There are people in the Foreign Office who confide privately that they believe Terry Waite is dead – seized as a spy in the wake of the Irangate scandal, tortured to extract information about his links with Oliver North and finally brutalised beyond endurance.
These officials fuel their fears by pointing to the complete absence of any attempt by his kidnappers to use the Church of England envoy as a political lever. In particular, they ask why at the height of the Salman Rushdie crisis in February they were never presented with a blurred picture of Waite with a pistol at his head and a demand for Rushdie’s life in exchange for his. They fear they know the answer.
Yet these officials would not dream of expressing their beliefs in public – for two reasons which reveal a great deal about the British Government’s approach to its long-suffering hostages.
The first is that they really do not know whether they are right. For every clue which says that Waite is dead, there is another which suggests he has survived. The private fears of these officials are based on nothing more than speculation. The Foreign Office has no facts.
It is an alarming commentary on the state of Britain’s hostage operation that nearly three solid years after the Archbishop of Canterbury’s personal representative disappeared, the Government department which is supposed to be retrieving him does yet know whether he is even dead or alive. Nor does it know for sure who is holding him. Nor where he is being held. Nor why.
The intelligence failure is particularly striking in the case of a figure with the high public profile of Terry Waite, yet it is probably more significant in relation to Waite’s two fellow prisoners, Brian Keenan and John McCarthy, because they have been missing for even longer – more than three and a half years now. As with Waite, the Foreign Office – with all the machinery of MI6 and GCHQ at its disposal – still does not even know whether it is trying to recover hostages or corpses.
The Foreign Office line on the hostages is that it will not make deals with terrorists to secure their release and that it is busy in other, more acceptable ways behind the scenes. However, a World In Action documentary to be shown tonight on ITV, suggests that this high-minded policy has become a mask for inaction and squandered opportunities, that the intelligence failure is part of a wider failure to take any initiative on behalf of the hostages beyond polite diplomacy.
The second reason for official reticence about Terry Waite’s fate is that the heart of the Government’s hostage policy is silence. In a conventional kidnap, the police routinely secure the agreement of newspapers and television companies to impose a press blackout on the story. With the very public seizure of the British hostages in Beirut, that has not been possible, but the Foreign Office has nevertheless done its best to give the story the lowest possible profile.
There is no question of Ministers calling press conferences to castigate the kidnappers or to talk about their tactics. There are no press releases to report the latest diplomatic moves. All the hostage families have been advised not to speak to reporters. Until Brian Keenan’s sisters and John McCarthy’s friends decided to defy that advice, the first two British hostages had simply disappeared off Fleet Street’s radar screens.
The interesting question here is why the Foreign Office has done this. The official explanation is that publicity would only encourage the kidnappers in Beirut to raise the price of the hostages’ release. Whether or not that is true, the effect of the policy is to reduce to the bare minimum the political pressure on the Government to do anything about the hostages. The result is that Britain is doing far less than any of the other Governments which have had their citizens seized in Beirut.
Nine other countries have been in the same position. Every one of them has succeeded in bringing out at least some of its hostages. Most have freed all of their hostages. They did so because domestic political pressure compelled them to put the hostages at the top of their agenda: they set up high-powered crisis committees, called on all available experts, forged new tactics, found go-betweens to contact the kidnappers, gathered intelligence and finally freed their people. Britain has done none of this.
There is no high-powered crisis committee looking after the British hostages. There is no search for expert advice and there are no special tactics; indeed, the entire “no deals” policy has simply been inherited from Northern Ireland and the IRA without any attempt to reshape it to fit the Middle East and the special problem of hostage-taking. There are no go-betweens; although the Foreign Office says it always scrupulously follows up anyone who comes forward, it has so far rejected every one of the 37 would-be intermediaries who have offered to help and – illogically -it has made no attempt to go out and choose its own.
The official defence for this inactivity is that dealing with terrorists is wrong because it only encourages more hostage-taking. The problem for that defence is that the facts do not support it. Of the nine countries which have freed their hostages, six have survived without any further hostage-taking. Britain, however, for all its refusal to deal continues to have its citizens seized – most recently the former RAF pilot Jack Mann in May of this year.
The Foreign Office line appears more and more like an exercise in crisis management: contain the press, control the families, limit the political damage. This interpretation is particularly tempting in the light of the Government’s reaction to the kidnap this summer of the Shi’ite leader Sheikh Obeid by Israeli commandoes and the subsequent threat to the lives of the American hostages.
The incident caused panic in Whitehall, where officials feared that the Israelis might be about to trade Sheikh Obeid for the release of the remaining American hostages, leaving the British Government completely isolated. Downing Street ordered the Foreign Office to seek reassurances from the Israelis that if a deal was done, it would include the British hostages. Then -according to Foreign Office sources – the Prime Minister personally ordered that a political safety net be hung out in case the Israelis let her down.
She ordered the Foreign Office to “tell our story” – to go on a public relations offensive to ensure that Fleet Street would stand by the utter wrongness of making deals and the utter rightness of the Government’s line. So the potential political damage was limited while the central issue of the hostages’ liberty was left to another Government.
In the event, the Israelis struck no deal. The hostages remained locked and chained, alone in the stifling heat of their dark cells. Britain’s hostage policy returned to business as usual.
* Nick Davies is the reporter on tonight’s World In Action, A Thousand Nights In Beirut, ITV, 8.30 pm.
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