Senators Fault Administration’s Hostage Effort

Members of the Senate, clearly frustrated by the United States’ apparent impotence in dealing with the terrorists who claim to have hanged Marine Lt. Col. William R. Higgins, on Wednesday condemned the Administration for doing too little to free American hostages in the Middle East by force.

It was a measure proposed by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) that caused the senators to unburden themselves about their feelings of helplessness in watching from the sidelines as Americans are abducted and killed in the Middle East with no effective response from the United States.

“The response of our country to terrorism frankly has been pitiful,” Specter declared.

Specter’s amendment, adopted by voice vote, requires the Administration to provide Congress with a classified report by Sept. 1 that would detail exactly what the CIA is doing to locate and free American hostages.

His proposal was attached to legislation authorizing $305 billion to be spent on the armed forces for fiscal 1990, which was approved by the Senate later, 95 to 4.

Specter, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee who is briefed regularly on CIA activities, said that the President has several obvious options in dealing with the hostage-takers, including third-party diplomacy, a blockade of Lebanon and direct military action against Iran, the country believed to be sponsoring the terrorists. And he added that not enough attention has been given to the third option.

“It may be that the option of action against Iran is something that has to be very, very seriously considered,” Specter said.

Surgical Strike Possibilities

Specter also noted that President Bush, as vice president, headed a commission that looked into the possibility of a surgical strike on the location where the hostages are being held. But he noted that one of the many problems related to such a strike is that U.S. intelligence officials have not been successful in pinning down sites where the hostages are detained.

“It is just an intolerable situation that we are not locating those hostages,” he said.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), also a member of the Intelligence Committee, agreed with Specter. He said that intelligence gathered by U.S. sources on the ground in the Middle East in so poor that “we’ve been unsure for a long time of where Col. Higgins is held--even about what country he is in.”

“We have, no doubt, the best intelligence capability in the world in terms of technical intelligence,” Nunn said. “But I have a haunting fear that the more we improve our technical intelligence, our human intelligence has begun to slide. . . . We ought to be asking some soul-searching questions about whether we can do better.”

The Senate defense spending bill to which the Specter amendment was attached adheres closely to the President’s proposed Pentagon budget. As such, it differs so markedly from the House-passed version that Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, predicted that Senate-House negotiations on the bill will be “the most difficult conference, in my judgment, in the last decade.”

Among other things, the Senate bill would allow the Air Force to continue production of the controversial Stealth bomber uninterrupted as long as it successfully completes initial flight tests. The House bill calls a halt to Stealth production until the Pentagon can come up with a plan to trim its estimated $70-billion cost.

The Senate bill also preserves a compromise worked out earlier this year between the President and the Democratic leadership in Congress that calls on the Pentagon to proceed with production of the single-warhead Midgetman missile to be deployed on truck beds as well as the deployment of the 10-warhead MX missile on railroad cars. The House eliminated funding for Midgetman and cut deeply into MX funding so that certain conventional weapons could be funded.