An Israel-based American TV reporter and a long-retired former Mossad agent, both of whom were captured, jailed and tortured in Iraq, agreed yesterday that the allied soldiers now held by Iraq faced heavy physical and psychological torture and offered their own formulae for surviving the ordeal.
Mr Bob Simon, the veteran Middle East correspondent for CBS News, who was captured with his crew five days into the allied air campaign to force Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in 1991, spent 40 days in Iraqi jails, where he was beaten and kept in solitary confinement as a suspected spy.
Watching TV pictures of the newly captured American soldiers brought back traumatic memories, he said. "The terror in their eyes was very difficult to take."
Mr Simon said he had no doubt that the POWs "are not in for a picnic. What is ahead of them are interrogation and very bad treatment."
Captives from the maintenance units would likely not have much information of use to the Iraqis, he suggested, but he noted that, in the past, captured pilots were "interrogated in real time", because the Iraqis wanted to get intelligence from them immediately.
Asked in an Israel TV interview how he had survived in captivity, Mr Simon said with mild self-deprecation: "You don't have any options."
Even if you felt suicidal, he said, "you'd have to be very talented" to find the means to take your own life. He added that he had learned "a lot about your own mind" and that "you can't be frightened 24 hours a day".
One of his chief emotions, he said, was anger, that he was unable to be out doing his job, reporting on the war.
Empathising with the captured troops from a far longer historical perspective, the former Mossad agent, Mr Yehuda Tajjar, who was imprisoned in Iraq from 1951 to 1960, said he had been chiefly sustained by the certainty that officials back home were doing everything to extricate him and that today's captives needed to know that, too.
Working under cover as an Iranian merchant, Mr Tajjar was arrested for involvement in organising the semi-clandestine emigration of Iraqi Jews to Israel, interrogated and tortured, and ultimately freed in a behind-the-scenes deal after Israel warned the Iraqi leader at that time, Gen Abdel Karim Qasim, of a Nasserist plot against him.
Mr Tajjar said the harshest torture was psychological, including one occasion when he was told he was going to be hanged the next day. "I spent the night before reciting psalms," he said.
He was taken to a scaffold "and spent 20 minutes with the rope around my neck" before being returned to his cell.
The experience was intended to break his spirit, he said, but it had had the opposite effect. "After that, I wasn't scared in jail."
Mr Uri Ehrenfeld, a former Israeli soldier captured by Egypt in the 1973 war, meanwhile, said he believed the screening of TV footage of the captured soldiers might work to their advantage. "It may be a kind of insurance policy," he suggested, proof that they had been captured alive, and thus requiring the Iraqis to ensure they stayed alive.
Israeli defence officials yesterday reiterated their conviction that the danger of Saddam launching Scud missiles at Israel, possibly with non-conventional warheads, would not pass for several days at least.
A spokesman for the Australian Defence Department, overseeing troops in western Iraq charged with thwarting Scud launches at Israel, said the Iraqis still had that capability.