Yesterday, Robert Levinson, a retired FBI agent who disappeared while traveling in Iran in 2006, became the longest-held American hostage in history. He replaces my father, Terry Anderson, who spent 2,454 days in captivity before being released. My father, AP's bureau chief in Beirut at the time, was kidnapped by a Shia militant group in Lebanon three months before I was born. I met him for the first time in December 1991, when I was almost 7.
“Longest-held American hostage” — it's a dubious honor, to say the least: the waiting, the false alarms, the images of your loved one, thin and pale, holding a hateful sign or speaking terrorist propaganda. The photos of a haunted, bearded Levinson wearing an orange jumpsuit brought tears to my eyes. The first time I ever saw my father speak, he looked just like that. I was a child, and his captors would intermittently release videos of him to the press. That was the image I carried of my father in my head for seven years; that and the picture of him from a happier time I kept under my pillow and kissed every night before I went to sleep.
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