Terror And Tedium

By ROBERT AJEMIAN BOSTON Frank Reed

Q. You were held captive for almost four years, from 1986 to 1990, half of that time in total isolation. A blindfold always covered your eyes, and often you were chained to a wall?

A. In 44 months I never saw the face of one of my captors. I even slept in my blindfold. Alone in the cell, when I heard no sound outside, I sometimes would raise the blindfold enough to see and then kept it at half-mast. If observed, that meant a beating.

Q. Two of those four years you were together with other hostages?

A. For most of 1987 I was in the same room with Terry Anderson and Tom Sutherland. For five months in 1988 two others joined us, Brian Keenan and John McCarthy. The five of us were held in a hideout a couple of hours south of Beirut. But even while together, all of us wore blindfolds.

Q. Did treatment improve when you were part of a larger group?

A. Somewhat. Still, we always had to cope with the slow and endless passage of time and sometimes our own brittle feelings. Each of us had different ways of dealing with confinement. Sometimes those differences even caused friction among ourselves. For example, I didn't speak to one of my fellow hostages -- chained right next to me -- for three months over some minor personal argument. Another time two of the hostages got into a fight over some trivial disagreement and started hitting each other. The constant tension led from time to time to irrational behavior.

Q. You are speaking out more bluntly than other released hostages. You seem ! less willing to contain your resentments. In prison, for example, unlike the others, you refused to accept books and television and even exercise privileges. Why so different?

A. I tried to escape twice. I suppose that says something about me too. I've always been dogged and independent-minded. Sometimes my fellow hostages pleaded with me to take books or special treatment. The way I saw it, privileges from the guards only reinforced their hold over us. I tried hard to get into their consciences, to make them feel guilty. Sometimes that invited harsh treatment. Even then, when they beat me, I was determined never to cry out.

Q. The President and the State Department did tell Americans to get out of Beirut. You chose to stay. So weren't you asking for trouble?

A. I keep hearing that question, almost as a challenge. Look, I ran a school for 600 Arab children, right through a horrible war. That school meant everything to me. My wife is an Arab. Yes, I put myself at risk. But I had important reasons for staying. Incidentally, the President's order was issued after I was kidnapped.

Q. How clearly do you remember the first months of confinement after you were seized in September 1986?

A. I was put into a basement cell 6 ft. by 6 ft. A thin foam mattress covered two-thirds of the floor. I was always in darkness. After a while, you begin to accept the blackness, like being blind, I suppose. Your hearing becomes more acute. I could literally hear mice move around the cell. I learned to identify approaching footsteps. I was able to figure out the time of day by outside sounds: for example, the various calls to prayer in the minarets. To hostages, time of day meant only how soon we were going to eat or sleep. At first I tried to track time by making charcoal match marks on the wall. One day, after a month or so, the marks were noticed and scrubbed off.

Q. What did that mean for you?

A. The feeling of endless time is crushing. A sentenced prisoner knows the limits of his sentence. He sees his captors. A hostage knows and sees nothing. I began to feel I had no future. I've always been a person who lived to plan and push ahead. That was gone.

Q. You were able to control your thinking?

A. I fought to create systems to maintain control. I tried to think of beautiful things, like Barbra Streisand's voice or Jack Nicklaus' golf swing, or how to introduce new rules for pro football. I thought up a new golf board ( game. Out of cigarette boxes I made a pack of playing cards, marked the different suits by dots of orange shampoo and played solitaire for hours. I hid them in my underwear, which is all I ever had to wear. Physically, I made a daily routine of walking my cell, one, two, three sidesteps, bump my shoulder against a wall and then return. By my count, 525 crossings made a kilometer. Whenever I got really rattled, I'd step off a kilometer, although sometimes they prohibited exercise for months at a time. They could be vicious. I learned from doctors later that they fed me arsenic to keep me weak. Once they put a snake in my cell.

Q. What about food and medicine?

A. In the morning they brought a cheese sandwich, for lunch a dish of rice and vegetables and at night another cheese or jam sandwich. Meat was a rare event. I had a plastic dish and spoon, a plastic bottle to hold waste, and a small stool. If you complained about an illness, they brought antibiotics, but only if you knew the exact type. I never in four years saw a doctor. Still, I knew they wanted foremost to keep me alive, so that helped. At the same time they never failed to remind me I'd be there for 20 years.

Q. When did the idea of escape come into your mind?

A. After several months alone, I began to think more desperately. I could hear the guards lock my cell door and routinely leave the keys hanging in the outside lock. Then they walked down the cellblock and passed through a second steel door -- again leaving the keys hanging in the lock -- to an adjoining guardroom. There I heard the click of weapons. That was my target since the guards slept upstairs. For weeks I ran the escape plan through my mind. Finally, one night I stood on the stool, stretched my arm through the bars and down to the keys. Suddenly, I was in the main cellblock. I hurried to the second door, reached through the bars again but discovered the keys were out of reach. I was crushed. I got back to my cell but was unable from inside to close the steel door tight. I tried for hours. Exhausted, I fell asleep, knowing because of the door ajar they would realize I had tried to escape. As soon as they brought the morning sandwich, they knew.

Q. What did they do?

A. Several of them rushed into the cell, furious. They beat my bare feet with an iron rod, bashed my nose and jaw. I lost half the hearing in my right ear. They attached live wires to my fingers. Two days later, a couple of sadistic ! guards beat me again, banged my feet and face. When I saw my face reflected in a metal ashtray, I was horrified.

Q. You still tried to escape again?

A. Four days later, on the daily walk to the toilet, I tried to tackle one of the guards and take his gun. He easily beat me off. This was a futile act, but by then being holed up alone was so abject. I was punished again. Now my kidneys started to bleed badly.

Q. You stayed in solitary?

A. For two more months. Then suddenly I was moved to another Beirut hideout. There, even under the blindfold, I could tell that other people were in the room. Goosebumps almost jumped off my skin. But we were forbidden to make a sound. Guards stayed in the room around the clock. It was three weeks before I dared to peek out. There were Terry Anderson and Tom Sutherland sitting beside me. We spent the next 10 months together in four different hideouts, once all chained to the same refrigerator. One day, without warning, I was returned to solitary, still constantly in darkness, still beaten periodically. That isolation lasted another six months, until the spring of 1988.

Q. Now, for the first time, you were put into a room with four hostages: Anderson and Sutherland as well as Keenan and McCarthy?

A. This was my best time. Five of us were together for five months, though always chained to the walls. Here we got a radio. Often we wore our blindfolds at half-mast. We made a Monopoly game and another set of cards. We used to talk and debate a lot, about Ronald Reagan, about the Israelis, history dates, even things like the specific gravity of milk. The radio put us back in touch with the world. Every so often I'd hear the names of other hostages but never mine. That added to my isolation. Hostages feel so vulnerable to outside events. When we heard news about author Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, we worried. That meant a harder line by the guards. Now U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia will mean the same.

Q. That togetherness ended abruptly?

A. One day they told me I was going home. I was taken back to Beirut. Instead they put me back into solitary. It was devastating. I had no idea what lay ahead. For the next 13 months I was kept alone, until October 1989.

Q. Was your thinking still under control?

A. My defenses really began to weaken. Nothing I did mattered to anyone. I began to realize how withering it is to exist with not a single expression of , caring around you. For the first time I began to fear dying alone, in this awful place, with no trace of personal concern.

Q. You say after 13 years of living in Lebanon you feel you understand the Arab mind. After what you've gone through, do you still understand?

A. I never believed anyone capable of this kind of cruelty. But I have come to learn that "hostaging," the whole ritual of taking and holding hostages, is an accepted practice of the Arab culture. In their minds, hostaging means trading -- and trading means talking. Throughout Arab history, hostages have been seized, and thereafter it is the duty of their patriarchs to talk and trade. The American patriarch, to Arabs, is the President or his designee. There is no dishonor in this ancient process. That's why I disagree with the U.S. policy of not talking to hostage takers. Talking and trading does not automatically mean seizing more hostages. Arab history does not support that. So long as Westerners stay out of the Muslim half of Lebanon, the danger disappears. Arabs have not seized and transported hostages from distant places.

Q. Have you expressed that view of hostaging to President Bush?

A. No, the President has not talked to me. I know he rejects that view. I'd like very much to tell him what I think.

Q. Do you feel you understand the Israeli mind as well?

A. I do understand their security fears. But their thinking has become oppressive. Somehow anyone who opposes Israel is labeled a terrorist. The word terrorist has been distorted out of all reality. When the Israelis resort to violence, they call it patriotism. When others resort to violence, the Israelis brand it terrorism. They turn the word on its head. And much of the world has been intimidated into accepting Israel's definition. Over there, to the man in the street, the Israelis are terrorists. They have modern weapons, and they use them.

Q. Was this a hot subject among the hostages?

A. We used to talk constantly about Israel's use of force. Back in America, I've been startled at the fear of such talk. Here, criticizing Israel is somehow off limits. Concealing opinions has never been our way. That's something new for America. Are we so mesmerized by the Israeli cause that we can't truly debate whether the Palestinians might also have a cause? It seems like mind control. Arab hatred springs heavily from what they consider America's unqualified and unquestioning support of Israel.

Q. How has captivity altered you?

A. I've become much too self-centered. In captivity you learn to concentrate totally on yourself. On the outside that doesn't work. As a hostage, I learned one overriding fact: caring is a powerful force. If no one cares, you are truly alone. I see it today in the faces of people I meet. Often they look at me and start to cry. Then my own eyes fill up. They care that I suffered. And I feel their caring.

Q. Are you able gradually to get the awful experience out of your mind?

A. There are too many reminders. I might be out on the golf course or somewhere drinking a beer, and suddenly I know that what I'm enjoying -- at that very moment -- is what we hostages used to fantasize about. I get angry and sad and guilty. The other hostages, in fact, may not even know that I'm free. That always stuns me. So my mind quickly turns back to that cell and the others. I wonder what they're doing and thinking.

Q. What's ahead for you?

A. Now one of my life purposes is somehow to keep the hostages in the public mind. They're so powerless. They're so pathetic. I know I can't ever be really free until they are.