France, Italy Ready Fleet to Help Albanians Flee : Exodus: Six adventurous refugees find their own way to the West. Several nations are involved in an operation to get 3,500 others out.

Six relieved refugees from Albania celebrated their first day of freedom in the West on Wednesday with pasta, chicken and American cigarettes as guests in an Italian monastery, while Italy and France readied a mercy flotilla to ferry another 3,500 Albanians from their Stalinist homeland.

The six young men, all in their 20s, escaped by motorboat in a poor man’s flight that ended luckily: their boat, out of gas and circled by sharks in the Adriatic, was found by a German tourist couple sailing to Greece. Towed to port and freedom Tuesday night, they were taken by Italian authorities to a monastery near the inland town of Lecce, where priests welcomed them with clean clothes, food, Marlboro cigarettes they recognized as smugglers’ luxuries at home and beverages beyond the reach of all but the richest Albanians: Coca-Cola and Italian espresso .

By contrast with the independent adventure of the six, the extraction of about 3,500 Albanians sheltering in Western and other embassies in the Albanian capital, Tirana, became a cumbersome exercise in international diplomacy, bureaucracy and logistics Wednesday.

Italy, France, West Germany and other countries providing diplomatic refuge in Tirana, as well as the United Nations, are all involved in delicate negotiations with the Albanian government.

The Italian government said it had chartered two privately owned car ferries, which normally carry tourists to Greece, to transport refugees across 85 miles of Adriatic to the port of Brindisi, on the heel of the Italian boot. They are expected to bring 808 Albanians from the Italian Embassy in Tirana and about 2,200 now jammed, short of water and food, in the West German Embassy. All will leave with permission from the government of Europe’s last bastion of hard-line communism, where timid reforms are scorned by mounting public unrest.

The Foreign Ministry here said France will also send a ship to transport the 540 Albanians in its Tirana embassy. That vessel will sail Friday, the ministry said, but the timing and destination were uncertain.

The Italian ferry Appia, with three doctors and nine nurses aboard, weighed anchor Wednesday from Venice for the 30-hour trip to Albania. The second ferry, the Espresso Grecia, was to sail this evening from Brindisi. It was not clear if the Italian vessels, each with a capacity of about 1,000, would need to make a second trip.

A Foreign Ministry spokesman said the ships will sail to the Albanian port of Durres but that the Tirana government will not specify an arrival time until the last minute. To do so in advance, the spokesman said, might provoke a spontaneous rush “of biblical proportions” to board the vessels.

Civil defense and Red Cross officials labored through the night to prepare a hasty refugee camp for the Albanians in Brindisi, a port of about 80,000 that is a busy terminal in summer for Greece-bound tourist ferries. Most of the Albanians will be taken to a former Italian army depot about six miles from the city, the government said.

Italian officials say most of the Albanians will remain in Italy briefly while in transit to the other countries whose embassies accepted them. Italy, which for years has served as a transit station for Soviet Jews and other East Bloc refugees, expects to accept about 850 Albanians as permanent residents, the spokesman said.

Albania, a Maryland-sized land of more than 3 million that lives off agriculture and mining, is the most backward country in Europe, the home of an absolutist communism so severe--”self-reliance” is the catchword--that its longtime ruler Enver Hoxha broke with both the Soviet Union and China as revisionists. Hoxha died in 1985; no foreign delegations were allowed by the new government of Ramiz Alia to attend his funeral, and a Soviet message of condolence was rejected.

Alia has moved steadily to reopen diplomatic, economic and cultural bridges to the outside world, even allowing some tourism, but has ruled out any abandonment of one-party Communist rule. Fierce popular pressure for quicker and more sweeping liberalization has mushroomed, though, with the collapse of communism everywhere else in Eastern Europe.

In mid-June the government said that Albanians would have the right to travel abroad for the first time since the Communists came to power in 1946, saying that passports would be issued as “another expression of the further promotion of our socialist democracy.”

On June 28, though, Albanians began storming into foreign embassies in Tirana. In recent weeks, at least 100 other Albanians, mostly ethnic Greeks, have fled through barbed wire and booby-traps into northern Greece. Like the embassy refugees, they complain that the Alia government has failed to make good on announced reforms.

The government-controlled Albanian Telegraphic Agency reported that 6,200 passports had been issued within days after the government decision to allow them.

Mindful that a stronger and much more economically advanced East German government began to shake when its citizens began fleeing, the Alia government is speeding up reforms. It has abolished the death penalty for those caught attempting to flee, allowed religion to be openly practiced after more than 40 years, reshuffled its ministries and promised a reduced rule for the state in economic activities.

Still, reports reaching Rome speak of unbridled discontent. Even as the tiny international flotilla is assembling to evacuate the embassy refugees, it is not clear how the Albanian government intends to head off what could become a massive exodus.

NEXT STEP

Albanians who seek asylum in the United States can apply at any American embassy, the State Department said. But most refugee cases are expected to come through the normal channel of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said preference for asylum requests in the United States would be given to Albanian refugees who have relatives here.