Lebanon Escape from Beirut

Two hours before dawn one morning last week, a lanky, bearded young man in a rumpled blue jogging outfit dashed into Beirut's luxurious Summerland Hotel, overlooking the Lebanese coast. "I'm Charles Glass. I need a place to hide!" he fairly shouted to a receptionist. A U.S. television journalist who knows the Middle East well, Glass had been seized by Muslim Shi'ite terrorists 62 days earlier in one of Beirut's southern suburbs. Having somehow escaped, he had fled to the right place: the hotel is a heavily guarded sanctuary of Lebanon's Druze community, which is closely aligned with the Syrian government of President Hafez Assad.

The receptionist promptly telephoned the Syrian army, which has 7,500 troops on duty in West Beirut, and within an hour Glass was on his way to freedom. What remained unanswered was whether Glass had slipped away from his captors unaided, as he contended, or had been allowed to escape. In either case, Glass had become a pawn in the growing power struggle in Lebanon between Syria, which for its own purposes is trying to restore order and ensure a secular, religiously diverse Lebanon, and Iran, whose fanatical revolutionary rulers are attempting to transform the country into a vessel of the Islamic revolution. Arabic Syria and non-Arabic Iran are allies on many matters, including the gulf war, but they are fiercely at odds over Lebanon's destiny.

As Glass recounted the story later, the first challenge was to shed his chains. Glass, 36, found that when he made a fist, he could wriggle out of the wrist binding, but the leg chain was trickier. With pieces of thread shredded from his blindfold, Glass bound links of the chain together, and over a period of days fooled his guards into loosening the tether. On the first night that he could pull free, Glass waited until he could hear the snores of his guards. Loosening the chains, he slipped onto the balcony of the high-rise building where he was being held, then back into the apartment through another door, past the guards' bedroom and out the front door, which he locked behind him with a key he had found on the inside of the door.

It was 2:30 a.m. Out on the street, in a Shi'ite district of southern Beirut, Glass immediately sought help. At an all-night bakery he claimed to be a Canadian of Lebanese origin who needed a doctor for his sick daughter. To have told the bakery patrons the truth, he feared, would have frightened them and perhaps even led to his recapture. But a passing motorist quickly gave him a lift to the Summerland, two miles away. The Syrians then took him to Damascus, and a day later he was home in London with his wife and five children.