The Hostage's Daughter

by Sulome Anderson

  “Congress was aggrieved, but everybody else quietly said, ‘Okay, let’s get this out, but let’s do it in such a way that we don’t have to see Reagan go through the same thing that happened to Nixon,’” Oakley says.

  “Didn’t all this have an adverse effect on the subsequent negotiations to get my father and the others out?” I ask him.

  “Absolutely. We had stopped paying. So he was stuck.”

  Oakley is my first reliable source to confirm my suspicion that the government’s actions actually may have prevented my father from being released for several more years. And as I continue to talk to people in D.C., many of them tell me the same thing: the arms-for-hostages deals probably prolonged his hell.

  It’s a sickening thought, and it angers me. It was one thing for people in the government to make such a colossal miscalculation out of the humanitarian desire to free its citizens. But if the arms deals were more calculated—and politicians as well as the people around them aren’t generally known for the purity of their motives—that will be difficult to understand, or forgive.

  From what I’ve been told, Reagan at least genuinely cared about the hostages’ fate. Whether that was out of concern for the hostages themselves or anxiety over the political fallout their continued captivity was having on his administration, I can’t say. But there is significant evidence indicating that the neoconservatives in his administration who engineered Iran-Contra had been nurturing secret arms deals to Iran via Israel way before my father was taken, and it wasn’t out of the goodness of their hearts.

  The most famous conspiracy theory regarding pre-Iran-Contra dealings between the neocons, the Israelis, and Iran has become known as the October Surprise narrative. Its proponents claim that just before Reagan became president, some who were lined up to be in his administration used nearly the same cast of characters that they later employed in the arms-for-hostages scandal to achieve a seriously disturbing goal. According to this version of events, officials like McFarlane and Michael Ledeen—another neocon Iran-Contra figure—wanted to ensure that the Americans taken captive in Tehran when the Iranians took over the U.S. embassy during the 1980 presidential race between Carter and Reagan (the Ben Affleck movie Argo recounts events surrounding this episode) would not be released until after Reagan was inaugurated. The hostages were actually freed twenty minutes after the conclusion of his inaugural address.

  I won’t get into the whole thing too much, other than to say that while it is largely dismissed today, players such as Yitzhak Shamir and former Iranian president Abolhassan Banisadr continue to insist that it happened. Supposedly the Reagan administration, with the help of then–Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and the Iran-Contra arms dealers and middlemen, supplied people in the Iranian regime with arms shipments from the United States in exchange for a promise not to release the hostages to the Carter administration, which was suffering the intense political fallout of not being able to free them. Carter—never a friend to the Israelis regarding their Palestinian policies—was replaced by a significantly more pliable Reagan, who received a huge boost in popularity and a reputation as a hostage-freer.

  The October Surprise narrative appears to have been debunked by a number of influential people, so it’s been labeled a conspiracy theory, and it does seem farfetched on the surface. There is other evidence to suggest that U.S. arms deals with Iran predated Iran-Contra, though. In a 1991 PBS Frontline interview, Nicholas Veliotes, assistant secretary of state for the Middle East at the time, described his investigation of an Argentinian plane that crashed in the Soviet Union in July 1981. Several newspapers, including the Sunday Times, reported on the mysterious plane crash. To make a long story short, Veliotes maintains that Israel had chartered the plane and it was carrying U.S. weapons to Iran. According to declassified government documents, McFarlane and his cronies had been pushing for permission to use Israel as a channel for weapons deals with Iran for some time, and when their proposal was dismissed, it seems they went ahead and did it anyway.

  But why would they have taken such a risk? Fear of Soviet influence in Iran was very real then, so that might have been part of the impetus—the neocons wanted to signal to Iran that it had no need to break bread with the USSR because there were friendly faces in Washington. But it’s probable that they were highly encouraged by the Israeli government to maintain this weapons pipeline. Israel was in the midst of establishing its “periphery policy” at the time and wanted to strengthen ties with Iran to thwart its greater enemy, Iraq. Israeli politicians may have wanted to make certain their Iraqi nemesis didn’t gain the upper hand, so they channeled weapons to Iran, knowing that Iran would be using them against their foe. Also, I imagine quite a bit of money changed hands along the way as a result of these arms deals, and much of it likely ended up in Tel Aviv. Israel was and still is a cornerstone of the global arms trade.

  As for the Iranians, they may not have changed their angry rhetoric toward Israel, but Iran was in a viciously even-matched war with Iraq and needed weapons, so it couldn’t afford to be choosy as to where they came from. We know from Iran-Contra that the U.S.-Israel-Iran weapons pipeline was fully functional, so it’s not that much of a stretch to consider that it may have been in place before the leaked arms deals. In any case, there’s an argument to be made that McFarlane and his neoconservatives had another agenda in mind when they triggered Iran-Contra, and it had nothing to do with saving Dad or the other hostages. To some of the more unscrupulous actors in Iran-Contra, my father and the others may have just been an excuse they needed to continue pursuing whatever political agenda led them to nurture the idea of using Israel as a go-between for weapons deals with Iran.

  There’s another factor that contradicts the notion that every American involved in Iran-Contra was just a naive bumbler trying to do what was best for all the hostages. One of the first men to be kidnapped was William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut. He was taken hostage in March 1984, a year before my father. This posed a major problem for the U.S. government and, of course, the agency.

  I meet with an ex-C.I.A. chief active at the time of my father’s abduction. He asks to remain anonymous, and is about as evasive as I expected him to be. But he does have a few things to say about Buckley.

  “We were dealing with the Buckley abduction quite a lot,” he tells me. “[William J.] Casey [director of the CIA at the time] was very concerned about Buckley, who was asked to go to Beirut; he didn’t volunteer. He seemed like a good choice because he had a military background. He wasn’t your ordinary liberal arts case officer . . . he wasn’t delighted at the idea of going, but he was a good soldier, and he went. We would be getting reports that he was being tortured. This really set Casey on edge . . . Buckley was sort of a tragic figure.”

  A Washington Post story by Bob Woodward and Charles Babcock, published not long after Iran-Contra broke, went as far as to say that rescuing Buckley “became a CIA crusade and a personal preoccupation of William J. Casey . . . For at least a year, the CIA undertook extraordinary measures—spending a ‘small fortune’ on informants, according to one source—intercepting communications and enhancing satellite photographs in hopes of determining where Buckley and other U.S. hostages might be held.”

  That might explain why Casey threw his lot in with the neocons despite the fact that his own agency had blacklisted the shady Ghorbanifar. Their plan seemed like the best way to get his man out.

  So it was likely a convergence of political interests, not simple altruism, that spurred the Iran-Contra arms deals. I’m sure some of the people involved had the best of intentions, but no country wants a man who has all its secrets in the hands of people who hate it.

  Whatever the motivations, the scandal that ensued after Iran-Contra was leaked to Ash-Shiraa ensured that the U.S. government essentially had its hands tied from that point forward. No one wanted to be caught negotiating with terrorists again. The government had undermined its own famously stern assertion once, and after tha
t, it was unable to negotiate effectively, for fear of public outcry.

  That lesson has not been forgotten, even thirty years later. Iran-Contra forever changed the way the United States interacted with hostage-takers and shaped the government’s approach to the many fanatics who continue to take up the cause of the IJO and other militant groups—such as the Islamic State. The scandal also dictated the way the media treated kidnappings thereafter. As Americans continued to disappear across the Middle East, “quiet diplomacy” and silence in the press became the accepted tactic; at least until IS began its social media campaign of videotaped beheadings in 2013. After that, kidnappings became front-page news again; another headline I end up in, against my will—but we’ll get to that.

  As for the American government, “We do not negotiate with terrorists” has become “We don’t talk to terrorists who kidnap people,” which in my opinion isn’t a helpful policy, especially from the perspective of anyone unlucky enough to be taken hostage.

  By this point in my investigation, I’m starting to seriously consider the idea that the U.S. government not only bungled the negotiation attempts, but directly extended my father’s captivity, most likely by four to five years. Everything I’ve learned about the Middle East has made me question the idea that America has ever been the “good guy” in the region, but this is personal, and after what I’ve been learning, it’s difficult for me to contain my anger with the country I’ve always been taught to honor and respect.

  Despite my misgivings, during my interview with Oliver North, I treat him like I would any other subject, with courtesy. North has managed to turn his reputation around since he was implicated in Iran-Contra: he’s the author of several bestselling books and, currently, the host of his own show on Fox News. During our phone call, he blames a lot of what happened on other people: a liberal Congress that wanted to take Reagan down, a media eagerly reporting information that would endanger Americans overseas.

  I ask him why so many of the men involved in Iran-Contra, including himself, managed to escape the scandal with minimal repercussions. He seems a little bit outraged at the suggestion.

  “We were all subjected to a very rigorous ordeal because of politics in Washington,” he tells me. “We had a liberal Congress, and they were adamant that there would be repercussions for the president. The special prosecutor offered me a deal: if I would accuse the president of lying, he would drop all charges against me. That’s how blatant it was. It was an effort to get Ronald Reagan and it didn’t work.”

  “I’ve heard from a number of sources that this scandal had an extremely adverse effect on the government’s ability to negotiate [with the terrorists], because it was under so much scrutiny after the affair broke,” I say. Then I ask him, “Do you in any way feel like your actions or the actions of those senior to you contributed to the length of my father’s captivity?”

  “I have no doubt that all the public disclosures, beginning with the congressional investigations and consummated by the special prosecutor, were responsible for your dad, Terry Waite, and others, some of whom died . . . being held for so long,” North counters. “I told them at the time, ‘If you hold public hearings on this, people are going to die.’ And they did, both in the Middle East and in Latin America.”

  “And you feel that was a result not of your actions, but the public reaction.”

  “There are covert operations being conducted right this second in various places around the world, any one of which could end up with people getting killed,” he replies. “Congress has lots of different ways of investigating things, but . . . they decided to bring it out in the open . . . thousands of classified documents, many of which I wrote or crossed my desk, were all declassified, and the result was that Americans were put at risk. Some, like your dad, were held longer; others, such as Terry Waite, who had tried simply to be an intermediary, were captured and taken. Others were killed. And that will happen every time classified information of that nature is declassified. I didn’t make that call. Ronald Reagan didn’t make that call. Congress did.”

  Ultimately, our conversation is frustrating. I am angry afterward, but not surprised; North just repeated to me the same things he’s been saying all along.

  But bringing up Terry Waite seems pretty ballsy, considering North has been accused of indirectly causing his kidnapping. Waite was working for the archbishop of Canterbury at the time. Before the scandal broke, he was recruited to negotiate the release of the Western hostages in Lebanon because he had previously been successful with similar negotiations in Libya. Apparently, North and the other Iran-Contra players wanted a cover story for why hostages were being released; since they couldn’t very well say it was happening because of illegal arms deals.

  The only problem was, after the real story came out, Waite elected to go back to Lebanon and continue negotiating. As a result, he was kidnapped himself, and held for more than four years, some of which he spent in a cell with my father.

  I Skype Waite from my apartment in New York City. I’ve always had enormous admiration for this man, who shares a lot more with my father than just a first name. Waite operates numerous charitable ventures, including Y Care International, the YMCA’s international relief agency, and Emmaus UK, an organization devoted to helping formerly homeless people. He tells me a bit about the charity work he’s done in Lebanon too. Like my father, since his release Waite has actually been back to meet with Hezbollah members, something I find astonishing.

  “I believe that in the Middle East, there’s no way there can be any resolution to the problems . . . unless people can put the past behind them and engage with groups like Hezbollah,” he says in his thick British accent. “I told them as far as I was concerned, let’s make a new beginning. I asked them for heating oil for Syrian refugees, and they gave it to me.”

  Waite tells me his kidnapping was an example of the dangers posed by negotiating with hostage-takers without solid protection from a government.

  “The real problem facing an independent negotiator such as myself is . . . if you’re able to make contact successfully, you can guarantee that every other country that has an interest in that situation will want to know you through their intelligence agents,” Waite says. “And you have to be careful, because on the one hand, you want to give aid and support to those who are trying to seek the release of innocent people. On the other hand, if you have any political savvy at all, you will recognize that governments often play out other political agendas around hostage cases. So you’re in a dangerous position, because you have to cooperate to some extent, but you can never cooperate fully, because you know there’s a chance that political activities will be taking place about which you know nothing. And that’s how I got caught out by Iran-Contra.”

  Waite recounts being encouraged by the U.S. government, and especially by North.

  “After Ben Weir and Martin Jenco were released, I was told it was a sign for me to keep up my efforts,” he says. “I was the only negotiator at that point to have face-to-face contact with the captors, as far as I know.” His efforts, as well as the deceptions of U.S. intelligence agencies, would eventually cost Waite his freedom.

  I ask Waite whether he believes the U.S. government was truly driven by concern for my father and the other hostages, or whether there was a more cynical reason for their actions.

  “I think there were two motivations,” he replies. “I won’t say there was no humanitarian motive. I believe there was a desire to get the hostages released. But it was all mixed up with seeking political advantage. Precisely what they were seeking and why, I haven’t explored, but almost always, where governments are concerned, it’s a blend of humanitarian concerns and broader political dealings . . . as a humanitarian negotiator, you have to take note of the political factors, but that isn’t your primary motive . . . and you try to maintain a strict boundary, but you have to tread in those waters, and sometimes you get caught by a wave, as I did.”

  In his book Decoy in a D
eadly Game: Terry Waite and Ollie North: The Untold Story of the Kidnapping—and the Release, British journalist Gavin Hewitt wrote North had been heard bragging that Waite made an excellent cover for the arms deals. But when I ask Waite if he’s angry that his role as “cover” resulted in four years of captivity, he says he holds no grudges. My dad has always said he feels similarly about the men who kidnapped him—something I have trouble wrapping my mind around. It’s a noble thing, to bear no bitterness toward the people who caused you so much pain and took years of your life. I’m not sure if I’d be able to do the same, in their situation.

  “That’s politics, and that’s the way people operate,” Waite says. “They’ll have to live with their own consciences, as I will mine.”

  Right before we say good-bye, Waite stops me. “There is one thing I’d like to say about your father, if I may. I owe Terry a very great debt of gratitude, because for most of my time I was in extreme solitary . . . it was very difficult to come out of that and back into the company of other people, particularly at a time when I was severely ill with a bronchial infection. I couldn’t lie down at night; I had to sit with my back against the wall gasping for breath, and your father would reach across and put his hand on mine. He was remarkably compassionate, and he didn’t say anything at all . . . he was a great support, and I’d just like you to know that. I know Terry’s had his ups and downs, but he is an extraordinarily good man.”

  This floors me. I’ve always been so angry with Dad for his inability to be a good father; I failed to consider whether he is a good man. I’m somewhat surprised to realize that despite his difficulty in building a bond with me, all evidence points to the fact that he is. Maybe sometimes, good men make bad fathers, especially when they’ve been robbed of as much as Dad has. As far as I know, he never had a particularly inspiring model for good parenting to begin with. An unhappy childhood, two tours in Vietnam, reporting on war, and then being kidnapped and brutalized for seven years would emotionally cripple anyone. Maybe—and this is a thought that hasn’t occurred to me before, although perhaps it should have—my dad tried his best to love me the way I needed him to. Maybe he just wasn’t equipped to do so.