Familiar Fingerprints

By William E. Smith

As the New Jersey's guns boom, terror hits Kuwait and Arafat sets to flee

We thought it was incoming fire," a U.S. Marine lieutenant on duty near Beirut International Airport said later. "The sides of buildings were shaking, and we thought the windows would shatter. We went into Condition 1, which means full combat alert. Then we realized that what we had heard was the firing of those big babies a mile and a half from shore. We didn't hear them land, but we could imagine what it must have been like."

The lieutenant was a member of the 1,800-man U.S. peace-keeping force in Lebanon, and the "big babies" were the battleship New Jersey's 16-in. guns, which fired their 1,900-lb. shells last week for the first time in combat since the Viet Nam War. The New Jersey, which has been cruising off the Lebanese coast since September, entered the on-again, off-again fighting after U.S. reconnaissance planes drew fire from antiaircraft batteries manned either by Syrian soldiers or by Syrian-supported Druze fighters. The battleship hurled eleven of the big shells in its first engagement and 40 rounds from 5-in. guns in a second attack. The salvos were another reminder to Syria and its allies in Lebanon that any challenge to U.S. forces will be swiftly met with a counterattack.

The New Jersey's thunder had its echoes across the Middle East and beyond. In Tripoli, Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat and 4,000 loyalists were preparing to flee. In the Chouf Mountains southeast of Beirut, Israeli troops helped evacuate Christian civilians and Phalangist militiamen from a town besieged by Druze forces for the past three months. Some 900 miles to the southeast, in the gulf state of Kuwait, terrorists unleashed a wave of suicide attacks that bore the increasingly familiar fingerprints of spreading Shi'ite fanaticism.

The trouble began when one or possibly two suicide terrorists rammed a truckload of explosives into the U.S. embassy compound in Kuwait, badly damaging one of the buildings in a towering explosion. Five people, none of them Americans, were killed in the blast; the toll could have been much higher, but the driver aimed his truck at a three-story administrative annex rather than the crowded chancellery building. About an hour later, a similar car bomb exploded just outside the French embassy, blowing a 30-ft. hole in the wall surrounding the compound. A crystal chandelier crashed onto Ambassador Jean Bressot's desk, missing him by inches. Other car bombs went off at a residential complex where many foreigners live, and at three Kuwaiti installations. There were six known killed and about 60 injured in the six explosions.

The first assault was similar to the truck-bomb attacks that have occurred in Lebanon this year, including the ones in October that took the lives of 241 U.S. servicemen and 58 French paratroopers. It was an ominous warning that the oil-producing gulf, a region of vital interest to the U.S., is not exempt from the kind of violence that has plagued Lebanon.

According to Kuwaiti newspapers, the terrorist who drove into the U.S. compound was an Iraqi member of the banned Al Dawa party, a fundamentalist Muslim group with ties to Iran. For years, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini has branded the U.S. as "the Great Satan." He is also angry with France for selling military equipment to Iraq and with Kuwait for supporting and underwriting Iraq in its three-year-old war against Iran. The Iraqi government of President Saddam Hussein immediately ordered missiles fired at five Iranian cities in retaliation.

In the wake of the gulf attacks, former Lebanese Prime Minister Saeb Salam warned, "The growth of Islamic fundamentalism is an earthquake. It is becoming more radical, making alliances with those who support Communist ideology." He and other Arab moderates felt the situation had been exacerbated, however, by the growing U.S. military involvement in the region and the U.S. decision, announced during Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's visit to Washington last month, to adopt a new policy of "strategic cooperation" with Israel so as to check the growing strength of Soviet-armed Syria.

Israeli officials have told TIME that the new Reagan-Shamir agreement included a "secret unwritten understanding" under which the U.S. would concentrate on protecting the oil-rich Arab gulf states against Iran, while Israel would help the U.S. handle the Syrian threat in Lebanon. According to the Israeli sources, Shamir also indicated that he would try to discourage Jewish groups in the U.S. from opposing American efforts to bolster moderate Arab governments.

Administration officials denied that what had been discussed amounted to a secret understanding. "It's obvious that we are in the gulf and Israel is not," said a senior Defense Department official. "It's equally clear that the Israelis have a stronger, more direct military confrontation with the Syrians than we do." But it would be "overdrawn," he said, to talk about "spheres of influence." Another result of the Shamir visit was the decision to convert military-aid programs to Israel and Egypt from loans to grants. Over the next fiscal year, the U.S. will give $1.4 billion to Israel and $1.1 billion to Egypt.

The Israelis underscored the extent of their responsibility for Lebanon last week when they stepped in to help the International Red Cross arrange the evacuation of some 2,500 Christian militiamen and 5,000 civilians from the mountain town of Deir al Qamar. Israeli armor and infantry provided cover for the exodus. Even so, there were some tense moments as Druze militiamen, waving their rifles, jeered the Phalangists, who had been bundled into Israeli trucks. The Christians were eventually taken by ship from the Israeli-occupied port of Sidon to Christian-controlled areas around Beirut.

Farther north, around Tripoli, the evacuation of P.L.O. troops besieged by Syrian-backed Palestinians finally began. On Saturday, an Italian ferryboat took 93 wounded P.L.O. fighters to Cyprus with the help of the International Red Cross. As five Greek ships prepared to evacuate Arafat and his remaining troops to Tunisia and North Yemen, Israeli gunboats shelled his positions. Said an Israeli official: "We want him to sweat a little."

Arafat's problems came up in an unexpected venue when U.S.S.R. Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko held a detailed discussion on the Middle East with Arthur Hartman, the U.S. Ambassador to Moscow. Gromyko spoke with regret about Arafat's predicament; the P.L.O., he said, was gradually moving toward a more moderate position, with the balance shifting toward those who acknowledge Israel's right to exist. Much of the talk touched on the Soviet Union's quest to be directly involved in future Middle East negotiations. "Why do you Americans feel you have a right to play a special role in the Middle East?" Gromyko asked. The Foreign Minister said that the Soviet government had urged Syria to exercise restraint and claimed that in most cases the Syrians had been responsive.

One of the great disappointments of the past year, from Washington's point of view, has been the halting progress of the Lebanese factions in forging a more broadly based national government. Lebanese President Amin Gemayel, whose weakness is often blamed for the slow progress, last week expressed the hope that the leaders of those factions would soon resume their reconciliation talks in Switzerland. If those discussions are successful, they could pave the way for the eventual withdrawal of the Marines and the other members of the Multi-National Force in Lebanon. President Reagan reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to that force but suggested, for the first time, that the Marines would be pulled out if there ever were such a "collapse of order" that no peaceful resolution of the Lebanese conundrum could be achieved.

Even as the big guns of the New Jersey were firing last week, U.S. Special Envoy Donald Rumsfeld was in Damascus conferring with Syrian Foreign Minister Abdel Halim Khaddam. Little was accomplished, but the fact that the session was held at all was an achievement of sorts. In the streets of the capital, 50,000 Syrians rallied to praise President Hafez Assad and to demonstrate against U.S. mili military power.

Though Rumsfeld did not meet with Assad, that privilege was reserved for Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al Faisal. He became the first foreign visi tor to meet with Assad since Nov. 9, when the Syrian President dropped out of sight after suffering from what the government officially labeled as appendicitis. In television footage aired after the meeting with the prince, Assad looked wan and fragile. Whether he remained seriously ill and will require a long period of convalescence, as many reports have suggested, was a secret the Syrians were keeping to themselves.

--By William E. Smith. Reported by Dean Brelis/ Beirut and Barry Hillenbrand/Kuwait, with other bureaus

With reporting by Dean Brelis, Barry Hillenbrand This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.