HOSTAGE CRISIS IN LEBANON : Outraged President Meets Aides, Weighs Alternatives

President Bush, visibly angered by the reported hanging of Marine Lt. Col. William R. Higgins, broke off a cross-country trip Monday to return to the White House, saying: “There is no way that I can properly express the outrage that I feel.”

Bush, facing the first major foreign policy crisis of his Administration, conferred with senior national security advisers for more than an hour Monday evening after watching what was characterized as a videotape of the murder on a television set in his office.

“It is a most troubling and disturbing matter that has shocked the American people right to the core,” the President told reporters earlier in the day. “Somehow, there has got to be a return to decency and honor, even in matters of this nature.”

Bush refused to say whether he is considering any retaliation for the reported murder of Higgins, who was kidnaped in February, 1988, by pro-Iranian terrorists in Lebanon.

Information Lacking

But other officials quietly played down the possibility of retribution, saying that there is still too little information on who was responsible for the reported killing.

“It is a period of assessment,” White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said. “We’re not trying to engender any sense of drama. . . . There are a lot of very difficult issues here that make one proceed cautiously.”

“The President made it very clear that until the facts are known--at least more facts than we have now--there’s no way you can make a definitive decision,” said Rep. William L. Dickinson (R-Ala.), one of a dozen congressional leaders who met with Bush on Monday evening.

“It’s an exercise in frustration,” Dickinson said. “If you do nothing, it’s the wrong thing to do. If you go to military action, it’s the wrong thing to do. And if you negotiate, it’s the wrong thing to do. What can you do in a situation like this?”

Late Monday evening, Bush issued an appeal to both Israel and the Lebanese Muslim terrorists who hold Americans hostage, asking them to release their captives.

The President said he was sending “an urgent call to all parties, who hold hostages in the Middle East to release them forthwith, as an humanitarian gesture, to begin to reverse the cycle of violence in that region.”

The statement was an implicit slap at Israel, which touched off the current crisis by kidnaping a militant Lebanese Muslim clergyman, Sheik Abdul Karim Obeid, last week.

Dickinson and others said there is still some lingering uncertainty about whether Higgins actually had been killed and considerable uncertainty about whether--if he had been--he was hanged Monday, as his captors claimed, or slain earlier.

Nevertheless, a palpable sense of outrage over Higgins’ apparent murder, fanned by the grisly videotape distributed by his captors of a body hanging from a noose, swept through the Administration and Congress.

“I’ve rarely seen the President have deeper feelings,” said Sen. David L. Boren (D-Okla.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“The outrage is overwhelming,” a State Department official said. “The Administration may be willing to (retaliate) . . . because of the strength of that feeling.”

Bush’s response to the announcement of Higgins’ execution was double-edged: a rapid and emotional public response, but caution in the private councils of his Administration.

Schedule Change

The President learned of the terrorists’ claim in Chicago, just before he was to speak to the annual meeting of the National Governors Assn. Deputy National Security Adviser Robert M. Gates told Bush that reporters who had seen the videotape identified the body as that of Higgins, officials said. The President decided almost immediately to scrap the rest of his scheduled two-day trip to Las Vegas and Oklahoma City and to convene his advisers at the White House to “figure out what might conceivably be done,” Bush said.

On his way back to Washington, Bush telephoned Higgins’ wife, Marine Maj. Robin Higgins--a “wonderful, stoic individual who is going through sheer hell,” he said. Then he called U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar to seek his help in recovering Higgins’ body, officials said. They said Bush had similar messages asking for help sent to the radical governments of Syria and Iran, which have good relations with Lebanon’s Shiite Muslim factions.

But Bush’s meeting with his advisers appeared to leave most of the questions about possible responses to the killing still unanswered. Officials said that CIA Director William H. Webster went into the meeting prepared to explain the limits of U.S. intelligence on Higgins’ captors; aides said Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, planned to stress the limited chance for success of any military response.

The series of briefings and meetings appeared to leave Bush, at the end of the day, as frustrated as he began.

“I got a very strong sense,” Dickinson said, “that if he could ever decide the right thing to do, he’d do it.”

“Whatever options are considered, for every action there’s a reaction,” a senior military official said. “You may not actually have the last play. You have to factor in the collateral damage and the potential harm to other hostages.”

Experts on terrorism and the presidency, who were watching Bush closely in his first major foreign policy test, offered divided verdicts on the President’s initial response.

Stephen Hess, a presidential scholar at Washington’s Brookings Institution, said Bush has successfully resisted both the idea of negotiating with terrorists and the lure of launching a hasty retaliation.

Past Dealings Recalled

“Previous Presidents have had the same kind of problem, and all have handled it badly,” he said, referring to Ronald Reagan’s arms deals with Iran and Jimmy Carter’s negotiations with Tehran over U.S. hostages.

“A President with as much experience as Bush should understand that about 50% of what we think we know now is wrong, so his response should be more cautious than it would otherwise be,” he said. “He has done the right pro forma things, but not much more.”

Terrell E. Arnold, a former State Department counterterrorism expert, also praised Bush’s caution but warned that his emotional involvement in the issue could enmesh him too deeply in a personal confrontation with the terrorists.

“It’s a risk,” he said. “The one wild card is the human factor. You don’t want your leadership to lose sight of the human condition, but you don’t want them to make mistakes because of it either.”

And one former Bush Administration official warned that the President may already have made that mistake by deciding to rush back to Washington--thus escalating the pressure on himself to act quickly.

Unnecessary Pressure?

“Terrorists want to draw attention,” he said. “The chief of state has hurried back to Washington and is huddled in a corner. It’s accomplished their objective. And it puts him in a position where his aides are always asking: ‘What have you decided? What have you decided?’ He’s put more pressure on himself than he needed to.”

“This is the first real foreign policy crisis he personally has had to face in his term in office,” said Geoffrey Kemp, an NSC official during the Reagan Administration. “I think that the biggest danger we face is that the American people are so outraged about this that there will be a demand for some response. And we saw during eight years of the Reagan Administration that rhetoric is cheap, but action is difficult.”

“He’s got one thing going for him,” Hess said. “It’s early in the Administration, his popularity is high, and it isn’t an election year. He may escape the pressure to ‘Don’t just stand there, do something.’ ”

Indeed, the reaction in Congress was somewhat divided--among those who called for immediate retaliation, those who called for caution and those who wanted to debate whether Israel should be blamed for precipitating the murder by kidnaping a Shiite Muslim leader in Lebanon last week.

“I think we have to give (the terrorists) a punishing blow,” said Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y ). “It’s about time that the United States adopt a policy more like that of Israel and the Soviet Union.”

He said the United States should send the terrorists a message “that we’ll seek them out, that we’ll hunt them down. . . . This is nothing less than war.”

“We can’t blow Lebanon up simply to avenge the life of one American,” Rep. Dante B. Fascell (D-Fla.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, objected.

“As for options, we’re back to square one,” said Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “It’s a horrible mess.”

Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) touched off a furor when he suggested that Israel should be held at least partly to blame for the murder of Higgins.

“We can’t continually apologize for Israeli actions in this country when it endangers the lives of Americans in some far-off country,” said Dole. “Perhaps a little more responsibility on the part of the Israelis would be refreshing.”

Defenders of Israel were outraged by Dole’s remarks.

“To blame Israel for what Hezbollah has done would encourage terrorists to take more lives,” said Rep. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.). “Any intimation that someone else is to blame is turning the world upside down. . . . Israel does not share any of the blame.”

Times staff writers Sara Fritz and Melissa Healy contributed to this report.