Middle East Gunboat Diplomacy

By William E. Smith

In the hazy seas off the Lebanese coast, the huge fleet steamed slowly eastward. Composed of 20 fighting ships, the armada was led by two of the world's largest aircraft carriers, the nuclear-powered U.S.S. Nimitz and the John F. Kennedy. The presence of so large a force in the volatile eastern Mediterranean last week inevitably raised the question: Was the U.S. preparing to launch a military assault to free all or most of the 24 foreigners, including eight Americans, held hostage by Shi'ite radicals in Lebanon?

Though the U.S. had clearly ordered the Sixth Fleet to make a show of force, Washington denied that a rescue operation was being considered. In fact, asserted American officials, not altogether convincingly, the primary + reason for the unusually large concentration of naval power off Lebanon was the unpredictable course of the Iran-Iraq war, some 700 miles to the east. In that war, Iran is waging a continuing campaign against the southern Iraqi city of Basra and thereby posing an implicit threat to Iraq's gulf allies, most notably Kuwait. "We talk about our strategic interests in the context of the Iran-Iraq war," a senior Administration official insisted.

Late last week, after apparently concluding that its powerful gesture had had some effect on the chaotic situation in both Lebanon and the gulf, the Pentagon ordered the armada to begin to disperse. The Kennedy, docked in Haifa, 75 miles south of Beirut, and other ships began moving away.

Another factor in the rise of tension in Lebanon last week was Washington's invitation to six allies to attend a conference in Rome on the hostage crisis. Other governments vetoed the idea of the meeting, fearing that any joint action might jeopardize the lives of the kidnap victims. Moreover, Iranscam has deprived the U.S. of much of its credibility in terrorist diplomacy, and allies are more reluctant than usual to follow Washington's lead.

The U.S. exercise in gunboat diplomacy in the Mediterranean, awesome though it may have been, did not help the plight of the hostages in Lebanon. In an atmosphere of rising tension, the Iran-backed Islamic Jihad organization, whose hostages are believed to include Terry Anderson, the chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press, and Thomas Sutherland, a dean at the American University of Beirut, defiantly warned that its captives would be killed if the U.S. attacked. Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the spiritual leader of Hizballah, the pro-Iranian Party of God movement, personally challenged the Sixth Fleet. "What can they do, destroy Beirut?" he demanded. "They cannot do that. The Americans are welcome . . . If I am on their hit list, then that is an honor."

Meanwhile, the drama of the dangerous mission of Terry Waite, the special envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury, continued to unfold. On Jan. 20, Waite dismissed his Druze militia bodyguards and disappeared into West Beirut, apparently to meet with people holding some of the hostages. By last week there was little doubt that he had ceased to be a free agent. Nabih Berri, leader of the relatively moderate Shi'ite Amal militia, said he had learned that Waite had been arrested but not kidnaped, a distinction that offered little solace. Walid Jumblatt, head of Lebanon's Druze community, felt so chagrined by the disappearance of Waite, whom his militiamen had tried to protect, he offered himself as a hostage in exchange. Asked by a Washington Post correspondent whether he regretted accepting the task of safeguarding Waite, Jumblatt replied, "It is not a question of regretting. We are living in a city of wolves."

The Waite saga took a more ominous turn, when the West German daily Bild Zeitung reported that according to "Beirut security circles," the British negotiator had been shot and critically wounded while trying to escape. Later the same day, however, two Beirut taxi drivers, both of whom knew Waite by sight, said they were certain they had seen him, surrounded by a band of armed men, walking on a street in a southern Beirut suburb and waving to passersby. Still later ash-Shiraa, the Lebanese newspaper that first broke the story of the secret talks between Iran and the U.S., reported that Waite was likely to be released sometime this week. Lebanese Leader Nabih Berri made a similar predication. But for the moment, the Anglican envoy's whereabouts were unknown.

As fears mounted over the negotiator's continued absence, British diplomats disclosed that they had warned Waite not to conduct another mission to Lebanon right now. According to one Druze official in West Beirut, Waite had incurred the displeasure of some Islamic Jihad extremists by not fulfilling a promise that he had allegedly made last November in connection with the freeing of Hostage David Jacobsen, a former hospital administrator at the American University of Beirut. They claimed that he had pledged to arrange the release of 17 members of a largely Shi'ite movement who are imprisoned in Kuwait but failed to do so.

If the threat to Waite remained shadowy last week, there was nothing ambiguous about the plight of four Beirut University College teachers, three of them Americans and one an Indian, who were abducted in January by gunmen posing as policemen. A Shi'ite splinter group calling itself Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine warned Israel that if it did not release 400 jailed guerrillas within a week, the four teachers would be "executed" and "their corpses thrown in the garbage cans of Cyprus."

Though the group said the guerrillas were being held by the Israelis in "Zionist Nazi jails in Palestine," it was apparently referring to those who are currently held by the Israeli-allied South Lebanon Army, a predominantly Christian militia, in a prison camp to the north of the border between Lebanon and Israel. Among the inmates are hundreds of Amal and Hizballah guerrillas who were captured in clashes with either the militia or the Israeli army. Israeli officials disclose privately that they have protested the poor treatment of prisoners at the camp to General Antoine Lahd, the militia's commander. Lahd replied that he was not running a hotel. In June 1985, the hijackers of a TWA jet demanded and eventually secured the release of several hundred Lebanese Shi'ites from Israel's Atlit prison in exchange for 39 passengers held hostage. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir said last week that a swap this time was "out of the question."

Along with the fate of Terry Waite and the plight of the hostages in Lebanon, the U.S. was concerned last week about the detention of Wall Street Journal Correspondent Gerald Seib in Tehran. Seib was one of more than 100 foreign journalists invited by the Iranian government to visit the country and, not incidentally, to report on Iran's recent progress in the gulf war. Toward the end of a five-day visit, he was suddenly arrested and accused of being "a spy for the Zionist regime." For several days it appeared that he would be brought to trial on espionage charges. But late in the week he was turned over to the Swiss embassy, which represents American interests in Iran, and put aboard a Swissair jetliner bound for Zurich. On arrival, Seib read a statement in which he thanked the Swiss for helping to secure his release. In response to the spying charges, he declared, "I am a journalist, and that is all that I am. I was simply doing my job."

Like almost everything else in Iran today, the reasons behind Seib's arrest remain a puzzle. The incident could have resulted from the continuing power struggle between the ayatullah Hussein Ali Montazeri, the designated successor to the aging, ailing Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, speaker of the Iranian parliament. The journalists had been invited by Rafsanjani supporters, and Montazeri's men may have been trying to embarrass them by arresting the reporter.

Seib's troubles could also have been part of the wave of tension in Tehran that followed the collapse of last year's secret negotiations with the U.S. Some experts speculate that the political balance in Iran is so fragile that each faction fears the other might strike some sort of deal with the U.S. and thereby win an advantage in the ongoing power struggle. The easiest way to handle the problem, it is felt, is to make sure that nobody else makes any deal and that the prevailing chaos continues. Like the hostages in Lebanon, Seib was simply a pawn in a complex power game that is far from being resolved.

With reporting by Dean Fischer/Cairo and Roland Flamini/Nicosia