Prime-Time Terrorism

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The hostages' families, meanwhile, waited for news, often while TV cameras waited for them to react to news. At the Boxford, Mass., home of Axel Traugott, whose brother Ralf is a hostage, three TV sets tuned to different networks flickered all day long. Said he: "We feel that our brother and the others are pawns in a game of geopolitical chess." Ralf, 32, a car dealer who had gone to Greece to see his girlfriend, "probably didn't know where Lebanon was."

Yellow ribbons festooned the trees in the yards in Richmond, Mo., hometown of TWA Pilot John Testrake. Said his mother Mildred, of Ripley, N.Y.: "At first I was scared, now I'm outraged. But John is a good man, and God has too many plans for him to take him now." In airport arrival lounges across the country, tearful reunions greeted the return of freed hostages. The Rev. P. William McDonnell, who had led 34 religious pilgrims on a trip to the Holy Land, headed straight from Chicago's O'Hare Airport to his Roman Catholic Church in Algonquin, Ill. Several hundred parishioners, nearly all wearing yellow ribbons, cheered wildly as he entered the church. Then they prayed for the four parishioners still held hostage.

Among the 20,000 Shi'ite Muslims living quietly in Dearborn, Mich., there was fear of a backlash. "We have replaced blacks as the object of hate," said Helen Atwell, a Lebanese American. The family of Nabih Berri -- his ex- wife and six children -- received threats; some local residents suggested that they be used as pawns in negotiations with Berri.

When the hostage crisis is finally resolved, with or without further bloodshed, the President will be faced with a difficult dilemma: whether to retaliate. His 1981 promise to meet terrorism with "swift and effective retribution" has so far been hollow. The U.S. has done nothing to retaliate for a long string of car bombings, kidnapings and shootings in Lebanon. The CIA did recruit friendly Lebanese to act as counterterrorist mercenaries, but agency officials say the idea was abandoned as impractical. Without its knowledge, the CIA says, some of these recruits planted a car bomb outside the home of Hizballah Leader Fadlallah. The bomb missed him and killed 80 people instead. It enraged the followers of Fadlallah, some of whom reportedly gave the hostages a guided tour of the bomb site.

The failure to retaliate against past terrorist outrages, in the view of many experts, may have led to the current hostage crisis. "The U.S. is paying the price for years of refusing to respond to the terrorists," said Michael Ledeen, an expert on terrorism at Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies. Terrorists, he said, are not irrational at all. "Terror is a high-gain, low-cost alternative. We've got to make terrorists pay a price for striking the U.S. We've got to make clear that they cannot attack the U.S. with impunity."