U.S. Cautiously Welcomes Iran Conciliation

Bush Administration officials Friday welcomed conciliatory statements by Iran’s new president but warned that apparent openings to Tehran in the past repeatedly have proven illusory.

“When you see a statement that offers hope for the return of our hostages, I want to explore it to the fullest,” Bush said in response to Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani’s offer to help find “solutions” to the five-year hostage crisis. But, Bush added, “I don’t know what--what it means fully.”

The cautious approach is a product of bitter experiences in the last decade, in which the search for Iranian “moderates” has led U.S. officials into serious policy blunders. Those included sales of anti-aircraft and anti-tank missile parts to Iran in 1985 and 1986, which became central elements of the Iran-Contra scandal during the Ronald Reagan Administration.

This time, officials say, they are determined not to let their hopes of winning freedom for the eight U.S. hostages in Lebanon lead them into over-eagerness, and they spent most of the day carefully analyzing the details of Rafsanjani’s statements, trying to determine exactly what they meant.

“This is the eye-of-the-hurricane day,” an official said, “a reflective day.”

Rafsanjani’s remarks, coupled with Iran’s help this week in staying the death threat against hostage Joseph J. Cicippio, could be “the perfect opportunity everybody’s been waiting for” to break the deadlock on the hostages held by Lebanese pro-Iranian militants, one State Department official said.

But, he cautioned, “nobody wants to get too far out on a limb and have our hopes dashed yet again.”

Bush ‘Encouraged’

Bush expressed a similar sentiment during a photo session with a group of senators in the Oval Office. “I’m encouraged,” he said, “but I don’t want to get the hopes of the hostages’ loved ones up once again to have those hopes dashed.

“This is a brutal process,” Bush said.

The process has been the first test of the new Administration’s ability to handle a foreign policy crisis, and officials were nervously congratulating themselves about the success, so far, of their efforts.

Those efforts involved at least two major departures from the way the Reagan Administration handled hostage matters. First, Bush has kept his distance from the hostage families. He has expressed sympathy for them, as he did Friday, saying: “What is foremost on my mind are the families . . . and the hostages themselves.”

But unlike Reagan, Bush has not met with the families personally, and contacts with them are being handled by the State Department, not by White House officials. Government counterterrorism experts said that personal meetings with hostage families by Reagan and his aides contributed to his Administration’s eagerness to enter deals that later went awry.

In addition, Bush carefully refrained all week from any statement that threatened military retaliation against either Iran or the Shiite groups that hold the hostages. Reagan was widely criticized for threatening “swift retaliation” that the United States proved, in most cases, unable to deliver.

But Administration officials have not been averse to allowing the news media to give Iran and its allies the impression that military action might be taken. Media reports that concentrated on ship movements and speculation about possible retaliatory strikes if a hostage had been killed helped the Administration convey an implied threat without having to make statements that could limit its options, a senior Administration official suggested.

Within the military chain of command, “the working assumption” during the week was that if Cicippio or another hostage had been killed, it was “quite likely . . . we might well be ordered to go,” the official said. But, White House officials emphasized, no formal decision was made to launch an attack under any particular set of circumstances.

Throughout the week, in fact, diplomatic, not military, efforts have been at the center of the Administration’s work. “We have engaged in . . . an extraordinarily broad exercise of diplomacy here in the last couple of days,” Bush said. And that emphasis was likely to continue through the weekend as officials search for a way to expand on the contacts to Iran made earlier in the week.

Messages between Washington and Tehran through third parties “are going back and forth almost as a routine thing now,” a senior official said, and as national security analysts study the events of the past week, their assessment of Iran’s role has warmed noticeably.

On Thursday, State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler issued a guarded assessment of Iran’s actions. Friday, the tone had changed. “Today we would characterize that we have reason to believe that Iran is genuinely engaged and no reason to believe that its engagement is not focused in a positive direction,” she said.

But that assessment is far from unanimous, with some officials suggesting that Syria, not Iran, played the major role in easing tensions. The White House “would like to believe this is an opening,” one senior Administration official said. “There may be some grasping at straws.”

Times staff writers James Gerstenzang and Norman Kempster contributed to this story.