Terry Anderson, the globe-trotting Associated Press correspondent who became one of America’s longest-held hostages after he was snatched from a street in war-torn Lebanon in 1985 and held for nearly seven years, has died at 76.
Anderson, who chronicled his abduction and torturous imprisonment by Islamic militants in his bestselling 1993 memoir Den of Lions, died on Sunday in at his home in Greenwood Lake, New York, said his daughter, Sulome Anderson.
The cause of death was unknown, though his daughter said Anderson recently had heart surgery.
Terry Anderson in 1999. Photo: AP
After returning to the United States in 1991, Anderson led a peripatetic life, giving public speeches, teaching journalism at several prominent universities and, at various times, operating a blues bar, Cajun restaurant, horse ranch and gourmet restaurant.
He also struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder, won millions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets after a federal court concluded that country played a role in his capture, then lost most of it to 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 section of northern Virginia he had discovered while camping with friends. `
“I live in the country and it’s reasonably good weather and quiet out here and a nice place, so I’m doing all right,” he said with a chuckle during a 2018 interview with Associated Press.
In 1985 he became one of several Westerners abducted by members of the Shia Muslim group Hezbollah during a time of war that had plunged Lebanon into chaos.
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After his release, Anderson returned to a hero’s welcome in New York.
Anderson, chief Middle East correspondent at Associated Press, had been reporting for several years on the rising violence gripping Lebanon as the country fought a war with Israel, while Iran funded militant groups trying to topple its government.
On March 16, 1985, a day off, he had taken a break to play tennis with photographer Don Mell and was dropping Mell off at his home when gun-toting kidnappers dragged him from his car.
He was probably targeted, he said, because he was one of the few Westerners still in Lebanon and because his role as a journalist aroused suspicion among members of Hezbollah.
“Because in their terms, people who go around asking questions in awkward and dangerous places have to be spies,” he told the Virginia newspaper The Review of Orange County in 2018.
British former hostage Terry Waite at Bedawy refugee camp in Lebanon in 2004. Photo: Reuters
What followed was nearly seven years of brutality during which he was beaten, chained to a wall, threatened with death, often had guns held to his head and often was kept in solitary confinement for long periods of time.
Anderson was the longest held of several Western hostages Hezbollah abducted over the years, including Terry Waite, the former envoy to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had arrived to try to negotiate his release.
By his and other hostages’ accounts, he was also their most hostile prisoner, constantly demanding better food and treatment, arguing religion and politics with his captors, and teaching other hostages sign language and where to hide messages so they could communicate privately.
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At the time of his abduction, Anderson was engaged to be married and his future wife was six months pregnant with their daughter, Sulome.
The couple married soon after his release but divorced a few years later, and although they remained on friendly terms Anderson and his daughter were estranged for years.
Father and daughter reconciled after the publication of her critically acclaimed 2017 book The Hostage’s Daughter, in which she told of travelling to Lebanon to confront and eventually forgive one of her father’s kidnappers.
“I think she did some extraordinary things, went on a very difficult personal journey, but also accomplished a pretty important piece of journalism doing it,” Anderson said. “She’s now a better journalist than I ever was.”
Anderson was married and divorced three times. In addition to Sulome, he is survived by another daughter, Gabrielle Anderson, from his first marriage.