Hezbollah Suspected I Might Be a Spy. What I Discovered Was Worse

My very recent encounters with Hezbollah and with Lebanese army intelligence officers have taught me an awful lot about the interplay of Lebanon's men with guns—and what this may presage for the immediate future.

Weeks ago, it became very clear to me as to who was giving the orders in the southern Lebanese town of Nabatieh. I had been sitting with my taxi driver in the only coffee shop that seemed to remain open in an otherwise largely deserted main street.

Nabatieh is a Shi'ite Muslim town I had last visited during a previous war, in 2006. I had slept for a couple of nights in the deserted maternity ward of its main hospital—the only place which seemed to have constant electric lighting. The hospital had also provided an excellent viewpoint across the river where Israeli forces had been clashing with Hezbollah fighters.

Now, though, from the cafe I could only hear distant thuds as the new war with Israel was ramping up. My taxi driver and I were sitting and chatting to a few men in civilian clothes who were puffing water-pipes.

Just then, a black SUV screeched to a halt outside and four men in dark T-shirts and black flak jackets leapt out. Trouble, I immediately figured. Yes indeed.

They immediately confiscated my cellphone and laptop and my note-book, and declared that any Westerner this far south was presumed to be a spy.

Deja Vu? I had heard all this before, in another area controlled by Islamists further south: in Gaza to be exact, 14 years ago.

The Lebanese men in black were jittery—understandably. A few days before, three thousand Hezbollah loyalists had been injured when they answered an error message on their newly-distributed pagers—beepers—or when they used their walkie-talkies. And top Hezbollah leaders had been assassinated. Clearly, Israel had spies, or at least astonishingly accurate intelligence.

In the taxi was my laptop, which had a normal keyboard but also carried Hebrew lettering. I had bought the laptop at Tel Aviv airport, and like almost every foreign correspondent now in Lebanon covering the conflict, I had been to Israel. I explained patiently that was so war reporters could get as close to Gaza as possible.

This did not satisfy the men in black. After scrolling through my phone, they handed over my terrified taxi-driver and me to another group of men who arrived brandishing automatic weapons. We were, its leader said, going to see 'our general'. I was not sure whether that was good or bad.

Instead, though, I was soon blindfolded and handcuffed as we drove in to what I later realised was a military prison. On the wall inside, I saw an official Lebanese Army badge with an eagle on it—to represent an intelligence division.

This seemed to me relatively good news: it was surely considerably less dangerous than being left fully in the hands of the first set of captors at the Nabatieh cafe.

Hezbollah is purely drawn from Shiites. But the Lebanese army comprises men from all four major population groups. Sunnis, Shiites, Christians and Druze serve in proportion to their population numbers. Shiite youths know that an army salary is much less than a Hezbollah salary.

But as I was now seeing with my own eyes, the Army was working very closely with Hezbollah—at least in the south.

At the prison, the first room we were taken into was—to my surprise—equipped with medical equipment. Two men in white coats wrapped a band around my arm and read my blood pressure.

It was—I could see from the reading—very high indeed. My sang froid or coolness under extreme pressure, something I thought I had developed from several dozen danger-filled reporting visits to war zones, was clearly a self-constructed myth.

Maybe, I thought, my blood pressure was raised too by remembering the fate of people I knew who had been seized by Islamic extremists in Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s. One had been a colleague, Jonathan Wright of Reuters News Agency—who later daringly escaped his captivity.

Another journalist working for an aid agency disappeared. His body was only uncovered 18 years after his captors had murdered him. And of course the five years Terry Waite had spent shackled after trying to act as a mediator in other cases of missing foreigners. Or John McCarthy—the television news producer. Enough of being morbid, I told myself.

I spent two nights inside a prison cell, stripped of all my belongings, bored and worried but fed reasonably. I was somewhat nonplussed when being regularly stared at through the bars of my cell door by a guard with extreme hate emblazoned in his eyes.

I was in solitary confinement—I had persuaded my captors to release the taxi driver. I only saw several prisoners when they were being led past my cell through the corridor blindfolded and being shoved and screamed at.

The only relief from the monotony, and from worrying about the anguish my family must have been undergoing over my disappearance, was—bizarrely—the melodious voice of a female prisoner in another cell singing a Christian hymn that included 'Save me Jesus' in its refrain.

What upset me most was that they confiscated not just my belt but also my wedding ring. I was not being allowed phonecalls—and never told what I was accused of.

It would only be a matter of time till the intelligence officers Googled me and found I had also been arrested in 2010 by Hamas and had spent 26 days in the jail of Gaza's Internal Security. I prepared a response, intending to inform them that four years later Hamas had apologised and granted me an exclusive interview with their deputy head—published in time.com—but I never got the chance to explain how we journalists operate.

On day three of my captivity a prison official brought a phone and plugged it into a socket inside my cell. On the line was the head of consular services for the UK—more than two days and nights after I had been seized. The consular lady said they had not been working over a weekend.

Several hours later, I was set free and even got my Samsung phone back—but not my computer or notebook. My captors drove me to a hotel, on condition that I would fly out the next day and never return.

A travel agent managed to find me one seat by pure luck on a packed plane to Paris. In the seat next me a Lebanese lady was emigrating, she told me, and revealed the nose and mouth of a small pet dog poking out from her travelling case under the seat. She was regularly slipping the animal some snacks and water.

"There's no future back in Lebanon," she lamented. "Not even for a dog."

I had been fortunate. And despite the prison detour, my interrupted reporting trip had been constructive.

The day before my 'arrest'—if that's what it was—I had been in the Shiite stronghold of Dahiyeh, in south Beirut, and had taken photos inside an indoor burial site. Larger-than-life cutouts of dead men towered above their graves.

I met a woman sitting on a plastic chair in prayer alongside the grave of a top Hezbollah military leader—recently killed by Israel. She looked miserable—somewhat surprisingly, I reflected, if she believed he was a 'martyr' who was now enjoying his reward of 70 'black-eyed maidens' in Heaven.

A few minutes later, as we drove away, a huge bang and another top leader had been killed not far away.

More tellingly, two visits to the American University hospital in another part of Beirut. A leading hand surgeon told me he wanted to write a very detailed account in a UK medical journal of his marathon complex operations.

Of the 250 people his hospital had admitted after the beeper blasts—one-tenth of the total injured countrywide—all were adult young men, he said, and all were from Hezbollah. Most had injuries to both hands, and many to their eyes as well. It was the ingenious start of the Israeli all-out offensive that two months later forced Hezbollah's ignominious retreat.

I had also met several students from the American University, who dished out numerous conspiracy theories about the Americans and Israelis—including that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had not been struck by three airplanes seized by Al Qaeda hijackers but were blown up from the inside by US and Israeli agents—a myth that surveys show is believed by more than half the Arab world's populations.

In my hotel several families who had fled from the south told me how angry they were with Hezbollah for lobbing rockets at Israel for several months when they must have known Israel would at some stage hit back much more fiercely. But none of them would give their full names. Hezbollah, they said, had ways to track them down.

A student selling ice-cream from a nearby shop said he held the same contempt for Hezbollah, and also asked that the name of his ice cream shop should not be mentioned in my article.

My narrow escape in Lebanon has taught me several lessons. One is that Hezbollah, though severely weakened, will continue to intimidate most of the Lebanese population.

It will also continue to receive many millions of dollars, and smuggle arms in from across the Syrian border.

As we were leaving we drove past a colourful sign stating in English: "We love Lebanon". Its only chance of becoming the tolerant,multi-ethnic Jewel of the Levant again would be if Hezbollah's vicious grip on power has been released, and Iran is too weak and too impoverished to bolster the country's destructive forces again.

That is a possibility, but also, sadly, a long shot.

Paul Martin is the CEO of the Center for International Conflict Journalism.

All views expressed are the author's own.

Do you have a unique experience or personal story to share? See our Reader Submissions Guide and then email the My Turn team at [email protected].