In 1984, I used to visit Tom Sutherland and his wife, Jean, after running on the track at the American University of Beirut. They had dared to join the faculty at a time when Lebanon was a rough place to live. The civil war was in its ninth year; the Israeli invasion was in its second year. Hezbollah, the emerging Shiite militia, was taking control of West Beirut, including the scenic seafront area around the university. Fighting disrupted daily life—you often didn’t know which war was playing out around you—and made sleep difficult. Electricity was erratic; shops often had food shortages. That was the year the American University president was assassinated and a professor taken hostage. The Sutherlands and I would sit on their terrace, sipping cool drinks in the Beirut heat, and ponder the latest chaos around us.
Tom, who died on Saturday, was a loquacious man, with a slightly receding hairline and a subtle sense of humor. He had grown up in Scotland before moving to the United States for graduate work in animal science. He spent more than a quarter century teaching animal husbandry and genetics at Colorado State University, and became a naturalized American citizen, but he spoke with the lilting Scottish burr of his early years. He still had a kilt, and loved to find a reason to quote Robert Burns. In 1983, he took a leave from Colorado State to become the dean of agriculture at American University, which was known as the Harvard of the Middle East until the civil war broke out. Jean, an earthy Midwesterner who loved to laugh at her husband’s humor, taught English. They still believed in the innate goodness of people; I didn’t.
Tom refused to let the war consume his life. “When you’re teaching class, you can’t pay any attention” to the gunfire, he told the Los Angeles Times. “Otherwise you lose the attention of the students, and they get worried and want to leave.”
He took a brief break from Beirut to attend his daughter’s college graduation. He flew back on June 9, 1985, and was picked up at the airport by the limousine normally used by the university’s president. A half mile down the airport road, gunmen with Islamic Jihad—a clandestine Shiite militia, with ties to Iran—stopped the car. They pulled Tom out and pushed him into their trunk. He was the ninth American taken hostage in Beirut in the mid-eighties. He later learned that his captors didn’t want him; they had intended to kidnap the university president.
Tom later recalled being pulled out of the trunk in front of some three dozen men talking excitedly in Arabic. “They had, after all, a new trophy,” he wrote in “At Your Own Risk.” “I didn't have time to more than quickly take in much of the surroundings before one young fellow cried out, 'The eyes; the eyes. Cover the eyes.’ ” The man pulled a hood over Tom’s head. “Though I blessedly didn't know it then, that was the last time I would see the sun for the next six and a half years.”
He was the second-longest-held American in Lebanon, after Terry Anderson, the Associated Press bureau chief. “Tommy was with me for about six of the almost seven years I spent in the gulag—sometimes on the same chain,” Anderson told me last night. (We’d also been friends in Beirut.) “We had so much time together and nothing to do, so he taught me French. He spoke it beautifully, because he’d spent time doing research in France. We’d sit on our mattresses. We never had pencil or paper. He also gave me lessons from his agriculture courses. Not long before he was released, he said, ‘You’d have enough credit now for a B.A. in agriculture.’ ”
Anderson added, “He said I saved his life. I say he saved mine.”
Tom suffered deeply in captivity. “He was a full-blooded academic,” Anderson, a former Marine, said. “He was used to people showing respect for each other. He had a hard time dealing with the brutality and violence.” Tom was badly beaten when he tried to take off his blindfold in a captor’s presence. After he was moved into a dark underground cell alone, he became utterly despondent.
“They wouldn't even give me a candle to eat by,” he recalled on ABC’s “Nightline” years later. “They really were causing me a lot of grief, and I thought to myself, I'll be damned if I'm going to put up with this. I'd sooner die. And so I tried to pull a plastic bag over my head and suffocate myself. But I found out on each try that it got very painful, and, as it got more painful, the vision of my wife and three daughters appeared before me ever more clearly. And I decided each time, ‘Gee, I can't go through with this,’ and I would pull it off.”
He also lost his Presbyterian faith. “God, I prayed so many times and prayed so hard—so hard!—and nothing happened,” he recalled later. “After thinking about it deeply, I’m not so sure there is a God.” Toward the end of their captivity, the hostages were occasionally given magazines or allowed to listen to a radio. Tom recalled weeping when he heard the BBC play a song with a dedication from his wife. He also recalled hearing a newscast, in 1991, which reported that a bomb had damaged the American University campus and that Magic Johnson had HIV. “I just lay there and cried,” he said. “I’m a great fan of Magic Johnson.”
U.S. intelligence officials later claimed that they discovered where the Americans were being held at least three times, but did not have enough specifics for a rescue operation. “It’s not enough to know what building they’re in, what floor, what apartment or even what room,” L. Paul Bremer, a former head of counterterrorism at the State Department, said, in 1991. “You’ve got to know which way the door opens and where the guard sleeps. That kind of intelligence we just never had.” Sutherland said he was moved to different subterranean cells sixteen times; the hostages were not always together.
Jean Sutherland was steadfast throughout her husband’s captivity. She stayed in Beirut to do whatever she could to help free him—and to be near him. She also continued to teach at American University, despite the war. Her father—William Murray, a two-time Republican candidate for governor of Iowa—became the family spokesman regarding Tom’s captivity. Murray died on November 16, 1991. Two days later, as Jean was on her way to Iowa for her father’s funeral, the State Department intercepted her at the Newark airport to say that her husband had been released in a complex deal negotiated by a special U.N. envoy.
Tom had spent more than twenty-three hundred days as a hostage. Two other Americans held by Islamic Jihad had died in captivity, and he was uncertain of his fate until the last few hours.
The Sutherlands returned to Fort Collins, where he was greeted by thousands—and his beloved bagpipes.
Tom may have lost his faith, but he never lost his humanity. At a press conference after his release, he said he wouldn’t mind returning to Beirut “if it proves possible to go back to help with the rebuilding process.” Jean concurred. In 2001, in an interview marking the tenth anniversary of his release, he told the Coloradoan that he wasn’t bitter, “because that doesn't help. Being bitter and angry are just consuming emotions, and that doesn't get you any better.”
Tom was awarded thirty-five million dollars in a suit that he, along with other hostages, brought against the Iranian government for aiding the Lebanese captors. The damages were taken from seized Iranian assets in the United States. With their windfall, Tom and Jean set up the Sutherland Family Foundation, which gave a lot to non-profit groups, including performing arts. Friends thought the Sutherlands would move to warmer climes—Florida or Arizona. “They assumed that because we came into some wealth that we were going to go build a multimillion-dollar house,” he later told the Coloradoan. “We got much more house here than we can use by a long way. It's easy to lose things in this house. If we went to a ten-thousand-square-foot mansion, I would really lose stuff.” Instead, in his seventies, Tom became an amateur thespian in local theatre. His début was in “A Lesson from Aloes,” Athol Fugard’s 1979 play about the damages to personal relationships wrought by apartheid in South Africa.
“We all got a lot of money,” Anderson recalled. “Tommy used it the best. He gave a lot of it away. He did nothing but good for his community from the time he went home. He spent thousands of hours with causes he believed in—like the Colorado Boys Ranch,” a treatment program for abused kids.
In 2001, when a reporter from the Coloradoan asked him about his legacy, Tom replied, “I would like them to remember that I was the recipient of an awful lot of kindness and goodwill and would like, if possible, to repay that. And, that they could say when I die: ‘Here's a guy who did do something for other people.’ ”
