Word: levins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Finally, last week, Jeremy Levin, 52, Beirut bureau chief for the Atlanta- based Cable News Network, saw his chance. There was slack in the chain that bound him, just enough to wiggle free. "I got the chain off," he said. "It's the usual cliche. I tied three blankets together, climbed out the window onto the balcony and went down the blankets...
Once on the ground, Levin ran from the villa, which was high on a mountain in Lebanon. As he scrambled downhill in the dark, wearing only pajamas, a sweater and socks, he could hear what "must have been a hundred dogs barking all the way down the mountain. My heart was in my mouth." Levin hiked for two hours before reaching a main highway. There he heard "a dog and human voices. I thought my kidnapers were at my heels, so I hid under a truck. But when I saw it was Syrian soldiers, I gave myself...
...Syrians led him to an army encampment near Baalbek in the Bekaa Valley of eastern Lebanon. Then he was taken to a Syrian intelligence office, where he described his capture by a lone gunman on the streets of Beirut last March 7. Next Levin was driven to the Syrian Foreign Ministry in Damascus, where he was turned over to William Eagleton, the U.S. ambassador in Damascus. Said Levin, as tears rolled down his cheeks: "The Orwellian year of 1984 was not a very good one for me, but 1985 is starting out a hell of a lot better...
Islamic Jihad, the radical Shi'ite Muslim group that has claimed responsibility for a number of terrorist acts, including the October 1983 bombing that resulted in the deaths of 241 U.S. servicemen in Beirut, had said repeatedly that it was holding Levin. Last week it issued a statement contending that it had decided to release him because "we have established that the American correspondent was not involved in any espionage or subversion against Islamic forces." The militants denied that Levin had escaped. Syria went along with the contention that Levin had been released. Ambassador to the U.S. Rafiq Jouejati said...
Buckley, 56, is a political officer assigned to the U.S. embassy in Beirut. He was kidnaped as he left his apartment in Muslim-controlled West Beirut last March 16 by unidentified gunmen. Levin, 52, Cable News Network's Beirut bureau chief, was abducted from a busy West Beirut street about a week earlier. The kidnapers struck again last May 8, seizing Weir, 60, a Presbyterian minister, as he walked with his wife in the Muslim section. His wife was left behind unharmed. The two other missing Americans are Peter Kilburn, 60, a librarian at the American University of Beirut...