The Hostage's Daughter

by Sulome Anderson

  I pulled it together, followed the rather sweet convicted murderer to the kitchen, peered in and said hello to the surprised, sweaty Bangladeshis and Ethiopians slaving away in there, and then practically ran back to the Christian wing with a mob of leering criminals in my wake.

  “Yalla, abouna,” I hissed at the priest through my brightest smile. “Time to go.”

  As soon as the prison doors clanged shut behind me, I felt my knees turn into liquid, and I had to fight the urge to collapse in a shaking heap on the ground.

  To my mother’ s distress, by the time I went on my jaunt to Roumieh, I was beginning to feel comfortable freelancing in the Middle East. I worked in Cairo on an episode of a TV show and reported a handful of stories in Lebanon for The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and Vice.

  For one piece, I went to Tripoli, already quite a dangerous part of Lebanon. It was at the time plagued by frequent violence between the Alawite population in Jabal Mohsen and Sunni residents in the adjacent neighborhood of Bab al-Tabbaneh. There, I spoke to a nine-year-old child soldier who proudly showed off his machine gun. Soon after, I drove up to Arsal, a northern town on the Syrian border now completely off-limits to Western journalists because it’s been heavily infiltrated by IS militants. The assholes have settled right in, even instituting sharia law in the areas they control. Hezbollah and the LAF are still fighting to regain control of the area around Arsal, but at this moment, daesh seems to be firmly entrenched.

  When I visited, though, the town was heavily populated by the thousands of desperately impoverished Syrian refugees fleeing the devastation of the war. Mostly children, the elderly, and women bereft of their men, who were probably dead or still fighting in Syria, they settled in horrifyingly bleak camps in and around Arsal. Rebel forces hadn’t been completely hijacked by jihadis yet, and there was still much support inside Lebanon for the Free Syrian Army’s revolution against Assad.

  The refugees didn’t benefit from any of this revolutionary zeal, though. Instead they were treated as an unwanted burden and plagued by the xenophobia and racism of their Lebanese hosts. Some of the women informed me that the men of Arsal had been kidnapping young Syrian girls, raping them, and throwing them—their marriage prospects ruined—near the camps for their parents to find. As a result, mothers were marrying their teenage and sometimes prepubescent daughters off to much older Lebanese men, both to preserve their honor and because each girl was simply one less mouth to worry about feeding. I spoke to a thirteen-year-old with ice-blue eyes who sobbed hysterically as she told me about the forty-year-old groom she was about to wed.

  “I’m disgusted by him, but I’m doing this for my family, so we can live in security,” she told me in the weary voice of a grown woman. “He’s the one who feeds us and protects us, and I’d rather be violated by one man than every man in town.”

  I cried for hours after that interview, though I didn’t shed a tear while I spoke to her. I resolved that day never to cry in front of a trauma victim. Who the fuck am I to cry? I thought. It’s not my suffering. I have no right to weep in their faces when I go home to my family’s beautiful home with running water and soft beds, to the millions of dollars sitting in my trust fund.

  And my trips back to the States were a complete mind-fuck. I’d sit in a bar or club watching the sleek New Yorkers sip their twenty-dollar cocktails in horror.

  This isn’t real life, I’d say to myself. This is Disneyland.

  I went back as often as I could to see my doctors, but a month was about the longest I could stand without going out of my mind with boredom. At this point, I was going long stretches without speaking to my father, who had filed for bankruptcy, moved out of his mansion in Ohio, and was teaching journalism at Syracuse University. He seemed greatly humbled by his losses and would often reach out to me, but I was still quite angry with him and tried to forget about it as I buried myself in my work.

  In the summer of 2013, I watched with interest as the Gezi Park protests erupted in Turkey, taking social media by storm. The idea of a bunch of middle-class kids spontaneously deciding to stand up against Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s autocratic government intrigued me, especially because the protesters faced brutal retaliation by the police. Also, I was casually dating a Turkish guy at the time. He was completely enthralled by the protests and more than willing to set me up with some of his friends in Istanbul, so I lined up stories, packed my bags, and went to join the fun.

  It was an intoxicating experience, and practically every foreign journalist was there covering it. I choked on tear gas and dodged water cannons almost every day and night for two weeks, sometimes barely sleeping for a few days at a time. I felt myself stray closer to the line between “soft conflict” reporting—what I call everything short of outright war journalism—and watching people get grievously hurt. I knew at this point that however grave and terrible these things were, I was also beginning to crave the adrenaline rush. Most of my friends had already worked in Syria, and when I got back to Beirut, I found myself seriously considering taking the leap into actual war journalism.

  One of my friends, a much wiser and more experienced journalist named Mitch Prothero, had somewhat taken me under his wing not long after I’d first arrived in Lebanon all dewy-eyed and enthusiastic (but mostly clueless). He accompanied me to Tripoli for the first time and gave me lectures that have proven invaluable to this day.

  Mitch also introduced me to the single most important person in my journalism career: my favorite fixer, Dergham Dergham, a semigangster who’s on friendly terms with practically every shady character in Lebanon. D, as I’ve always called him, has had a long list of questionable career choices, but he’s honest, and when he likes you, he’ll go to the ends of the earth to help you get a story. We hit it off right away, and I’ve been to many lunches at his house with his lovely wife and little terrorist of a son. I freely admit he opened many doors for me, and continues to do so to this day.

  With D’s help, I wrote lots of stories, including my first piece involving my personal experience as Terry Anderson’s daughter, as part of a story on kidnapping in Lebanon for The Atlantic. I spoke to drug lords and kidnappers, former hostages, experts, and others in an attempt to explore the possibility of a resurgence in kidnappings within the country, as incidents of hostage-taking were already beginning to take place with increasing frequency. I tried to weave my own story in with the larger issue as best I could. The most difficult interview for me was with an ancient, bentbacked woman whose son had been kidnapped and taken to Syria during the civil war, never to be seen again.

  “I know he’s dead,” she croaked at me, tears streaming down her wrinkled face. “I just want to bring his bones back to Lebanon.”

  In that moment, I thought about how lucky I was to get my father back, to have him in my life at all, despite all the pain of our complicated relationship. My pledge not to cry in front of a victim forgotten, I held the old woman’s hand and wept with her.

  There was one problem. Caught up in the Beirut journo party scene—which is thriving, since nothing takes the edge off PTSD like a good bender—I had started drinking too much, smoking pot, and occasionally dabbling in cocaine again. This had an extremely adverse effect on my mood, and a couple of breakups that year left me devastated and bordering on suicidal. I knew I had to figure out why this kept happening to me, and how I could curb my urge to latch on to unsuitable men, then fall apart when they left me. After a hysterical night spent in my bathroom with a knife to my wrist, I decided it was time to address my lingering issues once and for all. I scoured the Internet for the best treatment facilities designed for borderline patients and landed upon one near Boston.

  I told my friends in Beirut I would be gone for a while, although I didn’t tell all of them why. I did confide in Josh and Pete, though. By coincidence, Pete was about to move to Gaziantep, Turkey, where he would be working full-time with his NGO in Syria. I threw us a joint good-bye party at my house before we both left, and
the night before, Pete and I drove around buying booze and snacks.

  At one point, we started talking about our childhoods, and Pete gave a big sigh.

  “My parents always loved me,” he said sadly. “Very much. But it never felt like enough. It’s always seemed like I’m desperately alone, and I keep waiting for someone to fill that void inside me.”

  I looked at him from the passenger seat with surprise. I had no idea he felt this way, under his ranger drawl and good humor. “I know exactly what you’re saying,” I replied.

  The party was a lot of fun. I had never been quite accepted by the foreign journalist clique in Beirut, but I made some friends that night I probably wouldn’t have otherwise. We spent most of the night drinking and talking politics, to the dismay of any nonjournalists who happened to be unfortunate enough to find themselves in the room with us.

  “Poor things.” Pete laughed at one point as someone beat a hasty retreat from a conversation about chemical weapons casualties. “They must think we’re nuts.”

  I soon left Beirut for New York, where I was waiting to be admitted to the treatment center. A month later, in October of 2013, Pete messaged me on Facebook. I hadn’t spoken to him since the party.

  “Hey girl,” he typed. It was kind of late, maybe 11 P.M. I was lying on my couch considering going to bed. “I miss you!”

  “I miss you too, Mr. Pete,” I replied. “Where are you?”

  “I’m in Aleppo, we’re being shelled.”

  “Shit, please be careful.”

  “Hey,” he wrote. “You know I love you, right?”

  “I love you too, Pete,” I told my friend, a little surprised at this expression of emotion. “Stay safe for me, okay?”

  A few days later, Josh happened to be visiting me in the city and was crashing on my couch. One night, before we were about to go out for drinks, he looked up at me from his computer with stunned eyes.

  “They took him,” Josh said to me unbelievingly. “ISIS has Pete.”

  9. THE HUMAN INTELLIGENCE

  History is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging. What has happened before will perforce happen again.

  —GEORGE R. R. MARTIN

  NOW

  There are few heroes in the Holy Land.

  The Middle East is known as the cradle of civilization, because it includes Mesopotamia, widely considered to be the place where six thousand years ago, a species of nomadic hunter-gatherers decided to stop wandering and root themselves to one area. Once that occurred, they were free to harness their evolutionary gift of superior intelligence and build cities, farm, develop social systems, and record their thoughts in writing.

  Much of humanity seems to have nurtured a fascination with the region since. The three major Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—all originated there. From the Crusades to twentieth-century neocolonialism to our present-day preoccupation with its affairs, the Middle East has emerged as a focal point for dramatic conflict. And given the human tendency toward black-and-white thinking, it makes sense that we often succumb to the fantasy that a particular side in the struggle is “right.” We desperately want to believe that a certain political actor is morally sound and engaging in the good fight against a villainous entity.

  I believe this is a fallacy that should be immediately dispensed with. In my experience, with very few exceptions, any heroism that takes place in the region does so on an individual or small-scale level. People like my friend Pete show up there and engage in acts of incredible self-sacrifice. Certain locals give their land to refugees or start philanthropic NGOs with no agenda other than helping those less fortunate—things like that. There are certainly some lovely glints of humanity that polish the darkness. But I’ve come to understand that any sort of participation in Middle Eastern politics—or politics in general, actually, but especially so in the Middle East—involves a long process of sacrificing morals one by one. This is not to say that some sides aren’t simply more cruel and brutal in their tactics than others, because that’s quite clear. Bashar al-Assad, for example, or IS.

  Contrary to what is overwhelmingly believed in the United States, I think the Israeli-Arab conflict is a solid illustration of this concept. So while I am careful about how far I’ll pursue Zein’s claim that the Israeli government turned Asgari, who was essentially at the center of the Islamic Jihad’s terrorism spree, into a high-level intelligence source, I can’t in good conscience abandon the theory altogether. It has just as much circumstantial evidence behind it as other, more widely accepted and established theories surrounding this event—and my experience with Middle Eastern politics has already informed me to ignore what I’ve heard about there being a “good guy” in this conflict. Plus, I must admit that I feel the pull of the idea strongly. I already dislike the way the Israeli government has behaved in the region. It would be so easy—and certainly tempting—to find that it played a destructive role in my own personal history. But I have to keep reminding myself that it’s been thirty years since this happened and there’s less than a snowball’s chance in hell of my miraculously stumbling upon any incontrovertible proof.

  So I take Zein’s accusations to my sources. Let’s be clear: lots of them don’t consider it a possibility. Wright, Goksel, Crocker, even Baer—I bring Zein’s allegations to almost all the sources I already interviewed, and most of them say it’s crazy talk. I have to give that all the weight it deserves, and I often question whether this was just one of those weird red herrings that pops up in many investigations and I should just keep moving forward. Then I feel the idea pull me back into its grip, and I find myself nursing an obsessive preoccupation with this version of events, which spurs my reporter’s instinct to drop it altogether for fear of sacrificing my perspective to bias. I argue with myself about it constantly and often end these internal dialogues drained, half-convinced I should run screaming from this whole mess.

  Somewhat to my surprise, though, not everyone I speak with dismisses the idea so readily, and some of those willing to consider it a possibility are not the types to spout lunatic conspiracy theories. The first person to tell me it’s not out of the realm of possibility is David Hirst, former Middle East correspondent for the Guardian and author of Beware of Small States, the book about Lebanon that captured my interest when I was just starting my career.

  “Are you saying the Israelis were engineering some of the kidnappings through agents in Iran?” Hirst asks me when I describe the theory during our interview.

  “I’m not saying that I necessarily believe this, but it’s something I’ve been told,” I respond.

  “Well, it’s not inconceivable,” he says. “The fact that the Israelis were involved in Irangate, supplying weapons to the Iranians in the way that they did, with American connivance . . . it’s not inconceivable, and . . . well, the Israelis are capable of extraordinary things. For example, the bombing of the Liberty . . . but something like this would be almost impossible to prove.”

  He’s correct, of course, about it being impossible to prove, but Hirst does bring up two interesting points. The first, regarding the USS Liberty, is only relevant insofar as it offers some historical context. During the Six-Day War in 1967 between Israel and Arab nations supporting the Palestinians, an Israeli jet fighter and several of Israel’s torpedo boats attacked the Liberty in the waters off the Sinai peninsula, killing thirty-four American servicemen and wounding almost two hundred. The Israelis apologized and said they had mistaken the American ship for an Egyptian one, and that’s the explanation that’s been widely upheld over the years. But many crew members who survived the attack and some educated observers disagreed, saying it had to have been deliberate. In any case, it demonstrates that the “special friendship” between Israel and the United States wasn’t without turbulent episodes.

  And if one closely examines the relationship between the United States and Israel at the time of my father’s abduction, there are some interesting details that provide a
bit of fragile contextual support for the idea that Israel wasn’t behaving quite like the friendly ally it was supposed to be. While the multinational peacekeeping force that the United States led was seen by many Lebanese as supportive of Israel, it was originally formed with the intention of allowing the Palestinians to evacuate safely, and that was a responsibility it seems that Reagan took seriously. In that capacity, the United States often clashed with Israel, especially after the Sabra and Shatila massacres. When you think about it, the peacekeeping force’s objective was to help Lebanon stabilize, and for an enemy nation all too eager to watch Lebanon destabilize, that would have been inconvenient.

  For example, the marines stationed in Beirut frequently clashed with Israeli forces, and in March of 1983, the commandant of the marine battalion in Lebanon sent a letter to the secretary of defense charging that Israeli troops were deliberately threatening the lives of marine peacekeepers. My father told me a story, which is also documented in a New York Times article from February 1983, about how a marine captain actually climbed into an Israeli tank, drew his gun on an Israeli lieutenant colonel, and said the tanks would pass “over [his] dead body.” Apparently, the Israelis were trying to horn in on an area controlled by the peacekeeping force and refused to back down when told it was off-limits to them. The incident resulted in the United States lodging complaints with none other than the Israeli chargé d’affaires, Benjamin Netanyahu, under whose command all this harassment and intimidation of American troops was taking place.

  Right around now, I begin to ask myself some very important questions. I’m well aware of what I’m risking by even pursuing the idea that our supposedly closest ally had intelligence regarding terrorism against us, chose not to share it, and even possibly manipulated the circumstances so it would benefit from the violence. This line of reporting would be considered career suicide by 90 percent of established American journalists. That is by no means something I take lightly. I fought hard for this career—I have no wish to see it crumble before my eyes.