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Volume 1 Number 11

Hostage's Steps to Freedom

01 July 1988

Taken hostage? How would you cope?The knock on the door, the knife or bullet, the disappearance,the interrogation - it might happen anywhere, from Irelandto Argentina, in London or Paris as well as Beirut.For Jean Waddell it happened in Tehran. Seven years later she talks about her experiences to 'For A Change'.by Mary Lean

At home in Hampshire, England, Jean Waddell looks more like Agatha Christie's Miss Marple than Joan of Arc. Describing her seven months as a hostage in Iran, she refuses to cast herself in a heroic mould. `I was terrified most of the time,' she asserts.

She had reason to be. First, in May 1980, gunmen burst into her flat, shot her and left her for dead. A few days later the son of her boss, the Anglican Bishop in Iran, was assassinated. Three months later, she was arrested as a 'spy' and imprisoned. She was released with other Anglican prisoners in February 1981, a month after the American Embassy hostages were freed. Her case was the first handled publicly by the Archbishop of Canterbury's envoy, Terry Waite, who disappeared in Lebanon last year.

What brought her through, she insists, was not any courage or virtue of her own. Early in her imprisonment - when she was shown forged papers which alleged she was working for the CIA - she gave up hope of establishing her innocence. At such moments, she says, `You either die of frustration and terror, or hand everything over to God. I usually did the latter. I had been doing it all my life.'

She sees her life as a series of steps, leading on from her childhood in the Scottish seaside town of Arbroath. The big steps have usually come when she has been unable to see the way ahead. `You pray in desperation, "Whatever the answer is, I'm willing to accept it." And the way opens up - usually the most unimaginable.'

This process took her in 1956 from Scotland to London, in search of `something more worthwhile' than her work as a secretary in business. She worked as a medical secretary and then for a charity for the disabled. In 1965 she replied to an advertisement for a secretary to the Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem.

When Jean Waddell arrived in Jerusalem in September 1965, the city was divided between Israel and Jordan. The Anglican Cathedral, St George's, was in East Jerusalem, under Jordan. Then came the Six Day War of 1967. Shells exploded all around the Cathedral, while the staff sheltered in the cellars. When the fighting was over, East Jerusalem was under Israeli occupation. The readjustments for those around her were considerable.

In 1977, Bishop Hassan Dehqani-Tafti of Iran invited Jean Waddell to be his secretary. In contrast with the tensions of Jerusalem, Iran seemed a haven of peace. `Won't you find it boring after Jerusalem?' friends asked her. `I was looking forward to being in a country where I understood all religions lived together harmoniously,' she says wryly.

`At the beginning I really enjoyed it. What I didn't know was the awful fear of the secret police, the cruelty suffered by many people.' Feelings against the Shah - and his Western supporters - were coming to the boil and, in January 1979, he left the country. On the day of the revolution, she went to the shops in the centre of Isfahan. `The cars were going up and down the three-lane carriageway hooting. The people were so happy, shouting and singing. They were free. It was very moving.'

The Anglican Church in Iran was led by Iranian clergy and administrators, with, at the time of the revolution, some 30 missionaries helping with hospitals, schools and work with the blind. As resentment built up against the West, feelings turned against the missionaries. Khomeini's writings portrayed them as `agents of imperialism' who saw Islam as an obstacle to `their material interests and political power'. For many Iranians, writes Jean Waddell's colleague, Paul Hunt, Christianity had come to be associated with Western decadence and Western political and economic designs.

Hunt describes a talk with an Iranian friend the day after the Shah left the country. `He told me he looked on the foreigners as thieves who had broken into someone else's house and stripped it almost bare. I didn't try to argue with him... The longer I stayed in Iran the more vividly aware I became that we (the West) had much to answer for.'

In February 1979 an Iranian pastor was murdered. Foreigners began to leave the country, but Jean Waddell and her colleagues stayed on. `Somehow I didn't feel personally threatened,' she says.

On May 1, 1980, two gunmen burst into Jean Waddell's flat above the Hunts' in the capital, Tehran. She offered them coffee. `We talked for half an hour and I thought I was getting through. Then they said they were going to take me to the revolutionary headquarters and that they were going to blindfold me. Instead they took me by the throat. I passed out very quickly.'

Meanwhile Diana Hunt and her two small daughters were on their way upstairs to invite Jean Waddell on a picnic. Three-year-old Rosemary hammered so determinedly on the door that the gunmen let the family in and pushed them into the bathroom. Half an hour later they were able to slip out and run for help. The police found Jean Waddell lying on her bed, soaked in blood. She had been shot through one lung, diaphragm and ribs. They got her to hospital just in time.

By August, she was fit to fly home, but when she went to Isfahan to enquire about her exit visa she was arrested. For the next five weeks she was held in isolation, while wild allegations about her appeared in the Iranian press and the British Embassy struggled to find her.

One night she had an 'experience of the eternal' - something she finds hard to put into words. `It was a vision of Christ as the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End. I was reminded of the Holy Spirit in Creation bringing order out of chaos. God was showing me that he could bring order out of whatever happened. It didn't neccssarily mean I was going to be preserved, but I would be used.'

Her guards were students. `They even wanted to blindfold me when I went to the bathroom - they really thought I was an important spy.' She used to hear them at their regular daily prayers outside her door. One told her, `I'm praying that if you haven't done anything wrong you'll be released.' In her state of mind, she thought that perhaps he was mocking her. Now she often wonders what has become of him.

Eventually, she was blindfolded and driven to Tehran. There, she says with a smile, the driver had to stop the car to ask the way to the notorious prison, Evin.

Here things looked up - relatively speaking. After more weeks in isolation, she was moved to the open women's section of the prison, where she shared a cell with the American journalist Cynthia Dwyer and four Iranians. Their room was known as `Jean's cafe', because they had a heater on which they could boil water for coffee and tea, which they shared with other prisoners.

A Muslim became one of her closest friends. Jean Waddell calls her the `angel of Evin'. `Whenever anyone was in trouble, she was there.' They used to have long discussions about faith. `We all agreed that God is a God of love, truth, mercy and justice. He's so great and wide, we can't narrow him to fit in with our limited human wisdom.' Among her treasured possessions is a postcard with a saying of Imam Ali, revered by the Shi-ites, which was given to her in Evin, and a child's school-book, loaned by a guard in a later prison so she could brush up on her Persian.

Throughout her seven months of detention, Jean Waddell was simultaneously terrified and at peace. `Every time the door opened, I thought it was the end - even when I was having the most wonderful fellowship with people. It was like living on three levels. There was the level where one was absolutely terrified. There was the human level where one was having fellowship with people. And there was the spiritual level where one was resting in the midst of all the chaos and the fears.'

The uncertainties continued right up to the end. Terry Waite arrived in December 1980, but it was not until February 1981 that she left Evin - only to be held for another two weeks, first in a house and then in an old palace. There she found her fellow-missionaries John and Audrey Coleman, whom she had believed dead, and waited while Terry Waite negotiated their release and that of four Iranian colleagues.

Finally everything was arranged and they set out for freedom, still under heavy guard. In the middle of Tehran, the car broke down. They took a taxi to the Foreign Office, joined up with others leaving the country and embarked once again. On the way a car crashed into one of the vehicles in their cavalcade. By the time they got to the airport and were told they couldn't leave after all, all the hostages could do was laugh shakily.

They spent their last two days in Iran at the Tehran Hilton. `The food was more varied at the Hilton. But the cooking was better at Evin!' says Jean Waddell.

The hostages received a heroes' welcome when they got back to Britain on 28 February. Jean Waddell was elected Scot of the Year and was showered with daunting invitations to speak at public occasions. `It's not only in prison that you pray!' she comments.

In 1982, she returned to her old job as secretary to Bishop Dehqani-Tafti, now in exile in England and acting as an assistant Bishop of Winchester. She still continues this work part-time, and guides an annual tour to the Holy Land.

Seven years after her release, she looks forward rather than back. Her resilience and her ability to forgive are as live as ever: they are, she insists, no achievement of her own, but something that was given. She fears that her press interviews on her return made the faith which sustained her through her imprisonment seem `too pat'. `It wasn't so much taking things in my stride as knowing that God was there too - it's an experience, you feel it.' She remembers walking up and down a corridor in Evin, waiting to be taken in for interrogation and thinking, `God, I know you're going before me, wherever I'm going.'

She thinks - and prays-often for today's hostages, especially Terry Waite. She believes it is important to try to understand what turns people to violence - without condoning their actions. `Sitting in comfort at home one doesn't realize how desperate people are for worldwide recognition of their sufferings and injustices.' She is concerned at the way grievances often go unrecognized until they are about to explode.

Her love for Iran is as great as ever. Her experiences seem if anything to have deepened her respect for her Muslim friends and her certainty of the need to work together.

Last December she presented the 1987 Scot of the Year award to Susan Wighton, a nurse who worked in the Palestinian camp of Bourj al Barajneh, Beirut, during its 163-day siege. `She was really brave. She went into danger to help and showed tremendous physical courage,' says Jean Waddell. `That's the difference between us.'

Somehow, it's hard to agree with her.