Extra: Terry and the Pirates

PARIS — Terry Anderson and Don Mell drove home after tennis on the Beirut corniche, a beautiful seafront by bombed-out rubble in a city where in 1985 it was hard to hear the penny drop. That green Mercedes reappeared yet again. Don said, “I don’t like the look of this.”

Too late. Men bundled Terry into the Merc. One stuck a gun in Don’s face and waved him back. He chased them in his own car but lost them. In any case, what could he do with a wooden racket against assault weapons? 

Don, an AP photographer, later spoke with Hassan Nasrullah and asked why he was spared. “Do you fish?” the Hezbollah leader replied. “If you catch a big one, you throw the other ones back.” He wanted prisoners freed in Kuwait, and AP’s Middle East bureau chief was a bargaining chip. 

Terry spent 2,454 days in dank cells, often chained to a radiator. Like so many hostages who were eventually freed — and survivors of those who weren’t — he saw the fast-worsening risk to reporters as the reason it is so essential for them to stay at their jobs. 

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Terry’s kidnapping was a turning point. Until then, correspondents could mostly calculate “harm’s way.” We got into it by bad luck or poor judgment. Military officers and warlords wanted us to tell their side of the story. We wrote what we could see, hear and smell.

There were close calls. Months after Terry was taken, Don Mell and I covered famine in Sudan, including forays over the dunes and aid flights around Darfur, where nomadic Janjaweed gangs raided Bantu farms, raping and killing in a foretaste of today’s ignored brutal civil war.

We were young and dumb enough to take chances. But we were seasoned enough to listen for that penny to drop — and strategically beat a fast retreat. Mainly, we were confident that our bosses and a government committed to defending the press had our backs.

Ronald Reagan and the elder George Bush were negotiating for Terry’s release with a bizarre, secret arms deal for Central American contras involving Iran, Israel and go-betweens in Europe and Asia. Remember Oliver North? That was eventually exposed, and it blew up in their faces.

A new policy took shape in Washington. Officials refused to bargain, asserting that only encourages more hostage-taking for increased demands.

It is different now. Over the last few decades, the world has gotten entirely out of hand. Terry Anderson and others at the time were taken by Islamist zealots for specific political reasons. Today, we are closer to the old comic strip series: Terry and the Pirates.

“Terrorist” is not a helpful word. As international coverage recedes, readers miss intricate overlays. Somali pirates, for instance, fished until industrial foreign fleets decimated their catch. With fast boats and guns, they went after bigger fish: freighters and tankers. Now many have joined offshoots of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, driven into Africa from the Middle East.

Despotic governments, “non-state” actors, factions within militant groups, profit-seeking criminals, minorities going to extremes, political zealots who target journalists in Western democracies have no common link. Gaza is a tragic example. So is Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

When even the Wall Street Journal can’t bring home a respected correspondent, held as a pawn for more than a year for the crime of committing journalism, imagine the odds for independents with no support and scant resources who are arrested, or worse, all over the map.

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A while ago, I organized a public symposium with Bill Schmidt, then my colleague at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who had just left as a ranking New York Times editor in charge of, among other things, keeping a far-flung foreign staff as safe as possible.

Terry came along with Diane and John Foley, whose son, Jim, had been beheaded by jihadists in Syria. A gruesome video went viral for a moment, stunning the world. The Foleys were furious at U.S. government officials who kept them at arm’s length while doing little to help free him.

Diane is still at it, championing the underpaid, if paid at all, freelancers who wade into stories that big-media executives avoid letting their staffs cover. Jim would have been crushed, she says, if his death discouraged others from keeping watch on the world.

Later, I hung out with Terry. We talked less about reporting than how he emerged from “The Lion’s Den,” as he titled his book, with so much of his psyche and soul intact. He swept onto the AP fourth floor in New York, beaming at the thundering reception.

Partly, it was U.S. Marine training in Vietnam. Mostly, it was spiritual strength. He was a quiet Christian who didn’t talk much about religion. He had seen a lot of the world and knew that if people don’t confront what is wrong and fortify what isn’t, we will lose it.

This is not just “journalism.” Michael Ruby, a stalwart Mort Report editor with long experience in world news coverage, just shepherded to life a fresh version of “Man Without A Gun.” It is by Giandomenico Picco, who died in Connecticut, a month earlier and a year younger than Terry.

Picco was one of those deeply human, often-Italian peacemakers within the frequently ineffectual United Nations system. His shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East almost singlehandedly freed Terry and close to a dozen others.

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Don Mell and I just talked by phone about America’s rapidly narrowing worldview. Passionate students who once knew more about causes that brought them onto the streets now have global megaphones. Self-styled “influencers” shape opinions based on little understanding.

Campuses are aflame with pro-Palestinians who blame all Jews for monstrous overkill and human suffering. Others defend the ultra-Zionists led by a prime minister who, like Donald Trump, is fighting off criminal charges. Both antisemitism and hatred of all Muslims flourish.

This simplified dichotomy could defeat a U.S. president who is containing wider war while seeking a two-state solution. That would return the dummkopf wannabe Führer whose policies inflamed the West Bank and pushed Hamas to atrocious murders and hostage-taking near Gaza.

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After his release, Terry sued Iran and collected $26 million. He spent much of it on organizations that support journalists and other charities. Don Mell described his impact in a remembrance for old AP colleagues.

“Terry was able to forgive those who stole precious time from his life and to turn his misfortune into good for others,” he wrote. “That — and not the story of his captivity — is his true legacy.”

Don now lives in Delaware, a big big cheese in finance. (That’s him at the left in the photo with Terry’s family and some old friends.)

We lamented what all old hands do. Now, when it matters so much, so few Americans seem to give a damn about what happens beyond their line of sight. “You explain it to people, and so many just don’t want to hear it,” he said. “I’ve stopped trying.”

I get it, and it is tempting to do the same. But Samuel Beckett’s timeless line, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on,” resonates far beyond his qualms about writing novels. Think of a future without reporters motivated to do what it takes to see reality as it is.