U.S. Gets Free Rein in War on Terrorism, Reagan Says

President Reagan left Tokyo today after declaring that the joint statement on terrorism adopted by the 12th economic summit meeting means the United States feels it can “take whatever action is necessary” to stop and punish terrorists and the governments that support them.

The seven-nation conference, he said, agreed that “terrorism is a threat to all of us” and “an attack upon the world.”

Instead of each nation’s approaching the problem individually, the seven summit participants will now deal with it “as a united front,” Reagan told a press conference shortly before he boarded Air Force One.

The summit’s declaration means the next time Libya or another state sponsors a terrorist attack the allies will consult on a coordinated response, he said. “We together will decide what is appropriate,” he added. “We’re all in this together.”

The President made clear, however, that the United States still retains the right to take unilateral action. There was nothing in the joint statement that would “preclude some nation from acting” on its own if there were an attack on its citizens, he said.

Reagan denied that the United States is planning to use military force again against Libya, although there have been reports that the Pentagon is lobbying to launch cruise missiles against the regime of Col. Moammar Kadafi.

“No one was more surprised to hear that . . . than I was,” he said.

Asked why the terrorism declaration named only Libya as a terrorist state when the State Department also has accused Syria and Iran of supporting terrorism, the President said there was evidence that Kadafi’s “rogue regime” had planned 35 terrorist actions against the United States and other nations.

But, he added, “if we have the same kind of irrefutable evidence” that other countries also support terrorist acts, “they will be subject to the same treatment.”

The President also confirmed that his Administration has ordered the five U.S. companies doing business in Libya to halt their operations by June 30. The five companies--Occidental Petroleum, Conoco (a unit of Du Pont), Amerada Hess, W.R. Grace and Marathon (now part of U.S. Steel)--had been licensed to continue their oil field operations past Feb. 1, when all Americans were ordered out of Libya, because the Administration did not want their holdings to fall into Kadafi’s hands.

But Administration officials here have said this week that it has been difficult to find a way for the firms to extricate themselves without suffering losses. Now, Reagan said, they will have to “dispose of their holdings” quickly even it means a windfall for Kadafi.

Reagan called the summit “the most successful” of the six that he has attended, saying that “all we sought to accomplish . . . was achieved.”

The President, in fact, so thoroughly controlled the agenda here that he could claim credit for initiating every major declaration issued by the summit on political and economic matters.

He teamed with his major ally, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and turned around several allied leaders who had resisted fingering Libya as a sponsor of international terrorism. He secured a united statement on improving the reporting of nuclear plant accidents. And his Treasury secretary was the prime mover behind an ambitious new plan to coordinate the economic policies of the seven industrialized democracies and to smooth currency fluctuations.

Squeeze Rejected

Reagan failed to get everything he wanted during the three-day meeting. The other leaders rejected his appeal to join the United States in a massive economic squeeze of Libya, and they were not as harsh as Reagan had urged in criticizing the Soviets for the secrecy that surrounded their handling of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

But, generally, Reagan acted as a unifying force in mustering support for the summit’s joint statement on terrorism, for its position on the nuclear disaster and for coordination of economic policies. So unified were the summit participants that even French President Francois Mitterrand, a sometime critic of American policy, said “this was the easiest summit” in his six years of attending them.

Reagan also left here confident that Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev now is almost desperate for a superpower summit as a means of repairing the damage done to his image by his handling of the Chernobyl nuclear accident and will soon propose a firm date for their meeting in Washington this year.

After the U.S. bombing raid on Libya on April 15, Gorbachev canceled a scheduled pre-summit meeting between Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze and Secretary of State George P. Shultz. Gorbachev also raised questions about whether he would fulfill the commitment he made to Reagan at last November’s Geneva summit to meet again in Washington in 1986.

But, since the Chernobyl accident, the Soviets have sounded out Thatcher on whether Reagan is still interested in a summit this year. The President passed the word that he is, and a senior Reagan aide here told The Times, “There will be a summit this year--period.”

Outside Events

Like most previous summits, this one was driven by outside events--terrorism and the Chernobyl disaster--that had no direct connection with economics. And in the days before the summit opened, Reagan led a concerted Administration drive that put the U.S. stamp on both issues.

Because of Reagan’s heavy lobbying, he can be credited not only with the labeling of Libya as a terrorist state but also with the summit’s implied criticism of the Soviets for withholding crucial information on a nuclear disaster that posed a radioactive threat to neighboring countries.

As the summit neared adjournment, an ebullient Donald T. Regan, the White House chief of staff, said that, earlier this year, the President “was being written off by some people as a lame duck, and yet it’s the Reagan agenda that has dominated the summit. The President’s been vindicated in practically everything he’s done.”

Reagan has been riding the terrorism issue hard ever since the United States bombed terrorist targets in Libya. He also has been pushing the Chernobyl issue since the beginning of his Southeast Asia trip last week, when his aides quickly decided that the Soviets were vulnerable because they tried to keep the disaster a secret.

“We knew this was going to be an enduring issue, not one that would go up and down,” said a Reagan aide who helped plot the strategy to exploit the Soviets’ handling of the disaster. “And we knew that the openness of the American society, compared to the Soviet secrecy, would play well with world opinion.”

Thatcher underscored the comparison in discussions with other summit leaders, the Reagan aide said. At one point, she noted that “President Reagan went on television with a report to the American people right after the shuttle Challenger blew up, and yet it’s been over a week since the Soviet nuclear plant exploded, and we still haven’t heard from Gorbachev.”

Reagan again today accused the Soviets of trying to “cover up and confuse the issue” of what happened at Chernobyl in the days immediately after the accident. But he said he welcomed Tuesday’s explanations from a Soviet deputy premier that local officials had not acted promptly.

While Reagan and Thatcher were outspoken in their criticism of the Soviets, other summit leaders were reluctant to turn the accident into an East-West political issue and emphasized that it should be treated as a humanitarian matter.

Expressing Condolence

In fact, although the summit’s declaration noted that the Soviet Union failed to live up to its international obligation to fully disclose facts of a nuclear accident that affected other countries, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone said the statement was adopted “with no intention at all of criticizing the Soviet Union but rather to express our condolence.”

The summit’s statement on terrorism, which called for imposing political and diplomatic pressures on terrorist states, was described by Mitterrand as “a good declaration.” But he said he had at first been reluctant to name Libya and agreed to the final wording because it clearly condemned the regime of Col. Moammar Kadafi, not the people of Libya.

Mitterrand noted that none of the leaders had proposed mentioning other countries that are widely believed to sponsor terrorism, such as Syria and Iran. Confronting either Iran or Syria would be a more formidable task than taking on Libya because both are well-armed and influential.

But that question, in the end, is not what people will remember about this summit. They will remember that, at Reagan’s urging, the allies labeled Libya a terrorist state and pledged to take coordinated political and diplomatic action to stop state-supported terrorism.

Chernobyl, Economics

They will remember that the allies have been unified in faulting the Soviets for being secretive about their nuclear disaster and that the seven nations vowed to take a unified approach to solving international monetary problems.

The unity achieved at the summit was perhaps best summed up by Mitterrand when he discussed with Reagan the French decision last month to bar U.S. warplanes from flying over its territory en route to bombing Libya.

A senior Reagan Administration official quoted Mitterrand as telling Reagan:

“There has been a difficult situation between your country and ours, but . . . we have to place this in the context of 200 years of history. We did not set out 200 years ago to agree on every thing. But we have succeeded in agreeing on the most important issues, the difficult issues. Our friendship is our mainstay.”

Reagan, Mitterrand try a fresh start, Page 16. Other summit stories and photos, Pages 14, 15.