Hussein Rejected Summit, Aide Confirms

A top Jordanian official confirmed Tuesday that the United States had proposed bringing key Middle Eastern leaders to Washington next month for a summit piggybacked on the superpower meeting between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Adnan abu Odeh, minister of the Jordanian royal court, said the idea of bringing together Israeli, Jordanian and Syrian leaders for a “summit at the summit” was broached to Jordan’s King Hussein by Secretary of State George P. Shultz in October.

Quoting unnamed sources in both Israel and the United States, The Times reported last week that Hussein had vetoed the proposal. But Abu Odeh’s remarks at a Middle East seminar here sponsored by former President Jimmy Carter marked the first public confirmation of the plan and Hussein’s rejection of it. Abu Odeh also revealed for the first time that the invitation included Syria.

Abu Odeh, one of Hussein’s top advisers, said the plan was unacceptable because it would have fallen short of the international conference that Jordan wants as an “umbrella” for direct talks with Israel.

Abu Odeh said Shultz suggested the meeting in an effort to break the impasse over the international conference plan, which is supported by most Arab parties but is opposed by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

Hussein has said he is willing to negotiate with Israel only in an international context. The Israeli Labor Alignment favors a conference, but Shamir’s Likud Bloc is adamantly opposed.

“The idea from the American point of view was to make use of the Soviet-American summit in such a way as to extend invitations to the heads of states in the area--Jordan, Syria and Israel--to come and attend a meeting within the (U.S.-Soviet) summit, from which the Americans hoped that a new diplomatic initiative under the auspices of the United Nations would start,” Abu Odeh said.

“When we asked about the details, we saw it was really not an international conference,” he said. “That is why we refused it.”

U.S. and Israeli officials said Israel accepted the proposal before Shultz raised it with Hussein. These officials said Shultz had planned to sound out the Soviets next but did not do so because Hussein’s rejection killed the proposal.

After his meetings with Hussein and Israeli officials last month, Shultz said that efforts to convene an international conference seemed to have come to a dead-end and that it was time for Israel and its Arab neighbors to begin talking about substance and stop wasting time on “modalities.”

Although Shultz did not reveal the summit-at-the-summit plan at the time, its rejection by Hussein seems to have played a role in the secretary of state’s disillusionment over the proposal.