Terry Waite, John McCarthy and Brian Keenan: The Beirut Hostage Crisis

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Between 1982 and 1992, roughly a hundred foreign nationals were seized off the streets of Beirut and held hostage by Shi'ite militant factions during Lebanon's civil war, mostly journalists, academics, diplomats and aid workers taken simply because of the passports they carried. At least ten of them died in captivity. Three of the best known were British and Irish: John McCarthy, a young television journalist; Brian Keenan, a teacher from Belfast; and Terry Waite, the Archbishop of Canterbury's envoy, who went to Beirut trying to negotiate other hostages' freedom and ended up becoming one himself. Between them they spent close to fourteen years chained in basements and windowless cells. This is how they were taken, what happened to them while they were gone, and how each of them eventually came home.

Two Kidnappings, Six Days Apart

Brian Keenan arrived in Beirut in 1985, a 35-year-old from working-class east Belfast who'd left school early, worked as a heating engineer, then talked his way into night classes and eventually a place at the University of Ulster. He took a teaching post at the American University of Beirut, partly to put some distance between himself and the Troubles back home. On the morning of April 11, 1986, four months into the job, he was kidnapped by Islamic Jihad, apparently because his captors simply assumed that, whatever passport he carried, he counted as British.

Six days later, on April 17, 1986, John McCarthy, a 29-year-old British television journalist on his first overseas assignment, was seized by the same group while reporting in Beirut's Muslim quarter. Both men would eventually be moved through the same network of cells, cramped, vermin-infested, and mostly windowless, kept blindfolded for the majority of their captivity and chained by the hands and feet whenever they were taken out of solitary confinement.

The Negotiator Who'd Freed Ten Hostages Already

Terry Waite wasn't just any envoy. By the time he arrived in Beirut in January 1987, he'd already built a genuine track record freeing hostages elsewhere: Anglican clergy detained in Iran after the revolution, four Britons held by Colonel Gaddafi in Libya in 1984, and, in 1985, two American hostages in Lebanon itself, Father Lawrence Jenco and David Jacobsen. He'd become something close to a celebrity negotiator, trusted precisely because he had no government behind him and, in theory, nothing to hide.

That reputation collapsed almost overnight once the Iran-Contra scandal broke. It emerged that US Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North had been secretly brokering arms sales to Iran in exchange for hostage releases, with the profits illegally diverted to fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua, and that Waite had unknowingly been photographed alongside North and had used an American military helicopter for one of his trips. Lebanon's armed factions, already suspicious of Western intentions, now suspected Waite of being caught up in the same scheme, or worse, of being a CIA asset himself. Archbishop Robert Runcie, reportedly uneasy about the controversy, is said to have summoned Waite that November intending to end his role as envoy, but agreed to let him make one final trip first.

The Doctor Who Set the Trap

Waite landed in Beirut on January 12, 1987, with little real leverage left and hoping simply to see the hostages in person, among them McCarthy, Keenan and several Americans. A local doctor who'd previously helped arrange meetings between Waite and the captors got in touch, telling him this time a visit could actually be arranged. Waite, wary, asked the doctor for his hand as a personal guarantee of safe passage. The doctor took it and told him plainly that they would not keep him.

On the evening of January 20, 1987, Waite went to the doctor's consulting room for what he'd been told was final confirmation of the visit. As soon as he arrived, the phone rang. The doctor apologised, said he had an emergency at the hospital, and left. Waite considered walking away right there. He later said he'd come too far to back out and chose to go through with it. He was blindfolded, driven across the city to a safe house, and given a change of clothes. Several days later he was put in a van, taken to what felt like an underground car park, and told to jump down through a trapdoor in the floor. When he pulled off his blindfold he was standing in a tiled cell. It was only then that it fully registered: he wasn't there to negotiate anymore. He was a hostage.

Chains, Blindfolds and Mock Executions

All three men endured broadly similar conditions, though Waite's isolation was by far the most extreme. At 6 foot 7, he could barely stand upright in his cell, and for nearly four straight years he had almost no human contact at all, chained facing a wall for 23 hours and 50 minutes of every day, with a single ten-minute break to use the bathroom. Convinced he was a CIA operative despite his repeated denials, his captors periodically whipped the soles of his feet with a length of cable and staged mock executions, holding a gun to his head and telling him it was over. He went more than three years without being allowed a single book. When a guard finally brought him one, it turned out, almost comically, to be The Great Escape; the two that followed were a guide to breastfeeding and a book on childcare, since the guard couldn't read English and had no idea what he was actually buying.

McCarthy and Keenan, by contrast, were held together for most of their captivity after an initial period apart, moved between a rotating string of locations, sometimes cramped apartments, sometimes underground cells beneath the rubble of bombed-out buildings, at one point reportedly transported hidden inside a large refrigerator unit to avoid detection at checkpoints. Being chained together for years, at times literally handcuffed to one another, forged an unusually close bond. Keenan later credited that friendship, built on dark humour and constant needling of each other, as one of the only things that kept either of them sane. For a stretch, they shared captivity with the American Associated Press correspondent Terry Anderson, who'd been kidnapped in March 1985 and would end up the longest-held hostage of the entire crisis at nearly seven years, and Terry Anderson in turn credited his own survival to the men held alongside him, particularly crediting Keenan and McCarthy's constant, low-grade pestering of their guards for books, a radio, and basic human respect.

Captivity of this kind, holding a person indefinitely in total isolation as leverage rather than for any crime, wasn't unique to Lebanon in this period. A very different but equally deliberate use of prolonged confinement to extract concessions played out around the same era in the Nantes courthouse hostage crisis, though that standoff lasted hours rather than years. What Waite, McCarthy and Keenan endured was closer in scale to true long-term captivity, the kind explored in cases like the kidnapping of Barbara Jane Mackle, where prolonged sensory deprivation and total isolation were used as deliberate psychological weapons rather than incidental hardship.

Death was a real possibility for anyone in that network of cells, not a rhetorical one. Two months into Terry Anderson's own captivity, he listened through the wall as CIA station chief William Buckley, held in a neighbouring cell, took his final breaths after being tortured; Buckley never made it out. Waite, McCarthy and Keenan all survived, but none of them could have known at the time that they would.

Brian Keenan: The First to Go Home

Keenan was released into Syrian custody on August 24, 1990, after four and a half years in captivity, becoming the first of the three to walk free. He returned to Belfast three weeks later to an emotional homecoming at Central Station, greeted by hundreds of people. His memoir of the ordeal, An Evil Cradling, published in 1992, won the Irish Times Literature Prize for Non-fiction and the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize, and became less a conventional hostage narrative than a meditation on endurance, humanity and his friendship with McCarthy, whom he'd had to leave behind still in captivity.

John McCarthy: Freed Through a UN Diplomat's Deliberate Risk-Taking

McCarthy's release, on August 8, 1991, came down largely to one man: Giandomenico Picco, a United Nations assistant secretary-general who'd taken on the hostage negotiations personally. Picco's method was as unconventional as it was dangerous. Rather than negotiate from a position of institutional safety, he repeatedly placed himself directly in his adversaries' hands, at one point describing being forced into the boot of a car with a bag over his head, and by his own account allowed himself to be taken by the kidnappers nine separate times over the course of the negotiations simply to build enough trust to get a deal done. It worked. McCarthy was freed after 1,943 days, making him Britain's longest-held hostage of the crisis, and was driven to Syrian military headquarters before being handed to the British ambassador in Damascus. At his first press conference as a free man, he made a point of telling reporters that Terry Anderson, Tom Sutherland and Terry Waite, all still held, had been in good health and good spirits when he'd last seen them only two days earlier.

Picco's approach ultimately secured freedom for eleven Western hostages altogether, negotiated as part of a broader deal that also saw 91 Lebanese detainees released from Israeli custody. He later wrote about the experience in his own memoir, Man Without a Gun, framing his method bluntly: where Waite had gone into Beirut representing the West, Picco said he'd deliberately approached the problem from the East, working through Iranian channels instead.

Terry Waite: The Last One Home

Waite's release came three months later, on November 18, 1991, after 1,763 days in captivity, nearly four of them in solitary confinement. In the final stretch he'd developed a severe chest infection serious enough that it briefly threatened his life, and only improved medical attention in his last months allowed him to travel at all. He was freed alongside American hostage Thomas Sutherland. Of the ninety-plus hostages originally taken during the decade-long crisis, only a handful remained in Beirut by that point; Terry Anderson, the last, wasn't freed until the following month, after just under seven years.

Life After Release

All three men's lives took very different shapes afterward. Keenan settled in Dublin, continued writing, and eventually returned to Beirut for the first time in 2007, seventeen years after his release, describing the experience as something close to falling in love with the city all over again. McCarthy's relationship with Jill Morrell, the journalist who'd spent five years publicly campaigning for his freedom and co-wrote his own memoir, Some Other Rainbow, didn't survive his return; the two parted amicably in 1994, and McCarthy later married Anna Ottewill in 1999, going on to a long career in British broadcasting and journalism. Waite resigned his position with the Church of England soon after his release, wrote his own account, Taken on Trust, in 1993, and went on to found the charity Hostage International, dedicated to supporting hostages and their families. He was knighted in 2023, and in 2004 he made the striking decision to return to Beirut specifically to meet some of his former captors in person, later saying simply that they seemed surprised to see him.

The three men have stayed connected in the decades since, marking the anniversary of their releases together where they can. Keenan and McCarthy went on to co-write a further book, Between Extremes, in 1999, revisiting some of the places, this time as free men, that had shaped their captivity together.