Trial by Fire in Dublin

Until dashing Christopher Ewart-Biggs, 54, was posted as British Ambassador to Ireland last month, the Dublin embassy had been a quiet backwater where aging diplomats drifted into retirement. But Ewart-Biggs, a veteran diplomatic troubleshooter, had been hand-picked for the Dublin job by British Prime Minister James Callaghan to coordinate Anglo-Irish policy in the face of a surge of terrorism that has been spilling south into Ireland from the embattled British province of Ulster. The survivor of several brushes with violence, he wore a distinctive tinted monocle covering an eye lost at El Alamein in World War II and was the author of a thriller entitled Trial by Fire.

Only two weeks after his arrival in Ireland, Ewart-Biggs and two aides set out from his suburban residence for Dublin last week, in a blue Jaguar followed by two Irish police cars. As the Jaguar crossed a sewer 150 yds. from the house, two men lurking in nearby bushes detonated by remote control about 500 Ibs. of explosives hidden inside. The blast gouged a crater 10 ft. deep, hurled the Jaguar into the air and sent stones flying for several hundred yards. The ambassador and a secretary, Judith Cook, 25, were killed. Gravely injured were the chauffeur and Brian Cubbon, British Permanent Under Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, who had come from Belfast to confer with the new ambassador.

The terrorists escaped with a third man. Dublin launched a man hunt involving 4,000 Irish policemen--half the country's police force--and 2,000 soldiers. Prime Minister Liam Cosgrave declared that "this atrocity fills all decent Irish people with a sense of shame." In London, Prime Minister James Callaghan condemned the assassins as a "common enemy whom we must destroy or be destroyed by."

That enemy was presumed to be the terror-prone Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army. But the Proves, who are normally not shy about claiming credit for their killings, were silent, which suggested that the bombing was a freelance job by some I.R.A. splinter group.

Prime Target. Some police officials speculated that the prime target of the terrorists, whoever they were, might have been Ewart-Biggs' visitor, Cubbon. As Britain's top civil servant in Northern Ireland, he had been participating in exploratory and unproductive peace talks between Catholic and Protestant leaders in Belfast. Since efforts to set up a Catholic-Protestant coalition government in Ulster collapsed last January, the Labor government's "policy" in Northern Ireland has been to have Britain's 14,500 troops there simply lean on their rifles and let the two sides continue to slug out their hatreds a while longer.

And they have. In the North, where more than 194 Protestants and Catholics have been killed since January, 1976 is shaping up as the bloodiest year since the violence began seven years ago. The violence in the North has become random. Gunmen burst into pubs and spray customers with automatic-weapons fire, then disappear. Earlier in July, a terrorist shot a pregnant woman, who later gave birth to a child--with a bullet in its back. If there is any "rational" target of the gunmen now, it is the British, who are blamed by both sides for preventing either side from seizing full power in Ulster. The homes of three British civil servants have been bombed in the North this year.

Impressive Break. The Ewart-B|ggs killing was a dramatic demonstration of how easily the fires of the North can leap to the South. The Dublin government has stepped up patrols along its border with Ulster. Still, local support for the I.R.A., though waning in the South, makes control difficult. A Provo-organized march last April, banned by the Dublin government, attracted 10,000 marchers in the capital's streets. This month several jailed I.R. A. members staged an impressive break from a Dublin prison.

The Proves still keep their secret headquarters in Dublin, maintain countless hideouts and cross the border with ease. In addition to the assassination, Dublin's continuing dilemma was highlighted this week by an international conference sponsored in the capital by the Sinn Fein, the I.R.A.'s political arm. This was the Anti-Imperialist Festival of terrorist-linked organizations attended by 50 delegations, including one from the Palestine Liberation Organization.

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