NEWS ANALYSIS : Hostage Drama Played Out on Media’s Stage

The deputy Israeli foreign minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, rose from the long table in the ministry’s Situation Room and, with a purposeful gait, strode to the door, leaving his advisers on the hostage crisis shuffling papers.

End of meeting? No, a Foreign Ministry official who was present recalled later. The exit was staged for television. As soon as the camera operators packed up, Netanyahu returned and began to sift through the latest information on the give-and-take over Israeli and foreign captives in Lebanon.

Welcome to hostage theater: In Jerusalem and Beirut, the life-and-death bargaining for prisoners under control of unpredictable extremist militias is being adapted to the needs and potential of the world’s media--notably television, but also newspapers.

In Jerusalem, the methods are high-tech and slick. In Beirut, they are shadowy, unsophisticated and sometimes gruesome.

Media exploitation is not new in the world of hostage-taking. In past dramas, televised performances by airliner hijackers have kept audiences riveted to their screens for weeks on end.

But in the case of Israel, this time there is something of a departure from past practice. Even though Israel is trying to bring about the release of its own prisoners, whom it believes are in mortal danger, the government is vying with the hostage-holders for the media limelight rather than carrying on quiet diplomacy. Israeli officials say they are not going to leave the field to their adversaries and that they intend to respond with carefully worded but forceful comments of their own.

Capture of Obeid

In part, Israel was forced onto the screen by the negative reaction abroad to its capture of Sheik Abdel Karim Obeid, a leader in southern Lebanon of the pro-Iranian Hezbollah movement. After the uproar over his capture, Israeli officials feared that Israel would be blamed for any harm to the hostages rather than the extremist Shiite Muslims who hold them.

When the tide of negative opinion began to flow away from Israel, a new motive emerged: to keep the Western world, especially the United States, focused on the goal of pressuring the Shiites and their patrons in Iran and Syria to release all the captives, including three Israeli soldiers said to be held by Hezbollah.

“This is a problem that will be handled as a part of worldwide activity,” an official of the Israeli Foreign Ministry said. “Thus, we have to communicate throughout the world.”

The Foreign Ministry’s Situation Room is both a source and receptacle for global information on government action and public opinion. If a government wavers off course, Israel is ready to react, either by informing its embassies or directly appearing on the screen.

“In a war room, you move military forces,” an official intimately involved with Situation Room activities said. “Here we move political forces.”

The room was set up a year ago so that the Foreign Ministry could coordinate its public and diplomatic problems. Behind its steel doors are computerized facts on file, telexes and, of course, a bank of television sets that can show broadcasts originating worldwide. On Monday there was Jane Pauley on NBC-TV’s “Today” show on one screen and a Soviet opera production from Moscow on another.

Netanyahu, who heads a hostage task force at the Foreign Ministry, goes to the Situation Room about every three hours, and one of his chief concerns is said to be preventing conflicting messages from being sent out from Jerusalem. Israel’s coalition government is often the source of cacophonic opinions on a wide variety of topics.

“Everything that goes out must come through here,” one Foreign Ministry official said. He said only three ministers are authorized to speak during the crisis: Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Moshe Arens and Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Honing Demands Publicly

The extensive use of television--all three of the officials appeared Sunday on American television--throws into question Israel’s pledge that it will not answer Shiite demands over the air. In fact, Israel has honed its demands publicly. On Sunday, Rabin said on American television that Israel’s offer to exchange Obeid and other prisoners for the foreign hostages will be valid only if Israel recovers its soldiers held in Lebanon.

Meanwhile, the methods of the militant Shiite groups are comparatively crude. One group delivered a gruesome videotape as proof that it had hanged Lt. Col. William R. Higgins, the American Marine abducted last year in southern Lebanon. Another American hostage, Joseph J. Cicippio, was heard on a tape reading from an awkwardly phrased script, pleading for Israel to release Obeid lest Cicippio meet the same fate.

In Beirut, cassettes and written messages from the hostage-holders are delivered by anonymous messengers, often to night guards at newspapers, wire service bureaus or broadcast outlets.

Marilyn Roschka, an American journalist, recounted one guard’s description of his encounter with a messenger, which took place before the present crisis.

“He walked up to my desk,” she quoted the guard as saying, “and then with a Kleenex took the letter from inside his trousers and handed it to me.” She said the guard speculated that the tissue was insurance against fingerprints.

According to the rules, the receiving agency gets its story out and provides a copy to the others. Copies of any accompanying photos are also shared.

The abductors usually hide behind the militant title of their group--Islamic Jihad, the Organization of the Oppressed on Earth, the Arab Revolutionary Cells-Omar Moukhtar Forces.

But given the high public drama, the reclusive leaders of the fundamentalist Hezbollah movement, whose symbol is a raised rifle, have been forced into high profile.

Cloaked and turbaned in Shiite style, Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the spiritual leader of Hezbollah, has in recent days received a parade of international emissaries at his heavily guarded suburban villa.

On Monday, U.N. Undersecretary Marrack Goulding returned from Damascus to pay a second visit to Fadlallah. The first was Friday, when Algerian Ambassador Khaled Hasnawi also met with the Hezbollah leader. On Saturday, Fadlallah was called on by Father Khalil Abi Nader, a Maronite Catholic priest and emissary of Pope John Paul II.

Father Khalil and Sheik Fadlallah, whose followers are deadly enemies, were photographed chatting in a sitting room, talking about the fate of the hostages.

All the visitors left with the same message: The pro-Iranian Hezbollah, universally regarded as the umbrella under which the hostage-takers operate, knows nothing about the hostages or the abductors, and Fadlallah opposes hostage-taking and other forms of violence.

Fadlallah, who guides Hezbollah together with a shura , a consultative council of senior leaders, raises the issue of abduction only in regard to one of Hezbollah’s own--Obeid.

‘There Are Hellos’

Not all Hezbollah leaders have been as circumspect as Fadlallah. On Sunday, for instance, Hussein Moussawi, a member of the Hezbollah shura , talked with reporters in Baalbek, a Shiite stronghold in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, and conceded that some of the abductors are known to the Hezbollah leadership.

“There are telephone calls, hellos between us,” he said.

Pressed for details, Moussawi chided the reporters, saying he was talking with them in the spirit of journalism, not interrogation.

In the same session, however, he volunteered that one of Hezbollah’s two captive Israeli soldiers might be killed if Obeid were not released.