Lebanon Escape from Beirut

By William E. Smith

Two hours before dawn one morning last week, a lanky, bearded young man in a rumpled blue jogging outfit dashed into Beirut's luxurious Summerland Hotel, overlooking the Lebanese coast. "I'm Charles Glass. I need a place to hide!" he fairly shouted to a receptionist. A U.S. television journalist who knows the Middle East well, Glass had been seized by Muslim Shi'ite terrorists 62 days earlier in one of Beirut's southern suburbs. Having somehow escaped, he had fled to the right place: the hotel is a heavily guarded sanctuary of Lebanon's Druze community, which is closely aligned with the Syrian government of President Hafez Assad.

The receptionist promptly telephoned the Syrian army, which has 7,500 troops on duty in West Beirut, and within an hour Glass was on his way to freedom. What remained unanswered was whether Glass had slipped away from his captors unaided, as he contended, or had been allowed to escape. In either case, Glass had become a pawn in the growing power struggle in Lebanon between Syria, which for its own purposes is trying to restore order and ensure a secular, religiously diverse Lebanon, and Iran, whose fanatical revolutionary rulers are attempting to transform the country into a vessel of the Islamic revolution. Arabic Syria and non-Arabic Iran are allies on many matters, including the gulf war, but they are fiercely at odds over Lebanon's destiny.

As Glass recounted the story later, the first challenge was to shed his chains. Glass, 36, found that when he made a fist, he could wriggle out of the wrist binding, but the leg chain was trickier. With pieces of thread shredded from his blindfold, Glass bound links of the chain together, and over a period of days fooled his guards into loosening the tether. On the first night that he could pull free, Glass waited until he could hear the snores of his guards. Loosening the chains, he slipped onto the balcony of the high-rise building where he was being held, then back into the apartment through another door, past the guards' bedroom and out the front door, which he locked behind him with a key he had found on the inside of the door.

It was 2:30 a.m. Out on the street, in a Shi'ite district of southern Beirut, Glass immediately sought help. At an all-night bakery he claimed to be a Canadian of Lebanese origin who needed a doctor for his sick daughter. To have told the bakery patrons the truth, he feared, would have frightened them and perhaps even led to his recapture. But a passing motorist quickly gave him a lift to the Summerland, two miles away. The Syrians then took him to Damascus, and a day later he was home in London with his wife and five children.

Glass, who is perhaps best known for his reporting of the 1985 TWA hostage drama for ABC News, was quick to admit that he had made a terrible blunder by visiting Beirut earlier this year for a book he still intends to write about the Middle East. Glass was driving with a friend, Ali Osseiran, 40, the son of Lebanon's Defense Minister, when the pair suddenly found themselves sandwiched between two cars filled with armed men. The kidnapers were presumed to be members of the radical, pro-Iranian Hizballah (Party of God), the organization linked to a series of spectacular terrorist acts. They released Osseiran and his bodyguard-driver a week later, but kept Glass captive. Significantly, Glass's abduction was the first since Syrian troops had arrived in February in an attempt to restore order. The kidnaping was thus a personal affront to President Assad, who had vowed that the Muslim half of Beirut would henceforth be secure from such outrages.

Shortly after his abduction, Glass reported, he asked his captors for water. One of them replied, "Why water? You death. You no need water." Another taunted him, "You CIA." Later, telling him at gunpoint that if he did not cooperate he would never see his family again, they forced him to make a videotaped "confession," in which he declared that he had come to Lebanon to spy for the CIA. After his release last week, Glass said he had spoken ungrammatically in the tape, feigned a Southern accent (to indicate that he was in southern Lebanon), and crossed his fingers in the hope of indicating to viewers that he was acting under duress.

Soon after that, he began to write messages, sometimes in his own blood, promising a $10,000 reward to anyone who would help rescue him. He wrote nine such notes, scribbling some of them on the pages of a prayer book supplied by his captors, and pushing them out through the opening in a wall fan. His kidnapers found the ninth note. They warned him that if he made such a "mistake" again, they would kill him. Then they moved him to another location, the one at which he plotted his successful escape.

This was Glass's story. What was unclear was whether Iran had simply ordered its allies, the Lebanese Shi'ite terrorists, to allow Glass to escape, but in such a way that they would not appear to have caved in to Syrian pressure. Certainly, this was the version of events promoted by Syria, which is annoyed with Iran for challenging Damascus' prerogatives in Lebanon and which has been trying hard to repair its tattered relations with the U.S. and other Western powers.

As if to applaud Syria's efforts to free Glass, Washington announced last week that U.S. Ambassador William Eagleton would soon be returning to his post in Damascus for the first time in nine months. The U.S. had been particularly pleased that Syria had decided in June to shut down the Damascus office of Palestinian Terrorist Leader Abu Nidal. Given the degree of pressure that Syria was obviously exerting on his behalf, Glass speculated in an interview on ABC's Nightline that his release might have already been in the works and that "my escape may simply have jumped the gun by a few days."

Without doubt, Syrian-Iranian tension was at the heart of the case. If the Syrians had been angered by Glass's abduction, they were shocked by last month's incident in Saudi Arabia at the holy city of Mecca, where thousands of Iranian Shi'ite pilgrims staged a bloody riot against Saudi authority. This, in turn, caused other Arab leaders to urge Assad to stop supporting Iran in the gulf war -- a step that would cost him his right to buy Iranian oil at heavily discounted prices. According to Syrian diplomats, Damascus has warned Iran against widening the war to include any other Arab states.

Last week Iran's Parliament Speaker Hashemi Rafsanjani seemingly acknowledged the importance of the Syrian pressure. In an interview on NBC's Today, Rafsanjani suggested an exchange of foreign hostages held in Lebanon for Shi'ite Muslims imprisoned in Kuwait and Israel. Such deals have previously been turned down by Kuwait, Israel and, indeed, the U.S. But the Rafsanjani offer clearly implied a desire among some factions in Iran to improve Tehran's ties with the outside world and soothe Syrian irritation over the hostage taking in Lebanon.

Until now, the Shi'ite rulers of Iran have been successful in exporting their revolution to Lebanon. Assad welcomed Khomeini's Revolutionary Guards when they arrived in Lebanon in 1982 to help fight off the Israeli invasion. Some 2,000 stayed on after the war to assist Hizballah in the Shi'ite strongholds in the Bekaa Valley and southern Lebanon. Assad was still delighted when Lebanon's militant Shi'ites unleashed their ferocious fighting power against the Israeli occupation forces in the south and against the U.S.-led multinational peacekeeping force in Beirut. By that time Shi'ite political power had effectively filled the vacuum created by Israel's 1982 expulsion of the Palestine Liberation Organization from Lebanon.

Almost too late, Assad realized that Iran and Hizballah posed a threat to Syria's position in Lebanon. He also came to understand that an Islamic stronghold in Lebanon might eventually undermine Assad's own secular Baath ; Party government in Damascus. In 1984 Assad threw his support to Amal, the mainstream Lebanese Shi'ite organization and militia led by Nabih Berri, but Hizballah's influence continued to spread. One reason Assad sent his army into West Beirut in February was to bring the Iranians to heel.

Whatever the circumstances of his release, Glass was recovering in London last week, convinced that his days in West Beirut were over, "at least for a generation." Said his wife Fiona: "The children are thrilled. He's even better than James Bond." But his departure still left eight Americans and 15 other foreigners held hostage in Lebanon. Among them was Terry Waite, special envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who disappeared in West Beirut in January while trying to negotiate the hostages' release. Last week the Beirut magazine Ash Shiraa reported that Waite would soon be freed for a $5 million ransom worked out by an unidentified Lebanese leader. Until Syria and Iran can somehow resolve their differences, these other captives, like Glass until last week, will remain pawns in a wider struggle.

With reporting by Scott MacLeod/Cairo, with other bureaus