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Throughout the week, events had seemed to grow increasingly surreal as the hostages, whose freedom seemed so tantalizingly out of reach, were continually shown on television eating, talking and even driving themselves around Beirut with their captors. For days, Amal guards brought small groups of hostages before television camera crews for interviews that were replayed incessantly in the U.S. Though some of the hostages confessed to depression and anxiety, others, presumably to reassure their watching families, mugged and shouted "Hi, Mom!" as if they had been filmed at a picnic. White House officials protested that television was playing into the captors' hands, primarily by giving them the very world publicity they coveted. "This is bizarre," stormed one Reagan aide. "It can only screw up what we are trying to do."
There were some indications that the interviews were carefully stage-managed. Jimmy Dell Palmer in captivity was pictured playfully waving a pistol in front of an Amal guard. After he was freed last Wednesday, in advance of his comrades, he said he had argued against being photographed in that pose but yielded to persistent demands from his captors.
Other hostages told TV interviewers that they were being treated well by the Amal militiamen who had taken them away from the original hijackers, and their appearance did not contradict those assertions. Three hostages were interviewed by ABC's Charles Glass at the end of lunch in what looked like a pleasant seaside cafe near Beirut. Conwell, who lives in Muscat, Oman, went so far as to assert that "many in our group have a profound sympathy for the cause" of their Amal captors, namely freedom for 745 Lebanese held in an Israeli prison.
The resolution of the hostage crisis, however, involved not public interviews in Beirut but a tense backstage diplomatic drama on three continents. On Monday, Berri had seemed intransigent. He dismissed as insignificant Israel's release of 31 Lebanese prisoners early in the week. What about all the Lebanese still held in Atlit? he asked. He threatened to turn the hostages back to the original hijackers. One U.S. official went so far as to predict that "we probably are not going to get all these people back in any event."
By Tuesday morning, Speakes was openly warning of economic and military pressure against Lebanon. He even mentioned two specific options: closing the Beirut airport, presumably by organizing a world boycott of Lebanon's Middle East Airlines, the only line still operating there; and "cutting off goods and services," presumably by naval blockade. According to one White House official, the decision had been made that "it was time to turn up the heat and display some power." At an afternoon meeting between Reagan and his advisers, Secretary of State George Shultz pleaded for more time to give diplomacy a chance "to bear fruit." Speakes then implied a deadline. The President, he told the press, would apply pressure if diplomacy failed to produce results "in a day or two."