NEWS ANALYSIS : Media Assuming Key Role in Hostage Crisis Dealings

As the emergency White House session began last week, sources recall an angry President Bush saying the time had come to consider the military options in the Middle East hostage crisis.

They say Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, argued forcefully that even if Islamic kidnapers killed hostage Joseph J. Cicippio, the United States should not risk a retaliatory military strike against Middle East targets. Most of the others in the meeting agreed.

Yet last Friday the lead story in the New York Times, citing anonymous Administration sources, reported that the President was “all but certain” to order “the 6th Fleet to attack terrorist targets with carrier aircraft” if Cicippio was killed. The story named as one target an Iranian military installation at Baalbek in eastern Lebanon.

Several Administration sources now say they believe that the story was a leak authorized by the President and designed to give the impression that the government had firmly chosen to go ahead with a military strike when in fact it had not. The New York Times stands by its story and says it was not a plant. “It was not a one-source story and did not come largely from one agency or sector of the government. . .,” said Philip Taubman, the paper’s assistant Washington bureau chief.

But if, as several Administration officials now suggest, the story was leaked deliberately to mislead U.S. antagonists in the Middle East, then it is a particularly telling example of how the news media have been drawn into an active role in the hostage crisis. Antagonists on all sides, many of whom have no formal contacts with each other, are resorting to the media to convey their messages, some accurate and some perhaps not.

It is a variation on a common Washington theme: the intentional leak of closely held information. Sometimes the purpose is to influence a policy debate--to gain favorable publicity for a particular view on anything from defense spending to welfare benefit levels. Sometimes the goal is to float a trial balloon--to test the reaction to a capital gains tax cut, for example.

But in the case of the hostage crisis, analysts say all sides are using leaks as one--albeit extraordinary--form of conversation.

“The principal method of communication is through the news media,” White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said. “The Hezbollah (a militant pro-Iranian organization) and the Iranians quite often use that. That’s where the government learns a good deal of what (their) attitudes are.”

As recently as Thursday, when Iran decided to send indications that it was finally prepared to enter negotiations to end the five-year hostage crisis, it planted the story in the Tehran Times, an eight-page, English-language daily in Iran. The State Department’s hostage task force learned of the breakthrough at 5 a.m. by watching an account of the Tehran Times story on the Cable News Network.

The Israelis, seeking to pressure Hezbollah, have leaked stories about information they say they have extracted from Sheik Abdel Karim Obeid, Hezbollah’s spiritual leader. It was Israel’s kidnaping of Obeid on July 28 that triggered the latest round in the hostage crisis.

So sophisticated is Islamic Jihad, one of the Hezbollah’s radical cells, that it issues communiques to the media according to a strict form, and news agencies discount messages that do not follow the pattern. Last week, for example, Middle East analysts and journalists quickly dismissed a threat to kill British church envoy Terry Waite because it did not fit the right form.

The implications of these practices are not lost on U.S. journalists.

‘No Free Lunches’

“It is times like these that remind us that there are no free lunches,” said Karen De Young, national editor of the Washington Post. “Everybody has an interest (to pursue), and part of doing a story is finding out what that interest is.”

Taubman, of the New York Times, said, “We need to think every step of the way about being manipulated.” The way to do that, he said, is to report every story thoroughly to verify its accuracy--which he said the Times did to its satisfaction with the story about a U.S. military strike.

“Sitting where I was last week and watching a half dozen different reporters, it clearly was not a plant,” Taubman said. “That is not to say the White House was not delighted. . . . But we are quite confident that the information is as we reported it.”

Bernard Weinraub, who wrote the New York Times story, said he does not believe it was an authorized leak. “I got the instant sense that they were not very happy about it,” he said.

But several Administration sources privately offered different accounts. Several sources said the consensus of the Administration officials who attended last week’s planning session was opposed to a military strike, and no decision to strike was made.

Nevertheless, one high-ranking Administration official said the President wanted the story out anyway. And another noted that Bush, who is ordinarily upset by leaks that he has not authorized, was not concerned by the New York Times story when it appeared. Officials also have told reporters at two other newspapers that the New York Times story represented an authorized leak.

If the New York Times story was deliberately leaked by Administration officials who knew it to be false, it is a case with plenty of precedent. Two days before President Jimmy Carter sent his ill-fated mission to rescue the hostages in Iran in 1980, the Los Angeles Times quoted Administration sources as saying that a rescue mission had been “studied and just wasn’t feasible.”

When a Los Angeles Times reporter later chided White House Press Secretary Jody Powell about being deceived, Powell said he had not deceived the reporter but had flat-out “lied” to him, for the purpose of saving American lives.

In the current case, the Administration has sometimes been delib erate about using the news media to send its diplomatic signals.

For example, Secretary of State James A. Baker III, seeking to convey the “proper message” to Iran, has personally written answers to questions he thought reporters might ask at the department’s daily press briefing. State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler has then read Baker’s text whenever relevant questions came up.

“We wanted to make sure our message was clear and consistent, so we were careful to stick to the wording of the answers that had been written out,” said a State Department official who declined to be identified.

In a variant of that practice, Iran floats policy positions in Tehran newspapers. In fact, conflicting camps within the government sometimes communicate with each other through editorials in rival publications.

All this week, the new regime of President Hashemi Rafsanjani has used the Tehran Times to send messages to the United States indicating a growing willingness to talk. On Thursday came the firmest indication yet: “Political observers . . . believe that in the next few days we should expect certain moves toward mediation, of course unofficially.”

As in the United States, the leaks are designed in part to test the popularity of the proposals. And rival Iranian papers were quick to attack Rafsanjani’s overtures.

‘Treason, Mischief’

Kayhan, a pro-government evening newspaper, said Rafsanjani should not renew diplomatic ties with a government that promoted “crime, treason, mischief and bullying.”

Baffled by the conflicting signals, State Department officials told reporters Thursday that it was ready for direct contact with Iran.

The Israelis, meanwhile, have tried to pressure Hezbollah by feeding details to the news media about Obeid’s alleged disclosures. “That was designed in part to scare the Arabs,” said Wolf Blitzer, Washington bureau chief of the Jerusalem Post. The Israelis were saying “they had this gold mine” in Obeid, Blitzer said, and “if you want him back, you’d better hurry.”

For Hezbollah, the news media have often represented the only means of communication during the five-year-old hostage crisis. Sometimes the militant group backs up its communiques with photos or videotapes of the hostages.

That tactic may have backfired. Last week Hezbollah released a tape of a man later identified as Marine Lt. Col. William R. Higgins, one of the American hostages, hanging from a makeshift gallows. Many experts believe that the body, the clothing and the advanced state of rigor mortis all suggest Higgins died earlier than the kidnapers claimed and that he did not die by hanging.