U.S. Focusing Hostage Efforts on Iran, Syria

The Bush Administration worked delicately Tuesday to encourage third-party negotiations seeking the release of U.S. hostages in Lebanon, while trying to reduce pressure at home for a quick response to the apparent murder of Marine Lt. Col. William R. Higgins.

The Administration’s “preferred outcome,” as one senior counterterrorism official put it, is an exchange of Lebanese prisoners held by Israel, including a militant Shiite Muslim clergyman seized last week, for Israeli and American captives held by Lebanese radicals.

For the time being, however, U.S. efforts are concentrated on Iran and Syria, with diplomats trying to open channels of communications with Tehran and pushing Damascus to intervene with radical Islamic groups in regions of Lebanon it controls.

“Iran and Syria are the two countries there that would have the most impact on the situation, so it is natural that our diplomatic efforts are centered largely on those two countries,” a State Department official said.

“There’s obviously some kind of disagreement in Iran about what has happened,” the official added, noting that Iran’s foreign minister had condemned the Higgins killing while the interior minister appeared to condone it.

Although the United States has no formal diplomatic relations with Iran, American diplomats have passed messages to that nation’s new government through numerous channels, including the government of Syria as well as the embassies of Japan, West Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Also, the Administration is hopeful that Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze may have been able to elicit Iranian help during meetings in Tehran on Tuesday. Secretary of State James A. Baker III met with Shevardnadze in Paris on Monday, after the Shiite group had threatened to hang Higgins but before a videotape of the purported act was released, and discussed the hostage issue with him, officials said.

In the past, however, repeated efforts to enlist Iranian and Syrian help in freeing hostages have proven futile. And so far “we have not had a single positive signal,” a State Department official said.

U.S. officials repeatedly insist that the one group they have not sought to talk with directly is the captors themselves.

“Our policy has been very clear that we do not negotiate for the release of hostages,” White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said. But what U.S. officials are unable to do directly might be accomplished indirectly.

“Israel is a sovereign nation,” Fitzwater noted. “They have a different policy with regard to hostages than we have.” In the past, Israel has been able to engineer hostage exchanges that have freed U.S. captives while avoiding direct U.S. negotiations with hostage takers.

On Monday, Israeli officials proposed swapping U.S. and Israeli hostages for Shiite detainees in Israeli prisons and Sheik Abdel Karim Obeid, a Lebanese Shiite clergyman and radical leader seized by Israeli troops in Lebanon last week. Prospects for such a swap dimmed when it was rejected by Lebanon’s fundamentalist Hezbollah organization.

If that deal could be brought about, it could lead to freedom for some or all of the remaining U.S. hostages in Lebanon. If it does not succeed, however, “the options are not good in a situation like this,” a senior U.S. official said.

With U.S. hopes riding on Israeli success in negotiating some sort of swap, both the White House and the State Department moved quickly to repair any rift between the two nations stemming from Obeid’s kidnaping.

Over the last several days, several members of Congress, including Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), had expressed irritation with Israel, saying that seizing Obeid had endangered American lives.

Asked about those criticisms, Fitzwater repeatedly emphasized the close nature of U.S.-Israeli ties. Israel, he said, is “a strong ally,” and the two nations have a “vibrant relationship.”

Bush spent a good part of the day meeting with key advisers to assess the situation, conducting one 90-minute session with Baker, Vice President Dan Quayle, Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, Deputy National Security Adviser Robert M. Gates, CIA Director William H. Webster, Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh, White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu and Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Later in the day, Bush telephoned Pope John Paul II to ask for help in getting Higgins’ body returned, although White House aides cautioned that the government is still not entirely sure Higgins is dead.

Such doubts underscored the tremendous uncertainty facing Administration policy-makers. The Administration cannot say for sure when Higgins was killed--assuming that he is dead--who killed him, where he had been held or where the remaining hostages are being held.

U.S. forensic experts, who have obtained a copy of the videotape that purports to show Higgins’ hanging, are examining the tape in an attempt to find clues that would indicate whether the victim was already dead when it was made and whether it is Higgins, officials said.

As conflicting reports poured into Washington, White House aides sought to coordinate information from the Situation Room in the White House basement. At the State Department, officials reactivated a special hostage task force, placing its members in a room down the corridor from the seventh-floor office of the secretary of state. The atmosphere, a task force official said, was “bedlam.”

Despite Bush’s extensive involvement in monitoring the Lebanese crisis, aides took pains to insist that he was not preoccupied with it. The situation at the White House was “not business as usual,” said spokesman Fitzwater. But, he added, “we’re still conducting the day’s business here.”

“Nobody wants to fall into the Carter trap,” said a senior White House official, referring to then-President Jimmy Carter’s high-profile preoccupation with U.S. hostages in Iran during 1980. “You paralyze your own government and the hostage takers get some of what they want, which is the preoccupation of the world’s pre-eminent power. . . . It’s important to deprive them of that.”

Bush pointedly stuck to his plans to host a White House barbecue for members of Congress on Tuesday evening.

Times staff writer Doyle McManus contributed to this article.