Word: ite
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...background, saying nothing about the key role he had played in securing the captives' release. As the point man of U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar's seven-month campaign to resolve the hostage crisis, Picco had engaged in a series of daunting covert missions to Shi'ite strongholds in Lebanon to bargain with the captors. At times he disappeared from sight for days...
...with Syrian secret police to the border with Lebanon, where he was met by intermediaries waiting in a black Mercedes. Then he was driven -- alone, with his head covered by a cloth bag -- into the Bekaa Valley, in the eastern portion of Lebanon. Some of his meetings with Shi'ite operatives were held in the village of Nabisheet, where he may have spoken to some of the hostages. When asked about that possibility, Picco crisply responds, "Next question...
...effort started to pick up in August, when British journalist John McCarthy was released. He was carrying a message from Islamic Jihad: if Israel would release more than 300 Arab detainees, including Sheik Abdul Karim Obeid, a Shi'ite Muslim cleric kidnapped by Israeli commandos in 1989, the group would be willing to free its remaining captives. Using Picco as a go-between, the two sides began exchanging information about the condition of their prisoners...
Although the American hostages were innocent bystanders in the Middle East, their agonizing captivity became the nation's ordeal. They were kidnapped only because they were Americans, men who represented what Iran and its Shi'ite proteges called "the Great Satan," and their fate became an issue for all Americans, especially for three U.S. Presidents...
...released in Beirut last week, and once again the process followed a familiar pattern. One of the pro-Iranian Lebanese groups provided new evidence concerning the fate of one of the five Israeli soldiers still unaccounted for in Lebanon. Jerusalem responded by ordering the release of 15 Lebanese Shi'ite prisoners. That gesture, in turn, led to the freeing of Turner, a former mathematics professor who had been held for four years and nine months...