Cicippio, Joseph (1932–)

Joseph Cicippio was one of the last U.S. hostages to be released by the militant Islamic group that had taken him captive in Lebanon.

When he was abducted in 1986, Cicippio was the acting comptroller of the American University in Beirut. Muslim extremist groups had already abducted a handful of American University professors and staff. Because of the increasing danger to all Westerners in Beirut, Cicippio had not ventured outside of the campus for months. On the morning of September 12, gunmen, in well-orchestrated moves, grabbed Cicippio just outside the university building where he lived. Cicippio recalls that his kidnappers, posing as students, called out to him by name before taking him. His broken glasses and traces of his blood were the only evidence of his abduction.

Little was heard about Cicippio until August 1989, when a group of Shiite Muslim extremists called the Revolutionary Justice Organization announced that he was to be executed in retaliation for the arrest of Sheik Abdul Karim Obeid. But instead of being executed, Cicippio spent the next five years in captivity, tethered by a three-foot chain.

Many initiatives for freeing the hostages converged in late 1991. The militants released Thomas Sutherland and Terry Waite on November 19, and on November 20, Abbas Musawi, a Hezbollah leader, announced that the fate of the remaining American hostages was no longer tied to the Arabs held by Israel, thus removing a political obstacle to freeing the hostages. Iran, the principal sponsor of many of the radical Shiite groups, was using its influence to free the hostages, in hopes of eliminating the U.S. trade sanctions that were strangling its economy. Meanwhile, Giandomenico Picco, the special Middle East envoy of the U.N. Secretary General, was also nearing success in his negotiations with the Syrian government.

The Revolutionary Justice Organization released Cicippio on December 2, 1991, after 1,908 days of captivity. He was reunited with his Lebanese-born wife, Elham, in Damascus, Syria. U.S. military physicians found that Cicippio was in fair health, the conditions in which he was kept would affect him for life. He suffered occasional dizziness from a blow that had left him both unconscious and with a dent in his skull, as well as permanent frostbite in his fingers from two winters spent on a partly enclosed balcony.

Cicippio returned to the United States with no job and little money. Their life savings had been depleted when his wife paid ransom to conmen. Cicippio and fellow hostage David Jacobsen sued Iran for $600 million in U.S. courts. The civil suit included claims of kidnapping, physical abuse, false imprisonment, inhumane medical treatment, loss of job opportunities, and pain and suffering, as well as a claim that Iran kept the Western hostages as leverage to free billions of dollars in assets frozen by the United States—Cicippio and Jacobsen deemed [Page 96]Iran's actions “commercial terrorism.” Their case was dismissed in July 1994, on the grounds that United States lacked jurisdiction.

In 1998, in a separate case, a U.S. judge ordered Iran to pay $65 million in damages to Cicippio and his wife, as well as fellow hostages David Jacobsen and Frank Reed.