JAIL-BREAKING GLASS
Charles Moore welcomes
the return of a prodigal correspondent
I REMEMBER another occasion when Charles Glass caused anxiety to his wife. He came to the Spectator's annual party two years ago, telling Fiona that he would be back by eight p.m. This was a mistake. The party had barely started by eight. After the party came dinner. Then it seemed sensible to take up our High Life correspondent's suggestion of an evening in a night club. I wilted at about four and went to bed. But the hard core — Shiva Naipaul, Andrew Brown and Charles Glass — kept going with whisky and argument in Brown's flat. Charles Glass got home at eight a.m.
Mrs Glass was, quite rightly, very angry. But while she has endured for the past two months the consequences of her husband's much bigger mistake of venturing into West Beirut, I have never seen her angry with him or with anyone. She has been extraordinarily brave, and the particular quality of her courage has been a deter- mined, level-headed activity. She has not thrown herself into frenetic or histrionic performances: she has worked steadily by every possible means to get news of her husband and obtain his release. Political contacts, religious contacts, Lebanese friends — she explored every avenue. Even Mammon: the next step was to have been an approach to Mr Tiny Rowland. And throughout she has been cheerful and interested in others, although at first she could not sleep at all and only managed to eventually after deciding that if she took any more sleeping-pills she would bedome an addict.
On Tuesday night, I spent three hours with Fiona Glass at their house in London. Charles was safe, but not yet back. Deter- mined to avoid the US government's usual reception at the air force base in Wies- baden, he was flying straight home to London. This involved chartering a private plane (through the generosity of his former employers, ABC Television). His Cessna Citation was an unconscionably long time 'Ready when you are, Mr De Mille.'
a-coming.
The Glass household was a scene of confusion. The drawing room was hot with television lights. The cameras filmed Mrs Glass and three of her children watching the news of their father's escape on televi- sion. Charles Glass, once voted by house- wives one of the ten sexiest men in America, looks rather like Cary Grant in the Hitchcock film Suspicion. He does not look at all like Desmond Hamill, the ITN reporter, but when Mr Hamill appeared on the screen, Julia, who is two (for the circumstances of her birth see Spectator, 9 February 1985), shouted out, 'That's mY daddy'. George, who is nine, explained that no one would ever be able to kidnap him because he was going to join the SAS• Fiona told me that it was George wh° suffered most from the kidnapping, under- standing it better than his younger brother and sister but also fearing that the terror' ists might come to London and get him- I couldn't help wondering what the tens of millions of American viewers would make of Fiona Glass. They would be bound to notice her charm, but she offered them none of the extraordinary Public display of emotion which always marks American family drama. When she was interviewed on her doorstep on 18 June about the news of the kidnapping, she was calm and smiling. She was calm and smiling now. She had been up since two o'clock in the morning (when she had been woken with the news of Charles's escape by a call
from Ghida Salam, a Lebanese girl, a great friend and a researcher at ABC), but still she was composed for the camera. She has that peculiarly English quality which peo- ple sometimes mistake for an absence of feeling. It isn't. It is the insistence that feeling is essentially private. Which is why, even though we shared her joy, we all of us felt a little embarrassed to be there.
The Glasses met in 1976 and married the following year. Charles, who is half- Lebanese, already knew the country well and loved it. He has been a correspondent there for many papers including The Christian Science Monitor and the Obser- ver, for ABC and, of course, for the Spectator. So throughout their marriage, they have been aware of danger. Charles had told Fiona that if he were ever kidnap- ped she should go straight to Lebanon and make as much fuss as possible. This turned out to be inadvisable because the author- ities made such a fuss themselves. The kidnapping undermined Syria's claim to have restored order to Beirut. The Syrians Were keen to make amends. They re- sponded well to a letter from Fiona to President Assad. Charles had also told her that he would always say whatever his captors wanted him to if they forced him. On the video 'confessing' his work for the CIA, made on 6 July, he put on a Southern accent except when he said to his family 'I love you'. Fiona noticed this and men- tioned it to me at the time. She thought it was put on to indicate insincerity. I do not think she realised that the accent was Southern to indicate that he was in south- ern Beirut.
There may have been disputes among Sheite factions from the first about whether Charles Glass should have been kidnapped. His expertise and contacts made him an untypical hostage. Charles was blindfolded most of the time and chained. He cannot see very well without contact lenses and he has back trouble. He was threatened though not beaten or tor- tured. His ordeal was foul, but one fears that it was better than that of other hostages, just as one suspects that his escape, even if it had been winked at by his captors, will not set a precedent. Blindfolded, moved house four times, having no notion of his eventual fate, guarded by different people with each of whom it was impossible to establish any rapport, Charles Glass preserved his sanity
• by the strength of his Roman Catholic faith. A similar strength supported Fiona (who is an Anglican). I do not know whether it was this that gave her her odd intuition. More than two weeks ago, on the basis of no information, she told me almost confidently that Charles would be out in the middle of August. Her faith has been rewarded. Now they both want to help the hostages who remain. But I do hope that, for a while at least, Charles will risk nothing more adventurous than another night on the tiles.
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