So the Iranians sent a special contingent of their Revolutionary Guard to train and mobilize the increasingly radicalized Shia in Lebanon during the early eighties. Their attentions prompted the more religiously inclined Shia to break off from Amal and form their own militia. They would come to call it Hezbollah, the Party of God, and its members announced its presence in 1985, with a manifesto swearing to expel Israel and its Western allies from Lebanon. It began to coalesce while battling the Israelis in south Lebanon following the 1982 invasion, using coordinated suicide bombings and other guerrilla tactics against occupying Israeli forces. However, Hezbollah as we know it today appears to have emerged out of a loosely organized patchwork of various Shia militant groups with Iranian ties in the mid to late eighties, when it reorganized into a cohesive entity with the help of Iran.
“Right, but I mean, look, arming and sponsoring whatever you may call them, Shia resistance movements, is quite different from exporting terrorism against civilians,” I point out to Wright. I’m still confused as to how Iran went from supporting an armed militia defending their country against invaders to becoming the Islamic Jihad’s benefactors, and I’m curious about Hezbollah’s repeated insistence that they were not responsible for the IJO’s acts of terror. But of course, that’s not the kind of legacy any group trying to establish political legitimacy would rush to claim responsibility for.
“I’m not talking about exporting terrorism; I’m talking about exporting an ideology, and that’s how the Iranians looked at it,” Wright says. “They would not call it exporting terrorism.”
“When did you, as a journalist, first hear of Hezbollah?” I ask. “What was your understanding of who they were at the time?”
“One of the things we noticed first of all, in terms of tangible physical evidence, were all these Hezbollah symbols that started being spray-painted all over the southern suburbs,” Wright responds. “It was kind of staking out their turf. ‘This is where we are.’ Then we started hearing names, Abbas al-Musawi, Sobhi al-Tufayli. They’d have these meetings in the Beqaa and you’d hear people spouting off about things. Journalists had a lot to cover, so a lot of us didn’t pay much attention.”
Musawi and Tufayli would both go on to become secretaries-general of Hezbollah, the same position now held by Hassan Nasrallah. But I still need to know at what point Hezbollah and the IJO became two hands of the same body—one for resistance, one for revenge. There’s an element to this story that seems to be dancing right out of my line of sight.
“Then the terrorism started, right?” I ask. “Did people at the time assume it was Hezbollah?”
“Well, there were a lot of different names, and we were having a hard time figuring it out,” says Wright. “At some point, though, it became clear that whether they were all directly linked or not, they probably had a common agenda, a common philosophy, and there may be different cells doing different things.”
Maybe. Probably. But something still isn’t sitting right with me so far. I’ve started to feel like there’s a hole in the narrative of this event that I’ve been hearing all my life. I want to find it, stitch it back together with what I’ve been told. Perhaps that will help me wrap my mind around the moment in history that led to shackles snapping shut on Dad’s leg, holding him fast as six of my birthdays came and went. Maybe if I just knew the truth, I could understand the men who trapped my father on the ground while I slipped from his hand and drifted away into the sky like a little red balloon.
In another house in Dahiyeh, I’m speaking to a different hajj. He prefers not to be named, so I’ll just refer to him as the Hajj. He’s about the same age as Hamza, but shorter, heavier, with a jolly air about him. The Hajj was one of the very first to join Hezbollah when it split from Amal. He’s “retired” now, just a party supporter and educated observer. I tell him I’m working on a book about the civil war and ask him about his experience in the Party of God.
“The idea of a group like Hezbollah started back in 1978, around the same time as the victory of the Islamic revolution in Iran,” he tells me. “But until the Israelis invaded in 1982, we were only involved in Islamic [cultural and social] activities or daawah, not under the designation of Hezbollah . . . and as people of the south, we started resisting the Israelis before there was a Hezbollah. The seeds of Hezbollah started in secret . . . there were small groups, and then they made themselves known and announced themselves as Hezbollah in 1985.”
I ask him about the Islamic Jihad’s terrorism, whether it was committed under the umbrella of Hezbollah.
“In America they say, Hezbollah did the killing, Hezbollah did the bombings and kidnappings, but that’s not true,” the Hajj complains. “Before it rose, Hezbollah was not well organized. There might have been some extremist groups outside Hezbollah, not necessarily within our ranks . . . but those groups are now gone.”
Now is the moment. “My father is Terry Anderson,” I tell him. “He was kidnapped for nearly seven years and treated very badly by the Islamic Jihad. Do you know anything about the people who did that to him?” I like to save this information for well into interviews like this. It generally throws the subject off his guard.
The Hajj is clearly taken by surprise, but he recovers quickly. “Ignorance makes a human being do something like that,” he says, looking into my eyes. “We actually can’t call someone like that a human being. He doesn’t serve his cause, and he has nothing to do with Islam or humanity. Many people who are enthusiastic to help Islam only harm our religion . . . This is a barbaric act that goes against all religions. I can assure you that Hezbollah did not do something like this. It was meant to harm the Shias’ image in the West.
“We Shia have a saying,” the Hajj adds. “ ‘Don’t deal with a crazy person, because he hurts you when he really wants to help you.’”
His words remind me of something Hamza told me. In addition to his insistence that he didn’t hurt any of his passengers, Hamza also claimed that as an Amal leader, he helped negotiate the release of those on the TWA flight the Islamic Jihad hijacked in 1985, shortly after my father was taken. One of the passengers, a navy diver named Robert Stethem, was killed during the hijacking, and some of them were held for two weeks until complex negotiations, in which Amal did play a role, convinced the hijackers to free them. Again, Hezbollah was blamed; again, they deny responsibility to this day. The four primary hijackers were Mohammed Ali Hammadi, Ali Atwa, Hassan Izz-al-Din, and of course, Imad Mughniyeh. All four were known to be members of the IJO.
According to Hamza, after he helped secure the passengers’ release, some of them wrote him thank-you notes. He proudly informed me that he still has these letters of gratitude.
“In principle, we are completely against kidnapping,” said Hamza seriously. “Because we had our imam Musa al-Sadr kidnapped, we don’t approve of this tactic. How can we condemn an act and legitimize it for ourselves? But there were those of us who believed they had to protect their people and their country, in any way possible. They thought, ‘I don’t have the means to make the enemy desist in what he is doing to my family and country.’
“ ‘I don’t have a tank to fight their tanks,’” he continued. “ ‘I have a person who can get into a car and blow up their tanks and kill their soldiers. These soldiers have families and their families will start demanding that their sons would no longer be sent to war’ . . . but killing and kidnapping civilians for years is another thing.”
“So who were the people who committed these acts?” I asked.
“They indirectly knew that one day, the men they kidnapped would be freed and would tell about their barbarity,” Hamza said. “Who benefited from this? Where is this barbarism emanating from? Are they claiming faith? In this case, their faith was flawed. Whoever was behind the [Islamic] Jihad wanted to give a distorted view of the faith, just as daesh [ISIS] is doing now.”
Like the Hajj, he seems genuinely concerned that I understand he was not a part of what happened to my father.
It’s an odd feeling, hearing this from a terrorist. But it’s even stranger that I find myself seeing a terrorist as a human being.
THEN
October 2003
I OD’d for the first time not long after I started at NYU. It wasn’t serious enough to get me sent to the hospital. I just remember being in the middle of one of those meaningless, teeth-grinding coke conversations and coming to on the floor of my dorm room, with my boyfriend yelling and shaking me. Apparently, I had gone into convulsions. I got up, drank some water, waited a half hour, and did another line.
College was one long party—not the fun kind, but the kind where you wake up the next day feeling like shit and swear never to do that again. In many ways, I never got to the waking-up part.
My parents divorced the year I began college, which infuriated me, because I had been begging them to split up since I was eight or nine. They seemed quite incompatible to me. But they had inexplicably stayed together “for my sake.” The divorce was vicious, and since I was older, each of them used me as a sounding board for their anger and frustration with the other. Dad would tell me my cold, heartless mother was taking all his money in the divorce settlement; Mama would say my father had ruined both our lives.
Without any understanding of what a healthy relationship is supposed to look like, I quickly found all the wrong men. I dumped my first boyfriend, a loser with an inferiority complex, after he tried to choke me and my neighbors had to call the cops. I dated a lot after that. People tell me I have an air of sexuality about me, even now, when I’m trying my best to forget that phase of my life. I don’t know how to change that, but apparently, it gives men all kinds of ideas. Like my drug dealer, who held me down and raped me my sophomore year of college. He left three bags of coke on the bed when he was done. I snorted them all, crying the whole time.
Midway through college, I met a sweet English guy named Adam who was as messed up as I was, but in very different ways. He had a difficult childhood—probably more so than mine—and although he didn’t seek refuge from his trauma in the oblivion of drugs as I did, the emotional fallout from his past played off my own problems in a way that was intense, intimate, and destructive all at once. We fell in love, got engaged, and for a while, I didn’t feel so alone. Mama used to call us her twins, because we were born three hours apart. But we were too young and too damaged, and it didn’t last. He was the only man I was with for more than a few months who was kind to me during that time, though, and I’ll never forget him.
I was not an easy fiancée. One night, while I was ten tequila shots deep at a club, my guy friend decided to relieve himself against the wall while we were smoking cigarettes outside. Some cops took issue with that and started harassing him, so I stumbled over to defuse the situation.
“Officers,” I slurred. “It’s a Saturday night. Can’t we all just chill and go our separate ways?”
One of the cops, an unfortunate-looking fellow with not a hair on his shiny little head, squinted at me appraisingly. “We’ll go away if you give us your phone number,” he said, leering. “I get off at four.”
Normally, I’d have giggled and deflected such an offer, but that night I was in rare form.
“Maybe if you weren’t five feet tall and bald,” I replied. “Go fuck yourself.”
He gaped at me. “What did you just say?”
“Go. Fuck. Yourself. Did I stutter?” I flounced off, swaying.
“Get back here!” he yelled, to which I gave him the finger, not looking back.
Next thing I knew, I was slammed up against the wall of the club and handcuffed. They had to cuff my ankles too, after I started kicking him in the shins. I ran my mouth all the way to the police station.
“Hey, fuckheads, you know you’re the bottom two percent of our school system, right?” I spat. “A monkey could do your job. Go back to your studio apartment in Queens.” Charming.
After we got to the precinct, they cuffed me to a pipe outside a cell full of guys for eighteen hours, but made the mistake of leaving me too close to the fingerprint machine, which I covertly unplugged, giggling hysterically as I watched the cops try unsuccessfully to fingerprint a suspect. By the end of the night, every man in that cell had asked me for my phone number.
I woke the next morning with a sore arm and an aching head. When I realized where I was, the waterworks began with a vengeance. “I’m a good girl!” I wailed. “I go to NYU! I shouldn’t be here. This is a mistake.”
My protestations went nowhere, and at some point, they drove me to Central Booking.
“What’s Central Booking?” I asked one of the female cops.
“Oh, you’ll see,” she said, grinning.
As soon as we entered the building, an overpowering stench rolled down the hall and hit me in the face, and I immediately realized what Central Booking was—the place where they put all the criminals. Not wanting to become somebody’s bitch, I flattened myself against the wall.
“I am not going in there,” I shrieked, hysterical.
“You don’t go in there, we’re labeling you an emotionally disturbed person and sending you to the psych ward,” the lady cop warned, unimpressed by my performance.
“I don’t care! Take me to the fucking psych ward. I’m not going in there.”
So we went to the Bellevue psych ward, where I cried next to a trans woman for three hours until a bored-looking shrink ushered me into a room, asked me some questions, and said I was fine.
Two days had gone by at this point. It was Monday morning, and I could finally be booked. I was originally charged with resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer, both felonies. I told my court-appointed lawyer I was a victim of sexual harassment, and he looked over the report.
“Really?” he asked. “That’s not what the police say. They claim you walked up to them and told them you had methamphetamine on you.”
Fucking NYPD.
“Sir,” I yelled. “If I were doing meth, do you really think I’d waste it by telling two cops?”
“Good point.” He sighed.
I tottered into the courtroom on my stilettos, still wearing my skanky Saturday-night dress, rings of mascara decorating my face. Adam, who had been my one phone call, was sitting in the front row, arms crossed, shaking his head and glaring at me. Two of my friends sat beside him, looking worried. I don’t remember much of the arraignment, except that at one point, the judge read out the incident report.
“And then the defendant said, ‘Expletive, you fascist pigs.’”
Everyone in the room (except me) stifled a giggle. I was eventually let off with a drunk and disorderly and given three days of community service.
A couple of weeks later, after a fight with Adam, I ran out of our apartment and checked myself into a very nice hotel. I asked the doorman where I could get some blow, and spent the next two days holed up in my room doing coke and taking Xanax to come down. Adam must have eventually called my parents, because my dad had the concierge let him in and found me passed out in a nest of plastic baggies and prescription bottles. He dumped a bucket of water on me and sat on the bed with his head in his hands. It was the first time I ever saw him cry. I looked at him in openmouthed astonishment. I wasn’t aware I had the power to do that.
I was packed off to my first rehab in Arizona. I phoned in my entire experience there, until I tore the cartilage in my knee playing volleyball, ending my stint at rehab in a wheelchair on Vicodin. I had surgery right after I got out, and all the Percocet the doctors threw at me kick-started a three-year opiate addiction.
Despite all this, I managed to graduate NYU with a 3.7 GPA. Don’t ask me how. The best explanation I have is that my education was the only thing holding me together. Learning had been my lifeline throughout the destruction of my childhood and adolescence, and old
habits die hard. I took a couple of political science classes, one of which focused on Middle Eastern politics. I excelled in that course, mostly because I’d watch the news almost every day, and as high as I usually was, something deep inside me held on to my connection to that part of the world. So I had lots to say in that class, and I actually devoted a fair amount of time to studying for all my classes. But doing well in school was also my excuse for fucking up so badly—I got good grades, I would tell myself. Things weren’t all that terrible.
In the meantime, my relationship with my father continued to deteriorate. Every time we interacted, I felt frustrated and dissatisfied, unable to form a meaningful connection with him.
Dad began dating a woman less than half his age. I couldn’t stand her. When I would visit, I’d blast the song “Gold Digger” in my room in passive-aggressive protest. I once scrubbed a toilet with her toothbrush and put it back for her to use. He was deeply in love, though, and wouldn’t hear a word against her. I tried to tell him I thought she was using him, and was reprimanded for my efforts. Knowing I despised her, she would smile at me, smug as a cat, and adjust the diamond bracelet he had given her.
My father often seemed to confuse gifts for love. At my graduation, he pulled me aside and said casually, “I know I haven’t always been a good father to you,” then handed me a Rolex.
I pawned it for drugs within a month.
5. THE RABBIT HOLE
On puppet strings, a nation swings.
—MEGADETH
NOW
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