On March 16, 1986 a young television journalist named John McCarthy set off for a month’s assignment for Worldwide Television News (WTN) in the divided city of Beirut.
At Heathrow he reassured his tearful girlfriend Jill Morrell: ‘It’s only a month, Jilly.’ They were planning to buy a house and get married.
Soon after John arrived in Beirut, two British teachers Leigh Douglas and Philip Padfield and an Irish teacher named Brian Keenan were kidnapped.
The British ambassador urged British citizens to leave. John, with a few days of his assignment remaining, had a nagging feeling that things were closing in around him.