The Hostage's Daughter

by Sulome Anderson

  I have to hold back tears at the thought of my father and this man, chained and blindfolded in a Lebanese basement, and how much that small touch must have meant in those circumstances. I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder of Dad than I am in this moment. I might never get to the bottom of Iran-Contra, but I’ve gained a better understanding of our government’s role in this event, and hearing Waite’s anecdote about my father makes all the convoluted politics seem even more soulless and empty. Two men, their chains, and the pain they shared. That’s what matters, in the end.

  “Thank you, sir,” I reply. “I can’t tell you how much that means to me.”

  THEN

  December 2007

  The years I was doped up blend together in my mind. Now, when I look at pictures of myself from back then, I don’t recognize the glassy-eyed girl in them. I was locked into a downward spiral of self-hatred and hopelessness, and at the time it felt bottomless. I remember bumming around Europe for a summer, then coming back to New York and babysitting for a while, which ended rather abruptly when one of the mothers caught me nodding off while I was taking care of her kid. Because of the lawsuits my family won against Iran, I had all the money in the world to spend on drugs, and I made some dealers a lot of money.

  When I was twenty-three, I met Michael, a forty-year-old ex–army ranger. I was out at a bar one night and took him home. He had a girlfriend at the time, which I didn’t find out about until later. But he must have seen me and thought: Jackpot.

  I’ve read up a lot on sociopathy since I got Michael out of my life. It all fits—the lack of remorse, the stone-cold manipulation. Sometimes I’d look into his eyes and they’d be as black and dead as a shark’s. Pretty early on in our relationship, I wrote a letter and gave it to a friend of mine. It said if anything happened to me, the cops should knock on Michael’s door.

  He was good at what he did, though. He would call me a junkie whore, then cry and tell me I was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He told me he understood me, that he saw the parts of me I was most ashamed of and loved me in spite of them. Starved for unconditional love, I drank it up. He eventually broke up with his other girlfriend, moved in with me, and started spending all my money. Then the real abuse started. He never completely beat me up; I think he knew I wasn’t far gone enough to stand for that. But he did smack me around quite a bit, and I did my best to hide it from everyone I knew. He once dragged me across a room by my hair. Another time, my neighbors called the cops when I screamed that he was going to kill me because he was trying to wrap his hands around my throat. I broke up with him for a week, then took him back, only half believing his tearful apologies. But he had me convinced I was so disgusting no one else would ever want to be with me. We were together for almost two years. Every single meaningful person in my life despised him. My mother practically spat when his name was mentioned.

  At that point, my father married the horse trainer, who had just turned thirty-two, six years older than me. At their wedding, I took three Xanax with my champagne and missed most of the reception, held at the house my parents had built together, because I passed out in the basement. Dad and I wouldn’t speak for weeks, sometimes months, and when we did, it seemed like he couldn’t wait to get me off the phone. Now I imagine he must have been at a loss as to how he should react to my downward spiral. Looking back, I can see that he just didn’t know what to do, and I suppose he tried to be there for me sometimes, in his clumsy way. But he was so infatuated with his new wife that I felt like an afterthought. On the rare occasions when I’d visit him in Athens, I was barely home, spending every second I could getting fucked up with the few friends I had from high school. I realize now how much that must have hurt him, but all I could understand at the time was my own pain and anger at his seeming unconcern for me. For the remainder of their marriage, I despaired at ever having a relationship with my father, who grew ever more remote as I became more damaged.

  As my relationship with Michael—and my drug abuse—progressed, it seemed like there would be no limit to my self-destruction. My parents and friends were at a loss, and even my mother seemed to have come to terms with the fact that she’d probably pick up the phone one day and hear that her only child had died of a drug overdose. I lost track of the times I made her cry; she told me once she had to stay away from me because she couldn’t watch her daughter disappear anymore. Sometimes, she said, there were flashes of my real self—the girl who could connect with people of every social status, from sex workers to politicians, and charm them into revealing the parts of themselves they normally kept close. But then I’d retreat into oblivion, becoming alien once again. The shame of what I was putting my loved ones through consumed me, but I didn’t know how to stop. I became so hopeless one night that I swallowed half a bottle of antianxiety meds. Immediately regretting it, I took myself to the emergency room. It was the second of three times in my life I’d make a halfhearted attempt at suicide.

  An answer to the painful question of my life appeared one day while I was browsing the Internet and came upon the term borderline personality disorder (BPD). It piqued my interest, so I started researching it. I learned that, evidently, it’s the most lethal psychiatric illness because of the high suicide rate associated with it. I found the criteria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. They are as follows:

  1.Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.

  2.A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation. This is called “splitting.”

  3.Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.

  4.Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating).

  5.Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behavior.

  6.Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days).

  7.Chronic feelings of emptiness.

  8.Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights).

  9.Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms.

  You have to exhibit five of the nine criteria to qualify for a diagnosis. I had all nine. I also read that some of the risk factors for BPD include abandonment in childhood or adolescence, disrupted family life, poor communication in the family, and emotional abuse.

  I looked at my computer screen and burst into tears. It was like the missing piece to the fucked-up puzzle of my life. I had always known there was something wrong with me, something in my mind that made me play out these destructive cycles ad infinitum. The circumstances of my childhood were extreme; it was a revelation to learn they must have had an extreme effect on my psyche, although I probably should have realized that by now. But I always avoided thinking about my past with every ounce of my being and every drug I could get my hands on, so I had never made the connection before.

  The next day, I marched into my shrink’s office waving a sheaf of papers at him in agitation, babbling, “Doctor, I think I have this. Borderline personality disorder. It all fits. Look!”

  He took the papers from me and frowned at them uncomfortably through his glasses. I’d been seeing him for about a year at this point, and although he was nice enough, I never felt as though anything had changed as a result of our therapy. A quiet, awkward man, he’d listen politely to my sobbing and ask me questions like “Do you think the OxyContin has anything to do with how you’re feeling?” To which I would practically tear my hair out in frustration. No shit, doc. Drugs = bad. But without them, I knew I’d implode into a supernova of inexplicable shame at my very existence, and anything was better than that.

  “Erm, well, Sulome,” he said
hesitatingly. “I think the rehab you went to in 2007 might, well, they might have mentioned something like this.”

  I was flabbergasted.

  “Wait,” I hissed. “Are you telling me I was diagnosed with this years ago, and no one told me?”

  “Well, you were on so many substances at the time, it was hard to tell what was the drugs and what wasn’t. You still haven’t passed a urine test in months.”

  “That is not the point. Drugs or no drugs, you knew I might have a mental illness and you didn’t tell me?”

  “I didn’t think it would be helpful. But since this diagnosis seems to resonate with you, let’s talk about where we can go from here.”

  “Seriously, Doctor? You can go to hell.”

  Let’s just say that was not a productive session. I left fuming, but by the next week, I had calmed down and was ready to discuss options. I researched possible treatments for BPD and saw that mood stabilizers were often helpful, so I got past my anger at my psychiatrist and he agreed to put me on one.

  In hindsight, that was the first step I took toward sanity, although it didn’t feel like it at the time. There would still be plenty of crazy to come, but learning of my diagnosis gave me some hope that if I was sick, I could get better someday. For a long time, I thought I’d wake up one day and be “cured.” I would then take my place among the sane, well-adjusted people who made living look so easy. I’ve since learned that’s not how it works. But looking back—that was when I at least started trying to halt the self-destruction.

  A few weeks later, while Michael was out of town, I locked myself in my room and quit OxyContin cold turkey. My shrink offered to give me Suboxone, which would help with the withdrawal, but I said no. I wanted to feel every second of the dope sickness, so the next time I thought about taking a pill I would remember that terrible, aching pain. I was tired of watching my life drift by me in an apathetic haze. I couldn’t hear the word potential applied to me one more time with a tone of wistful regret.

  After I stopped puking and shaking, I started asking myself why I was letting a scumbag twice my age treat me like shit. I wish I had immediately cut Michael loose at that moment, but it took another month or two. The last straw came while we were leaving a bar, and he grabbed me by the throat and threw me into some empty outdoor tables. I landed on the cold concrete and thought, Enough. I pretended to ask for his forgiveness like I always did, then called 911 the second I was alone.

  That night, Michael was cooling his heels in jail. I got a restraining order, which he would constantly break with calls, e-mails, and texts, sometimes calling me names, sometimes begging me to take him back. For months, I would lie awake at night imagining how he was going to kill me. I still think were it not for the fact that he would have been suspect number one in any murder investigation, he would have happily done so. I don’t believe he has a conscience, and people without consciences are capable of almost anything. To him, killing me would have been like taking out the trash.

  But thankfully, the calls and texts became less frequent, then finally stopped. Once they did, I was left trying to figure out what the hell I wanted to do with my life.

  One day while watching the news, I suddenly came to terms with something that had always been in the back of my mind: I wanted to be a reporter.

  I grew up around journalists, so I knew that world pretty intimately, which was of course the reason I used to want no part of it. Obviously, my father’s experience colored the way I viewed the profession, but the damage I saw in his friends and colleagues also made me reluctant to join their ranks. Alcoholism, emotional numbness, inability to hold down a relationship . . . many of them had the whole potpourri of fun PTSD symptoms.

  People used to ask me when I was little if I wanted to be a journalist, and I’d always laugh and say no, thank you very much. Journalism didn’t have a single positive connotation to me, growing up. My parents’ footsteps trailed through some pretty miserable terrain, and I had no desire to follow in them. As far as I was concerned, that job had wrecked my life.

  But reporting had been stitched into the fabric of my life from the moment I was born, and finally embracing it, however reluctantly, felt right, somehow. I loved talking to people, and getting them to open up to me. I was concerned with shitty corners of the globe where terrible things were happening to people no one knew or cared about. Be that as it may, I had no desire to save the world—I think my lifelong exposure to journalism saved me from that delusion, common among many aspiring reporters. But I felt passionately that reporting should be accurate and true. I despised the oversimplified sensationalism I saw in so much of the news, and I wanted to write honestly about things I knew to be messy and real—the normal people trying, and the world that made it so hard for them. Growing up in a hugely publicized situation that was, in actuality, very different from the media portrayal gave me an intense belief that the world should be told the truth about things, and I wanted to tell it.

  In 2009, at age twenty-four, I started interning at the Committee to Protect Journalists, and I won’t lie and say I didn’t get that job because of my father, who was on the board of directors. When my dad learned of my newfound interest in reporting, he smiled vaguely and said, “I had a feeling this would happen. I’ll see what I can do.” I was still drinking too much and dabbling in drugs, so I dressed inappropriately, showed up late, and was frequently reprimanded by my boss. But when I was asked to write blog posts, I always did a good job, and the looks of surprised respect from my coworkers were enough to give me some faith in my ability.

  I applied to Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism, and got in, probably also partly because of my father and the fact that he used to teach there. This was something I felt self-conscious about for a long time—I longed for the day when I had built up enough credibility to escape from under the umbrella of his name and reputation. But for the moment, his name, and my talent, seemed like all the support I had on my fragile new path.

  I loved police reporting, and writing about international affairs. My Covering Conflicts teacher despised me, but I learned things from her about being a foreign correspondent that I haven’t forgotten to this day. On my final evaluation, she wrote that no news organization would put up with me. She was probably right. To get through the long hours and heaps of work, and to counteract the sedative effects of the mood stabilizer I was on, I started abusing my ADD medications. That soon turned into buying Adderal from dealers, and I shed weight until I was stick-thin and scary-looking. I was always late and unprepared for class, and my fellow students would sneer at me behind my back for my short skirts. But I worked hard, had clean copy, and wrote good stories, to the frustration of my professors, who would sigh and say I had plenty of skill but no discipline.

  The most valuable thing I learned in journalism school was the term joyful entitlement, which basically means marching into a place you have no business being, walking up to a person who has no reason to talk to you, and getting a story simply because you act like you should. Being joyfully entitled is one of the most important qualities a journalist can possess, in my opinion. For a girl who felt undeserving of even small kindnesses, it was a difficult concept to grasp. But the more I watched my journalism improve, the more I began to believe I might be able to hack it as a foreign correspondent, which I had by that point chosen as a career path.

  I left Columbia a reporter, albeit a crazy one. After graduation, I went to the only place that made sense to me: the country I had grown up loving, my mother’s homeland and my father’s prison. I moved to Lebanon.

  6. THE SPOOKS

  He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

  —GEORGE ORWELL

  NOW

  Hassan Sabra is not an easy man to track down.

  It should be simple to set up an interview with the editor of Ash-Shiraa, the newspaper that broke Iran-Contra. Editors of publications that break momentous, history-ma
king events aren’t usually recluses. I manage to find a number for the Ash-Shiraa office online, but it looks like the newspaper hasn’t been in the news-breaking business for some time. Through some deep Googling, I unearth an article mentioning some conflict with a former Lebanese president in the nineties over something Sabra wrote. Strange, for an outlet that was so prominent during the civil war to have faded from view like this. It’s still listed as a functioning business in Lebanon, though, so I call the office number.

  The secretary who picks up seems extremely wary when I ask to speak with Sabra.

  “He’s not in town,” she says to me in Arabic.

  “Okay, well, will you please give him my number and tell him I want to interview him about Irangate?” That’s what the Lebanese call Iran-Contra.

  “Of course,” she says politely.

  I’m not particularly optimistic that he’ll call me back. Honestly, I’m a little perplexed that his secretary was so guarded with me. I decide to just go to the office in person. It’s a lot harder to duck someone when they’re standing in front of you.

  But as with the Hezbollah press office, deciphering the written address for the Ash-Shiraa headquarters is no small feat. It’s somewhere in Hamra, a big, bustling area of Beirut. After a lot of misunderstandings and misdirection from well-meaning passersby, one of whom points me to another neighborhood, I accidentally end up at the office of An-Nahar, a different newspaper entirely. Once I realize my mistake, I ask one of the reporters there if he knows anything about Hassan Sabra and Ash-Shiraa. He laughs.

  “I worked in the archives there for a little while,” he tells me. “The man’s got intelligence agent written all over him. He actually has warrants against him in Lebanon and I’m pretty sure he’s on the run. I doubt you’ll be able to sit down with him.”