Terry Anderson, one of America’s longest-held hostages in Lebanon, has died. He was 76.
Anderson, who worked as a correspondent for the Associated Press, was held for about seven years starting in 1985 when he was abducted from a street in Lebanon, per Politico.
He died Sunday in his home in Greenwood Lake, New York, according to his daughter, Sulome Anderson, who said Terry Anderson had heart surgery recently, per the outlet. The cause of death has not been released.
Terry Anderson’s life as a hostage started on March 16, 1985, when he was taken by “gun-toting kidnappers,” Politico reported.
Terry Anderson himself said he was probably targeted since, as of the few Westerners still in Lebanon, he questioned what was happening.
“Because in their terms, people who go around asking questions in awkward and dangerous places have to be spies,“ he said in a 2018 interview with The Review of Orange County in Virginia.
For about seven years, 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,” per Politico.
He was the longest held of Western hostages Hezbollah abducted over the years, the outlet reported.
By all accounts, including his own, he was not a silent hostage as he often would demand better food and treatment. He would also argue with his captors over politics and religion, per Politico, adding that by teaching other hostages sign language, he enabled them to communicate secretly.
After his release in 1991, Terry Anderson gave public speeches, taught journalism and dabbled in the restaurant business.
He won millions of dollars after a federal court ruled Iran played a part in his time as a hostage. He then lost that money due to poor investments and filed for bankruptcy in 2009, Politico noted.
Since his release, he was haunted by his time as a hostage.
“The AP got a couple of British experts in hostage decompression, clinical psychiatrists, to counsel my wife and myself and they were very useful,” he said. “But one of the problems I had was I did not recognize sufficiently the damage that had been done.
“So, when people ask me, you know, ‘Are you over it?’ Well, I don’t know. No, not really. It’s there. I don’t think about it much these days, it’s not central to my life. But it’s there.”
Anderson wrote about his abduction and imprisonment by in his best-selling 1993 memoir “Den of Lions.”
