At Last, the Agony Is Over

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

For the 39 American hostages, their anxious relatives in the U.S., and for officials in Washington, Damascus and Jerusalem, the weekend had sent emotions spiraling from hope to gloom and back again. The captives were on their way to freedom, the White House had announced before dawn on Saturday. But no. They were still in Beirut. The carefully crafted plan for their release had gone awry. Darkness fell in the war-torn city, and the hostages were once again split into groups and sent back to their beds in the secret hideaways of their Shi'ite Muslim guards from Lebanon's Amal militia. When they awoke on Sunday, they had no way of knowing how much longer their ordeal would last.

But soon they were on their way back to a schoolyard in an Amal-controlled neighborhood in Beirut. Waiting for them were at least ten Red Cross vehicles that would take them to Damascus, where a U.S. Air Force C-141 StarLifter transport was ready to fly them to West Germany and freedom after 17 days of the televised Terrorist Suspense Spectacular.

At 5:45 p.m. Beirut time, 10:45 a.m. in Washington, the freedom ride finally began along the mountainous 75-mile road to Damascus. Accompanying the hostages were armed escorts from Amal and from another Lebanese faction, the Druze. Also in the caravan were representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross and Syrian army officers and security agents, which helped emphasize the pivotal role Syria had played in arranging the release of the long-waylaid passengers and crew of TWA Flight 847.

"It's great, it's great, we are going home," one of the Americans called out to journalists. The TWA pilot, Captain John Testrake, shook hands with some Lebanese bystanders and then climbed into the lead Red Cross car. The convoy was headed by a Lebanese Army truck with an antiaircraft gun, and there were others mounted with heavy machine guns. Shortly before beginning their 3 1/2-hour drive to Damascus, the Americans were given flowers, farewell tokens from their captors. Reporters were kept away by militiamen, who fired shots into the air and rolled unprimed grenades toward the startled newsmen.

The White House, exercising extreme caution, made no official statement about the hostage release until National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane verified through official sources that the convoy had reached the Syrian border. Then, at 2:05 p.m., White House Spokesman Larry Speakes made a brief statement, including the President's response. "That's very welcome news," said Ronald Reagan. Using pilots' slang for airborne, he added, "Let me know when they are wheels up."

( The hostages arrived in the Syrian capital on Sunday evening to face a crowd of reporters and the ubiquitous television crews that had become integral players in the long ordeal. Serving in his role as spokesman for the hostage group once again, Oil Executive Allyn Conwell tactfully thanked Syrian President Hafez Assad, whose portrait hung over the speaker's table, for his negotiating efforts. Said Conwell: "For anyone and everyone who has prayed for us, talked for us, waited for us, hoped for us, we thank you from the bottom of our heart." As for the hijackers, he added, "I don't seek any retaliation or revenge. I think all of the men here would like to see justice prevail." All of the hostages who spoke seemed to feel some empathy for the Amal militiamen who had taken over custody of them from the original hijackers. They said they had learned a lot and been well treated in captivity. After 20 minutes, pleading exhaustion, Conwell cut off questioning and the group left for Damascus Airport.

After the hostages had cleared Middle East airspace, Reagan appeared on nationwide television to deliver a brief address that combined relief and anger. "We can be thankful that our faith, courage and firmness have paid off, but this is no moment for celebration," said the President. "The U.S. gives terrorists no rewards and no guarantees. We make no concessions; we make no deals," he went on. "Nations that harbor terrorists undermine their own stability and endanger their own people.

"Terrorists, be on notice: we will fight back against you in Lebanon and elsewhere," the President warned. "We will fight back against your cowardly attacks on American citizens and property. We call upon the world community to strengthen its cooperation to stamp out this ugly, vicious evil of terrorism." How strongly the President felt was revealed by a remark he made into an open mike before his statement: " After seeing Rambo last night, I know what to do next time it happens."

From Damascus the hostages were to be flown to Rhein-Main Air Base, near Frankfurt, then taken to a U.S. military hospital at Wiesbaden for medical checkups. This route to freedom was hauntingly familiar. The U.S. embassy personnel who were held captive for 444 days by militants in Iran had followed virtually the same routine in 1981.

Shortly before the hostages started off on their momentous journey home, the Israeli Cabinet was holding its regular Sunday meeting in Jerusalem. It took no action, at least officially, on the continued detention of 745 Lebanese civilians, most of them Shi'ites, whom Israel has held at Atlit prison since its withdrawal from southern Lebanon. The Israelis thus preserved both their own and Washington's stipulation -- and virtual fiction -- that there could be no direct linkage between the release of the American hostages and the Lebanese prisoners, as the hijackers had demanded.

Nonetheless, the arrangement worked out by the three governments presumably calls for the freeing of the Lebanese, perhaps as early as this week for at least some, and the U.S. had a "tacit understanding" with Israel that this would occur. An Israeli military source told the Associated Press after the Cabinet session that he expected the release of the detainees to begin within several days. At least some hiatus was necessary, he said, to prevent the appearance of a quid pro quo deal. The release schedule also depended on the security situation in southern Lebanon, he added.

The main reason for the nerve-racking 24-hour delay in the release of the hostages was a last-minute demand by Nabih Berri, leader of the Amal militia, that Washington give assurances there would be no retaliation by the U.S. or Israel against the Shi'ites after the hostages were set free. Amal spokesmen conveyed their anger at some remarkably ill-timed remarks on Friday by Reagan. In the speech in Chicago Heights, Ill., the President called the captors "murderers and barbarians," adding ominously: "Terrorists, and those who support them, must and will be held to account."

The White House privately set about "clarifying" Reagan's remarks, but by late Saturday night an official statement was deemed necessary. The State Department at 10 p.m. released a Delphic sentence presumably designed to allay the sensitivities of the Shi'ites. It stated, "The U.S. reaffirms its long- standing support for the preservation of Lebanon, its government, its stability and its security and for the mitigation of the suffering of its people." McFarlane, looking tired but sounding optimistic, had driven his own car to the White House at 6:20 a.m. on Sunday, where he confirmed that the statement was "apparently a factor" in the breakthrough. He called it "a fairly artificial requirement that came up at the eleventh hour."

Amal leaders seemed to be satisfied. One militiaman quoted Syrian officials as saying that the U.S. had given an assurance not to retaliate. As Berri explained to reporters on Sunday, "We were ready to take them to Damascus yesterday, but after Reagan threatened us we had to delay their departure. I had to talk to the hijackers and to my people."

On Sunday, however, McFarlane insisted that Reagan's statement was not responsible for the delay. Rather, he said, it was used as "a pretext" by those Shi'ites who had doubts about the arrangement. When Reagan was informed that the plan seemed to be coming unraveled, he told his aides: "Well, these things happen, but we're right in our policies and it will work out." Iran, officials suggested, probably contributed to the weekend delay. Syria, however, helped keep the diplomatic dialogue on track. It was through Syria that the U.S. learned that some declaration about no retaliation was desired. When an adviser telephoned Reagan about the proposed State Department announcement, the President said, "It's a restatement of policy. If it helps, so be it, but we're not changing course."

Another serious obstacle that developed on Saturday morning was that Berri's militia did not have control over four of the captives, who were being held by Shi'ite extremists of Hizballah (Party of God).

After the hostages had been reunited on Sunday, the four confirmed that they had been removed from the aircraft on its second visit to Beirut and were not part of the group that had been taken into custody by the Amal militia. The hostages said that they had been detained for the first nine days in what they called "a bunker" in the Bekaa Valley. The first time they had seen the other hostages was last Tuesday night when they were brought to Beirut for a visit by Red Cross officials. "We were pretty frightened," admitted Robert Trautmann, Jr., one of the four. "But they didn't maltreat us, and the food was kind of O.K." After nine days they were moved to what Trautmann called "a better place, which had proper toilets."

Confirmation of the rumor that four Americans had been kept apart from the other hostages took place in a dramatic on-camera television scene that was carried to the U.S. by satellite. It happened on Saturday morning in the schoolyard near the Beirut airport, where the hostages and their luggage were assembled for what was expected to be an imminent trip to Damascus. It looked like a rather shaggy adult-education class being called to order, except for the gun-toting Amal guards watching from rooftops. In his now familiar crisp tones, Allyn Conwell called out the names of his 38 fellow American hostages, only 31 of whom answered "here" or "present." Three of those absent were not a cause of alarm. They were the crewmen of the TWA jet, who had been kept in the aircraft most of the time and were known to be in the hands of the Amal militia. But the other four should have been at the school. After the roll call, the hostages sat next to their bags and waited. And waited.

Meanwhile, a vigil had been in progress roughly 50 miles southeast, at the Lebanese-Syrian frontier. U.S. Ambassador to Syria William Eagleton, Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shareh and other officials of both nations had gathered at noon on Saturday to greet the hostage convoy. They also waited. And waited.

The hostage roll call and the border vigil by the diplomats were repeated on Sunday. This time all 39 Americans were together. After a quick calculation to make sure no one was missing, Conwell shouted, "Do you all want to go home?" In unison they replied, "Yeah!" Added Conwell: "O.K., fellows. I think we made it." This time the convoy did roll, and the patience of all of the negotiating parties in the strange deal that no one wanted to admit was a deal had finally been rewarded.

In the end, the key to the release seemed to be a most unlikely liberator, Syria's Assad. Though he is an ironfisted dictator and a Soviet ally, Assad has carefully nurtured a reputation as a man who can be relied on to deliver on any deal to which he puts his name (see box). It was his involvement and coordination with Washington that produced Sunday's success.

Throughout the week, events had seemed to grow increasingly surreal as the hostages, whose freedom seemed so tantalizingly out of reach, were continually shown on television eating, talking and even driving themselves around Beirut with their captors. For days, Amal guards brought small groups of hostages before television camera crews for interviews that were replayed incessantly in the U.S. Though some of the hostages confessed to depression and anxiety, others, presumably to reassure their watching families, mugged and shouted "Hi, Mom!" as if they had been filmed at a picnic. White House officials protested that television was playing into the captors' hands, primarily by giving them the very world publicity they coveted. "This is bizarre," stormed one Reagan aide. "It can only screw up what we are trying to do."

There were some indications that the interviews were carefully stage-managed. Jimmy Dell Palmer in captivity was pictured playfully waving a pistol in front of an Amal guard. After he was freed last Wednesday, in advance of his comrades, he said he had argued against being photographed in that pose but yielded to persistent demands from his captors.

Other hostages told TV interviewers that they were being treated well by the Amal militiamen who had taken them away from the original hijackers, and their appearance did not contradict those assertions. Three hostages were interviewed by ABC's Charles Glass at the end of lunch in what looked like a pleasant seaside cafe near Beirut. Conwell, who lives in Muscat, Oman, went so far as to assert that "many in our group have a profound sympathy for the cause" of their Amal captors, namely freedom for 745 Lebanese held in an Israeli prison.

The resolution of the hostage crisis, however, involved not public interviews in Beirut but a tense backstage diplomatic drama on three continents. On Monday, Berri had seemed intransigent. He dismissed as insignificant Israel's release of 31 Lebanese prisoners early in the week. What about all the Lebanese still held in Atlit? he asked. He threatened to turn the hostages back to the original hijackers. One U.S. official went so far as to predict that "we probably are not going to get all these people back in any event."

By Tuesday morning, Speakes was openly warning of economic and military pressure against Lebanon. He even mentioned two specific options: closing the Beirut airport, presumably by organizing a world boycott of Lebanon's Middle East Airlines, the only line still operating there; and "cutting off goods and services," presumably by naval blockade. According to one White House official, the decision had been made that "it was time to turn up the heat and display some power." At an afternoon meeting between Reagan and his advisers, Secretary of State George Shultz pleaded for more time to give diplomacy a chance "to bear fruit." Speakes then implied a deadline. The President, he told the press, would apply pressure if diplomacy failed to produce results "in a day or two."

It took only hours. Wednesday morning, Berri summoned reporters and TV crews to the hot, crowded basement under his office in West Beirut to broadcast "my answer to threats from America." First, Berri announced the release of Palmer, 48, a hefty air-conditioning technician from Little Rock, who was seated next to him. Palmer suffers from high blood pressure and a heart condition.

Then came a seemingly offhand bombshell. Said Berri: "We are prepared to hand the kidnaped persons over to a Western embassy, Swiss or French, whichever they (U.S. officials) choose." Alternatively, he said, Amal might "send the airplane with all the hostages to Damascus." Berri attached one giant condition: Syrian President Assad, or whoever else took custody of the Americans, would have to pledge not to set them free until all Lebanese prisoners in Atlit had been released by Israel. In Washington, White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan was awakened at about 3:30 a.m. by a call from the White House Situation Room alerting him to Berri's statement.

Shultz spoke out Wednesday night to add what seemed to be a major American condition to the secret negotiations. In a speech delivered in San Francisco, the Secretary of State said the U.S. would insist that not 39 but 46 American hostages be released "unharmed and unconditionally." In addition to those aboard TWA Flight 847, he was referring to the seven "forgotten hostages" who had been kidnaped one by one from the streets of Beirut during the previous 16 months. Berri has insisted that he did not have any control over the seven and did not even know where they are being held.

Switzerland convened an emergency Cabinet meeting on Thursday and, according to a Foreign Ministry source, "informed Berri that we would be happy to take the American hostages in our Beirut embassy but on our conditions, not his." The Swiss conditions: the hostages would be flown immediately from Beirut to Switzerland, and Bern could then set them free "at the time of our choosing."

All this left Syria as the most promising intermediary. Even though Syria is far from an ally, Washington was anxious to get the hostages out of Beirut and into Damascus, where the U.S. has a well-staffed embassy that would be dealing with a full-fledged government. (The Lebanese government, in which Berri is Minister of Justice, exists to a great extent only on paper.) Assad had been in contact with both Shultz and Reagan and promised to try to play a helpful role. Since his troops occupy strategic portions of Lebanon, he has influence with all factions in that nation's internal wars.

Assad managed to extract an important clarification from each side. No happier than France or Switzerland to act as a warden over U.S. prisoners, he - persuaded Berri to stop demanding that the hostages remain in Syria until all of Israel's detainees were released. Conversely, from Washington he won an assurance that those detainees would be granted their freedom. Ironically, in the same Friday speech that evidently angered Berri, Reagan carefully reaffirmed that fact. "Israel had always intended to release them and had made that very clear," said the President.

Israel thus found itself in a most uncomfortable position. The prisoners had been taken out of Lebanon by withdrawing Israeli occupation forces. Long before the TWA hijacking, the U.S. contended that transferring them to Atlit violated the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Israeli officials were keenly and resentfully aware that they were likely to be blamed if any foot dragging about release of the Lebanese prisoners prolonged the captivity of the American hostages, and they were concerned about endangering their all- important relationship with the U.S. But they had another imperative to consider: Israel cannot afford to look as if it is yielding to Arab terrorism. U.S. officials were nonetheless saying that Israel would be "no problem."

Although it would run into unexpected delays, the arrangement had been settled on by Friday night. Assad by then had emerged as the intermediary who would take custody of the hostages from Berri and quickly set them free. Berri had agreed to hand over the Americans without any prior or even simultaneous release of the prisoners in Atlit. That would save face for the U.S. and Israel; both countries had insisted that any outright swap would constitute a payoff for terrorism. It was assumed that Israel would begin "unilaterally" setting the Atlit prisoners free as soon as the American hostages were at liberty. Such a release had in fact been planned and promised before the hijacking drama began.

Syria's offer to accept the hostages made it clear that their time in Syria would be short. Word that the arrangement was essentially complete was received by the White House about 7 p.m. Friday. Damascus wasted no time in going public with the news. All American television networks were able to get the report on their 7 p.m. newscasts. The announcements, both in Syria and the U.S., added to the pressure during the tense hours of Saturday to assure that the arrangement did not fall through.

When the hostages finally return to their hometowns for what will be a particularly jubilant Fourth of July week, the celebrations may begin to drown | out the pain that they and their nation have suffered during the 17-day ordeal. But even the more-or-less successful resolution of the hijacking (tending to be forgotten was murdered Navy Diver Robert Stethem) seems unlikely to discourage those who would use hostages as pawns in a political power game and terrorism as a form of propaganda theater. On the contrary, the astonishing adroitness that a militant faction in an anarchic country displayed in monopolizing world attention, in effect holding Washington and much of the American public hostage, is an ominous sign.

Once negotiations were under way, officials from Washington to Jerusalem to Beirut were forced into a symbolic dance under the TV lights. The substance of a solution was not all that problematic. It was obvious from the start that it would have to involve the release of both the hostages and Israel's Lebanese prisoners. All parties seemed willing to accept that. Yet enormous efforts had to be made to avoid any public appearance of a swap.

The final arrangement may be justified as the price a caring nation must pay for the lives of a group of its citizens. For the fact that the hostages are returning home unharmed, the nation can and should feel thankful. But for very little else.

With reporting by John Borrell/Beirut and Laurence I. Barrett and Johanna McGeary/Washington