Terry Anderson was chief Middle East correspondent for the AP when he was kidnapped in Beirut in 1985 by the militant group Hezbollah, who suspected he was a spy. His 1991 best-seller ‘Den of Lions’ chronicles his torture and time in captivity.
Terry Anderson, the globe-trotting Associated Press correspondent who became one of America’s longest-held hostages after he was kidnapped from a street in war-torn Lebanon in 1985 and held for nearly seven years, has died at 76.
Anderson, who chronicled his abduction and torturous imprisonment by Islamic militants in his best-selling 1993 memoir “Den of Lions,” died Sunday at his home in Greenwood Lake, New York, said his daughter, Sulome Anderson.
Anderson died of complications from recent heart surgery, his daughter said.
“Terry was deeply committed to on-the-ground eyewitness reporting and demonstrated great bravery and resolve, both in his journalism and during his years held hostage. We are so appreciative of the sacrifices he and his family made as the result of his work,” said Julie Pace, senior vice president and executive editor of the AP.
“He never liked to be called a hero, but that’s what everyone persisted in calling him,” said Sulome Anderson. “I saw him a week ago and my partner asked him if he had anything on his bucket list, anything that he wanted to do. He said, ‘I’ve lived so much and I’ve done so much. I’m content.’”
After returning to the United States in 1991, Anderson led a peripatetic life, giving public speeches, teaching journalism at several prominent universities and, at various times, operating a blues bar, Cajun restaurant, horse ranch and gourmet restaurant.
He also struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder, won millions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets after a federal court concluded that country played a role in his capture, then lost most of it to bad investments. He filed for bankruptcy in 2009.
Upon retiring from the University of Florida in 2015, Anderson settled on a small horse farm in a quiet, rural section of northern Virginia he had discovered while camping with friends.
“I live in the country and it’s reasonably good weather and quiet out here and a nice place, so I’m doing all right,” he said with a chuckle during a 2018 interview with The Associated Press.
In 1985, Anderson became one of several Westerners abducted by members of the Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah during a time of war that had plunged Lebanon into chaos.
After his release, he returned to a hero’s welcome at AP’s New York headquarters.
Louis D. Boccardi, the president and chief executive officer of the AP at the time, recalled Sunday that Anderson’s plight was never far from his AP colleagues’ minds.
“The word ‘hero’ gets tossed around a lot, but applying it to Terry Anderson just enhances it,” Boccardi said. “His six-and-a-half-year ordeal as a hostage of terrorists was as unimaginable as it was real — chains, being transported from hiding place to hiding place strapped to the chassis of a truck, given often inedible food, cut off from the world he reported on with such skill and caring.
