Reagan Says U.S. Won’t Yield to Iranian Threats

President Reagan gave new notice to Iran on Saturday that terrorists cannot force the United States to abandon its Mideast interests and that current U.S. “tolerance” of Iranian provocations is limited.

The warning, in Reagan’s regular Saturday radio address, came in the wake of a report that Iranian diplomats are actively scouting U.S. embassies for soft spots vulnerable to attack.

The chief of the State Department’s bureau of diplomatic security, Robert E. Lamb, on Friday termed the terrorist threat to U.S. embassies “the most serious that we have ever seen.”

The White House had no comment on the remarks, but one Administration official in Santa Barbara said privately that specific accusations were not helpful to U.S. efforts to play down the Iranian threat.

“Our attitude is, the less said about terrorism, the better,” the official said.

The President, speaking Saturday from his mountaintop ranch outside Santa Barbara, said his decision to protect Kuwaiti oil tankers plying the Persian Gulf under the U.S. flag is one example of American resolve in the region.

The oil tankers of Kuwait, an ally of Iraq in its war with Iran, have sustained more than 50 Iranian sea and air attacks in the last year.

Won’t ‘Bow to Intimidation’

“We cannot permit extremists to set the agenda or coerce their neighbors” in the Persian Gulf, Reagan said.

“We have to show that efforts of intimidation, like Iranian threats against Kuwait and other non-belligerent states in the gulf, do not work. We’re a tolerant people, but we do not bow to intimidation.

“Our tolerance” of Iranian acts in the region, such as the mining of sea lanes, “should not be mistaken for a lack of resolve,” he said.

Responding for the Democrats, Sen. Wyche Fowler Jr. of Georgia blamed the crisis in the gulf on the Reagan Administration’s failure to develop an energy policy that effectively reduces the nation’s dependence on Mideast oil.

Foreign Oil Dependency

“Do any of us think for one minute that we would even be in the Persian Gulf . . . if we were not so desperately dependent on that foreign oil?” asked Fowler.

“Every president from Richard Nixon through Jimmy Carter supported the development of a comprehensive national energy policy,” Fowler said, until “this Administration decided the best energy policy was to have no energy policy at all.” The result has been increasing dependence on imported oil, he said, citing an Energy Department estimate that it may fill 60% of U.S. demand in the 1990s.

Fowler said the Administration has “tried to abolish or diminish every program successfully reducing our oil dependency.” Even so, he said, “we do know how to be energy self-sufficient.” He called for a nonpartisan effort to “develop a national energy policy as a matter of American security, American strength, American independence.”

The Middle East was one of half a dozen items that the President covered Saturday, continuing a weeklong campaign to distance himself from a summer of televised political scandal.

Agenda Laid Out

“After many weeks, the Iran- contra hearings are over,” he said. “The issues involved have been examined from every angle and in every light. The mistakes that were made have been dealt with.

“Now it’s time for Americans to come together and move our nation forward.”

The President’s agenda for the future, laid out for the fourth time in four days, includes winning Senate confirmation of his Supreme Court nominee, Judge Robert H. Bork; enacting into law a series of budget reforms he has dubbed an “economic bill of rights,” and signing a pact with the Soviet Union to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear forces worldwide.

Reagan also sought to minimize differences between a White House plan for a cease-fire in Central America’s guerrilla wars and the peace plan signed this month by Nicaragua and the other Central American nations--Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatemala and El Salvador.

Assailed by Conservatives

The Administration has come under sharp attack by its own conservative supporters for proposing any cease-fire, which they say will doom the U.S.-financed contras battling Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.

At the same time, Reagan’s plan has been attacked by moderates who want the White House to show greater support for the Central America peace plan, drafted on the basis of an initiative advanced by President Oscar Arias Sanchez of Costa Rica.