Reagan’s and Shultz’s Views Appear to Differ : Administration Signals Mixed on Riots

Reagan Administration officials said Thursday that the main cause of Palestinian rioting in the Israeli-occupied West Bank is local dissatisfaction with Israeli rule, despite President Reagan’s comment Wednesday evening that the riots were “not just spontaneous and home grown.”

At the same time, however, officials said U.S. intelligence reports do indicate that Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organization have aided and encouraged the Palestinians on the West Bank--the “intimations” to which Reagan referred in his news conference on Wednesday.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz said the unrest was “essentially indigenous” and told reporters on his airplane en route to Jerusalem: “There is an underlying problem consisting of a large number of people in an occupied area that don’t have the basic rights of governance.”

Shultz’s explanation appeared to conflict with the thrust of Reagan’s comments. The President, responding to questions about the riots, said: “There’s every evidence that these riots are not just spontaneous and home grown. . . . We have had intimations that there have been certain people suspected of being terrorists, outsiders coming in, not only with weapons, but stirring up and encouraging the trouble in those areas.” Reagan did not mention any indigenous causes for the riots.

Other officials, seeking to soften the apparent conflict, argued that both Reagan and Shultz were correct.

“Those (comments) are totally consistent, as far as we’re concerned,” White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said. “The President said the same thing, simply that he just said that they were partly influenced by outside sources.”

“He’s saying that it’s indigenous in the sense of the nature of the political problem there, but there has been some outside influence as well,” Fitzwater said.

Two officials familiar with U.S. intelligence reports on the West Bank said the President was correct about signs of outside influence on the riots--only “he didn’t phrase it very well,” said one.

He said Palestinian demonstrators on the West Bank have received secret and direct aid and advice in recent months from both the Palestine Liberation Organization and from Syria, but not from Communist Bloc nations or from fundamentalist regimes such as Iran, at least as far as U.S. intelligence can determine.

“All the (West Bank) resistance was home grown,” the official said. “The PLO was caught short and Syria was caught short. They didn’t expect it. But then they decided to keep it going, and there has been infiltration (into the West Bank) since then.”

Another official pointed out that a radical, Syrian-backed PLO faction, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, has been broadcasting propaganda to the West Bank, “including instructions on how to make a Molotov cocktail,” from a radio station in southern Syria.

Intelligence, some of it apparently supplied by Israel, also indicates that the PLO has succeeded in shuttling some agents back and forth across the Jordan River, which separates the Israeli-occupied West Bank from Jordan.

The PLO, while it is headquartered outside the occupied territory, has long had a large and devoted following among Palestinians on the West Bank.

Sixty-five people have died since the rioting began, most of them shot by Israeli troops.