One of the enduring stories from the Lebanese civil war years is how the Soviet Union was able to secure the quick release of three of its diplomats kidnapped in Beirut, in contrast to the United States, which saw its hostages held for many years. Those who repeat the story, usually in American or Western media outlets, invariably play up the Soviet method as “the right way to deal with terrorism.”
This is roughly what happened. Four Soviet diplomats serving in Lebanon were seized in two separate incidents in September 1985. They were Valery Mirikov, Oleg Spirin, Arkadi Katkov, and embassy physician Nikolai Sversky. The group claiming responsibility was the so-called Islamic Jihad, which some have described as a precursor to Hezbollah. Others regarded it merely as a front—a “telephone organization,” in the words of academic Marius Deeb. Islamic Jihad had also claimed the suicide attacks against U.S. Marines and French paratroopers of the Multinational Peacekeeping Force in Lebanon in 1983, killing nearly 300 servicemen. Now, it seemed, the shadowy group was widening its list of enemies by targeting not only Western countries, but also Moscow’s interests.
What appears to be an article on the incident from the Washington Times, reproduced in a document partly declassified by the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act, set the tone for U.S. interpretations of the episode. The article played up the fact that now the United States and the Soviet Union were in the same boat. It cited a former CIA official, Ray Cline, as saying, “The Russians aren’t any better off than we are; [but] they will be much more ruthless.” By this time, several Westerners had been kidnapped by Islamic Jihad, including Americans Benjamin Weir, Terry Anderson, Thomas Sutherland, Jeremy Levin, and CIA bureau chief William Buckley, as well as United Nations employee Alec Collett, a British citizen. The mood in the West was such that then president Ronald Reagan would try to secure the release of the Americans by supplying weapons to Iran, which would ultimately provoke the Iran-Contra scandal.
In this atmosphere, it was not surprising that the Americans were looking for a silver bullet to release their hostages and prevent such abductions from occurring again. The reason for this is that the Soviet diplomats were released only a few weeks after being kidnapped, although one of them, Arkadi Katkov, was killed by his captors, probably because he had been severely injured and developed septicemia. What had made this relatively swift denouement possible? Within months, media outlets would try to provide an answer.
According to the Jerusalem Post, in an article cited by United Press International on January 6, 1986, the KGB played a key role in securing the hostages’ release. The UPI story reads: “The KGB, the Post said, kidnapped a Lebanese man, castrated him and sent the severed testicles to his relative, a key fundamentalist leader. The Soviet secret service then threatened that other family members would be dealt with in a similar fashion if the three Soviet hostages were not immediately released. The castrated captive had been shot in the head and killed, the Post said.”
That message would be picked up by one Benjamin Zycher, writing in the Los Angeles Times a few days later, under a revealing headline: “KGB ‘Brutality’ Saves Lives, Our ‘Humanity’ Would Lose.” In his article, Zycher repeated the story about the KGB, noting that the organs of the Hezbollah official’s relative “were sent to [him] with a warning that he would lose other relatives in a similar fashion if the three remaining Soviet diplomats … were not immediately released. They were quickly freed.”
This tale of Soviet decisiveness would linger for decades. In October 2016, one Darien Cavanaugh would repeat it as if the details were now unquestionable. In a piece on the KGB’s Alpha Group, a commando unit, Cavanaugh would cite a book by Matthew Levitt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, in which Levitt wrote, “In one retelling, the KGB kidnapped a relative of the hostage-taking organization’s chief, cut off the relative’s ear, and sent it to his family. In another, the Alpha unit abducted one of the kidnapper’s brothers, and sent two of his fingers home to his family in separate envelopes.”
So many body parts flying about, and in multiple envelopes no less. Yet the reality is that all these versions appear to have largely been fabricated. There was no carving up of victims, no dispatch of Alpha Group to liberate the diplomats, no brutal Soviet methods that could eventually be implemented by the more “humane” United States to free its own hostages, no silver bullets.
At the time, journalists who knew Lebanon well fully grasped what had really taken place. Jim Muir, writing in the Christian Science Monitor in November 1985, noted, “All indications are that the freeing of the Soviets Wednesday was the result of a special effort by Moscow’s main Mideast ally, Syria, and friendly local Lebanese militias.” Nora Boustany, then with the Washington Post, wrote after the liberation of the diplomats, “There were widespread reports and evidence … that the Soviet Union and Syria, which has several thousand troops in Lebanon and was highly embarrassed by the kidnapping, had begun an all-out effort to gain the captives’ release.”
Vassili Kolotocha, who would become the Soviet Union’s ambassador to Lebanon in May 1986, wrote in his memoirs, “For a quarter of a century since this tragedy, various myths, heresies, half-truths, and distorted tales have been woven around it …” including the “cutting of heads” and more. But the reality proved much more mundane. The Soviet Union asked its allies in Lebanon, above all Syria, but also Iran, to put pressure on the kidnappers, who sought to end Syria’s siege of Sunni Islamists in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli. The Lebanese Druze leader Walid Joumblatt, an ally of the Soviet Union during Lebanon’s civil war, recently responded to my question about whether violence was used to liberate the diplomats by scoffing.
As Kolotocha wrote, reports that the Soviet Union had landed special forces in Lebanon to liberate the diplomats made it seem that they were “Hollywood film heroes.” In a way, the late ambassador put his finger on something. Faced with complicated and frustrating situations in complex Middle Eastern countries, American commentators in particular over the years have been bewitched by the prospect that violence could allow them to cut through the webs of intricacy they regularly face. When the United States is destabilized, all too often there are critics who insist that its failings are a result of Washington not going far enough in its ferocity.
Not surprisingly, a nation in the Middle East that many American officials hold up as an example to follow in fighting “terrorists” is Israel. It is lost on them that Israel has spent decades deploying unspeakable violence against its enemies, but today finds itself more vulnerable and reviled than ever, completely incapable of offering a political solution to help resolve its conflict with the Palestinians.
That the case of the four Soviet hostages continues to elicit admiration among misinformed people for the tough methods allegedly employed by Moscow tells us much more about the admirers than about what actually took place in 1985. Ultimately, it’s a bad idea to believe that the natives only really understand force. All the evidence from the region is that America has paid a heavy price for thinking that aggression can magically cut its Gordian knots.
