Former hostage Terry Anderson, smiling behind his six-year-old daughter Sulome—the author—reaches out to shake hands upon his arrival at the Associated Press headquarters in New York on Wednesday, December 10, 1991. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
Former hostage Terry Anderson, smiling behind his six-year-old daughter Sulome—the author—reaches out to shake hands upon his arrival at the Associated Press headquarters in New York on Wednesday, December 10, 1991. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
Annons
Annons
Annons
Cover photo courtesy Dey Street Books/Harper Collins
Annons
Terry Anderson carries the author, 11, as they leave Beirut airport following their arrival in 1996 for his first trip back after being kidnapped. (AP Photo/Saleh Rifai)
Annons
Annons
All of Dad's circle of friends were reporters. They had their own sources, and after he was abducted, they worked their connections as hard as they could, trying to find information on his whereabouts and condition. In a Skype conversation, Scheherazade Faramarzi—another colleague of my dad's whom everyone called Shazi—tells about how she and fellow journalist Robert Fisk began their quest to find my father."I had a very good source in Tehran," she begins. "We used to call him Annie so that nobody would know who we were talking about, but it was a man. Anyway, this guy used to be part of the Iranian regime, but at the time when I got in touch with him, he had left his job and was doing business. I called him in Tehran and I said, 'Can you do something? What can you do?' He said, 'Let me find out.' After a few exchanges, he told me he had talked to the Iranian regime and they wanted to know what happened to four Iranians who had disappeared."Shazi and Fisk made some inquiries into the whereabouts of the missing Iranians. Most of their sources seemed to think the men were dead, and they relayed this to Annie. But their dialogue with him continued."I put Fisk in charge of contact with this guy, but of course we kept your mother informed, and she became very dependent on Annie," Shazi murmurs softly. "I think she was clinging to him, to his information. It made her keep going."This hurts my heart a little. I remember how my mother's face would tighten and turn ash gray sometimes when I was very small. Sometimes, I can still hear her sobbing behind a closed door."This guy started coming into Cyprus to talk with us, because it was very dangerous to talk over the phone," Shazi tells me. "We [Shazi and Fisk] went one night to a pub, because it was dark and noisy. We didn't want anybody to hear us. It was like a James Bond movie. He wrote down—and I still have this piece of paper; it's become yellow now—he wrote down the name Imad Mughniyeh."Mughniyeh would soon become the primary suspect in the US government's hunt for the terrorist mastermind who was engineering the kidnappings. But at the time, he was little more than a rumor—just the faint outline of a boogeyman in the dark."We had never heard of him," Shazi says. "He didn't even want to utter his name."Preorder a copy of The Hostage's Daughter, to be published on October 4 by Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, here. Reprinted by permission. Follow Sulome Anderson on Twitter.I remember how my mother's face would tighten and turn ash gray sometimes when I was very small.
