As riveting details of cruelty at the hands of their captors emerge, efforts are under way to bring home the remains of two American hostages who died in Lebanon.
The sister of one, the CIA's William Buckley, said it was always his wish to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. And if any good came of his death, it was that other hostages were treated better for awhile afterward, she said.Former hostage David Jacobsen, who lives in Huntington Beach, Calif., said Buckley's captors did nothing to try to save his life. "They let the poor guy die in misery. It was a wretched death for him."
American hostages William Higgins and Peter Kilburn also never made it home. Kilburn's body has been returned, but the remains of Higgins and Buckley have not.
The night Jacobsen was kidnapped May 28, 1985, he was taken a few hundred yards from the airport and put in a room with Buckley and Terry Anderson, the longest-held hostage who arrived back in the United States this week.
The room was divided by plywood into three 4-by-8 compartments.
"We were all blindfolded and we were chained by one wrist and one ankle to the floor and we were on cots on the floor," Jacobsen said. On the night of June 3, Buckley was "obviously very ill," he said.
"He obviously was running a high fever," he said. "He was delirious. He was trying to vomit. He had the dry heaves. The guard, named Sayed, was trying to comfort him."
Jacobsen said the 57-year-old Buckley either had an abnormal accumulation of fluid in his lungs or was in the final stages of pneumonia. Jacobsen and Anderson could hear him moaning, and Jacobsen heard Buckley say, "I don't know what's happened to my body. It was so strong 30 days ago."
Another time, a delirious Buckley was heard in the bathroom saying, "I think I'll have my hot cakes now and I'd like to have blueberry syrup."
Sayed asked Jacobsen, administrator at the American University of Beirut hospital, "What can we do for our friend?"
"I said, `You better take him to the hospital or a doctor because he's very sick. He's going to die,' " recalled Jacobsen. "He said, `Well, we can't do that. You must know something to do.' "
Jacobsen suggested the captors buy medications to bring Buckley's fever down and settle his stomach. Sayed told him, "Thank you. We'll do it," but they never did, Jacobsen said. Later that evening, Jacobsen heard the death rattles.
A few days after Buckley died, a doctor gave the other hostages cursory physicals and told the captors that if they didn't treat them better, they would die. "And a dead hostage is of no value," Jacobsen said.
"There was garbage on the floor that had never been cleaned," he said. "The guards have a habit of spitting on the floor. They came in with a hose and they flushed the apartment, then they took a squeegee and pushed it all out.
"You could smell the Lysol. They disinfected everything. They even scrubbed my feet with Lysol. Then I was put into the area in which Buckley had lived and they had a cot in there and I think they gave Terry Anderson a cot, too. So we were off the ground and they gave us clean blankets and sheets. They let us take a shower and brush our teeth.
"Then Sayed came to me and he went to all the other ones, too. He said, `What would you like for dinner? Would you like to have a little chicken, a little steak, a little spaghetti?' They actually went to a restaurant to buy our food for several weeks. Before that, food was atrocious."
Buckley's sister, Maureen Moroney of Salem, said: "At least something good came from his death."
She and another of Buckley's sisters, Joyce Wing of Saugus, expressed joy at the release of the last American hostages last week.
President Bush has demanded an accounting of Buckley, later identified as CIA station chief in Beirut, and Higgins, a Marine lieutenant colonel who was serving with U.N. observers when he was kidnapped Feb. 17, 1988.
Higgins' captors released a videotape July 31, 1989, showing his body hanging from a makeshift gallows.
Kilburn, who was an American University of Beirut librarian, disappeared Dec. 3, 1984, and was found shot to death with two British hostages on April 17, 1986. A nearby note said Arab Revolutionary Cells killed them in retaliation for the U.S. air attack on Libya.
In a meeting last week, U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar assured Higgins' widow, Robin Higgins, a Marine public information officer in New Orleans, that he expected to receive Higgins' body by the end of the year.