Church Envoy to Meet Kidnapers Again : Archbishop’s Aide Leaves for Beirut After Talks in London

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s special envoy left for Beirut via Paris on Monday night to meet again with Lebanese kidnapers of Americans whose release he is trying to arrange. He also conferred with U.S. officials in London.

“I think there are certain things that I can now say (to the kidnapers) which I hope will take the conversations forward and help us in this long and difficult process of negotiation,” Terry Waite told reporters at London’s Heathrow Airport.

Obvious Urgency

He left with obvious urgency less than 24 hours after arriving from Beirut. He went there last week after four of six missing Americans wrote an appeal for help to Archbishop Robert A.K. Runcie, spiritual head of the Anglican church.

Waite spent Monday morning with U.S. officials who came to London for the meeting and conferred separately later with British government officials. On Sunday, he had made a long report to the archbishop.

Waite would not identify the U.S. officials or give details of the talks.

“Loose words can cost lives, and I don’t want any more lives to be lost in this unhappy drama,” he said. “All I will say is that today we had extremely useful and helpful conversations.”

Secretary of State George P. Shultz said Monday on the “CBS Morning News” that he had summoned the U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon, Reginald Bartholomew, to Geneva for private talks Sunday in order to get a full report on Waite’s mission.

Waite said he remains optimistic and will stay in Beirut “as long as necessary,” but he would not predict when the hostages might be released.

His departure came as a message was given to a Western news agency in Beirut, purportedly from Islamic Jihad (Islamic Holy War), a Shia Muslim extremist group that claims to hold the Americans. The message said one of four French hostages also being held was “pitifully sick.” The Frenchman was not identified.

The statement warned the French government of the consequences for the hostages of “stalling in the current negotiations.”

However, Agence-France Presse, the French news agency, quoted Waite as saying on the flight from London, “The people to whom I have talked so far told me they had no knowledge of and no responsibility for the French citizens.”

Hostages Identified

The hostages who wrote to Runcie are Terry A. Anderson, 38, chief Middle East correspondent of The Associated Press; Father Lawrence Jenco, 50, a Roman Catholic relief official; David P. Jacobsen, 54, of Huntington Beach, Calif., director of the American University Hospital in Beirut, and Thomas Sutherland, 53, the university’s dean of agriculture.

They said in their letter that they had been told a fifth hostage, U.S. Embassy officer William Buckley, 57, was dead. The hostages did not mention the sixth American hostage, Peter Kilburn, 60, the American University librarian missing since last December.