Hostages' days: Tea and card games

WASHINGTON Morning tea. Radio shows and occasional videos.Enough - or even too much - to eat.

While uncertainty still clouds the future of Western hostages inthe hands of Islamic fundamentalists in Lebanon, reports fromreleased hostages John McCarthy and Edward A. Tracy provide assurancethat treatment of the captives is better than it once was.

Hostages who were shackled in roach-infested cells, beaten and starved in the mid-1980s seem now to have more freedom to movearound, greater opportunity to socialize with fellow captives, and atleast minimal access to medical treatment and other necessities.

"For the last two years at least, food and living conditionshave improved greatly," McCarthy, a British television journalist,said after he was released last week.

The newly released hostages continue to provide additional de tails of these improvements. Tracy, an adventurer and book-seller,has told how his captors gave him coffee once or twice a week, teaevery morning and card games each day.

Once or twice a week he saw a video. "Some of them can cookreally good," he said of his captors.

Hostages Terry Anderson, Terry Waite and Tom Sutherland, who arebeing held by the group called Islamic Jihad, "are franticallyexercising," Anderson's sister, Peggy Say, said after talking toMcCarthy. "They want to look good when they come out and they'vebecome a little obese."

The three men have a short-wave radio that can pick up newsreports, McCarthy said, and is particularly useful to Sutherland, whois fluent in French.

McCarthy told the brother of Terry Waite, the kidnapped Churchof England envoy, that Waite has a Bible and "his sense of humor isintact, as is his faith."

Other recent reports have indicated that the hostages, who wereoften chained in darkened cells in the earlier days of theircaptivity, now are kept in large rooms that are partitioned intocells and joined by common rooms where they can spend time together.

The hostages are sometimes blindfolded, but apparently notshackled for long periods. Jerome Leyraud, the French reliefofficial who was kidnapped last Thursday and released Sunday, saidhis captors were so casual about hiding their identities that theymerely asked him to avert his eyes.

Experts believe there are several possible explanations for theimprovement in the hostages' treatment, which they say has changedgradually since 1985.

Captors who are about to give up hostages want them to appearwell-treated so Western governments will be more likely to give upIslamic prisoners and less likely to launch military missions.

"Without the hostages, the abductors become potentiallyvulnerable," said Bruce Hoffman, terrorism expert with the RandCorp., a California think tank.

It may be inevitable, too, that some of the captors woulddevelop personal relationships with their prisoners, said BrianJenkins, terrorism expert at Kroll and Associates in Los Angeles.

Terrorism specialists say that, despite the apparentimprovements in the hostages' lives, the physical and emotional tollof their captivity should not be underestimated. The closeconfinement without sunshine, fresh air or easy movement, combinedwith frightful uncertainty, leaves prisoners weak physically andemotionally frail, as Tracy's appearance demonstrated Sunday.