It was in 1994, while living in Cali, Colombia, when her husband, Thomas Hargrove, an agricultural journalist, was captured by teenage Marxist guerrillas and held hostage in the Andes for nearly a year. Seeing Pearl’s picture reminded her of Tom’s “proof of life,” the term used after a kidnapping, and the title of the recent film starring Russell Crowe, which was based on her husband’s experience. At the time, Susan wondered if they could accept a two-month old newspaper as proof of life for her husband before turning over the ransom. “You don’t pay for a dead man,” Thomas Hargrove told NEWSWEEK.
Hargrove and Terry Anderson are unfortunate alumni of a select group–journalists who were taken hostage and endured long periods of captivity. No one knows what Daniel Pearl is going through, but Hargrove and Anderson can guess. In 1985, Anderson was working for The Associated Press in Beirut during the civil war in Lebanon when he was captured by Islamic Jihad radicals and held for nearly seven years. “These people probably have been very threatening to him,” Anderson said. “He’s feeling a lot of regret. He’s worried about his wife. He’s not very happy, but he’s trying his best to maintain equanimity. He’s trying to deal with these people rationally day to day without making any mistakes.”
Although Danny Pearl’s captors announced in an e-mail last week that he is being held in “very inhumane” conditions, it could get even worse. Hargrove was so ill-fed during his period of captivity that his 6-foot-tall build had withered from 185 pounds down to 125 pounds and his hair had turned bright orange from malnutrition. Anderson, who wrote about his experience in the 1993 book “Den of Lions,” had his wrists, arms, and legs so tightly taped at times he was unable to sit up without falling over. Later the tape was removed, but he was chained to a bed and forced to urinate in a bottle. He spent much of the next seven years blindfolded.
In his own book, “Long March to Freedom,” Hargrove describes how an agricultural journalist trying to teach poor farmers to grow pest-resistant rice stumbled into Colombia’s violent and corrupt substrata of anarchy. The rebels had been stealing cars, but when the gringo pulled up to the roadblock, the head commander recognized immediately that they were blessed with a pesca milagrosa, or miracle fish. The young men forced him into the back of a pickup truck and drove him at gunpoint through the sugar fields. Colombia has the highest rate of recorded kidnappings in the world, but Hargrove did not initially recognize what a serious predicament he was in. “There’s a lot of adrenaline running, but I didn’t think they were going to kill me,” he said. “I was working in agricultural development to help poor farmers, and when all this happened, I thought, Marxist guerrillas, supposedly concerned with the plight of the rural poor–as soon as I can meet someone in charge and explain who I am and what I do, that I’m not Bank of America, I’m not Exxon, I will be released.”
They drove high into the Andes to a clearing where about 40 guerrillas were gathered. Hargrove was told to walk into the forest; three men with AK-47s followed. “I thought ‘Uh, oh. This is how they do it in the movies, marching me to the treeline.” But his journey was far from over. Hargrove and the guerrillas rode mules even higher into the mountains where it was wet and cold. A commander who called himself Rambo finally told Hargrove that he was being held for ransom.
Hargrove was chained in a small cell, left for days at a time and given little to eat, but eventually was allowed outside. He used a broken machete to cut bamboo and built campfires in a ritual that fought off mental fatigue as much as the mountain chill. “There was nothing to do, so I would stare into the fire for hours,” he said. “The loneliness was the hardest part. Until then I always thought Vietnam was the most incredible experience of my life. But to be taken away from everything that you’ve known, no news about the outside world, no family … I’m not very sentimental, wasn’t then, and I’m not now. But I would cry. I cried alone, never in front of them. You spend so much time thinking about everything you’ve ever done, every good thing, every bad thing. I sang every song I ever knew to myself, old country songs from when I was a kid in west Texas.”
After his family paid his ransom, twice, Hargrove was released without notice. He walked for two days before reaching a village, where the residents then drove him to his home in Cali.
Depending on how long Daniel Pearl is held, the aftermath could be almost as difficult as his captivity. Anderson and Hargrove both credit their wives and family for their recovery. Still, it was not easy. Peggy Say, Anderson’s sister, fought hard for her brother during his long years as a hostage. But they quarreled shortly after he was released and were estranged for a short period. “You work at it,” Anderson told NEWSWEEK. “You are affected by what’s happened to you, it’s a traumatic experience. But there are people out there who can offer the kind of counseling that [Daniel Pearl] will need, that I needed.”
Despite the beatings, loneliness and fear of execution, former hostages say a kidnapping may be hardest on those left behind. Mariane Pearl, Daniel’s new bride, was six months pregnant when he disappeared. So was Terry Anderson’s fiancee, Madeleine. Their unborn daughter Sulome grew into a 6-year-old girl before her father came home. But the Andersons felt lucky he did. Another hostage held with Anderson, CIA station chief William Buckley, was tortured and later died in captivity. On two occasions U.S. authorities told Madeleine that Terry had been killed, even beheaded.
“I think the experience was a lot tougher on [my wife] Susan and the boys than it was on me,” says Hargrove, who is now an international agricultural communications consultant. His sons, Miles and Getty, were starting classes at college when he was abducted. They flew down to Colombia to help negotiate for Hargrove’s release, thinking they’d be back in Texas in a few weeks. Eleven months later they were still there. “Not too long ago someone asked me if I dream about it, if I have nightmares, and I said ‘No, never had.’ Susan said, ‘Well, speak for yourself cowboy.’ I always knew I was alive. They never knew if I was or not, and they had to make decisions about negotiations and all kind of things. I lived a very simple life. My only job was to survive.”
Editors feel a particular kind of ambivalence, and even guilt, for sending their reporters into danger zones. “It’s traumatic,” said Gene Roberts, former executive editor of The New York Times, now a professor at the University of Maryland and chairman of the Committee to Protect Journalists’ board of directors. “You keep telling them periodically ‘Don’t take unnecessary risk, link up with other reporters,’ but knowing in your heart of hearts that the most aggressive reporters in the end are going to go after the story no matter what you tell them. If some people weren’t prepared to take that kind of risk, the flow of news would cease in many parts of the world.”
He remembers the time in the late ’70s when one of his Philadelphia Inquirer reporters was held incommunicado for a few days along with another reporter in a Ugandan jail, where they were beaten with elephant-hide whips. “They just disappeared,” Roberts says, “it was a mess. Fortunately the embassy started making inquiries so fast that by the time I learned about it and we got word they were in the process of being extracted.”
Most reporters have the street smarts to determine what is an acceptable risk, Roberts said. But even the most seasoned reporters can be caught unaware, and injury and even death are, to an extent, part of the business.
“There used to be a kind of sick joke in Vietnam,” said Roberts, who was a reporter there during the Tet offensive. “It was, ‘Welcome to the world of foreign corespondents, we have the highest death rate and the highest divorce rate anywhere,’ which is more or less true.”
Despite their bravado, journalists like Anderson, Hargrove, and Pearl are keenly aware of their duty to insure the free flow of information–and the risk it entails. “Most of the foreign correspondents I know are actually highly idealistic people. You may think of them as cynical, but they’re not,” Anderson said. “They really believe in what they’re doing. Most of what you see is not very thrilling, it’s depressing. They do it because they are convinced that this is an important job, to tell people what’s going on in the world. And the only way to do that is to take some risks to get out there and look and see.”
