The Hostage's Daughter

by Sulome Anderson

  Not a succinct man. Also, I’m willing to bet that the Lebanese people wouldn’t stand behind Hezbollah if the group tried to exert that much control over the government. Tufayli seems pretty radical, and I know around the time he was booted out, Hezbollah decided to take a different, more diplomatic political approach, so it makes sense that he would have clashed with the rest of the leadership. But wait . . . the sheikh isn’t done yet.

  “Unfortunately, Hezbollah went and split the country into two camps, with people taking sectarian sides; Sunni and Shia,” he continues. “They recruited Shia under the banner of fearing the Sunni and vice versa . . . and that’s how we came to struggle with ourselves; we eat each other when we fight against our neighbors and brothers and countrymen and relatives . . . the path of corruption always leads to destruction. This is not exclusive to us. The Americans; why are they hated in the world? It’s because they’re instruments of corruption everywhere they go. If they had really been champions of freedom, people would have nothing but fondness for them. Instead, they are hated because they are liars.”

  Tufayli has a way with words. But unless we want to be there all day listening to his pronouncements, I think I should move on to more pertinent questions.

  “I’m going to go into the past a little bit,” I tell the fixer. “Tell him I don’t want to dredge anything up—but the terrorist attacks that were blamed on Hezbollah in the eighties, does he feel any responsibility for them? Does he think that this legacy is haunting the Shia?”

  “The value of nations and their respect, their legacy, depends on the extent to which they adhere to their principles,” Tufayli replies. “Their waning and destruction depends, on the other hand, on the extent of their lies and hypocrisy in applying their principles. I’m Sobhi Tufayli, an imam in a mosque. I’m not a general and have no ties to the military. But when an enemy inexcusably occupies my country, and when the major powers in the world assist and share in this occupation, I would become a traitor, lacking in honor and respect to myself and others, if I didn’t resist this occupation.

  “In reality, if we want to label anything as terrorist, it should be the unjustified political crime,” he continues. “We here in Lebanon today have the right to defend ourselves. But there are those who would come here from the ends of the earth, not to defend themselves but defend their interests . . . and what are their interests? Their interest is to put their hand in my pocket to steal. And if I object, I am a terrorist. The truth is that American and Western policies are terrorist policies . . . daesh are the result of Western policies in the region. Madmen, deranged people, idiots . . . but this evil is the result of a great injustice . . . our problem here is not with the small-scale murderers. It is with the large-scale murderers, and those who create them.”

  I’m actually shortening his quotes quite a bit.

  Our fixer translates for me. “Blah blah blah, you get the point,” he finishes with an eye roll that the sheikh can’t see.

  I lean forward and look Tufayli square in the eye, speaking to him directly in Arabic.

  “Sheikhna [our sheikh, an honorific], I speak some Arabic because my mother is Lebanese,” I begin.

  Tufayli smiles. “Where is your mother from?” he asks me.

  “Originally from Smar Jbeil,” I answer. It’s the name of the village where my grandfather’s family used to live. Then I go for it.

  “What I want to ask is this: there were people caught up in the war who had nothing to do with it, especially those who came from America and Europe,” I say. “One of these people was my father, Terry Anderson. And I’m with you one hundred percent about the wrongs committed politically by the Americans here, as well as their wrongs in the past . . . but what’s important is that my father was innocent. He was working as a journalist.”

  Tufayli leans back. His eyes widen just a little at this information, but he’s too much of a pro to show more of a reaction.

  “Who is your father?” he asks.

  “Terry Anderson, one of the hostages taken in Lebanon,” I reply.

  “I’m against this filthy act perpetrated by known entities,” the sheikh says. He’s holding my gaze now, the first time he’s really engaged with either Josh or me during the interview. “We in Hezbollah were against kidnapping, and we still are. This is not an honorable act and it harms us, our movement, our honor, and our values.

  “After the Iran-Iraq War, the Iranians sent me a message telling me to take the hostages and do with them as I pleased,” Tufayli continues. “I told them this is a stain and I refuse to soil Hezbollah with it. Of course this does not mean there weren’t any Lebanese working with the Iranians. But this was done at a distance from our leadership.”

  “Ask him about the office in Iran that was running the Islamic Jihad,” I tell our fixer. “Was it run by Mehdi Hashemi, separately from the mainstream Iranian government?”

  Tufayli dodges the question. “I’m in solidarity with you and your father,” he tells me. “And I believe he was unjustly treated, the way we all were, by this insane policy. Of course I am not saying this to defend or advocate any position. I say this out of fairness.”

  “Was the Islamic Jihad separate from Hezbollah?” I ask, persistent.

  “There were security groups,” Tufayli says. “So if I’m an Iranian official and I have one or more cells in Lebanon, I use them to kidnap and exchange hostages. Clear?”

  “Yes, sheikhna,” I tell him. This seems to fit with what I’ve heard about Asgari nurturing the IJO as his own private terror cell, unconnected to the Hezbollah leadership—which somewhat bolsters Zein’s narrative. If Tufayli isn’t lying—and he very well might be—then perhaps Hezbollah’s claims of innocence have some merit.

  I notice our fixer gesturing at me to wrap it up. I’m surprised Tufayli has been this frank with me and I can sense him getting edgy. Time to go. “Thank you so much for your hospitality.”

  Penetrating even the very outer circle of Hezbollah by getting some of its followers and fighters to trust me has been no easy feat. This is a group that exists in a state of constant paranoia. Lebanon is a major hub for espionage in the region and Hezbollah is still considered by the United States to be a terrorist organization. In 2009, Hezbollah and the Lebanese authorities busted a large Israeli spy ring, reportedly by turning a Mossad operative into a Hezbollah double agent. The group took down a CIA ring in 2011—and those are just the incidents that were made public. All this means Hezbollah members are immediately suspicious of an American girl—even a half-Lebanese one speaking decent Arabic—who shows up in Dahiyeh asking questions about a thirty-year-old terrorist act the world considers them responsible for.

  My fixer, who has asked that I not use his name because he fears Hezbollah leadership will take action against him, is a large part of the reason I was put in the same room with them. He’s a Dahiyeh boy, through and through. The men from that neighborhood—almost exclusively Hezbollah fighters and party supporters—all know and trust him, so they are willing to speak with me out of respect for him. But once I’m in that room, it’s my job to get them to trust me. Part of that is just establishing a rapport with them, as I would try to do with any other source, but I am uniquely positioned to reach Hezbollah in a way others cannot.

  I find that revealing my father’s identity almost always works out for me in these situations. For one, it’s completely obvious that many people associated with Hezbollah feel a collective sense of shame for what happened to Dad, which was clear from my interactions with the Hajj and Hamza. They also seem to respect me for being Terry Anderson’s daughter and still sitting in a room with them, unafraid, treating them like human beings. I think they can see that I just want to understand how this could have happened. As a result, they are generally more forthright with me after discovering who I am.

  This gives me rare journalistic access to their world, which I do my best to respect by reporting on them with as little bias as possible. I’m not Hezbollah’s PR rep, so
not every story I write is going to make them happy, but I think it’s clear that I’m not pursuing a vendetta—just doing my job. I believe a few of them have come to trust me, in a strange way. Not because I think they’re just the cat’s pajamas—they’re religious fundamentalists, and I’m no fan of those, no matter which book they pray from—but I’ve come to reluctantly admire their sense of honor. Say what you like about Hezbollah; the men I meet who identify as such all share a sort of code. Are they saints? Would I even call most of them good? Not a chance. But they’ve become people in my mind, and something about their identity makes sense to me—the resistance part, I suppose.

  Also, it must be said: there are a different set of political circumstances here in Lebanon, where most of the party leaders and politicians have blood on them up to their elbows. The country is run by former warlords, many of whom were known to commit the odd atrocity or two in wartime. Samir Geagea, current executive chairman of the Lebanese Forces, the largest Christian political party in the country, actually spent eleven years in solitary confinement for his war crimes—until he was pardoned in 2005. Geagea now lives in luxury, enjoying his political comeback.

  Every powerful figure in Lebanon has a cemetery in the closet. Case in point: Walid Jumblatt, the Druze tribal chief and head of the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP), a leftist political organization, is having coffee with me at his gorgeous home in the Clémenceau neighborhood of Beirut. Jumblatt is something of an enigma. His heavily armed Druze militia, which was responsible for its share of violence during the civil war, earns him the title of warlord. He’s been dubbed “the Weathervane” because of his political tendency to abruptly shift sides and ally himself with opposing factions. His reputation as a calculating, highly intelligent man is widespread, and even the Lebanese who hate him seem to display a grudging respect for his intellect.

  As a major player in the war, Jumblatt concerned himself with the kidnappings, mostly because he assumed personal responsibility for Terry Waite’s safety on the negotiator’s fateful trip to Lebanon. When Waite was captured, Jumblatt reportedly tried everything to find and free him, so I decide to see if the tribal chief would tell me something about what went on behind the scenes. Jumblatt is considered royalty by the Druze, and servants hover in the background as we speak, kowtowing to him like a king when they refill the coffee.

  “This is quite a complicated issue,” Jumblatt tells me. “As for the Islamic Jihad, it was a small organization. We heard about it after the 1983 attempt on the marines and the French, but we didn’t know who was behind it . . . I believe it was the Iranians and the Syrians under Hafez al-Assad.”

  Jumblatt has a strange relationship with the Syrian regime. Once close to the Assads despite the fact that the Syrians likely killed his father, Kamal Jumblatt, in 1977, he’s changed his tune since the start of the Syrian civil war. The PSP is increasingly vocal in its condemnation of Bashar al-Assad’s war crimes.

  It doesn’t seem that Jumblatt will tell me much about the hostage crisis. For whatever reason, it’s clear he doesn’t want to go there. But we start talking about the current situation in Lebanon, and I have more luck with that line of questioning.

  “The daesh kidnappings are really for shock value in a lot of ways, right?” I ask Jumblatt. “Especially the Westerners. ISIS doesn’t kidnap to bargain; they kidnap to make a statement.”

  “Yes, they don’t kidnap to negotiate,” Jumblatt agrees. “They kidnap, then later on, they kill. Now they have killed Americans, British, French, but also daesh and Jabhat al-Nusra [another Islamist group] are fighting. It’s a mess in Syria. A total mess.”

  “This is a frightening state of affairs,” I remark. “For Westerners in Lebanon especially. Do you think that hostage-taking could become a problem in Lebanon again?”

  “With the decay in the situation nowadays, it might be again, yes,” Jumblatt says darkly. “We are living in total uncertainty.”

  As I’m about to end the interview, he asks me why I’m writing this book.

  “I’ll be honest with you,” I say, surprising myself by confiding in this highly intimidating man. “What happened to my father completely destroyed me for a long time. He came home really messed up. Until I was seven, I thought he was going to be a superhero, and it wasn’t like that at all. So on this very personal level, I want to know what happened, and it’s not about the book or about anything else, not really. I just want to know.”

  Jumblatt looks at me with his sharp gray eyes. “Maybe your father being kidnapped was even more difficult than my father being killed,” he tells me. “I shook hands with the man who killed my father, who was responsible for his death, and I didn’t feel any need for revenge. Sometimes you just have to move on.”

  I now have a warlord for a life coach. It’s quite a funny moment, but as I’m trying not to giggle, I suddenly realize something I had been unaware of. I’m being carried by a winding, inexorable current, and I can see all that raw, raging pain from a growing distance as I float past. I imagine watching it slowly recede behind me until it’s very small and far away.

  THEN

  May 2013

  I could feel the ring of prisoners closing around me, their eyes burning holes into my tensed back. It was time to get the fuck out of Roumieh.

  I had come to the most dangerous prison in Lebanon for a story, but also because I had access. In the spring of 2013, very few journalists were allowed in. This was partly because the press had not been kind to the place, which was an overcrowded den of broken lives and human rights abuses, but mostly the Lebanese government’s aversion to exposure was due to a rapidly deteriorating security situation inside the jail.

  Two years after the Syrian civil war started scratching at Lebanon’s door, rebels fighting Syrian president Bashar al-Assad were already well into the process of Islamization that would eventually culminate in the dramatic seizure of power by the Islamic State a couple of years later. At this point, IS, then known as ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) had just begun consolidating and controlling certain areas within the ravaged country, and they were still just a whispered name to me, another boogeyman in the dark.

  One thing was certain: Roumieh showed signs of being completely overwhelmed by the jihadi brand of crazy that was bleeding into Lebanon from Syria. The Islamist prisoners segregated in the infamous Block B had formed a kind of mafia, and their power was growing. Rumor had it many of these inmates enjoyed khaleeji (Gulf) patronage as well as support from certain local politicians, and just like outside the prison walls, money and influence bought quite a lot of clout in there. It was said the Islamists basically had the run of the place. South Asian and African migrant workers, who made up the lowest rung on the prison ladder, would work as their maids, and as one ex-resident of Block B would tell me, “People gave us things—microwaves, MP3 players, fridges, things like that.” He declined to share whom he meant by “people.”

  The immediate result of the jihadis’ monopoly on power was a surge in violent incidents within the prison. Riots became an almost weekly occurrence, and prison guards were routinely held hostage until the Islamists’ demands were met or a truce negotiated. Many of them, I learned, were foreign militants caught crossing the border from Syria or men accused of carrying out terrorist activities in Lebanon. In short, they were exceptionally dangerous people—a kind of precursor to the daesh incursion into the country that would eventually result in murmurs about the infamous black IS flag in Tripoli and battles between the hated group and the Lebanese army along the Syrian border, which continue to this day.

  I had managed to gain access through a rather pervy priest who ran an NGO staffed almost exclusively by attractive young women. He never outright made a pass at me, but he certainly slimed his hand onto my leg a few times, and while I immediately shifted away from his touch, I tolerated his greasy stare because I knew he was my best shot at getting into Roumieh to write about the Islamist takeover.

  The prison was as dep
ressing as one would expect. Stained clothes hung from every barred window, and the whole place smelled like unwashed armpits and feces. When we arrived, the sun had just crept up over the horizon, and the courtyard was empty. The prisoners were allowed to mingle in public areas of the jail for most of the day, but it was too early for many of them to make an appearance. True to Lebanese form, Roumieh was divided along sectarian lines, and the priest and I first met with inmates in the Christian wing. They had been expecting us, and were polite and relatively respectful, probably because the priest was highly regarded among that population as a result of the charitable work his organization did inside the jail.

  When one of them asked if he could show me around, I didn’t want to reveal my trepidation, so I glanced meaningfully at the priest to see if I should go or not. He gestured for me to follow the inmate, who was heartbreakingly eager to show me the art room, where he proudly displayed some of his woodcarvings. After I had oohed and aahed enough to prompt a wide yellow grin from him, he told me I should see the kitchen, which had been rebuilt after some inmates had burned it down a couple of years previously to protest the terrible prison food.

  The kitchen was located on the other side of the courtyard, which we crossed as I took in the situation with mounting panic. A couple of hours had passed by now, so it was about midday and the prisoners from other blocks were all too awake, and all too interested in a female wandering around unguarded. I was in the midst of a throng of rapists and murderers who hadn’t seen a woman in God knows how long.

  I will not be gang-raped in a Lebanese jail, I thought fiercely as I felt them pressing closer. No one, certainly not the guards, would have been able to pull them off me.

  So I closed my eyes for a minute, took a deep breath of ripe prison air, and focused on projecting the fuck-off-or-I-will-shank-you-in-the-dick attitude I generally adopt in situations where being a woman means risking one of the worst potential consequences of this job. I pictured the hell I would experience if one of them decided to lunge at me, and tried not to scream.