No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one’s life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.
—ORSON SCOTT CARD
NOW
The afternoon of May 28, 2015, is dragging its feet. It’s the very last day of my third trip to Lebanon in five months; I have a flight to catch at eight the next morning. All my efforts to persuade the Masuul to finally set a date for this interview have proven fruitless. Desperate, I call my fixer and ask him what we should do.
“Fuck it,” he says colorfully. By now, the poor man has spent an extraordinary amount of time trying to get the Masuul to sit down with me. In many ways, it’s become his quest as well as mine, although he too has asked me not to include any identifying information about him because he wants to avoid the headache Hezbollah would give him for bringing me around these people. “Let’s just go. He can’t ignore us if we’re outside his house.”
So we jump in the car, drive to Jnoub, and call the Masuul when we’re five minutes away. Arab hospitality being the revered institution it still is in those parts, he can’t really say no. When we arrive, he welcomes us in and we sit down in his living room as he serves us coffee and presses a cigarette on me.
I light it and feel the smoke curl around my face. The Masuul and I look at each other. The moment is like a foundation stone finally shifting into place. It feels as inevitable as a mountain avalanche in winter.
Before we got there, my fixer told me to act as though I didn’t know the man the Masuul had spoken about was actually him, but the pretense is immediately dropped by us both. The Masuul must understand that I know who he is by the set of my shoulders when I walk into his house, the confusion in my eyes. He spreads his hands, almost helplessly.
“You should be interviewing the American soldiers on the New Jersey who killed our people after they lied and said they were neutral, then took the Israelis’ side,” he tells me as I jot down his words in my notebook. He’s referring to an incident in which the U.S. battleship fired upon Druze and Shia militias in the hills overlooking Beirut. For some reason supposedly having to do with bad gunpowder, the ship’s fire was disastrously inaccurate, some shells missing their targets by ten thousand yards. When the dust settled, hundreds of civilians in the Shia suburbs of Beirut lay dead. Many cite the USS New Jersey incident as a pivotal moment in the Lebanese civil war, after which the neutrality of the U.S. force in Lebanon came under serious question and Lebanese Muslims began to believe the United States had chosen the side of the Christians and their Israeli sponsors.
“Do you know why we kidnapped your father?” the Masuul asks me. “It was nothing personal. Our fight was not with Terry Anderson or the other hostages. Our fight was with the people who had slaughtered our families.”
“But you ruined my family,” I tell him.
The Masuul holds my pain up to the light and examines it. I can tell it hurts him to look at it. He sighs. “When we took your father, we weren’t thinking about you,” he replies. “You’re sitting here in front of me now. You’re a decent, good, respectable girl. I like you very much. And I liked your father. He is a good man, the best out of all those we took. But it could have been anyone. If someone else had caught our eye, we would have taken him. I look at you now and I feel for you. I think about your father and I feel for him too. But at the time, we didn’t see your father as Terry Anderson, the person. To us, he was America.”
“But he didn’t do anything to you,” I point out. “What made you think kidnapping an innocent man was the right thing to do?”
“We were desperate,” the Masuul says simply. “We were a tiger in a cage, without food or water, beaten every day. We just couldn’t take any more. We had to do something.”
When I ask him about the rumors of American incompetence and Israeli involvement in the kidnappings, his posture becomes stiff and guarded.
“We didn’t know anything about the Israelis,” he says quickly. “We weren’t working with them or anything. But let’s just say they ate it up because it made us look bad to the world. We’re still paying that price today. But we didn’t know.”
So he doesn’t want to talk about that. I don’t blame him. If the allegations about Asgari being an Israeli asset are true, the men involved are now members of Hezbollah, and might be embarrassed at having been penetrated at that level. Also, the last thing any Hezbollah member wants is the intimation that they were working with the enemy. I change the subject.
“You broke my father’s mind,” I tell him shakily. “He was never the same again. I thought he would be perfect, and I was crushed.” My face feels wet. I know I’ve started to cry. Fuck. I’m surprised I have any tears left at this point in my journey.
“I’m sure,” the Masuul says sympathetically. “I didn’t expect him to be normal after what he went through.
“At the time, we all felt terrible to know you were born without a father,” he continues. I can feel him talking himself out of his shame. “We felt terrible for Terry Anderson because he had a daughter he didn’t know. But we did what we had to do to save our people. Eight of the boys in my unit were killed by Americans. I can take you to their graves the next time you come. At least your father is alive. You can see him, talk to him. I can’t ever talk to my friends again.”
“Do you regret what you did to him?” I ask. I already see the answer in his eyes, but I need to hear the answer he will give me.
“If Terry Anderson comes to me today, to my house, I will embrace him and say I’m sorry for what happened to him,” the Masuul replies. Then I hear his voice harden like frost. “But I don’t regret what I did. I did it to help my people.”
My fixer gestures for me to end the conversation, and I don’t trust myself not to say something stupid, so I thank him distantly and get up to leave. As we’re walking out the door, the Masuul stops me and takes my hand in his, ignoring his religion, which tells him he’s forbidden to touch a woman who isn’t his wife.
“Please give Terry Anderson my regards,” the man who kidnapped my father tells me with a smile. “He was always my favorite.”
I try to control my trembling on the drive home. My heart is thrumming. Fuck them all, I think. Fuck the Masuul, his friends, Iran, Israel, Hezbollah, America—they all had some part in this, whether direct or indirect. I realize it doesn’t really matter to me which of them was “responsible,” who is guilty and who’s innocent. I finally find myself knee-deep in the gray area of history, where there are no heroes, just people in all their filth and glory. The Masuul did what he did not because of some conspiracy, but because he sacrificed his morals at the altar of nationalism and revenge. Whether Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad acted separately or together; whichever faction in Iran gave the orders; whether or not there was some manipulation of the circumstances by Israel; however much America floundered and obfuscated—they all tried to use my father’s kidnapping to their own advantage. Most of them likely did the same with Pete.
As we speed down the highway to Beirut, I realize I’ve relinquished an important element in my quest to understand the humanity of the people involved with this event: politics. What drives people to erase their sense of right and wrong, allowing themselves to be manipulated like bits of plastic on a board game. Why places like Lebanon lose their beauty to violence like a flower flung into a storm. I remember something a prisoner in Roumieh once told me during an interview.
“It’s all about politics,” he said. “That’s the virus of this country.”
I go home for a couple of months, then return to Lebanon, with the intention of meeting the Masuul again. I barely know why, but I need to continue speaking with him. There’s so much I know he can tell me, and I can see that he wants to. I have no idea what is driving this man to ignore every single reason and impulse not to trust me. I don’t know why he’s revealed as much as he has. But I think about th
e stories he still has to tell, the questions he can answer for me, and I know the two of us are not finished with each other yet.
When I arrive and coordinate with my fixer, we run into an issue. Another journalist we know makes an appearance on Lebanese television and mentions his friendship with none other than retired CIA agent Robert Baer, who was active in Lebanon at the time of my father’s captivity and tasked with tracking down the terrorists—including, of course, the Masuul. This journalist also met the Masuul through my fixer and interviewed him for his own stories. The Masuul happens to see the TV show, becomes quite concerned that the journalist is a spy, and suspects me by association. As a result, that trip ends fruitlessly. But I don’t give up, and book another flight as soon as I get home.
I give it a month and a half, until I believe the Masuul has calmed down enough to agree to another meeting with me. My fixer sets up a visit to Jnoub as soon as I land. I bring a female journalist friend with me, knowing she’ll help break the ice. This time the Masuul seems to be in a good mood, and he obviously finds my friend charming. He has a wide, joyful smile that smacks me across the face every time I see it, because terrorists and kidnappers aren’t supposed to smile like that. Knowing how paranoid he is, we chat about other topics for some time. I’m trying to be cautious so as not to arouse his suspicions, but I still manage to steer the conversation around to my father’s kidnapping.
“Tell me about how you treated the hostages,” I eventually ask, knowing the answer. “Did you hurt them?”
The Masuul’s smile vanishes. He shrugs helplessly; his mouth appears empty of words. I feel his impulse to downplay their brutality, and I can see him fight it.
“What can I say, Susu?” he replies finally. My name is difficult for him to pronounce, so he’s adopted my fixer’s nickname for me. It jars me every time he says it. “I’d like to tell myself we weren’t that cruel to them, but I know we treated them very badly. Some of them worse than others, though. Your father, we all respected him. He is a tough man; he was not afraid of us. He always used to try and reason with us, explain to us why what we were doing was wrong.”
The Masuul laughs gently. “Terry Anderson is not weak. He is a hard man. He used to be a soldier, right? A marine?”
I nod, silent.
“We were soldiers of a sort. We treated him better than the others.”
“I know how you treated him,” I say quietly. “He wrote a book. I read it when I was ten.” I can feel angry tears simmering beneath the surface of my voice. I’m too worked up to speak Arabic, so my fixer translates, but I feel him shift uneasily next to me. He’s trying to soften the blow of the words, but because I understand what he’s saying, he has to communicate the message more accurately than I can tell he wants to. I can taste the tension in the room and know my fixer is mentally urging me to turn down the emotion, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to maintain my composure.
The Masuul shakes his head, again at a loss for words. “Susu,” he finally says. “What do you want me to say? I don’t know what I can tell you except that if I could, I would go back in time and put you in your father’s arms myself.”
This means little to me, but also more than I want it to.
I switch gears. “Tell me about Ali-Reza Asgari,” I say. “Was he the man in charge of the kidnappings?”
The Masuul hesitates, then gives a nervous laugh. “Where did she hear that name?” he asks my fixer.
My fixer grins. “She knows more about this subject than you think.”
“You’re good,” the Masuul says to me, wagging a finger. “You also speak more Arabic than you appear to, right? I bet you speak it as well as him and I.”
I give a brief, enigmatic smile. “Who is Ali-Reza Asgari?” I ask again.
He sighs. “What do you want to know about him?”
“I heard he was working with Israel. Is that true?”
“Why do you have to ask me that?” The Masuul groans. “I’m not supposed to talk about that.”
“Look, what you did to my father almost destroyed my family,” I tell him through my fixer. “I need to understand what happened.”
The Masuul sighs. “We didn’t know he was,” he says reluctantly. “But yes, Asgari was working with Israel. He was one of their dogs. Imad Mughniyeh had no idea; none of us did. It was a shock when we found out.”
“Was he part of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard contingent that started Hezbollah?” I ask.
“Not exactly,” the Masuul replies. “They say now in the press that he was, but he was actually part of his own group . . . People in Hezbollah knew what was happening and let it go on. You can say Hezbollah was a part of it. But Asgari was working for a cleric’s office.”
This fits with what I’ve learned about Asgari and Hashemi breaking off from the IRGC to form their own terror-exporting group in Iran. Hashemi was a cleric and seems to have established the IJO from within Ayatollah Montazeri’s office. But what if the Masuul is lying? He does have plenty of motive to place blame for the kidnappings on someone else, and what better scapegoat than his archnemesis, the Israeli government? I find myself wanting to believe his information because it fits in so neatly with what I’ve learned elsewhere. But I have to again fight my impulse to give in to certainty. I need more information, hard proof that this theory is worthy of my attentions.
Unfortunately, the Masuul looks like he’s done talking for the day. “Come back and I’ll tell you more,” he says. “Bring your friend again.”
But when my fixer calls him a few days later, the Masuul doesn’t pick up the phone; nor does he return the following dozen calls. I return home unsatisfied. The pattern repeats itself; I give him a month and a half to tell himself that I’m not a spy, then when my fixer says the Masuul is ready to meet, I return to Lebanon. Each trip hasn’t been a total loss, as I’ve filed many stories from Beirut, but I’m beginning to grow quite tired of this chase.
Then again, even if he realizes I’m not CIA, this man has every reason to think I’ll turn him in for the reward, which is still in the millions, even after all this time. Has he told the others involved about me? Maybe they’re instructing him not to meet with me, or perhaps his superiors in Hezbollah don’t approve. I’m well aware there’s no chance my jaunts down south have gone unnoticed.
When I arrive and my fixer calls to tell me the meeting is set up, I leave my friend behind. I want the truth from the Masuul, without distractions. I don’t want him downplaying his actions so as not to appear unfavorably in front of a pretty female journalist.
On this trip, I do something I freely admit to being uncomfortable with, not just because of the danger if I’m discovered, but because it seems ethically questionable to me. I record our interview without the Masuul’s knowledge. I want to protect myself from the inevitable accusations that I’m inventing this man and our meetings.
We have to pause the conversation periodically while people come in and out, asking for favors or submitting paperwork. The Masuul is a high-level Hezbollah official, so he is appointed to oversee local affairs. Each time they leave, I press him for more information.
“Why would the Israelis want to involve themselves in kidnapping foreigners here in Lebanon?” I ask.
“They were the ones who benefited from what we did,” says the Masuul. “Now the Shia and Hezbollah are known as terrorists, which is what they wanted.”
I sense his discomfort with the topic and realize I need to establish a bond, which is when I do something I generally try to avoid with sources. I give him my personal political opinion.
“I felt that from the start,” I tell the Masuul through my fixer. I can feel myself losing whatever objectivity I’ve managed to hang on to. I know I need to pull back, but I also feel compelled to show him I’m not an enemy, that I understand the struggle of his people despite what he did to my father. In this moment, I’m not a reporter. I’m a person, with the human fallacy of conviction.
This is all so he’
ll tell me the truth, I say to myself. I just need to make him trust me.
“Look, I just want you to know something,” I tell him. “I hate what those people [in the Israeli government] did to Lebanon; I think the way they’ve acted is evil. If the Israelis knew about what was happening or were involved in some way, I want to know about it.”
“Don’t press me,” the Masuul complains. “When I’m not feeling well, I don’t like to talk about these things. I promise I’ll tell you everything before you leave. You’ll take the information with you on the plane.”
I’ve heard that one before.
“Sometimes I don’t sleep,” he says suddenly. “I think about the past too much. I take four medications just to calm my nerves. The past is hunting me now. What happened cost me my health. If my son knew what happened, if I tell him, maybe when he grows up, he’ll think I’m a bad person.”
I wouldn’t blame him, I think to myself. Listening to this man talk about how hard it was for him to inflict those horrors on other human beings infuriates me, but I try to keep my tone even and pleasant.
“Ask him if it makes it worse for him to talk to me about the past,” I tell my fixer. “Or does it help?”
“I haven’t told anyone in my life about this,” he replies when my fixer translates. “I put it behind me. I never forget it, but I’m older now, I want to move on.”
A woman interrupts by coming in, asking for help with a problem. Our conversation pauses.
“Don’t think I’m sitting here, smiling and laughing,” the Masuul continues when she leaves. “We are human beings, after all. My hair turned white when I was nineteen years old. There was no stability. We’d spend the night in different places. It was chaos; you couldn’t trust anyone. Our sect was being destroyed by the war.”
“So you must feel guilty,” I say. I know he does; I can see it in his face. “That’s only human.”
“No,” the Masuul insists. “I don’t feel guilty for doing what I did. I did it for my country and my people. But it was difficult.”
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