Jamie Tobias Neely: Journalist recalls kidnapping in Lebanon: “It could have happened to all of us”

Perhaps more than anyone else in the Inland Northwest, Alann Steen can relate to the experience of kidnapped American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, who were beheaded by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria this summer.

Steen, also a former journalist, was an American hostage in Lebanon from 1987 to 1991. Now 75 years old, he lives just north of Spokane. He followed the news of the kidnapped American journalists closely, comparing Foley’s and Sotloff’s fates to his own. The primary contrast: the fundamental nature of ISIS itself.

Steen, who had worked as an editor at the daily newspaper in Arcata, California, and taught journalism at Humboldt State University and California State University, Chico, moved to Lebanon to teach English and journalism at Beirut University College in 1983.

Although fighting surrounded him in Beirut, Steen felt he and his fellow professors were kidnap-proof. That illusion lasted for three and one-half years, right up until Jan. 24, 1987, when the American professors were called into a security briefing with Lebanese police.

As Steen entered the room, he found men dressed in light blue uniforms and red berets, carrying M16 rifles. Soon the university’s four American professors were hooded, handcuffed and shoved into the trunk of a limousine.

Their captors were part of Hezbollah, a militant Shiite group. The first night, after his kidnappers had learned that Steen had served in the Marines as a young man, they threw him around the room, shouting, “You Marine! You CIA!” When Steen fell, his left temple hit the edge of a coffee table. This brain injury left him with epilepsy.

Steen escaped once in the first year, but was quickly returned to his captors. He recalls spending most of the next four years chained to a wall.

Over the years, one by one, his fellow hostages were led away. On Dec. 4, 1991, the guards brought him an oversized double-breasted suit, and suddenly Steen found he, too, was released.

While Steen says he’s never known what caused his captors to free him, a 1992 story from the Washington Post provides one explanation. The Bush administration, according to the Post, reported that Iran not only financed the confinement of Steen’s group of hostages, it also paid their captors $1 million to $2 million for each one released.

After Steen returned to the U.S., he met with President George H.W. Bush at the White House. He ultimately completed his teaching career at Casper College in Casper, Wyoming.

In 2003, Steen and his family won a federal court case against Iran. A judge awarded Steen and his family $42.7 million in compensatory damages and another $300 million for punitive damages. Iran never answered the charges, and Steen understood that the money was to be paid from Iranian assets that the U.S. had frozen.

Unlike the longest-held hostage of that era, Terry Anderson, who won a successful lawsuit against Iran, Steen has never received any of this money. He read that in November the U.S. government agreed to release frozen assets to Iran, and while Steen has contacted his Washington, D.C., attorney and his political representatives, he has heard very little. His attorney did not respond last week to questions about the case.

In 2004, Steen retired to Spokane, where one of his daughters was living. He and his wife live in a quiet, wooded area where he gardens, takes long walks and avidly watches television reports from the Middle East.

His memories of his imprisonment trickle in a small, slow stream, he says. But when the rains come, the stream swells and memories flood back.

This summer the news of Foley’s and Sotloff’s beheadings shocked Steen. “No one could be as animal-like as these people are,” Steen says. “I couldn’t believe it.”

The primary difference between his experience and that of Foley and Sotloff, Steen says, is ISIS’ sheer, mindless brutality. In contrast, Hezbollah was more methodical and political than al-Qaida and, although radical, even al-Qaida appears more moderate to Steen than ISIS.

Steen believes Hezbollah kidnapped him primarily for ransom, while ISIS took Foley and Sotloff to incite terror. Unlike them, Steen and his fellow professors were worth more to their captors alive than dead.

The news of Foley’s and Sotloff’s deaths aroused a mix of emotions for Steen.

“When I think of the beheadings, I think of how lucky I was,” Steen says. “It could have happened to all of us … the threats were always there.”