to tell him that he had just heard an erroneous radio report that said he had been freed and that he was in Syria.
“I said, ‘Mahmound, listen to this, I’m not here. I’m gone, girls. I’m on my way to Damascus. And we both laughed,” he told Giovanna DellÓrto, author of “AP Foreign Correspondents in Action: World War II to the Present.”
He later learned that his release was delayed when a third party to whom his kidnappers planned to hand him over left for a date with the party mistress and they had to find someone else.
Anderson’s humor often masked the post-traumatic stress disorder he acknowledged suffering from for years.
“The AP got a couple of British hostage decompression experts, clinical psychiatrists, to advise my wife and me and they were very helpful,” he said in 2018. “But one of the problems I had was that I didn’t recognize the damage. that had been done.
“So when people ask me, you know, ‘Are you over it yet?’ Well I do not know. No, not really. He is there. I don’t think about it much these days, it’s not central to my life. But it is there.”
At the time of his kidnapping, Anderson was engaged to be married and his future wife was six months pregnant with their daughter, Sulome.
The couple married shortly after his release, but divorced a few years later, and although they remained on friendly terms, Anderson and his daughter were separated for years.
“I love my dad very much. My dad has always loved me. I just didn’t know it because he couldn’t show it to me,” Sulome Anderson told the AP in 2017.
Father and daughter reconciled after the publication of her critically acclaimed 2017 book, “The Hostage’s Daughter,” in which she recounted how she traveled to Lebanon to confront and eventually forgive one of her father’s kidnappers.
“I think he did some extraordinary things, he undertook a very difficult personal journey, but he also accomplished some pretty important journalistic work in doing so,” Anderson said. “He is now a better journalist than me.”
Terry Alan Anderson was born on October 27, 1947. He spent his early childhood years in the small Lake Erie town of Vermilion, Ohio, where his father was a police officer.
After graduating from high school, he turned down a scholarship to the University of Michigan in favor of enlisting in the Marine Corps, where he rose to the rank of sergeant while fighting during the Vietnam War.
After returning home, he enrolled at Iowa State University, where he graduated with a double major in journalism and political science and soon after began working for the AP. She reported from Kentucky, Japan and South Africa before arriving in Lebanon in 1982, just as the country descended into chaos.
“It was actually the most fascinating job I’ve ever had in my life,” he told The Review. “It was intense. The war continues; It was very dangerous in Beirut. A cruel civil war and I lasted about three years before they kidnapped me.”
Anderson was married and divorced three times. In addition to his daughter, she is survived by another daughter, Gabrielle Anderson, from his first marriage.
Memorial arrangements were pending, Sulome Anderson said.