The Seven Left Behind

For long months they have lived in a no-man's-land: no glare of TV cameras, no transcontinental phone calls from network anchormen and no publicized negotiations. It is not clear exactly who seized them, or where they are being held, or even whether all are still alive. Only because of the attention focused on the TWA hijacking was the U.S. public reminded of the plight of the seven other Americans who have been taken hostage in Lebanon, one by one, since March 16, 1984.

That was the day when William Buckley, 57, political officer of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, was abducted from his car. In May 1984 the Rev. Benjamin Weir, 61, a Presbyterian minister who had lived in Beirut for more than 30 years, was seized. Six months later, Peter Kilburn, 60, a librarian at the American University of Beirut, was reported missing.

This year has proved equally perilous. In January eight men wielding automatic rifles pulled the Rev. Lawrence Jenco, 50, director of Beirut's Roman Catholic Relief Services, from his car in West Beirut. Two months later, Terry Anderson, 37, chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press, disappeared. In May six assailants snatched David Jacobsen, 54, director of the medical center at the American University, from the campus. Only five days before Flight 847 was commandeered, several gunmen captured Thomas Sutherland, 52, the university's dean of agriculture. Jeremy Levin of the Cable News Network, another American hostage taken in Beirut, escaped in February, eleven months after he was abducted. In March two French embassy officials were abducted in Beirut; in May a journalist and a researcher, both French, were kidnaped.

When the Administration began negotiating for the 39 TWA hostages, President Reagan publicly assured the families of the long-missing seven that the Administration had not given up on their relatives' release. "We insist," said Secretary of State George Shultz later in the week, "on the return of our hostages, all 46 of them, immediately, unharmed and unconditionally."

Despite Shultz's statement, that was never a very real hope. Apparently, neither Nabih Berri, leader of the Amal militia then holding the 39 TWA hostages, nor Syrian President Hafez Assad was able to deliver the seven. "They didn't have access to them," said one U.S. official last week. It also became clear to Washington that if the President insisted on the release of all 46, it would not even get the TWA 39. Said one U.S. official ruefully: "Sometimes policymakers have to decide on the greatest good for the greatest number."

One hitch, U.S. officials suggest, is that the demand sporadically issued as a condition for the release of the seven simply may not be negotiable. In return for their victims, the hostage takers have said they want freedom for 17 extremists who were convicted of the 1983 bombings of seven targets in Kuwait. Kuwait has firmly refused to release the terrorists, and the U.S. has supported its position. Besides, say U.S. sources, freeing them would not be an exchange of "innocent for innocent," or of "guilty for guilty," as in other recent swaps.

One White House aide said that when Reagan called the Syrian President last week, the release of the seven abducted Americans was the top item on his agenda. Though Assad did not give Reagan much cause for hope, relatives of the seven were buoyed somewhat last week when Lebanese television, supplying Arabic subtitles, allowed them to plead on the air for the release of their loved ones.