Talks to Magnify Malta’s Mystique : Summit: Through the centuries, the island nation’s main resource has been geography. Intrigue and neutrality account for its modern appeal.

Independent and stridently neutral Malta, the base for the first American-Soviet seaborne summit meeting, is a fortress archipelago that insured the maritime power of Great Britain for more than a century, then lost its strategic importance in the decline of the British Empire and the dawn of the nuclear age.

Now, the tiny nation seems destined to enter the consciousness of Americans for the first time since John Huston directed his first movie, “The Maltese Falcon,” in 1941. In a tense moment that has made film history, the Fat Man (Sydney Greenstreet) asks Humphrey Bogart, the star playing detective Sam Spade: “What do you know, sir, about the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem?”

“Crusaders or something,” Bogart replies, and the spellbinding intrigue of ancient treasure quickly unfolds.

As hordes of news reporters and photographers descend on Malta to cover the Dec. 2-3 meeting of President Bush and his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail S. Gorbachev far offshore, Americans will discover that the three inhabited islands of Malta are still exotic, steeped in history and touched by intrigue. Although the falcons have been exterminated, the Order of St. John, which ruled Malta for more than two centuries, still exists, its three dozen or so members wearing their medieval robes and oddly shaped Maltese crosses.

The intrigue even hints of terrorism. West German officials said only this week that they have come upon clues that link the destruction of the Pan American World Airways plane over Lockerbie, Scotland, last Dec. 21 to a suitcase that came from an Air Malta flight. The suitcase may have been put aboard the Air Malta plane in Valletta, the capital of Malta, and transferred to the Pan Am plane in Frankfurt, they said.

In another brush with terrorism, the Maltese government allowed Egyptian commandoes to storm an EgyptAir passenger plane that had been hijacked to Valletta in November, 1985. The assault was bungled, and 57 people died in the terrifying battle.

Maltese officials infuriated the Reagan Administration in April, 1986, when they warned Libya that they had spotted American bombers flying overhead on the way to Tripoli and Benghazi. Since then, the Maltese have elected a more pro-Western government, led by Prime Minister Edward Fenech-Adami.

But Fenech-Adami has still tried to maintain the neutralist position of Malta--a stance that may help explain why Bush and Gorbachev agreed that the small republic could serve as a logistical base for the summit aboard their warships in the Mediterranean Sea.

Another reason may be its magnificent harbor, a small bay alongside Valletta known as the Grand Harbor. Warships nestled in that harbor for centuries but no longer do. From the fortified Grand Harbor, the British navy could guard both sides of the Mediterranean Sea and the Adriatic and Aegean seas as well. In the 19th Century, neither France, the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Hapsburgs nor the Ottoman Empire of Turkey could control these waters so long as Britain controlled Malta.

The strategic importance of Malta was so great that Hitler tried in vain to bomb it into submission during World War II.

Now British, German and Scandinavian tourists crowd the few beaches of the islands, and the Malta government hopes to attract a million tourists next year. That is three times the population of the republic itself.

The 350,000 Maltese live on the 122 square miles of the three islands--Malta, Gozo and Comino--located south of Sicily, east of Tunisia and north of Libya. There are two other Maltese islands but they are not inhabited.

Over the centuries, Malta has been settled or conquered by Sicilians, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs, Normans, French and British. The mixed population speaks a language that is three-quarters Semitic, mostly old Arabic, and a quarter Romance, mostly Italian. English, however, is recognized as an official language as well.

The fascinating history of Malta makes clear that its main resource has always been geography; its location creates a bridge between the Christian and Muslim worlds and between Europe and Africa.

Christianity was introduced in Malta when St. Paul was shipwrecked there in the year 60. The Maltese are mainly Roman Catholic and boast that they attend church more regularly than any other people on Earth.

In 1530, Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire ceded Malta as a fief to the Knights of St. John, who had been evicted by the Turks from their base on the island of Rhodes. Their tribute to the emperor was a single falcon, to be given every year on All Saints Day. It was not a sculpted jewel-bedecked black bird of the John Huston movie and the Dashiell Hammett novel on which the movie was based, but a real falcon from the islands.

The knights, who began as an order nursing Crusaders stricken en route to Jerusalem, later became a military order as well. They transformed Malta into a naval base and the southernmost bastion of Christianity in Europe.

Napoleon seized the islands in 1798 but surrendered them to the British two years later. Malta’s strategic value was so great that Horatio Nelson, the British naval hero, wrote: “I hope we shall never give it up.”

Britain formally annexed it as a colony in 1814, building an enormous port in Grand Harbor and using it until recent times as the base for its Mediterranean fleet. British spending on the base insured economic prosperity for the Maltese.

As the power of Britain waned and as naval dominance became far less important than nuclear dominance, the military significance of Malta diminished. In 1964, Britain granted the islands their independence. Malta, while remaining in the British Commonwealth, broke its ties to the Queen of England in 1974 and declared itself a republic.

Although the British maintained the Grand Harbor as a North Atlantic Treaty Organization naval base for several years after independence, it withdrew all its military forces in 1979. Malta then assumed its neutral role.

The decline in British spending on the base after World War II insured a decline in prosperity, and there has been an extensive emigration from the islands for the last few decades. In 1954 alone, more than 11,000 Maltese, 3% of the total population, left the islands.