‘I’m amazed people remember me. They stop me in the street’
As he turns 80, former Beirut kidnap victim Terry Waite tells Robert Mendick how his ordeal continues to shape his life
It was seven years ago that I took Terry Waite back to Lebanon to meet his kidnappers. We landed at Beirut airport and summoned a taxi – one of those big old Mercedes saloons that are so familiar in the Middle East – and clambered in. Terry sat in the front, a big man, all 6ft 7in of him occupying the front passenger seat and blocking my view.
“Are you OK there?” I shouted to him from the back, aware of my own responsibility in bringing Terry back to this place. “I’m absolutely fine,” he replied. Deep pause. “The last time I was in one of these,” he continued,
his voice reverberating about the interior of the car, “I was in the boot.” I remember thinking at the time how his sense of humour, often quite black, must have helped get him through such an ordeal.
Today, Terry Waite turns 80 and is in a reflective mood. It is more than 32 years since he was kidnapped in Beirut on January 20 1987 and almost 28 since his release on November 18, 1991 “after 1,763 days in chains”.
I had accompanied Terry back to Lebanon in 2012, ostensibly to highlight the plight of Christian refugees flooding across the border from Syria. But once there, two days into the trip, he had declared he wanted to meet the doctor who had betrayed him and the terrorists who had kidnapped him. It had culminated in a midnight drive to Hizbollah’s headquarters in a high-rise residential block in southern Beirut, where dozens of families were living above and below the offices to deter Israel
‘Looking back, if I could choose, I would probably choose to be kept on my own’
from bombing its leadership.
Terry was funny but brave. He was also keen to try new experiences; meet new people and build new bridges.
Life for him, you get the impression, is still a chance to learn. Seven years on from our Beirut adventure, we met up again, this time at his country home in Suffolk, a cottage dating back almost 700 years that sits on the fringe of a pretty English green. It could not be further removed from the chaos and noise of Lebanon.
A voracious reader and writer, he also travels the UK, giving talks and signing his books. He was held for five years in solitary confinement: chained, blindfolded, occasionally tortured, with no one to talk to. Now he can’t sit still. Two days before this interview, he had been at a reunion of old school friends and neighbours who grew up together in Styal, the picturesque Cheshire village where his father was the resident police constable.
“Fifty people turned up. Most of them were bent double. One of them was in a wheelchair with Parkinson’s,” says Terry, who hasn’t lost an inch of his huge frame. “It’s luck of the draw. Although a lot of it is attitude, too, when you’re getting older. I was talking to my next door but one neighbour. She lost her husband, then her dog, and her whole routine has gone. You need routine, something to get up for. It’s nice to keep busy.”
He reels off the book festivals he has recently attended, the talks he has given to police and the Foreign Office on dealing with kidnappers; his work with the homeless and in prisons.
“My aim when I came out of captivity was to give my time to various organisations for free and to earn a living from writing and lecturing, and I’ve done that. It’s coming up for 28 years [since being held hostage] and it’s amazing people still remember. People still stop me in the street.”
He had travelled to Beirut as the special envoy to Robert Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to negotiate the release of John Mccarthy, Brian Keenan and other western hostages. Through the Eighties, he had been involved in other, successful hostage negotiations, including the release of Christians held in Iran and western hostages in Libya. Photographs on the wall of his kitchen show him with dignitaries from the Queen, Pope John Paul II and President George H Bush to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.
But it had gone wrong in Beirut in 1987. He was treated worse than the hostages he was trying to get released. They had each other for company but he was alone until the final few months of his captivity.
Earlier this month, he and Mccarthy were reunited for the first time in two decades, at the Lebanese embassy in London. “I first met him after he’d been in solitary for four years. I’d spent my time with other hostages but he’d been on his own,” Mccarthy told me. “But when we met, he just said, ‘Hello. Are you all right?’ I always wondered how he managed to stay so normal.”
“You have to relearn connections,” Terry says now, adding: “I think, looking back, if I could choose to be with others or by myself, I would probably choose to be on my own.”
Two years ago, he wrote a book called Solitude about what it’s like to be truly alone; visiting a ranch in Australia’s outback 400 miles from the nearest shop and meeting George Blake, a former British spy and double agent for the KGB, who had escaped from Wormwood Scrubs in 1966.
Terry, you feel, enjoys the isolation his tiny Suffolk village offers, preferring it to the London home he shares with Frances, his wife of 55 years. They have four children and three grandchildren.
Even at 80, he yearns for adventure. He plans a return to Beirut this year, invited by Lebanon’s ambassador to Britain. Seven years ago, when we met Hizbollah, Terry had given an impromptu speech, telling its leading officials he forgave them. Hizbollah said they were delighted to have him back in the city but insisted they were not responsible for his detention. “They denied kidnapping me,” recalls Terry. “But when I was in captivity, I never received any correspondence except for one card, the John Bunyan card
[reproduced on the front pages of most newspapers at the time]. On one side there was a message and on the other my name, with the address blanked out. Years later, I got in touch with the person who posted it. I said, ‘Thousands of cards were sent, yours was the only one that got through. What address did you put?’ He said, ‘I sent it to Terry Waite, c/o Hizbollah, Party of God, Lebanon’. They denied the kidnapping but really it doesn’t matter.”
That sort of sums up Terry Waite: a big, kindly man, now aged 80. He doesn’t bear a grudge. He just wants us all to forgive each other.