The Discreet Work youtube channel
Transcript of “Unlisted I was taken hostage” a video of 7:55
Who was the highest ranking diplomat who was taken hostage for 444 days in Tehran?
His name was Moorhead Kennedy. He was a classmate of mine. His father was also a Princetonian.
Moorhead was also CIA. We had several members of the Knick who would meet usually 2 or 3 times a year. If the lunch was 12:15 to 3 pm, we would arrive at 2:45 for lunch. We hoped that most would have left.
12 years before [the Iran hostage taking in 1978], three weeks after I was married on Sanibel Island off the west coast of Florida, I was taken hostage on the way to Damascus, Syria with the confidential assistant to the president of Lebanon. He spoke five languages. The car was to pick me up at the St. George hotel in Beirut. They said that the car wasn’t working and they said, “There’s another car waiting for you at the new hotel.”
I said, “This is not my car!”
They said, “The two drivers are [well armed], they have guns and it’s just you and this lady.”
So we started out all the way out to the cedars and then you go about a mile to what appears to be a gate where a couple of guys, not even in uniform, open and close the gate and that’s the border. Lebanon had been part of Syria.
We were on a dirt road for three or four miles when all of a sudden, boom boom boom boom, machine guns.
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They hung me by wire. Until about five years ago, you could see the barbed wire marks on my wrists. This girl kept saying in the local language, “No, no, he’s not a spy! He’s helping us.” She meant the Palestinians, of course. It turned out that her uncle was a ruler of the Druze, a mountain tribe. These arabs were rude to her. They kept slapping her. She said, “They will try to prove that I am not a liar. If they can’t prove that I’m not a liar, they are going to kill us both.” They were gone for overnight, a day and a half. He came back and she said, “He’s here.”
I’m hanging with my arms up. I could just touch the ground with my toe because the tree wasn’t that big.
I would come down but i would still hurt my back.
Then the leader of these guys said to her in Arabic, “We approve that you are telling the truth. We will release him.”
This happened in 1966.
It was the middle to late April. I was not allowed to discuss this incident.
The only guy who knew this story was the guy who published in Beirut. They published in four languages, English, French, Arabic and Farsi.
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EXTENDED LEARNING
NOTE: This segment could turn into a blog post with links to other videos, such as the Moorhead Kennedy interview which provides some interesting background. Moorhead was perhaps one of the first freshmen students at Princeton to study Arabic.
Link to interview with Moorhead Kennedy
One of the valuable reasons for reading “Discreet Work” by JAB is that people and events that many of us have not paid much attention to can be viewed in a new light. The “discreet stories” can be doorways into asking about “well, what did Moorhead have to say about the Middle East? How did he get involved?” His interview with Harold Channer in 1986 (now posted on YouTube) can provide insight…
Partial transcript
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