John McCarthy
On 17 April 1986 television journalist John McCarthy was kidnapped in Beirut by the terrorist group Islamic Jihad. Like Islamic Jihad’s other prisoners – among them Terry Waite, Brian Keenan, Tom Sutherland, Frank Reed, David Jacobsen – he was held in isolation, squalor and usually chained. His captivity lasted for five years, during which his then girlfriend Jill Morrell campaigned ceaselessly for his release.
The next morning we were given breakfast by Sayeed and Mustafa and taken to the bathroom. Daylight flooded in, cheering our spirits. Then came the rattle of chains. They brought them into the room with them. They fixed a bolt to the wall, then the chains to the bolt. I couldn’t believe it. I knew that the Yanks had been chained up before, but it was such an awful thought that I’d tried to blot out any notion that it could happen to me. Yet here it was. My immediate reaction was to laugh, “You cannot be serious.” They were. No humour could break this impermeable human ice. They were set.
Brian was furious. He could easily believe they’d do it.
“I am a human being, not an animal. You are destroying my dignity as a human being.”
“We are sorry, this for your security.”
“For our security! That’s crazy, you’re destroying our security completely!”
“No, this is good for your security, if you chained then you won’t try escape and we won’t have to shoot you, so you safer with chains.”
With this surreal logic, they chained us up.
I was a man, and in my mind I knew it, but what was happening to my body told me otherwise. The guards lifted and pulled our legs around as if they weren’t attached to a person. They experimented with the length and tightness of the chains as if it were a normal exercise, part of a regular working day, two men working on repairing a bit of office equipment, deciding the best spot for a new piece of furniture. It was bitterly demoralizing that men could do this so naturally, that it was possible for them to ignore our humanity so casually. It also boded ill for any ideas of release.
We’d had our blindfolds on for more than thirty hours. That meant that the guards were permanently around. Any move was tense, but this time we had moved continuously, and the blindfolds had been taped tight over our eyes. Physically this was very uncomfortable, but the torment of going, sightless, to an unknown fate was unbearable. Whenever we were like this I had to loosen the binding so that I could feel, even in the darkness of a metal box or the boot of a car, that I was going out with my eyes wide open.
There was also the difficulty of walking blindfolded. In the prisons we learned the route to the bathroom and anyway would be able to look down our noses and see a small area around our feet. Most of the guards were quite happy with this, even pulling up our blindfolds a little if we stumbled, so that we could move more easily. However, other guards, the nervous or sadistic ones, insisted we had them on tight. The sadists enjoyed pushing us around in our blind confusion.
You never, ever, get used to being blindfolded. It was always a cold shock when talking to a guard, especially if it was a friendly conversation, to realize, “He’s talking to me in this pleasant, intimate way, yet he can’t see me, and won’t let me see him.” Any warmth was rendered meaningless. It was so sad to think this was the only level on which these guys could operate. If they felt shame, their fear of us and their bosses overrode it – that’s assuming they ever did consider what they were doing. Every time we took them to task for their treatment of us, we got nowhere. The incessant commands for silence, the chains, the blindfolds, all reflected their own insecurity, their lack of real power.
After the first couple of days, life settled back into the usual routine of food deliveries and bathroom runs. The pressure was slightly eased when they put a curtain across our door so that at least we could raise our blindfolds more often. But we still had to keep almost silent, speaking in only the lowest of whispers.
In the mornings, after the guards had finished their dawn prayers, they would usually go back to bed for a while. As the light strengthened outside I often peeked through a crack around the cardboard that had been taped over the window. Just outside I could see greenery, what looked like a privet hedge in the foreground and beyond that a tall tree. The glimpse of trees, the sounds of street life and the thin band of daylight moving across the ceiling and down the walls as another day passed never failed to lift my spirits.
We had no books now, nor even our faithful set of dominoes. We talked as much as ever despite the closeness of the guards – more so perhaps, for we were both highly nervous. The uncertainty of what might come next, Sayeed’s insane praying and, above all, the new and terrifying shock of being chained up kept us constantly on edge. Even the homey nature of our cell was a vicious tease emphasizing, through its incongruity, that we might be displaced again at any moment. Our nervousness came not so much from fear, as from the impossibility of calming down, of “settling” in this place. The slightest thing would set us off into uncontrollable fits of giggles.
Our nerves were so stretched that even pet jokes became unnecessary. Merely saying each other’s name or just sighing was enough to render us hysterical. This madness became more acute at night, perhaps as subconsciously we prepared ourselves for the eerie ordeal of listening to Sayeed’s prayers. Faith, or psychosis, prompted him to pray all night, alternating the praying with readings from the Koran. These would almost immediately reduce him to tears, raving over the words. I know this can happen to fervent devotees, but in Sayeed it didn’t seem genuine. He’d switch back to normal in a second if he got up for a drink or to give an order. He made a deafening racket and it was often so alarming that I couldn’t sleep through it. Brian was less affected by it and once Sayeed broke off his wailing to pull back the curtain and tell me to make Bri stop snoring. It was crazy.
In the first week of April our guards were joined by a new man who spoke very good English. On his arrival he came and asked us how we were. He seemed more sophisticated than the others and was obviously more powerful. Brian made it clear that we were not happy and that while some of the guards were all right, others were evil men who had beaten us for no reason. He apologized, explaining that some of the “brothers” were poorly educated and couldn’t understand that hostages should be treated differently from enemies or criminals. He promised to speak to them and remarked that just as we were being tested by our experience, so, too, was God testing the “brothers” in the way they treated us. Fine sounding phrases, but as meaningless as the claims that the guards were as much prisoners as we were.
The next day Brian was unchained and moved out of the kitchen. I was afraid that we would be separated or that we were in for yet another move. In fact Bri was only moved to the far side of the room next to the kitchen, where the guards initially had based themselves. I heard the English speaker talking to him. He seemed to be asking questions. He then came to me and gave me some sheets of paper with questions written out on them. I had to fill in the answers.
The questions struck me as being rather mundane, but their curious use of English made me smile. “What is a news?” “How you make a news for TV?” I could answer those fairly easily, concerned only that the answers might be too technical or boring. As with Sayeed’s interrogation back in November there were questions about my life, family, work and all the places I’d ever visited. After a couple of hours I had worked my way through them. The man returned, thanked me and gave me another great wodge of papers to go through.
I was quite enjoying the limited mental exercise of planning the answers and putting them down coherently on paper, the only such opportunity, apart from the necessarily brief messages we’d exchanged in the Land of Grey and Pink, that I’d had in almost a year. But now the questions were getting more detailed. “Give names for all your organization’s offices in the world.” I listed as many as I could remember. They wanted to know how the company budgets were organized. This was something I’d never been involved with so said as much, but privately regretted that it took oddly phrased questions from my kidnappers for me to realize how little effort I’d made to understand the workings of my company.
I had a chuckle when they asked, “List all details of corruption in your organization.” Apart from the odd lunch on somebody’s company credit card, posing as an executive from another TV station, I really didn’t know of anything. When the man came back again, I explained that I couldn’t answer some of the questions but he seemed unperturbed. He said that he would give me more questions the next day.
I couldn’t follow what was going on at all. There had been no threats, no force, indeed the man had been very polite. Nonetheless, I couldn’t get one of Tom Sutherland’s jokes out of my mind. Hand-talking one day about the difficulties of sleeping, he’d said, “It reminds me of the joke about the guy who says to his wife, ‘Be sure and get a good night’s rest, honey, there’s something very important I want to tell you in the morning.’ ” Like the woman in the story I didn’t sleep a wink.
The following morning, after breakfast and the bathroom run, the man came to me again. My imagination had been working overtime all night, convincing me that things would soon get very unpleasant, that I would be “interrogated” in a more direct and painful way. But no, I was just presented with another batch of written questions.
This time, however, they were more to the point. “List all your contacts with secret services (any country)”, “Give the names of all secret people who have spoken to you in Lebanon.” This struck me as being quite barmy. If I had been a spy surely I would have known how to dodge the obvious questions? They repeated some of the earlier ones about news so I reckoned that there might be some method in their madness and decided that simple, honest answers would still be best. I wrote that I’d had no contact with any secret service people from anywhere and that if any spies had made contact with me they hadn’t told me about their private business. Knowing that I wasn’t a spy made it all seem rather pointless, even though it was mildly amusing. What did bother me was that they might find out that WTN was largely owned by ABC, the company who had managed to get an exclusive on the TWA hijack/hostages story in Beirut in 1985. This was widely seen as having been made possible through throwing bundles of money at powerful Shia leaders and having powerful friends in high places in and around Washington, DC. If they knew I was linked to ABC, I feared they would become suspicious, or feel that I was more valuable and hang on to me even longer.
When the fellow came back, I told him I’d answered his questions as well as I could, but that the replies seemed very dull. He didn’t seem worried and asked if I would like anything. I said that I wanted to write a letter to my family and my girlfriend. It had been a year since I’d seen or spoken to them. Surprisingly, he agreed and gave me a sheet of paper. How could I convey in such a small space what had happened to me, my fears and my concerns for those I loved? I wrote first to my parents and brother. I wanted them to know that I was all right and that I was in good spirits. I hoped that their fears for me would be eased if my letter sounded optimistic. I said that I was fine and that conditions weren’t too bad. I told them how much I loved them and how thinking of things in the past often had me laughing out loud. I said I was sure I would be home soon. I asked them to tell Jill that I loved her very much and that she mustn’t worry about the time we’d lost, that we were both young and that we had the whole of our lives to live and enjoy together. The man took the letter away but returned after a while, saying he had read it and thought that my “spirit” was very good. He said his friends felt the same.
I was pleased but felt rather uncertain. It seemed to imply that the guards thought I was co-operative. Brian and I had worked so hard to keep each other’s spirits up and work together to maintain our dignity in the face of constant humiliation that it was a mixed blessing to have our success endorsed by the people who were holding us down.
The man also added that he was going to take my answers to some other “brothers”. I just hoped they would be as satisfied as he seemed to be. I wanted to believe that all the questions were aimed at proving to the British government that my kidnappers did hold me, although I had to admit to myself that it was a very long-winded way of doing it. With this hope in mind, I asked the man what the “brothers” purpose was in asking all these questions. “We want to be sure you are what you say.”
“But I’ve been here a year, haven’t you done that already?”
“No, now we will be sure and hope for negotiations.”
“You mean there haven’t been any yet?”
“No, but now we hope for a quick solution to your problem.”
That quick solution was more than four years away.
It was a great relief when Brian was moved back into the kitchen with me. Our visitor had left, all his questions answered, and we tried to put some positive meaning into the little information we’d gleaned from him. It wasn’t easy. In fact, he’d only confirmed our worst fears, that no-one had been negotiating on our behalf and we both had the clear impression that they hadn’t made any demands for us. Like me, Brian had been allowed to write a letter. We could only hope that these would be sent so that at least they’d know back home that we were all right.
Mahmoud came in and told us he was very happy that we’d said good things about him. We tried to take advantage of his good mood to get a clearer idea of where things stood.
“Your friend told me that negotiations would now start. What do you want and how long will it take?”
“I am sorry I do not have the order, but I hope you go home very soon.” The same old story.
The next day was the first anniversary of Brian’s kidnap, 11 April. That night Sayeed came and said we were moving to a better place. He unchained me, told me to pick up my clothes and led me to the front door of the house. Standing on the doorstep he put a gun to my back and said I must walk straight across the road to his friend. The night was very quiet. Underneath my blindfold I could see the rutted track in the moonlight. I sensed the village sleeping around me. Should I make a run for it? Would it be possible in these floppy plastic sandals? How far would I get barefoot with at least two men after me? What would Bri do if I made it without him? Sayeed pushed the pistol in my back. I stumbled across the road.
I knew that there were two guns pointing at me but at least I was walking freely, with no tape or chains binding me. It felt good.
On the other side of the road Mahmoud led me up a flight of stairs and told me to sit in the corner of a room. Brian joined me a few minutes later. Our mattresses were brought in and we were told to go to sleep – hard to do with the guards staying in the same room. We slept fitfully and at dawn they were up praying.
The next day they fitted bolts to the wall and chained us to them. Then they stretched some wires across our corner and hung curtains from them so that we found ourselves in a sort of tent. This gave us a little privacy and we could raise our blindfolds, but our guards were living in the same room and we never had a moment to forget them. A new man, Abu Salim, joined Mahmoud and Sayeed. The three of them were incredibly noisy. They would have the radio and television going full blast at the same time. At prayer times they would often have a tape machine playing “Nadbars”, Moslem chants, so that we found it impossible either to think or to relax. Their mattresses came right up to the curtain so that now I had one or two extra heads snoring within arm’s reach.
Abu Salim soon demonstrated that he was one of the would-be holy-macho brethren and would compete with Sayeed as to who could pray the loudest, hissing and clicking his fingers at us if we whispered or even just sighed. He liked clicking his fingers. He’d click at us to indicate that we should leave the bathroom. It irritated me so much that he couldn’t even bother to say “dah”, come, that I would stand in the bathroom doorway clicking my fingers back at him until he either said something or came and grabbed me. One morning I was desperately tired and so furious at the row from the radio that I started clicking my fingers over the top of the curtain. He came over hissing like a goose. I kept on clicking until he put his head through the curtains and then, pointing to my ears, I whispered, “Radio, radio”, and made a lowering motion with my hands. He clicked and hissed, but did go and turn the thing down. It was a minor achievement, but it made me feel a hell of a lot better.