Surviving In Captivity

By Bruce W. Nelan

"Tolerable" was the word John McCarthy carefully chose to describe living conditions during his most recent months as a hostage in Lebanon. He assured the families of three of the men who had been held with him -- Americans Terry Anderson and Thomas Sutherland and fellow Briton Terry Waite -- that when he last saw them, "they were in good health and good spirits."

McCarthy also said mildly that his first two years as a prisoner were "very difficult." In fact, the years after he was kidnapped in Beirut in 1986 were hellish. Brian Keenan, an Irish teacher released last year who spent part of his captivity with McCarthy, described life with Islamic Jihad: "Tiny, tiny cells, constant blindfolds, prolonged days in the dark, sometimes weeks without light." The guards, he said, "just could not control the urge to beat very badly." When he and McCarthy were moved from one vermin-infested flat to another, they were covered with tape and stuffed under the floorboards of a truck.

For Associated Press correspondent Anderson, who has been held since March 1985, longer than any other Westerner, it has been at least as bad. Some of the hostages freed earlier have reported that Anderson's first cell was a cramped room in Beirut's Shi'ite slums where he lay chained and blindfolded. Later he and four others were moved to a basement dungeon that was partitioned into cubicles. The guards beat them and repeatedly threatened to kill them. , Food was a meager ration of bread, tea and cheese.

Shared suffering did not make the cramped quarters any easier for them to bear. Anderson, a liberal Democrat, and another hostage, David Jacobsen, a conservative Republican, found that politics could make strained bedfellows. After his release, Jacobsen told a British newspaper, "I was chained for 19 months, night and day, with Terry Anderson, a bleeding-heart liberal. It was hell for me, and you can imagine what it was like for Terry Anderson."

Later, when several men shared a room and were allowed to remove their blindfolds, Anderson carried out a compulsive daily routine of cleaning, pacing the room, talking aloud. Keenan says, "Terry's a bit of a bulky and belligerent man" with "a voracious hunger for intellectual conversation." Anderson went on a hunger strike at least once. Keenan says Anderson took his ailments stoically, "for in truth all pain and illness were generally dismissed by our keepers, though they would eventually supply us with some form of antibiotics."

The hostages held regular Christian services in their "Church of the Locked Door," using bits of bread to celebrate Communion. Anderson had been a lapsed Catholic but rediscovered his faith with the counsel of another prisoner, the Rev. Lawrence Jenco, who was freed in July 1986.

After guards took away the chess set he made from tinfoil, Anderson asked Sutherland to teach him French. Sutherland also kept them occupied with lectures on agriculture and his Volvo car. One day at the end of 1987, overcome by frustration, Anderson banged his head on the wall until his scalp bled. But later, when a French hostage, Marcel Fontaine, said he hoped not to die a prisoner, Anderson replied, "I don't want to die anywhere." Like Anderson, Sutherland experienced days of despair. Several times he tried, but failed, to suffocate himself with plastic bags.

Much less is known about the conditions of Waite's captivity. The Church of England envoy was on his fifth trip to Beirut to negotiate for the freedom of other hostages when he was kidnapped in January 1987. British diplomats and friends in Lebanon had warned him not to return, saying the situation was too dangerous. Waite ignored them. He vanished while waiting in a go-between's home to meet representatives of Islamic Jihad. For years no faction claimed to be holding him, and nothing was heard of him. Many Western officials privately concluded he had been killed, possibly because he was suspected of working with the Reagan Administration in the arms-for-hostages swap with Iran.

Keenan raised new hopes after his release a year ago. He said he was convinced Waite was still alive and was being held in isolation in Beirut. He told a television interviewer that his guards had called the man in the cell next to his "Terry," and he knew it wasn't Anderson.

Some time after that, Waite was allowed to join McCarthy, Anderson and Sutherland. "We had to work very hard between us to keep our spirits up," McCarthy said last week. "We have done that very well, I think. The men I was with -- Terry Waite, Terry Anderson and Thomas Sutherland -- were all very strong men. They supported me, and I hope I've supported them."

He added that Waite had been seriously ill. "He had a very bad problem with his lungs -- asthma," said McCarthy. "They did take him to a doctor and gave him medicine for that, and now I hope that he will be okay until he is released."

Former hostage Jacobsen, once director of the American University Hospital in Beirut, has predicted they will make it. "If you can last a month," Jacobsen said last year, "you can last forever. The only danger is illness." The remaining hostages have already survived illness and years of cruelty and boredom. Now it is up to their captors to decide how many of them will be allowed to savor freedom.