https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/21/us/terry-anderson-dead.html

Terry Anderson, Reporter Held Hostage for Six Years, Dies at 76

The Beirut bureau chief for The Associated Press, he was kidnapped in 1985
by Islamic militants.

By Sam Roberts
April 21, 2024

Terry Anderson, the American journalist who had been the longest-held
Western hostage in Lebanon when he was finally released in 1991 by Islamic
militants after more than six years in captivity, died on Saturday at his
home in Greenwood Lake, N.Y., in the Hudson Valley. He was 76.

The cause was apparently complications of recent heart surgery, said his
daughter, Sulome Anderson.

Mr. Anderson, the Beirut bureau chief for The Associated Press, had just
dropped his tennis partner, an A.P. photographer, at his home after an
early morning tennis match on March 16, 1985, when men armed with pistols
yanked open his car door and shoved him into a Mercedes-Benz. The same car
had tried to cut him off the day before as he returned to work from lunch
at his seaside apartment.

The kidnappers, identified as Shia Hezbollah militants of the Islamic
Jihad Organization in Lebanon, beat him, blindfolded him and kept him
chained in some 20 hideaways for 2,454 days in Beirut, South Lebanon and
the Bekaa Valley.

The militants, supported by Iran, indicated that they were retaliating
against Israel’s use of American weapons in earlier strikes against Muslim
and Druze targets in Lebanon. They also had been seeking to pressure the
Reagan administration to secretly facilitate the illegal sales of weapons
to Iran — an embarrassing scheme that became known as the Iran-Contra
Affair because the administration had planned to use proceeds from the
arms sales to secretly subsidize the right-wing Contra rebels in
Nicaragua.

Mr. Anderson was the last of 18 Western hostages released by the
kidnappers. After his release, he married his fiancé, who had been
pregnant when he was kidnapped, and, for the first time, met his 6-year-
old daughter.

While he had not been tortured during his captivity, he said, he was
beaten and chained. He spent a year or so, on and off, in solitary
confinement, he said.

“There is nothing to hold on to, no way to anchor my mind,” he said after
the ordeal. “I try praying, every day, sometimes for hours. But there’s
nothing there, just a blankness. I’m talking to myself, not God.”

He found some consolation in the Bible, though, and added: “The only real
defense was to remember that no one could take away my self-respect and
dignity — only I could do that.”

Terry Alan Anderson was born on Oct. 27, 1947, in Lorain, Ohio, where his
father, Glen, was the village police officer. When he was still young, the
family moved to Batavia in Western New York where his father drove a truck
and his mother, Lily (Lunn) Anderson, was a waitress.

After graduating from high school, he was accepted by the University of
Michigan and offered a scholarship, but decided to join the Marines
instead. He served for five years in Japan, Okinawa and Vietnam as a
combat journalist and a final year in Iowa as a recruiter.

After he was discharged, he earned degrees in journalism and political
science from Iowa State University while working for a local television
station.

He worked for The A.P. in Japan and South Africa before beginning a two-
and-a-half-year stint in Lebanon in 1983.

After his release, he owned a blues bar in Athens, Ohio, and ran
unsuccessfully as a Democrat for the Ohio State Senate in 2004. He sued
Iran for $100 million in damages in a federal court and eventually
collected about $26 million from that nation’s assets that had been frozen
in the United States. His windfall lasted about seven years; he filed for
bankruptcy in 2009.

Mr. Anderson established a foundation, the Vietnam Children’s Fund, with a
friend, Marcia Landau, which built more than 50 schools in Vietnam. He was
the honorary chairman of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

He also taught at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, Scripps
School of Journalism at Ohio University, the University of Kentucky and
the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.

In addition to his daughter Sulome, he is survived by his second of three
wives, Madeleine Bassil, whom he married in 1982; another daughter,
Gabrielle Anderson; a sister, Judy Anderson; and a brother, Jack Anderson.

As much as captivity was an ordeal, Mr. Anderson recalled, so was
acclimating to what he called “the real world.”

“I had problems, and it took me a long time to begin to cope with them,”
he said. “People ask me, ‘Did you get over them?’ I don’t know! Ask my ex-
wife — ask my third ex-wife. I don’t know; I am who I am.”

“I was damaged a great deal more than I was aware of — than anyone was
aware of,” he said.

“It takes as long to recover as the time you spent in prison,” he added.

Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting.