"They Are Cowardly Bums"

So says Reagan as Italy's Red Brigades kidnap a U.S. general

While the world was keeping a wary eye out for a Libyan attempt on President Reagan or some other U.S official, terror struck from a different, and unexpected, quarter. A few grim facts came in an anonymous telephone call to the ANSA news agency in Milan: "This is the Red Brigades. We have kidnaped Brigadier General James Dozier. A communique will follow."

A second anonymous call, a day later, was even more ominous. It described Dozier as "the hangman of NATO" and said he was being held in a "people's prison, where he will be judged by the proletariat." No mention was made of ransom or terms for his release.

Dozier, 50, is the highest-ranking American Army officer at NATO'S Southern Europe land forces headquarters in Verona, with the title of Deputy Chief of Staff for Logistics and Administration Four men dressed as plumbers knocked on his apartment door, clubbed him over the head and carried him off after binding his wife Judith, 47, with chains and tape. By the time her frantic banging against floors and walls aroused neighbors, the kidnapers had a four-hour lead. By week's end police had found no trace of Dozier. Indeed, they have found none of the hideouts used in half a dozen kidnapings during the past three years by the brutally efficient Brigades. Ambassador Maxwell Rabb, who has been under tight security because of an alleged Libyan plan to assassinate him, cut short a visit to Genoa and returned to Rome to coordinate the U.S. side of the kidnap watch.

Dozier, a 1956 graduate of West Point, is one of seven generals and six admirals among the 12,000 U.S. military personnel in Italy. The Arcadia, Fla., native is quiet and proper, and lived in unspectacularstyle. His career includes decorations for combat in Viet Nam and commands in Germany and at Fort Hood texas but he had been in Italy less than 18 months and was outranked at the Venona base by its Italian commander. A U.S. official speculated that his abduction was a "symbolic" act: "He's American he's a general, he's part of NATO."

It was the first time that the leftist red Brigades had attacked an American during their eleven-year campaign to destroyItaly's Establishment. Terrorism in Italy peaked in 1978, when 2,395 terrorist attacks were attributed to Italy's left and right including the Brigades' kidnaping and murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro. But a police crackdown, aided by the testimony of Brigades and other terrorists turncoats, has led to 1,650 arrests across the ideological spectrum and has reduced the number of terrorist acts to about 900 this year.

As a result, the Brigades have been more selective about their targets, aiming at those with the greatest publicity value In September the Brigades' "fall offensive" manifesto warned of a strike against a 'high-ranking NATO-U.S. target." On Sept. 15 a West German terrorist unit near Heidelberg ambushed an automobile carrying General Frederick Kroesen commander of U.S. Army forces in Europe. Kroesen escaped with only minor injuries, but U.S. generals in Europe were advised to safeguard themselves. Little was done. Dozier went on living in his top-floor apartment in downtown Verona--the city of blood feuds and doomed love in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet--in a building without a doorman or even a resident superintendent.

The pattern of Red Brigades kidnapings has been to draw out the agonized suspense for governments and the families of victims, often issuing two or three shrill polemical communiques be-:ore setting ransom. One possible demand in the Dozier case: scrapping a plan to install 112 nuclear-tipped American cruise missiles in southern Sicily in 983.

Whatever the terms, the situation will put to the test President Reagan's stated opposition to dealing with terrorists. During a brief exchange with reporters on Friday, he declined to say if he would bargain. But his frustration was evident. Said the President: "I would like to be able to ... say to the people who do these things [that] they are cowardly bums, they aren't heroes, and they don't have a cause that justifies what they're doing.''

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