NEW YORK — Terry Anderson, the Associated Press travel correspondent who became one of America’s longest-held hostages after being snatched from a street in war-torn Lebanon in 1985 and held for nearly seven years, is died at age 76.
Anderson, who recounted his kidnapping and tortured imprisonment by Islamist militants in his best-selling 1993 memoir “The Lions’ Den,” died Sunday at his home in Greenwood Lake, New York, said his daughter, Sulome Anderson.
Anderson died following recent heart surgery, his daughter said.
“Terry was deeply committed to eye-witness reporting on the ground and demonstrated great bravery and determination, both in his journalism and during his years as a hostage. We are very grateful for the sacrifices he and his family have made through his work,” said Julie Pace, AP senior vice president and editor-in-chief.
“He never liked being called a hero, but that’s what everyone kept calling him,” Sulome Anderson said. “I saw him a week ago and my partner asked him if he had anything on his bucket list, anything he wanted to do. He said: “I have lived so much and done so much. I am happy.'”
After returning to the United States in 1991, Anderson led an itinerant lifestyle, giving public speeches, teaching journalism at several prominent universities, and, at various times, running a blues bar, a Cajun restaurant, a ranch horses and a gourmet restaurant.
He also suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, gained millions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets after a federal court found the country played a role in his capture, then lost most of them because bad investments. He filed for bankruptcy in 2009.
Upon retiring from the University of Florida in 2015, Anderson settled on a small horse farm in a quiet, rural part of northern Virginia that he had discovered while camping with friends.
“I live in the country and it’s pretty nice and quiet here and it’s a nice place, so I’m good,” he said with a laugh in a 2018 interview with The Associated Press.
In 1985, Anderson became one of several Westerners kidnapped by members of the Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah during a period of war that had plunged Lebanon into chaos.
After his release, he received a hero’s welcome at AP headquarters in New York.
Louis D. Boccardi, the AP’s president and CEO at the time, recalled Sunday that Anderson’s plight was never far from the minds of his AP colleagues.
“The word ‘hero’ is thrown around a lot, but applying it to Terry Anderson only reinforces it,” Boccardi said. “His six-and-a-half-year ordeal as a hostage to terrorists was as unimaginable as it was real – in chains, transported from hideout to hideout, strapped to the chassis of a truck, fed often inedible food, cut off from the world he spoke of with such skill and attention.
As the AP’s chief Middle East correspondent, Anderson had been reporting for several years on rising violence in Lebanon as the country fought a war with Israel, while Iran financed militant groups trying to overthrow his government.
On March 16, 1985, a day off, he had taken a break to play tennis with former AP photographer Don Mell and was dropping Mell off at his home when armed kidnappers dragged him from his car.
He was probably targeted, he explained, because he was one of the few Westerners still in Lebanon and because his role as a journalist aroused suspicion among Hezbollah members.
“Because in their terms, people who ask questions in difficult and dangerous places must be spies,” he told the Virginia newspaper The Review of Orange County in 2018.
What followed was nearly seven years of brutality during which he was beaten, chained to a wall, threatened with death, often with guns pointed at his head, and kept in solitary confinement for long periods.
Anderson was held the longest of several Western hostages kidnapped by Hezbollah over the years, including Terry Waite, the former envoy to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who arrived to try to negotiate Anderson’s release.
According to accounts by Anderson and other hostages, he was also their most hostile prisoner, constantly demanding better food and treatment, discussing religion and politics with his captors, and teaching other hostages sign language and where to hide messages so they can communicate privately.
He managed to maintain a sharp wit and a biting sense of humor during his long ordeal. On his last day in Beirut, he called the leader of his captors to his room to tell him that he had just heard an erroneous radio report announcing that he had been released and was in Syria.
“I said, ‘Mahmound, listen to this, I’m not here. I’m gone, babies. I’m on my way to Damascus. And we both laughed,” he told Giovanna Dell’Orto, author of “AP Foreign Correspondents in Action: World War II to the Present.”
He later learned that his release was delayed when a third party to whom his captors planned to deliver him left for a tryst with the hostess of the party and they had to find someone else .
Mell, who was in the car during the kidnapping, said Sunday that he and Anderson shared an unusual bond.
“Our relationship was much broader and deeper, and more important and meaningful, than this single incident,” Mell said.
Mell credited Anderson with launching his career in journalism, pushing the young photographer to be hired full time by the AP. After Anderson’s release, their friendship deepened. They were each best man at each other’s weddings and were in frequent contact.
Anderson’s humor often hid the PTSD he admitted to suffering from for years.
“The AP brought in a few British hostage decompression experts, clinical psychiatrists, to advise my wife and I and they were very helpful,” he said in 2018. “But one One of the problems I had was that I didn’t recognize the damage enough. it had been done.
“So when people ask me, you know, ‘Are you done?’ Well, I don’t know. Not really. It’s here. I don’t think about it much these days, it’s not central to my life. But it’s there,” he said.
Anderson said his faith as a Christian helped him let go of his anger. And something his wife later told him also helped him move on: “If you keep hatred, you can’t have joy.” »
At the time of his kidnapping, Anderson was engaged and his future wife was six months pregnant with their daughter, Sulome.
The couple married shortly after his release, but divorced a few years later and, although they remained on good terms, Anderson and his daughter remained estranged for years.
“I love my father very much. My father always loved me. I just didn’t know because he wasn’t able to show me,” Sulome Anderson told the AP in 2017.
Father and daughter reconciled after the publication of her critically acclaimed 2017 book, “The Hostage’s Daughter,” in which she recounts her journey to Lebanon to confront and eventually forgive one of the hostage’s captors. his father.
“I think she did some extraordinary things, took a very difficult personal journey, but also did some pretty important journalistic work,” Anderson said. “She is now a better journalist than I ever was.”
Terry Alan Anderson was born on October 27, 1947. He spent his early childhood in the small Lake Erie town of Vermilion, Ohio, where his father was a police officer.
After graduating from high school, he turned down a scholarship to the University of Michigan and enlisted in the Marines, where he rose to the rank of staff sergeant while participating in combat during the Vietnam War.
Returning home, he enrolled at Iowa State University where he double majored in journalism and political science and soon after went to work for the AP. He worked in Kentucky, Japan and South Africa before arriving in Lebanon in 1982, as the country was descending into chaos.
“In fact, it was the most fascinating job I’ve ever had in my life,” he told The Review. “It was intense. The war continues, it was very dangerous in Beirut. A vicious civil war, and I lasted about three years before being kidnapped.
Anderson was married and divorced three times. Besides his daughter, he is survived by another daughter, Gabrielle Anderson, from his first marriage; a sister, Judy Anderson; and a brother, Jack Anderson.
“Although my father’s life was marked by extreme suffering during his time as a hostage in captivity, he has found a quiet and comfortable peace in recent years. I know he would choose to be remembered not because of his worst experience, but through his humanitarian work with the Vietnam Children’s Fund, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Homeless Veterans and many other incredible causes,” Sulome Anderson said in a statement Sunday.
Memorial arrangements were being made, she said.
—-
Weber reported from Los Angeles. John Rogers, a retired Associated Press writer, contributed biographical material from Los Angeles.