Photo Finish

By Jill Smolowe

As a travel agent who conducts group tours of the Holy Land, Peter Hill has been in and out of the Middle East 105 times in the past two decades. On almost every one of those occasions, he has toted his camera in a carry-on bag. But as he was preparing for the long flight home from Athens last June 14, he found his hand luggage a bit overstuffed and decided instead to stash his 35-mm Canon AE-1 camera in the suitcase he would check through at the airport.

It was the only bit of luck Hill would know for the next 17 days. The flight he boarded, along with 144 other passengers, most of them Americans, was TWA 847, which was hijacked shortly after takeoff by two Arab gunmen demanding the release of 700 Shi'ites from Israeli custody. A few days later, as Hill, 57, waited anxiously with seven other American hostages in a house four miles south of Beirut, his keepers, who belonged to Lebanon's Amal militia, brought the prisoners some of the baggage from the plane's hold. "Luckily, my suitcase was among the bags delivered, and the camera was still inside," Hill said last week in his office in a Chicago suburb. "Not once during our whole captivity did they know I had a camera."

Over the next several days, Hill used his camera judiciously, snapping pictures only when he was certain the guards were fast asleep. "They were vigilant enough, but there were only two of them the whole time, with no relief," said Hill, who has been harsh in his criticism of Amal since his return to the U.S. "They weren't lazy, just exhausted."

The militiamen were also eager to wash their hands of the hijack affair as quickly as possible on June 30, when they began to release the remaining 39 American hostages. "I thought surely they'd give us a body search as we left Beirut," Hill recalled. "If not there, at least in Damascus before they set us free." Nothing of the sort happened, and Hill was able to smuggle out his film, concealing it in his underwear.

Some of the pictures he took are almost lighthearted. In one, a guard is caught napping in a patch of sunlight; in another, seven hostages are dining in a kitchen, a kettle on the stove, a yellow shirt and underwear drying in the window. But Hill also aimed his camera in earnest, particularly on one occasion when he was able to reach the roof of the building in which he and his fellow hostages were being held, and photographed the neighborhood. "I hoped to take pictures that investigators could use in the future to pinpoint our location," he said.

That may be how U.S. authorities intend to use the pictures. Hill told TIME last week that his photographs have been examined by intelligence agencies, and said that while he has received "some pictures back from the FBI, a number of others remain in the hands of intelligence organizations." He has been discreet about which agencies are involved (the CIA denies having any pictures, the FBI refuses to comment), and he declines to say what the unreleased film shows. He also will not say how many rolls of firm are involved.

Hill is happy, however, to discuss his plans for the photographs that have been returned to him. He intends to use the proceeds from their sale to set up "some sort of higher-education scholarship for service personnel in the name of Robert Stethem." Stethem was the 23-year-old Navy diver who was gunned down by the hijackers 14 hours after TWA 847 was seized. --By Jill Smolowe. Reported by Lee Griggs/Chicago

With reporting by Reported by Lee Griggs/Chicago