“Mr. Elliott is not available now,” the voice said pleasantly. “I’m Mrs. Kessler. Is there something I can do?”
“Perhaps.” Dawson carefully explained why he had called.
The voice became cool. “Wait, please.”
Several minutes passed. Dawson was about to hang up and call again when the connection came alive. This time the voice was frigid. “Mr. Elliott advises that whatever you think you heard was confidential and may not be used.”
“I’m a reporter,” Dawson said. “If I hear or learn something and it wasn’t told to me confidentially, I’m entitled to use it.”
“Mr. Dawson, I see no point in prolonging this conversation.”
“Just a moment, please. Does Mr. Elliott deny having used the words I read to you?”
“Mr. Elliott has no further comment.”
Dawson wrote down the question and answer, as he had the previous exchange.
“Mrs. Kessler, do you mind telling me your first name?”
“There is no reason to … well, Diana.”
Dawson smiled, guessing Kessler had reasoned that if her name was to appear in print, it might as well be in full. About to say thank you, he realized the connection had been severed.
As he replaced the phone, the bureau chief handed him a slip of paper. “Rhodes is on his way to La Guardia in a State Department car. Here’s the number of the car phone.”
Dawson lifted his phone again.
This time, after a ringing tone, a male voice answered. When Dawson asked for “Mr. Alden Rhodes,” the response was, “This is he.”
Again the reporter identified himself, aware that Sandy Sefton was listening on an extension.
“Mr, Rhodes, my paper would like to know if you have any comment on Mr. Theodore Elliott’s statement that CBA network will reject the recent Sendero Luminoso demands and, in Mr. Elliott’s words, ‘we’re not going to let a bunch of crazy Commies push us around.’”
“Theo Elliott told you that!”
“I heard him say it personally, Mr. Rhodes.”
“I thought he wanted it kept confidential.” A pause. “Now wait a minute! Were you sitting in that hall when we walked through?”
“Yes, I was.”
“Dawson, you’ve tricked me and I insist this entire conversation be off the record.”
“Mr. Rhodes, before we began talking I identified myself and you did not say anything about being off the record.”
“Fuck you, Dawson!”
“That last was off the record, sir. By then you’d told me.”
The bureau chief, grinning, gave a thumbs-up signal.
The ethical debate in Baltimore did not last long.
In any news organization there always existed a predilection toward disclosure. However, with some news stories—and this was one—certain questions needed to be asked and answered. The executive editor and national editor, who would oversee the story, posed them to each other.
QUESTION: Would publication of CBA’s decision imperil the hostages? ANSWER: The hostages were in peril already; it was hard to see how publication of anything could make much difference. QUESTION: Would anyone be killed because of publication? ANSWER: Unlikely because a dead hostage would cease to be of value. QUESTION: Since CBA would have to make its decision known in a day or two, what difference would it make to be a little early? ANSWER: Not much, if any. QUESTION: Since Globanic’s Theo Elliott revealed the CBA decision casually and others must know of it, was it likely to stay secret much longer? ANSWER: Almost certainly no.
At the end, the executive editor expressed the conclusion of both: “There isn’t an ethical problem. We go!”
The story led the Baltimore Star’s main afternoon edition with a banner headline:
CBA SAYS NO TO SLOANE KIDNAPPERS
Glen Dawson’s by-line story began:
CBA will say an emphatic “No” to demands by the Sloane family’s kidnappers that it cancel its televised National Evening News for a week, replacing it with propaganda videotapes supplied by the Peru Maoist rebel group Sendero Luminoso.
Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, has admitted holding the kidnap victims at a secret location in Peru.
Theodore Elliott, chairman and chief executive officer of Globanic Industries, the parent company of CBA, declared today, “What we’re not going to do is let a bunch of crazy Commies push us around.”
Speaking at Globanic’s headquarters at Pleasantville, New York, he added, “As for running those Shining Path tapes, not a hope in hell.”
A Star reporter was present during the Elliott statement.
Alden Rhodes, Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, who was with Mr. Elliott when the statement was made, declined to comment when questioned by the Star, though he did say, “I thought he wanted it kept confidential.”
An attempt late this morning to reach Mr. Elliott for additional information was unsuccessful.
“Mr. Elliott is not available,” the Star was informed by Mrs. Diana Kessler, an assistant to the Globanic chairman. In response to questions, Mrs. Kessler insisted, “Mr. Elliott has no further comment.”
There was more—principally background and the history of the kidnap.
Even before the Baltimore Star hit the streets, the wire services had the story, giving credit to the Star. Later that evening the Star was quoted on all network news broadcasts, including CBA’s where the premature news was received with near-despair.
Next morning in Peru, where the kidnap story was already prominent in the news, newspapers, as well as radio and TV, featured the disclosure with special emphasis on Theodore Elliott’s “bunch of crazy Commies”—“grupo de Comunistas locos”—description of Sendero Luminoso.
6
“I like Vicente,” Nicky said. “He’s our friend.”
“I think he is too,” Angus called over from his cell. He was lying on the thin, soiled mattress of his makeshift bed and filling empty time by watching two large beetles on the wall.
“Then un-think, both of you!” Jessica snapped. “Liking anyone here is stupid and naïve.”
She stopped, wanting to bite her tongue and call the words back. There was no need to have spoken sharply.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean that to come out the way it did.”
The trouble was that after fifteen days of close confinement in their tiny cages, the strain was telling on them all, wearing their spirits down. Jessica had done her best to keep morale, if not high, at least at a level above despair. She also made sure they all performed daily exercises, which she led. But clearly, despite best intentions, the close physical restriction, monotony and loneliness were having an inevitable effect.
Additionally, the greasy, unpalatable food was one more burden that sapped their physical resources.
Compounding those miseries, and despite their efforts to stay washed, they were usually dirty, odorous, and frequently sweating, with their soiled clothes sticking to them.
It was all very well, Jessica thought, to remind herself that her anti-terrorism course mentor, Brigadier Wade, had suffered a good deal more and for a longer period in his below-ground hellhole in Korea. But Cedric Wade was an exceptional, committed person serving his country in time of war. There was no war here to stiffen the mind or sinews. They were merely civilians caught in a petty skirmish … for what purpose? Jessica still didn’t know.
Just the same, the thought of Brigadier Wade and Nicky’s remark about liking Vicente, plus Angus’s endorsement, reminded her of something she had learned from Wade. Now seemed a good time to bring it up.
Speaking softly while glancing warily at the guard on duty, she asked, “Angus and Nicky, have either of you heard of the Stockholm syndrome?”
“I think so,” Angus said. “Not sure, though.”
“Nicky?”
“No, Mom. What is it?”
The guard was the one who sometimes brought a comic book; he seemed engrossed in one now and indifferent to
their talking. Jessica also knew he spoke no English.
“I’ll tell you,” Jessica said.
In memory she could hear Brigadier Wade’s voice informing the small study group of which she had been part, “One thing that happens in almost every terrorist hijack or kidnap situation is that after a while at least some of the hostages come to like the terrorists. Sometimes hostages go so far as to think of the terrorists as their friends and the police or troops outside, who are trying to rescue the hostages, as the enemy. That’s the Stockholm syndrome.”
All of which was true, Jessica confirmed subsequently through additional reading. She had also been curious enough to go back and learn how the process got its label.
Now, dipping into memory and using her own words, she described the strange story while Nicky and Angus listened.
It happened in Stockholm, Sweden, on August 23, 1973.
That morning, at Norrmalmstorg, a central city square, an escaped convict, Jan-Erik Olsson, age thirty-two, entered Sveriges Kreditbanken, one of Stockholm’s larger banks. From beneath a folded jacket Olsson produced a submachine gun which he fired into the ceiling, creating panic amid a shower of concrete and glass.
The ordeal that followed lasted six days.
In the course of it no one participating had any notion that for years and probably centuries to come, an outcropping of the experience they were sharing would become famous as the Stockholm syndrome—a medical and scientific phrase destined to be as familiar worldwide to students and practitioners as Cesarean section, anorexia, penis envy or Alzheimer’s disease.
Three women and a man, all bank employees, were taken hostage by Olsson and an accomplice, Clark Olofsson, age twenty-six. The hostages were Birgitta Lundblad, thirty-one, a pretty blond; Kristin Ehnmark, twenty-three, spirited and black-haired; Elisabeth Oldgren, twenty-one, small, fair and gentle; and Sven Säfström, twenty-five, a tall, slender bachelor. For most of the next six days this sextet was confined to a safe-deposit vault from where the criminals presented their demands by telephone—for three million kronor in cash ($710,000), two pistols and a getaway car.
During the siege, the hostages suffered. They were forced to stand with ropes around their necks so that falling would strangle them. From time to time, as a machine gun was thrust into their ribs, they expected death. For fifty hours they were without food. Plastic wastebaskets became their only toilets. Within the vault, claustrophobia and fear were all-pervading.
Yet all the while a strange closeness between hostages and captors grew. There was a moment when Birgitta could have walked away but didn’t. Kristin managed to give information to the police, then acknowledged, “I felt like a traitor.” The male hostage, Sven, described his captors as “kind.” Elisabeth agreed.
Stockholm’s police, waging a war of attrition to free the prisoners, encountered hostility from them. Kristin said by telephone that she trusted the robbers, adding “I want you to let us go away with them … They have been very nice.” Of Olsson, she declared, “He is protecting us from the police.” When told, “The police will not harm you,” Kristin replied, “I do not believe it.”
It was revealed later that Kristin held hands with the younger criminal, Olofsson. She told an investigator, “Clark gave me tenderness.” And after the hostages’ release, while being taken by stretcher to an ambulance, Kristin called to Olofsson, “Clark, I’ll see you again.”
Lab technicians searching the vault found traces of semen. Following a week of questioning, one of the women, while denying having had sex, said that during one night while others were asleep she helped Olsson to masturbate. Investigators, while skeptical about the no-sex statement, dropped the matter.
During questioning by doctors the freed hostages referred to police as “the enemy” and believed it was the criminals to whom they owed their lives. Elisabeth accused a doctor of attempting to “brainwash away” her regard for Olsson and Olofsson.
In 1974, nearly a year after the bank drama, Birgitta visited Olofsson in jail, conversing with him for half an hour.
Investigating doctors eventually declared the hostages’ reaction typical of anyone caught in “survival situations.” They quoted Anna Freud who described such reactions as “identification with the aggressor.” But it took the Swedish bank drama to create a permanent, memorable name: the Stockholm syndrome.
“Hey, that’s neat, Mom,” Nicky called out.
“I never knew all that, Jessie,” Angus added.
Nicky asked, “Got any more good stuff?”
Jessica was pleased. “A little.”
Once more she drew on her memories of the Britisher, Brigadier Wade. “I have two pieces of advice for you,” he once told his anti-terrorist class. “First, if you’re a captive and a hostage: Beware the Stockholm syndrome! Second, when dealing with terrorists keep in mind that ‘Love your enemies’ is vapid nonsense. At the other extreme, don’t squander time and effort hating terrorists, because hate is a wasteful, draining emotion. Just never for a moment trust them, or like them, and never stop thinking of them as the enemy.”
Jessica repeated the Wade advice for Nicky and Angus. She went on to describe airplane hijackings where people who had been seized and abused developed friendly feelings for their attackers. This proved true with the infamous TWA flight 847 in 1985 when some passengers expressed sympathy for the Shiite hijackers and expounded their captors’ propagandist views.
More recently, Jessica explained, a released hostage from the Middle East—a pathetic figure, clearly another victim of the Stockholm syndrome—even delivered a message from his jailers to the Pope and the U.S. President, gaining much publicity while he did. The nature of the message was not disclosed, though unofficially it was called banal and pointless.
Of even greater concern to those who understood the Stockholm syndrome was the case of kidnap victim Patricia Hearst. Unfortunately for Hearst, who was arrested in 1975 and tried the following year for alleged crimes while dominated by her brutish captors, the events in Stockholm were not sufficiently known to allow either sympathy or justice. Speaking at one of the Wade anti-terrorist sessions, an American lawyer declared, “In legal and intellectual values the Patty Hearst trial must be equated with the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692.” He added, “Knowing what we do now, and remembering that the wrong done was recognized by President Carter who commuted her prison sentence, it will be a dark day of shame for our country if Patricia Hearst is allowed to die unpardoned.”
“So what you’re saying, Jessie,” Angus said, “is not to be taken in by Vicente’s seeming easy. He’s still an enemy.”
“If he weren’t,” Jessica pointed out, “we could just walk out of here while he’s guarding us.”
“Which we know we can’t.” Angus directed his voice to the middle cell. “Have you got that, Nicky? Your mom’s right and you and I were wrong.”
Nicky nodded glumly, without speaking. One of the sadnesses of this incarceration, Jessica thought, was that Nicky was being faced—earlier than would have happened normally—with some harsh realities of human infamy.
As always in Peru, the developing news concerning the Sloane family kidnapping traveled over the longest distances and to the country’s remotest places by radio.
The first news of the linkage of Peru and Sendero Luminoso to the kidnapping was reported on Saturday, the day following the CBA National Evening News broadcast in which the exclusive material assembled by the network’s special task force was revealed. While the kidnapping had been reported earlier by Peru’s media in a minor way, the local involvement made it instant major news. Here, too, radio was the means of widest dissemination.
Similarly, on the Tuesday morning following Monday’s news breakthrough by the Baltimore Star, radio delivered to the Andes mountain city of Ayacucho and the Selva hamlet Nueva Esperanza the first report of Theodore Elliott’s rejection of the kidnappers’ demands and his low opinion of Sendero Luminoso.
In Ayacucho the radio report
was heard by Sendero leaders and in Nueva Esperanza by the terrorist Ulises Rodríguez, alias Miguel.
Soon after, a telephone conversation took place between Miguel and a Sendero leader in Ayacucho, though neither disclosed his name while talking. Both were aware that the telephone connection was poor by modern standards and that the line passed through other locations where anyone could be listening, including the army or police. Thus they talked in generalities and veiled references, at which many in Peru were practiced, though to both men the meaning was understood.
This was: Something must be done immediately to prove to the American TV network, CBA, that they were dealing with neither fools nor weaklings. Killing one of the hostages and leaving the body to be found in Lima was a possibility. Miguel, while agreeing that would be effective, suggested for the moment keeping all three hostages alive, preserving them like capital. Instead of killing, he advised another course of action which—remembering something he had learned while at Hackensack—he believed would be devastating psychologically to those at the other end of the equation in New York.
This was promptly agreed to and, since physical transportation would be needed, a car or truck, whichever proved available, would leave Ayacucho immediately for Nueva Esperanza.
In Nueva Esperanza, Miguel began his preparations by sending for Socorro.
Jessica, Nicky and Angus looked up as a small procession filed into the area immediately outside their cells. It consisted of Miguel, Socorro, Gustavo, Ramón and one of the other men who served as guards. From their sense of purpose it was evident something was about to happen and Jessica and the others waited apprehensively to discover what.
One thing Jessica was sure of: Whatever was expected of her, she would cooperate. It was now six days since she had made the videotape recording in course of which, because of her initial defiance, Nicky had been tortured by agonizing burns. Since then, Socorro had come in daily to inspect the burns, which were sufficiently healed so that Nicky was no longer in pain. Jessica, who still felt guilty about Nicky’s suffering, was determined he would not be hurt again.