The crisis began on Sept. 30, 1986, when four attaches from the Soviet Embassy were kidnapped in Beirut by Muslim extremists. Western news agencies received individual photos of the four men that same night, each with an automatic pistol pressed against his head.
The photos were accompanied by a note from a hitherto unknown group calling itself the Islamic Liberation Organization. The message warned that the four Soviet captives would be executed, one by one, unless Moscow pressured pro- Syrian militiamen to cease shelling positions held by the pro-Iranian fundamentalist militia in Lebanon's northern port city of Tripoli.
Only two days after the kidnappings, the body of one of the four kidnapped men, a 30-year-old consular secretary named Arkady Katov, was found, shot through the head, on a Beirut trash dump.
Apparently, that's when the Soviets dropped the idea of sweet talk and turned the matter over to the KGB.
The KBG determined the kidnapping to be the work of the Shiite Muslim group known as Hezbollah, or Party of God.
The KGB kidnapped a man they knew to be a close relative of a prominent Hezbollah leader. They then castrated him and sent the severed organs to the Hezbollah official, before dispatching the unfortunate kinsman with a bullet in the brain.
In addition to presenting him with this grisly proof of their seriousness, the KGB operatives also advised the Hezbollah leader that they knew the identities of other close relatives of his, and that he could expect more such packages if the three Soviet diplomats were not freed immediately.
The three remaining hostages were freed on foot only 150 yards from the Soviet Embassy.
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