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Meanwhile, the drama of the dangerous mission of Terry Waite, the special envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury, continued to unfold. On Jan. 20, Waite dismissed his Druze militia bodyguards and disappeared into West Beirut, apparently to meet with people holding some of the hostages. By last week there was little doubt that he had ceased to be a free agent. Nabih Berri, leader of the relatively moderate Shi'ite Amal militia, said he had learned that Waite had been arrested but not kidnaped, a distinction that offered little solace. Walid Jumblatt, head of Lebanon's Druze community, felt so chagrined by the disappearance of Waite, whom his militiamen had tried to protect, he offered himself as a hostage in exchange. Asked by a Washington Post correspondent whether he regretted accepting the task of safeguarding Waite, Jumblatt replied, "It is not a question of regretting. We are living in a city of wolves."
The Waite saga took a more ominous turn, when the West German daily Bild Zeitung reported that according to "Beirut security circles," the British negotiator had been shot and critically wounded while trying to escape. Later the same day, however, two Beirut taxi drivers, both of whom knew Waite by sight, said they were certain they had seen him, surrounded by a band of armed men, walking on a street in a southern Beirut suburb and waving to passersby. Still later ash-Shiraa, the Lebanese newspaper that first broke the story of the secret talks between Iran and the U.S., reported that Waite was likely to be released sometime this week. Lebanese Leader Nabih Berri made a similar predication. But for the moment, the Anglican envoy's whereabouts were unknown.
As fears mounted over the negotiator's continued absence, British diplomats disclosed that they had warned Waite not to conduct another mission to Lebanon right now. According to one Druze official in West Beirut, Waite had incurred the displeasure of some Islamic Jihad extremists by not fulfilling a promise that he had allegedly made last November in connection with the freeing of Hostage David Jacobsen, a former hospital administrator at the American University of Beirut. They claimed that he had pledged to arrange the release of 17 members of a largely Shi'ite movement who are imprisoned in Kuwait but failed to do so.
If the threat to Waite remained shadowy last week, there was nothing ambiguous about the plight of four Beirut University College teachers, three of them Americans and one an Indian, who were abducted in January by gunmen posing as policemen. A Shi'ite splinter group calling itself Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine warned Israel that if it did not release 400 jailed guerrillas within a week, the four teachers would be "executed" and "their corpses thrown in the garbage cans of Cyprus."