Terry Anderson, an American journalist who had been a longtime Western hostage in Lebanon and was finally freed in 1991 after more than six years in captivity by Islamic militants, died Saturday at his home in Greenwood Lake, N.Y., on the Hudson. Valley. He is 76 years old.
His daughter, Sulomi Anderson, said complications from recent heart surgery were to blame.
The Beirut bureau chief of The Associated Press, Mr. Anderson had dropped off his tennis partner, an Andhra photographer, at his home after an early-morning tennis match on March 16, 1985, when men armed with handguns opened his car door and pushed him into a Mercedes-Benz. The same car tried to cut him off the day before as he returned to work from lunch at his seaside apartment.
The kidnappers, identified as Shiite Hezbollah fighters from the Islamic Jihad group in Lebanon, beat him, blindfolded him and chained him for 2,454 days in about 20 hideouts in Beirut, southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley.
The Iran-backed militias indicated they were retaliating for Israel's use of US weapons in previous attacks against Muslim and Druze targets in Lebanon. They sought to pressure the Reagan administration into covertly aiding the illegal sale of arms to Iran—an embarrassing plan that became known as the Iran-Contra affair, as the administration planned to secretly subsidize the proceeds of arms sales to the franchise. -wing contra rebels in Nicaragua.
Mr. Anderson is After his release, he married his fiancée, who was pregnant when he was abducted, and met his 6-year-old daughter for the first time.
While he was not tortured during his captivity, he said he was beaten and chained. He spent a year or so in solitary confinement, he said.
“There was nothing to hold on to, no way to anchor my mind,” he said after the ordeal. “I try to pray every day, sometimes for hours. But there's nothing there, just emptiness. I'm talking to myself, not to God.
However, she found some comfort in the Bible, adding: “The real security is remembering that no one can take away my self-respect and dignity – only I can do that.”
Terry Allen Anderson was born on October 27, 1947, in Lorain, Ohio, where his father, Glenn, was a 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 high school, he was accepted by the University of Michigan and offered a scholarship, but decided to join the Navy instead. He spent five years as a war journalist in Japan, Okinawa and Vietnam, and a final year as a recruiter in Iowa.
After he was discharged, he earned a degree in journalism and political science from Iowa State University while working at a local television station.
He worked for The AP 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 for the Ohio State Senate in 2004 as a Democrat. He sued Iran in federal court for $100 million in damages and eventually recovered about $26 million from the country's assets. It was frozen in America. His sudden decline lasted about seven years; He filed for bankruptcy in 2009.
Mr. Anderson co-founded the Vietnam Children's Fund with a friend, Marcia Landau, who built more than 50 schools in Vietnam. He was the Honorary President of the Committee to Protect Journalists.
He has also taught at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, the Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, the University of Kentucky, and the SI Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.
Besides his daughter Sulom, he is survived by his second wife, Madeleine Basile, whom he married in 1982; another daughter, Gabrielle Anderson; a sister, Judy Anderson; and a brother, Jack Anderson.
As the captivity was an ordeal, Mr. Andersen recalled, so he called it “the real world.”
“I had problems and it took me a long time to get over them,” he said. “People ask me, 'Did you pass them?' I don't know! Ask my ex-wife. I don't know; I'm just me.”
“I was damaged more than I knew — more than anyone knew,” she said.
“It takes as long to heal as the time you spent in prison,” he added.
Neil MacBarquhar Contributed report.
