New Italy Leader, in First Visit to U.S., to Emphasize Sharing Defense Burden

Italian Prime Minister Ciriaco De Mita will travel to Washington on Monday to hold get-acquainted talks with President Reagan and to show his young government’s willingness to shoulder a greater share of the Western defense burden.

Differences in Parliament prevent De Mita from taking with him final approval for redeployment in Italy of 72 American F-16 fighter-bombers now based in Spain. But government officials say De Mita has ample parliamentary support to overcome domestic critics of the decision to accept the aircraft, which Spain has ordered to be removed from Torrejon Air Base near Madrid.

It will be the first Washington visit as prime minister for the 60-year-old De Mita, a Christian Democratic Party leader who has led a five-party coalition government since April.

The Italian leader will be Reagan’s first European visitor since the President’s trip to Moscow last month. U.S. sources expect De Mita to get a first-hand assessment of Reagan’s talks with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Italian officials expect Reagan and De Mita to explore issues of common concern in advance of an economic summit meeting of the so-called Group of Seven--the six major Western industrial democracies and Japan--next weekend in Toronto.

Pre-Summit Agenda

East-West issues, regional crises such as the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, the question of Third World debts, trade and tariffs and mutually troubling problems of terrorism and drugs are all on the pre-summit agenda.

There is also likely to be a review of U.S.-Italian collaboration against organized crime following major strikes against the Mafia on both sides of the Atlantic. There are many such points of cooperation between two of the West’s closest allies and virtually no major bilateral differences, according to officials on both sides.

De Mita is seeking to reduce government debt and to overhaul cumbersome parliamentary and bureaucratic bottlenecks through institutional reform. He may find Reagan sympathetic, but his success will hinge more on Italy’s internal dynamics than on its relations with fellow industrial powerhouses.

Closer to Mideast

Last weekend, De Mita’s center-left coalition Cabinet agreed unanimously to accept redeployment in Italy of the U.S. fighter-bombers based in Spain and assigned to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO defense ministers formally asked Italy to accept the jets at a meeting in Brussels last month after the Spanish government asked that they be withdrawn.

The alternative, U.S. and NATO officials said, would be to return them to the United States, though this would weaken NATO’s southern flank. Redeployment in Italy, by contrast, strengthens both Italy’s NATO role and the southern flank by siting the planes closer to the eastern Mediterranean.

An Italian base would also put the jets closer to Middle East trouble spots, and the Libyans do not like the Italian decision. A Libyan government radio broadcast called it “an escalation of tension in the region.”

Leftist Opposition

The De Mita government has a strong parliamentary majority, but the redeployment plan stirred an immediate outburst of opposition from leftist parties, especially the Communists. Also, there were protests from environmentalists, regional officials and seven Roman Catholic bishops in southern Italy, where the jets will likely be based.

Communist Party leader Giorgio Napolitano decried the redeployment decision, saying that too many Italian governments have been “too zealously willing to accept NATO military burdens.”

De Mita had hoped to win formal approval in Parliament this week before his trip to Washington. But the leftist parties, taking advantage of poor attendance by government legislators, succeeded in deferring debate until next week.

Some members of the De Mita government support the redeployment but believe it will never take place because the planes may be part of a negotiated reduction of conventional forces by the United States and the Soviet Union. That is also the Soviet position.

“I don’t see the logic of the transfer of the F-16s because before the end of the year, we will start negotiating for the reduction of conventional weapons,” Soviet diplomat Nikolai Afanasievsky said here Thursday. He is in Italy to brief Italian and Vatican leaders on the results of last month’s U.S.-Soviet summit.

Jets ‘Sentenced to Death’

“The fate of the warplanes has already been earmarked,” he said. “They are sentenced to death.”

It is not yet clear where the planes of the 401st U.S. Tactical Fighter Wing and the 6,000 to 8,000 personnel would be based. Two possibilities are the Italian base at Gioia del Colle at Puglia and a little-used airport at Crotone in Calabria. With NATO paying the more than $600-million relocation costs, Crotone seems the most logical choice; it is in one of Italy’s most underdeveloped areas.

Declaring their region “a denuclearized zone,” Calabrian officials said they do not want the base, and Catholic bishops in Puglia have also objected, saying, “We want this to be a region of peace and not a region of war.”

The F-16s can carry nuclear weapons, but under an agreement with Spain they are armed with conventional weapons. Nuclear weapons for the aircraft have long been stockpiled at an Italian-American air base in northern Italy.