Gorbachev Dispatches Top Aide to Mideast With a Message for Hussein : Diplomacy: Soviets seek a peaceful resolution to the crisis. France’s president heads for the region to review troops.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev sent his top foreign policy adviser to the Middle East on Wednesday to explore with Arab leaders the possibility of a peaceful resolution of the Persian Gulf crisis.

Yevgeny M. Primakov, a member of Gorbachev’s policy-making Presidential Council and one of his closest advisers, is scheduled to arrive in Baghdad today with a message from the Soviet leader for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Neither Soviet spokesmen nor the official news agency Tass disclosed the contents of the message to Hussein. However, well-informed Soviet specialists on the Middle East said they believe Gorbachev is suggesting ways out of the deadlock through negotiations and warning Iraq that, if it did not seize this opportunity, it risked military action against it.

Primakov’s mission follows President Bush’s cautious suggestion Monday that a diplomatic solution of the gulf crisis could, as French President Francois Mitterrand had urged last week, open the way for a broader peace in the Middle East, including a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Hussein earlier praised the “positive tone” of Mitterrand’s proposal, while ignoring the fact that it took as a basis Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait. Soviet officials warmly endorsed Mitterrand’s comments.

Mitterrand himself headed to the region Wednesday to review French troops who are part of the multinational force deployed against Iraq. From Abu Dhabi, he is to board a French frigate to meet with French regional commanders today. Later today, he is to travel to Saudi Arabia to meet with King Fahd and talk with more troops.

Meanwhile, Iraq offered to release all French hostages, apparently in response to Mitterrand’s peace proposal. Nine French citizens previously held hostage in Iraq were flown to Amman, Jordan, and were headed for Paris late Wednesday night.

“I am very happy that I have been released, but a lot of people remain in Iraq and Kuwait,” Jean-Yves Bobin, who had been detained in Kuwait, told reporters. “We hope they can be freed soon and that all things will develop toward a peaceful solution.”

Gilles Munier, chairman of the French-Iraqi Friendship Assn., a private group that secured the release of the nine, said Iraqi officials in Baghdad told him they are willing “to release all French hostages if a top official from the (French) government or opposition goes to Iraq.”

Officials in Moscow said Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze coordinated the surprise Soviet mission with U.S. and other Western diplomatic efforts. He is in New York meeting with other diplomats at the United Nations General Assembly. Bush met with Shevardnadze this week, and Secretary of State James A. Baker III has met with him almost daily.

Traveling first to Amman, Jordan’s capital, Primakov met Wednesday with King Hussein to review the two-month-old crisis and what a Radio Moscow commentator described as “avenues of approach,” ideally through the United Nations, to a peaceful settlement.

“The two men expressed anxiety over the danger of armed clashes in the gulf and the need for a political settlement,” Tass said, reporting Primakov’s meeting with King Hussein.

Primakov later met with Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, who like King Hussein put forward his own peace plan several weeks ago and has maintained contacts with Baghdad through the crisis.

“I expect a lot from my meetings here before my visit to Baghdad,” Primakov, a leading Soviet specialist on the Middle East, said before meeting Arafat. “I need some advice.”

He was scheduled to fly to Baghdad today, according to Soviet officials.

From the outset, the Soviet Union has condemned Iraq’s seizure of Kuwait and has supported all the U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding the immediate withdrawal of Iraqi forces and the restoration of Kuwait’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity. But at the same time, Moscow has kept its contacts with Baghdad, once a key Soviet ally in the region and a major arms customer.

“We have a relationship that goes back 30 years. Let’s see what we can do with it,” a Soviet Foreign Ministry official commented. “We can still approach and talk with Hussein, and we hope that he will consider our president’s message very soberly.”

Primakov is also expected to press for the release of more than 1,100 Soviet specialists, mostly oil field workers, construction personnel and engineers, whose departure is being delayed by Iraq even although their employment contracts are finished.

To the Soviet Union, which still has 5,174 specialists in Iraq, the workers are looking increasingly like hostages whose presence might be used, as some Western and Japanese men now are, to deter attacks on strategic military and economic installations.

“We want them out,” a senior Communist Party official said Wednesday in Moscow. “We want them all out, and we want them out now. . . . Saddam Hussein will be left in no doubt about our seriousness on this whole matter.”

In what Tass described as an unrelated development, the Defense Ministry announced that its newest guided missile cruiser, the Chervona Ukraina, and a new destroyer will pass through the Suez Canal to the Red Sea today.

The ships are en route to Vladivostok in the Far East to join the Soviet Pacific fleet and will not remain in the area of the Persian Gulf, Tass said.

Meanwhile, Japanese Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu met in Cairo with Egyptian Prime Minister Atef Sedki as Egyptian newspapers reported that Tokyo has pledged $600 million in aid and loans to nations such as Egypt, Jordan and Turkey that which have suffered economically because of the gulf crisis. As part of his five-nation tour, Kaifu later flew to Amman, where a spokesman said he might meet with Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Taha Yassin Ramadan.

In coordinating Primakov’s trip with Baker and other Western foreign ministers, Shevardnadze had reiterated the Soviet commitment to Security Council resolutions demanding Iraq’s immediate withdrawal from Kuwait as the only basis for a political resolution, officials in Moscow said.

With the full restoration of Kuwait’s sovereignty, however, the Soviet Union believes that most of the original issues could be resolved through negotiations or mediation and that the overall impetus could be carried over to other Middle East issues, including the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Even so, Shevardnadze has continued to hold out the possibility, of military action--with Soviet participation--under U.N. auspices if the current economic sanctions and blockade of Iraq do not work.