U.S. Cancels Terror Parley After Britain, France Balk : Meeting Was Slated for Friday

The Reagan Administration today abandoned an effort to convene a meeting of anti-terrorism officials from seven leading industrialized nations after key allies Britain and France refused to attend.

State Department spokesman Charles E. Redman said the Administration had proposed the meeting of the nations that participate in annual economic summits to discuss the recent rise in kidnapings of Westerners in Lebanon and ways to exchange information for dealing with such terrorism. The meeting was to have started Friday in Rome and continued through the weekend.

France, with support from Britain, objected that the allies might have been drawn into a controversial discussion of U.S. military options to combat terrorism in Lebanon, said an official who demanded anonymity.

“Military action was not on the agenda,” the U.S. official said. “But, presumably, any discussion of terrorism would touch on that.”

The French government announced earlier today that it opposed the meeting out of fear that the seven nations would “appear as the world’s gendarmes, especially in the current context” of heightened tension in the Mediterranean.

“France, like certain of its partners, felt such a meeting raised concerns as to its objectives as well as its timeliness,” Denis Baudouin, a spokesman for Premier Jacques Chirac, said at a press briefing in Paris.

‘Bilateral Character’

“The French government holds to the bilateral character of contacts and exchanges of information,” Baudouin said.

The spokesman expressed concern about U.S. Navy movements in the Mediterranean.

“We ask ourselves about the real and final intentions of the Americans,” Baudouin said. “From the point of view of the hostages, it is disquieting.”

A flotilla of more than two dozen U.S. warships and support vessels is stationed off Lebanon where eight Americans and 18 other foreigners are missing and believed held by Shia Muslim extremists.

The United States has sought to dampen speculation that a military strike was in the offing.

Indeed, informed sources at the Pentagon said today that the Defense Department may soon allow one of two Marine amphibious groups sailing in the Mediterranean to leave for home to discourage speculation that a military strike is planned.

Disclosed by Andreotti

Plans for the meeting on terrorism were first disclosed earlier this week by Italian Foreign Minister Giulio Andreotti during a Washington visit.

The conference was to be held in Rome because Italy is to host the next summit meeting of the seven major industrial nations--United States, Canada, Japan, France, Britain and West Germany.

Redman cited “a great deal of growing cooperation” among the allies on combatting terrorism in recent months and said the level of intelligence exchanges has been “quite striking.” Despite the shelving of the meeting, he said, close cooperation will continue.

“We continue to believe that cooperation and consultation among the world’s democracies is the most effective method of suppressing terrorism and hostage-taking,” Redman said.

Redman said there is “no indication” that the reluctance of the allies to join the meeting is the result of the Administration’s anti-terrorism credibility problem after revelations that it had secretly sold arms to Iran as part of an effort to win freedom for American hostages held by pro-Iranian terrorists in Lebanon.

The United States was to have been represented at the meeting by L. Paul Bremer, director of the State Department’s Office of Counter-Terrorism and Emergency Planning.