N.Y. Cardinal Goes to Lebanon in Hostage Bid

New York’s Roman Catholic prelate, Cardinal John J. O’Connor, flew to Lebanon on Saturday and said he is ready to do anything he can to help free as many as five Americans kidnaped and believed still held hostage there by fundamentalist Muslims.

O’Connor traveled from this Mediterranean island to the Christian enclave just east of Beirut, where he met with Lebanese President Amin Gemayel, a Maronite Catholic, as well as Nasrallah Sfeir, the Maronite prelate for Lebanon.

Speaking to reporters before those meetings, O’Connor said he had not come to Lebanon to interfere in any other negotiations that may already be under way to secure the release of the hostages, but he declared:

“You have my services for anything I might do peacefully, prayerfully, to assist in any way,” O’Connor said. “We pray for the American hostages. I have talked with some of their families. Of course, we would love to have them returned in good health, and naturally I would personally do what I could to assist if anyone could help me to help the hostages.

“I come not to interfere. . . . I don’t pretend to have any kind of ability that anyone doesn’t have, but I am here, I am available.”

Also Going to Syria

O’Connor’s New York office said his three-day visit to the region, which will also take him to Damascus, Syria, is part of a review of the work of the Catholic Near East Welfare Assn., whose work he oversees in the United States. O’Connor was accompanied by Msgr. John G. Nolan of Albany, N.Y.

The visit began a day after President Reagan said the U.S. government’s latest efforts to free the hostages had failed. “The channel that we had been following--and we thought would be successful--failed,” Reagan told reporters without giving details.

Five Americans have been missing in Lebanon for more than a year and are believed to have been kidnaped by a fundamentalist Muslim, pro-Iranian group calling itself Islamic Jihad (Islamic Holy War).

The missing include Father Lawrence M. Jenco, 50, of Joliet, Ill., who headed the Catholic Relief Services mission in Lebanon and who was technically a subordinate to O’Connor.

Other Captives

In addition to Jenco, the American hostages are Terry A. Anderson, 38, Beirut bureau chief of the Associated Press; Thomas Sutherland, 53, dean of agriculture at the American University of Beirut, and David P. Jacobsen, 54, director of the American University Hospital. A fifth missing American, William Buckley, 57, a U.S. Embassy political officer, may be dead. Last October, anonymous phone calls to Western news agencies said Buckley had been killed in retaliation for the Israeli bombing of the Palestine Liberation Organization headquarters in Tunisia. However, his body was never found.

Terry Waite, an emissary from the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, has visited Beirut on several occasions in an effort to secure release of Americans and other foreigners believed hed hostage by Muslim terrorists. Waite contacted people he said were intermediaries who had seen the hostages, but his efforts have so far not yielded results.

Those who claim to have abducted the Americans have said the hostages are being held to try to force the release of 17 Muslims imprisoned in Kuwait for the December, 1983, bombings of the U.S. and French embassies there. The bombings are believed to have been carried out by Al Dawa, an underground movement of Iraqi Shia Muslims who oppose the current government in Baghdad, because of Kuwait’s support for Iraq’s Sunni Muslim regime.