Terry Waite and Hizbollah: the making of the 'Party of God' However his poltical status was rare among the hostages, most simply being targets because they were westerners. The longest-held was American Terry Anderson, chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press news agency. He was captured - either by Hizbollah or Islamic Jihad - after finishing a tennis match in Beirut. He was taken in March 1985, before finally being released in December 1991, while the second longest-held was Scottish-born American Thomas Sutherland, who spent 2,353 days - more than six years - in capacity. Britons in particular were a high-profile and high-value target for Hizbollah, including John McCarthy, the journalist, seized in April 1986 as he covered the civil war. McCarthy spent five years in captivity. He was said to have been kidnapped by the Islamic Jihad as a reprisal for the 1986 American air raid on Libya. His fiancee, Jill Morrell, campaigned tirelessly for his release. He shared his cell with Brian Keenan, Belfast-born but carrying an Irish passport, who was working as a teacher in Beirut when he was bundled into the back of a car by armed gunmen. The multiple kidnappings were what brought Terry Waite to Beirut, as special envoy from the Archbishop of Canterbury, working to secure the release of kidnap victims, with his successes including Americans Lawrence Jenco and David Jacobsen, freed in 1985. There was international opprobrium when he himself was kidnapped while negotiating in 1987. He spent almost five years in captivity, nearly four years of it in solitary confinement. His release finally came, along with Sutherland, as the hostage crisis slowly came to an end. McCarthy and Keenan were already free when on 18 November 1991 Waite arrived, safe, thin and grey but otherwise physically well in Damascus. "The prayers of so many people have been answered today and we thank God for news of his release,"" said Dr George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury. But who are Hizbollah? Hizbollah, meaning the Party of God, was formed as a resistance movement when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982,a time when the country was locked in civil war. Hizbollah began as a small, paramilitary group of Shia Muslims, but has since grown into a mainstream political party led for the last 20 years by Hassan Nasrallah, who is rarely seen in public for fear of assassination. The reason it is so controversial is that it is backed and armed by Iran; its publicly declares its devotion to the Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomenei. The party has two wings: the political arm and the military arm, which is listed as a terrorist organisation by the UK and several other countries. The United States says its political wing is also a terrorist organisation. Hizbollah was implicated in the 1983 suicide bombing of an American Marine barracks in Lebanon that killed 241 American military personnel as well as the hijacking of a Trans World Airlines flight from Athens to Rome in 1985. In 2005, the then Sunni prime minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated in a car bomb in Beirut, which was widely blamed on Syria's Assad regime using Hezbollah to carry out its orders. However its political wing was not stopped from an apparently unusual alliance: that year it joined Christian and secular parties to form a coalition, andin 2011 the grouping formed a government. Hezbollah currently holds 12 of the 128 seats in the Lebanese parliament as well as having two ministers in the cabinet. Its place in government has not stopped its hatred of Israel or gained it the one thing it apparently hankers after - full recognition as a political party giving it dialogue with countries including Britain. Between 1982 and 1992 there was nowhere more notorious for kidnappings than Lebanon. During its bloody civil war a series of Westerners were taken hostage - some briefly, others for years.