Terry was a man of hope in our darkest hour. As we sat on the floor in our underwear last Christmas, he gave us hope that we would be free men. In our sadness and darkness, he gave us something we desperately needed. . . We love this guy.
–David Jacobsen, speaking after 17 months as a hostage in Lebanon.
With his strong voice emerging from an Old Testament beard roughly six feet above the Earth, Terry Waite must seem a pin-striped prophet to those in the Mideast who have chosen to express their grievances through the ancient and barbaric custom of kidnaping.
If Waite, no priest, is not a man of God, he surely seems touched by Him: ”I like to see my life as a vocation, and I try to live it out as one.”
But when he took a job six years ago as special assistant to Robert Runcie, the archbishop of Canterbury, in charge of relations with the Anglican communion worldwide, Waite never expected his life to become so public or his work so dangerous.
It has been Waite, the 47-year-old son of a village policeman, who has been the most committed and visible go-between in the efforts to secure the release of U.S. citizens in Lebanon, some of them held hostage for nearly two years.
When David Jacobsen, a hospital administrator, was released last November, or when Rev. Lawrence Martin Jenco, a Roman Catholic priest from Joliet, was released in July, or when Rev. Benjamin Weir, a Presbyterian missionary, was released in September, 1985, Waite was there, towering in a corner of the television screen as the former hostages greeted their families or spoke haltingly, weeping, to an avid press.
The worst anyone says about Waite is that he actually likes the notoriety. And yet it also embarrasses him. He sees his work as a function of Christian good-neighborliness and reconciliation, and his media persona as a sort of talisman against harm. ”I`m not an ambitious person as such,” he says. ”But I am ambitious to attempt to live my life fully, and I`m happy to have been able to have done so thus far.”
He has been to Lebanon, Libya and Iran numerous times, futilely, more often than not; his life has been threatened; he has felt himself a near-victim of kidnaping more than once, as he listened to those with whom he attempted to negotiate debate whether he himself ought to be held.
Waite also has had his failures, which understandably move him more than his successes. Within days of the U.S. air strike against Libya in April, carried out from British bases, two British hostages were murdered in retaliation. Waite had been in contact with their captors, and he described how, after seeing off Father Jenco, he spoke at a memorial service for the two Britons. ”I`d been working for the freedom of those men, and I failed,” he said. ”I mention that fact, for it helps describe why we in the churches are involved in this matter at all.”
Waite`s strength comes from his faith, his patience, his tact, his willing ear–but also from his distance, which he has tried assiduously to maintain, from any particular government or institution other than the Church of England, as the archbishop of Canterbury`s ”special envoy.” It has been this distance that has probably saved Waite from the fate of those he has tried to help, whom the kidnapers have perceived as agents of their governments and their ”imperial ambitions” in the Mideast.
Not surprisingly, he`s tired–of all the travel, despite his Sony Discman; of all the attention and the risk and the days away from home; of all the hopes invested in him by those to whom he is already committed and by those, unknown to him, who cry out for aid and help and succor. ”Many, many people write to me, and enormous demands are made on my time from every corner and every quarter,” Waite says with a touch of exasperation. ”I can`t possibly deal effectively with every hostage problem or other problem.”
But besides Waite`s ad hoc diplomacy as the archbishop`s special envoy, there are all his other primary responsibilities, both administrative and personal, to the Church of England, which has about 70 million communicants worldwide. Desmond Tutu, now archbishop of Johannesburg, is an Anglican, for example, and Waite has done his best to be Tutu`s go-between as well, particularly on the vexing issue of whether the United Kingdom should heed calls from the British Commonwealth for economic sanctions against South Africa.
Nor can Waite easily shunt off that other work to other shoulders: He is one of only five special assistants to Runcie, all with their own
responsibilities and all there primarily to further the archbishop`s aims–not those of Washington, Damascus, Tehran or any other faction or state.
Thus friends say Waite has been stung by recent criticism that he has been an unwitting tool of a contradictory American policy, which has publicly reviled deals with state-sponsored terrorism and Iranian fundamentalism while negotiating with factions in Tehran to free the U.S. hostages in return for arms.
It has been widely known for some time that various secret U.S. emissaries, such as CIA director William Casey, UN Ambassador Vernon Walters and former National Security adviser Robert McFarlane, have made numerous visits to the Mideast concerning the hostages. After the release of Jacobsen in November, newspaper reports suggested that his freedom, as well as that of Rev. Weir and Father Jenco, had been purchased by specific shipments of arms to Iran.
Waite reacted angrily to those reports. He had clearly expected two other U.S. hostages–Terry Anderson, the Beirut bureau chief of the Associated Press, and Thomas Sutherland, acting dean of agriculture at the American University in Beirut–to be released along with Jacobsen. ”There has been so much speculation, a great deal of misinformation and various people cutting in for a variety of reasons best known to themselves, that it has made the whole scene extremely complicated,” Waite said in November.
”The rumor and speculation,” Waite continued, had made his own contacts within Islamic Jihad, a mysterious Lebanese Shiite group that also holds Anderson and Sutherland, ”a little nervous. It means there is a new vulnerability in the situation. . . There is no doubt that from this point onward the task is made immeasurably more difficult,” because many of his contacts had gone silent, ”and they may not surface again.” And he urged reporters to be careful, saying: ”Do those people who write such speculative comments realize that such comments could cost me my life? Is it realized how sensitive this situation is?”
That outburst, made in the heat of danger and disappointment, was uncharacteristic of a man renowned for his patience and good humor, who has spent days waiting in Beirut hotel rooms for contacts who have never materialized. A year ago, as gunfire swirled around the AP bureau in Beirut, Waite broke the tension by announcing he would take a shower. ”If you can`t do anything else,” he said, ”you might as well make use of the time.”
Waite was clearly upset, however, by the U.S. arms shipments to Iran. Before the press, after a mid-November meeting with the three freed American hostages and representatives of U.S. Episcopalian, Presbyterian and Methodist churches, he said that the Reagan administration had always respected and honored his independence and that the mere existence of the reports had been harmful. ”Governments have always and no doubt will continue to strike bargains, both in secret and in public,” he said, but he stressed that it was his belief, shared by the freed hostages who flanked him, that the kidnapers were not under the control of any single government or authority.
As for a U.S. official`s private assertion that Waite`s efforts were
”the gift wrapping” on the hostages` release, providing opaque cover for the real deal, Waite said dismissively: ”It is the sort of thing some people would say in that larger political game. Everyone tries to use everything to their own political advantage–American, Iranian or Syrian, they all do it.
”That`s the kind of cross fire I have to deal with,” he continued.
”This time last year I found myself exposed to cross fire whilst caught in the middle of a street battle in Beirut. This year one is exposed to political cross fire . . . If I can`t take it, I should get out. But I`m clear about my own motives.”
For all that he does, Waite is paid about $22,000 a year. ”It`s nothing, really,” he says. And he has talked increasingly seriously, lately, about giving up the job and spending more time with his wife, Frances, and their four children, ages 14 to 22. Six years ago Waite was the first layman to be appointed the archbishop`s secretary for the Anglican communion–for a seven- year term.
”But I`m committed to working for the . . . release of the American hostages,” Anderson and Sutherland, Waite said fiercely last November.
”That`s something I`ll continue with. I`m not giving that up until we`re through with that problem, in one way or another.”
Yet it`s clear he would like ”that problem” resolved as quickly as possible, perhaps as much for his own peace of mind, though he won`t put it that way, as for the well-being of those ”innocents,” as he calls them, who have been seized by groups purporting to represent the people the hostages came to Lebanon to help in the first place.
Waite says he is fully cognizant of the limits to what he can do. A recent editorial in The Times of London suggested that his highly publicized efforts might increase the attractiveness of hostage-taking and be subject to a law of diminishing returns. ”The line between being useful and being used,” the paper said, ”is a fine one.”
Asked about that view, Waite says, ”Of course, The Times has a point. I`m concious of the fact that when you step into the waters, you run the risk of being used by a dozen different parties. But being used depends on the user. One must work in the world as it is. . . .
”But whenever innocent people of any country are deprived of their liberty and used as pawns in a larger political game, then it is only right and proper that their neighbors–put it like that–or anyone who has any humanitarian spark within them should make efforts to seek their release. So if I don`t do it, I hope and am sure there will be lots of other people who will try to have a go.”
Terence Hardy Waite was born on May 31, 1939, and raised in Styal, Cheshire, in western England. ”I didn`t grow up in a particularly devout home,” Waite says. ”It was a home of occasional churchgoing. But if I went to church, I was always encouraged, not discouraged.”
He left school at 16, with no clear idea of what he wanted to do. He joined the army, the Grenadier Guards, to fulfill his National Service–not the first young man to join because of the prospect of travel. But he had to quit, regretfully, after a year, when it turned out that he was allergic to the dye in the khaki uniforms. But he already was thinking of his life as a vocation, and he joined the Church Army, an Anglican organization modeled on the Salvation Army, and studied theology at the Church Army College in London. In 1964 he married Helen Frances Watters, the daughter of a Belfast lawyer, and that same year began a five-year stint as lay adviser to the bishop of Bristol, traveling often to the U.S. and Africa.
He spent the next three years, until 1971, working with the first archbishop of Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi and coordinating a relief project in southern Sudan. Then for eight years Waite was the Rome-based consultant on missionary and development work for the Roman Catholic Church–a sign more of his commitment to the Third World and disinterest in doctrine than of any particular attraction to Catholicism.
Runcie chose Waite for his current job in 1980, the same year Waite joined the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the best-known British think tank on foreign affairs. He is also a member of both the Travellers`, a London club, and the Left-Handed Society. ”Well, it`s a bit defunct now,”
Waite says, laughing. ”But when it was founded, left-handers were a persecuted minority–you couldn`t get left-handed tin openers or scissors–so we formed ourselves together as a sort of lobby for the rights of left-handed people.” It was in February, 1981, that Waite first became known to Britons, when three months of shuttle diplomacy with the government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini led to the release of three Anglican missionaries jailed in the chaos of the Iranian revolution. Waite says he volunteered his services because he couldn`t think of anything else, but it was then that he began to discover how an imposing presence, strong religious convictions, humanitarian concerns and a large dose of patience could unlock doors that governments and international agencies could not.
In 1982 Queen Elizabeth II made Waite a Member of the Order of the British Empire.
Early in 1985, after six months of circuitous negotiations with Libya
–including numerous chats with Col. Moammar Gadhafi in his desert tent
–Waite brought home four other Britons jailed by Gadhafi after Britain severed diplomatic relations with Libya in April, 1984.
That rupture resulted from the slaying of a British policewoman by shots fired from within the Libyan embassy in London, and Waite`s trips to Tripoli, in that atmosphere, were difficult and haunting. Yet, as always, he prepared exhaustively, discovering that Gadhafi was fascinated by the influence of the early Greeks on Islamic thought and giving him a book on the subject at their first meeting. When Gadhafi responded with a gift for Runcie, Waite sought out the assistant bishop of Jerusalem, Kenneth Cragg, to find an apposite passage from the Koran with which to respond.
Yet when Gadhafi accused Britain of torturing imprisoned Libyans, Waite responded forcefully: ”Do you believe I`m telling you the truth? Libyans are not being tortured in jail.” And he immediately offered to set up a church-run telephone service for Libyans in Britain who might be in difficulty.
Waite became involved with the American hostages in Lebanon because Rev. Weir, a Presbyterian, taught at a Beirut theological seminary run by the Church of England. After his kidnaping, the Presbyterian Church contacted Runcie and asked for Waite`s help. Given that Islamic Jihad also holds Anderson and Sutherland, Waite has taken their release upon his shoulders as well.
If Waite can sometimes seem like a latter-day exponent of Teddy Roosevelt`s ”muscular Christianity,” or like some Victorian empire-builder preaching Christian justice to the benighted, he has nonetheless produced extraordinary results. ”I think there are too many people who have so-called faith, who really give the impression that it`s something rather precious, something not current with the whole of everyday life,” he says. ”I don`t treat my faith as anything exceptional or special–I just try to be myself.” At the same time, he is without any prejudice and clearly eager to regard anyone to whom he speaks, whether hostage or terrorist, as a human being created–however faultily–in the image of God.
”There are very few people in my experience who are totally bad,” Waite says. ”The cardinal rule is to be perceptive and sensitive, to recognize that behind the stereotypes are people who are pushed into an extreme position, who are desperate or made to feel desperate. They feel there is no hope for the future other than trying to change the conditions they find themselves in by using force.”
Terrorism itself, he says, ”is only symptomatic of a deeper disorder, and the longer the deeper disorder goes untreated, the more symptoms we`re likely to see. I try in my relationships with groups in the Middle East to understand the fundamental reasons for their grievances, and not just be content to listen to or deal with symptoms. But many of the measures we`re likely to take, quite understandably, to contain the symptoms are in fact doing only that–and we`re having new symptoms breaking out all the time because the fundamental questions go unresolved. But I think we`re a long way in today`s world from dealing with root and fundamental questions.”
At the same time, he says ruefully, ”the further people are pushed into radical and extreme positions, the more difficult it becomes to make any positive gestures toward them, so the problem compounds itself.”
Among those fundamental questions, Waite says, are all the usual and seemingly impossible ones: first, ”the whole question of the position and settlement of the Palestinian people in the Middle East. The Palestinians feel they are totally misunderstood, and many of them have lived in camps the whole of their lives.” In one sense, he says, ”you can argue that they are their own worst enemies for the way in which they present their case and the way in which they have tried to tackle their problems. On the other hand, you can argue that those who oppose them have played upon those divisions.”
But the other root question ”that must be resolved, and which is intimately related, is the right of Israel to live within secure boundaries. And whatever you may think about the way the state of Israel was settled, it`s now there, it`s now a fact, and again there has to be some recognition and understanding that Israel has the right to live within secure boundaries. But there`s a lot of talking to do, there`s years and years of bitterness and misunderstanding to be worked at.”
Waite speaks of the scars left on the Jewish people by World War II, which he says was ”a most horrible reminder to us of what happens when the value of the individual is forgotten.” In his own work, he says, ”I try to look with the same compassion on the sufferings of the Arab people, many of whom have been driven into hopelessness and despair.” The people of Lebanon have suffered particularly badly, he says. ”They have been driven to adopt desperate measures because they have become desperate people.”
Hostage-taking and acts of terrorism are clearly wrong, he says, but ”it is equally wrong for the West to stand by and fail to act to help relieve the suffering of so many in the Middle East.”
And he calls on President Reagan and other world leaders for a fresh political initiative ”that can really get to the root of the Middle East.”
Without such efforts, he says, ”we will have this problem repeating and repeating itself, and we`ll be into an endless chain of violence.”
But the larger problem is not confined to the Mideast, he says. ”In other parts of the world there are people and nations still working toward their identity after years of what they consider to be the so-called oppression of colonialism. And it takes a long time for a people to grow up completely and know what they consider to be their own identity. It`s not an easy process.”
Iran is an obvious example, he noted, with its attempt, after the revolution, to find a new identity in a fundamentalist Shia Islam, shorn of Western influence. ”The shah underestimated the power of radical Islam, as did we all, and that in fact religion still has the real possibility and potential of touching people very fundamentally, changing the shape of a whole country and region–from the Middle East right across Africa. Whether that`s for the better or not is a question others must answer. . . .
”But we`re bound to see, I think, the growth of that fundamentalist expression in coming years. And whether or not in the long run it will produce any greater happiness for people or be able to accommodate itself to the inevitable technological advance of the 20th Century are also very open questions. But for a period in history it may well prove to be a unifying and solidifying factor.”
Yet, when pressed, Waite admits there is a thread that runs through all these issues: the role of the United States in the developing world and the way Americans are perceived by the aggrieved and the alienated.
”It`s sometimes very difficult for Americans to recognize just how they`re perceived by some people,” Waite says. ”Now I think many of the perceptions are totally inaccurate. But Americans are seen, as you well know, as being sometimes totally without sympathy, without understanding for those who find themselves in the position I`ve just described, are seen to be a nation that doesn`t mind pushing people around.
”And this image, which I`ve said is not necessarily totally correct, is constantly reinforced and increasingly believed, and it leads to greater and greater resentment.”
When a questioner breaks in to say, ”And of course Israel is seen as an extension of that American arm,” Waite says: ”Exactly. Then they will say that America is certainly not impartial but totally partial–that`s how it`s seen.
”And every time there are new acts of terrorism–of barbarism, if you like–against foreign subjects, the position is made worse: People are further polarized, the gap becomes more and more difficult to cross, and I think that is happening.”
Asked what he would like to do next with his life, Waite ponders carefully. What he`d really like to see, he finally says, is a ”reshaped United Nations. We desperately need in today`s world an international agency that could perhaps be a little leaner, a little fitter, with integrity and effectiveness. And I wouldn`t mind in some ways playing a part in the reshaping, restructuring, revamping.
”But having said that, I wouldn`t in any way wish to get caught up in the awful bureaucracy that bogs down so many of our international
organizations. That`s why I`ve always been very reticent to say what I`ve just said, because it`s always a difficult business of how you match individual charisma, if you like, and gifts with large bureaucratic organizations whose aims and ideals are excellent, but who are often prevented from achieving them by the very nature of the bureaucracy itself.”
Waite pauses to think, stroking his beard. ”How do you somehow match the two, so you can have within an institution that openness, that freedom to deal with problems, and at the same time not just be caught up in preserving the institution itself?”
It must be possible, he says, musing, to take the sort of personal trust he has established with the alienated onto a government-to-govern ment plane. ”If there can be people in government or international agencies or institutions who can be seen to be people and not just officials–that seems an awfully silly thing to say, but you know what I mean. I think one thing about people in the Middle East or Africa is that they`re certainly not without heart, and they relate better to people than to structures and organizations.
”And if you`re able to form strong personal bonds of understanding and loyalty, sometimes you`re able to carry those over to make stronger institutional bonds. I think we need more people in government and on all levels of society who are able to convey and communicate trust through their own person, and convert that trust across to the institution. That`s really what we need.”
Asked finally if this or another government were to come to him and ask him to define a job, to try to bridge the gap, to try to be one of those people of whom he speaks, would that intrigue him?
”Yes,” says Terry Waite, laughing hugely at the unlikelihood of it all. ”It would intrigue me. Yes.”
Those who have it within their power and their imagination to contemplate such matters–please note.
