Perot: Image of Lone Gun Trouble-Shooter Emerges : Politics: Washington insiders say he has often offered freestyle fixes, then walked away if they didn’t fly.

Seven years ago, during a period when U.S. officials were worrying about the security of the American Embassy in Moscow, citizen Ross Perot stepped forward with a solution.

According to several sources, Perot told a panel studying the security issue that he would fire the embassy’s 200 low-level Russian staff members, then use his own funds to pay American replacements and take over personal responsibility for maintaining the embassy’s security.

The idea was neat, direct, simple--but not accepted. Its originator later quit the advisory panel, denouncing its work as a “sham.”

Perot, in response to a query from The Times, confirmed on Thursday that he suggested firing the Soviets, but he denied offering to finance their replacements.

Still, the episode as related by the sources is vintage Perot, reflecting a little-known side of the colorful Texas businessman who has vaulted into the political firmament: his repeated efforts to play a role in government affairs--often by proposing highly unconventional courses of action in which he would have a free hand to operate outside normal government channels.

It was characteristic, too, that when his ideas were not adopted, Perot scornfully washed his hands of the problem.

Although Perot styles himself as the ultimate government outsider in his yet-unannounced presidential bid, over the last quarter-century he has again and again sought to make himself a pivotal figure in government efforts to deal with a variety of problems.

In addition to the Moscow embassy offer, he used his money and influence to spring from a Singapore jail a British prisoner who claimed to have a videotape of American POW “slaves” in Southeast Asia. He sent a team of private citizens into Tehran during the Iranian revolution to engineer a jailbreak and rescue employees of his computer company. And he has proposed other off-the-books operations that were turned aside by the U.S. government.

The episodes show that Perot, far from disdaining government, has long yearned to be involved with it--but only if he could hold the reins and use them with a free hand.

To his supporters, such ventures reflect the qualities they most admire in Perot: his refusal to be stymied by bureaucrats, red tape or official timidity.

If some of his efforts have seemed foolish in retrospect, others have proved prescient. His 1985 suggestion for a reduction in the number of Soviets working at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow was embraced by a wide range of experts by 1987--after the embassy found Soviet microphones throughout the building and two U.S. Marines guards were accused of security violations.

But to others, including many experienced foreign policy hands, Perot’s impulse to brush aside all impediments to his chosen course of action could lead to problems should he occupy the White House.

How would he cope with the presidential requirement to share power, operate within constitutional checks and balances, and observe the exigencies of world and domestic politics? Perot’s free-lance operations “have been noble in purpose, if not always well thought through,” says Robert Oakley, a former U.S. ambassador and national security official. “But if he were the President of the United States, this could take on quite disturbing implications.”

Perot insists that his taste for action does not mean he cannot work with others. On the contrary, he says, reaching consensus, and recognizing the good ideas of others, is the way he built his computer services firm, Electronic Data Systems.

“You don’t get things done by giving orders. You get things done by building consensus,” he said in a recent public television interview with David Frost.

Still, Perot has sometimes seen consensus where others have not. Time and again, he has claimed he was asked to step in and take charge, while officials say it was he who thrust himself into the fray.

When Perot describes his two efforts to deal with the issue of U.S. POWs and MIAs--between 1969 and 1973 and again in the mid-1980s--he tells of how he answered the government’s call to get the job done. In contrast, some past and present officials familiar with his involvement describe a man who insinuated himself into the situation, sometimes getting results and other times just getting in their hair.

Perot became an overnight celebrity in 1969 when he tried to get 28 tons of food, medicine and gifts to the POWs in Vietnam in two planeloads on Christmas Eve. The planes didn’t get through, but the worldwide publicity gave then-President Richard M. Nixon’s Administration a political boost. Perot contends the effort eventually improved the POWs’ treatment as well.

Afterward, Perot began calling the Nixon White House as frequently as once a week with information and suggestions on how to handle the problem. Among other things, he suggested schemes to rescue the POWs.

The memos from Nixon’s aides describe their view of Perot as a freewheeling, impulsive man, whose unpredictable deeds alternately gratified, annoyed and alarmed them.

One memo, from aide Alexander P. Butterfield, quotes Perot as railing against sedentary bureaucrats. “We have too many thinkers and not enough doers,” he says Perot told him, and he quotes Perot as denouncing a troublesome International Red Cross functionary in Indochina as “bordering on insanity.”

In other papers, aides repeatedly stress that they want to keep Perot at a distance from official White House activities. In a 1970 briefing memo, Butterfield urged Nixon before a meeting with Perot to emphasize “the need to keep his activities totally independent of the White House.”

Clearly, what Nixon aides saw as Perot’s tendency to become a self-appointed emissary often gave them heartburn. He frightened them during his Christmas Eve trip when he told South Vietnamese officials that if he couldn’t get the supplies to the GIs, he would donate them to North Vietnamese orphans.

“We could suffer considerable undue embarrassment,” an alarmed Butterfield wrote Nixon. “It would only be a matter of days before the Communist propaganda machine would turn the gesture into an admission of war crime guilt on our part.”

In the last analysis, some Nixon aides seemed to think Perot wasn’t worth the trouble. Butterfield once told Perot to “goddamn stop calling,” according to a memo, and H.R. Haldeman, the chief of staff, wrote in 1972 that Perot’s efforts had “no tangible benefit.”

Contrary to the assertions of some Nixon aides, Perot contends he did not volunteer for the POW task but was enlisted by White House officials, including then-National Security Adviser Henry A. Kissinger.

But if some of Nixon’s men were unhappy with Perot, his fame only grew in 1979, when he mounted a commando raid to free two employees of his computer company jailed without charges by the new revolutionary government in Tehran.

Complaining of paralysis by Jimmy Carter’s Administration, Perot hired Vietnam veteran Col. Arthur (Bull) Simons to train a group of military veterans working for EDS at Perot’s estate in Texas. In Tehran, meanwhile, an Iranian working for EDS fomented a riot and jailbreak, and the two EDS employees joined other company employees in Iran in a dash to the Turkish border.

The story was chronicled in a book and a made-for-television movie, “Wings of Eagles,” and further increased Perot’s celebrity among average Americans indignant at Iran’s actions.

Yet Perot’s plan was criticized as reckless free-lancing by Cyrus Vance, the Carter Administration’s secretary of state. And even Perot has since allowed that in this adventure he was “more lucky than smart.”

Perot betrayed no self-doubt when he plunged back into the POW rescue business.

The issue had received new priority under Ronald Reagan’s Administration. In 1986, Reagan and Vice President George Bush gave Perot special access to government documents concerning the POWs and MIAs.

Perot frequently called White House officials, including Reagan and Bush, made several trips to Vietnam--and reached the opposite conclusion from the White House. He decided there were hundreds of GIs in Southeast Asia, that U.S. officials were covering up their existence, and that some of those addressing the issue were inept and corrupt.

In particular, Perot argued for the firing of Richard L. Armitage, the assistant defense secretary responsible for the POW-MIA issue. Along with accusing Armitage of foot-dragging, Perot charged he had compromised his office by writing a letter on official stationery to ask a U.S. judge for leniency in dealing with a Vietnamese friend accused of gambling.

At one point, Perot saw Bush to personally give the vice president an inches-thick stack of allegations about Armitage. The vice president declined to accept the papers, which came from disaffected veterans and other sources, and suggested Perot take them to FBI Director William Webster.

Perot’s efforts against Armitage “made a ordinary low blow look like something from the Marquess of Queensbury rules,” says Rep. Stephen J. Solarz, D-N.Y., who has clashed with Perot several times as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s subcommittee on Asia.

Congressional and Reagan aides said the charges against Armitage, now the coordinator of U.S. aid to Russia, displayed Perot’s willingness to believe in government conspiracies and his tendency to vilify people who disagree with him.

Perot infuriated the government’s POW-MIA team again in April, 1987, when he spent three days in talks with Vietnamese officials. He returned to publicly denounce the Reagan Administration for “arrogance,” and vowed he would not deal with them again.

Former Reagan aides today accuse Perot of bollixing the government’s negotiating position by giving the Vietnamese false expectations and tipping the U.S. hand. From the American press, meanwhile, there were jokes about “Secretary of State Perot” and questions about whether the Texan was violating the Logan Act, which bars private individuals from conducting diplomacy.

When Perot delivered his final report to Reagan, the President was polite but pointedly “did not thank him for his work when he greeted him--or when he left,” said one former Reagan official.

This official claimed Perot had talked of offering the Vietnamese $10 million for each American soldier, and doubling the figure if the Vietnamese refused--a proposal the aide said would embarrass the United States without freeing any soldiers.

Perot on Thursday denied that he talked of buying freedom for the prisoners. But he has repeatedly bankrolled efforts to look into the POW-MIA issue.

In 1983, Perot gave what he has since described as a small sum to former Green Beret James (Bo) Gritz for an fruitless expedition into the Laotian jungle to find proof of remaining POWs and MIAs. Perot said the gift was only to placate Gritz, but some officials said the Laotians’ anger over the episode stymied U.S. talks with them for more than a year.

In 1985, Perot was drawn into a scheme to buy a videotape that purported to show American POWs in slave-labor camps in northern Laos. According to a Pentagon memo, the videotape was owned by an international gold dealer and showed 39 former soldiers “yoked together with slave collars extracting gold from a mine.”

Perot was skeptical. But he put up $100,000 bail to get the alleged tape’s owner, Robin Gregson, out of a Singapore jail. And he paid another $45,000 to persuade an Indian businessman to drop charges against Gregson.

He promised he would pay $4.2 million for the tape. But the deal fell through when Gregson accused U.S. government officials of betraying him. He claimed to have burned the tape in anger.

Perot and his associates in the plan said Perot was personally asked to get involved by Reagan aides, beginning with then-White House Chief of Staff Howard H. Baker. As former Reagan aides tell it, Perot asked permission to look into the matter, and was encouraged to do so.

In 1986, Perot got involved in the efforts of Marine Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, the principal in the Iran-Contra affair, to ransom the U.S. hostages being held in the Mideast.

North, then trying to use private donors to circumvent government policy against ransoming the captives, got Perot to put up $200,000 and pledge $2 million more to try to free two hostages. The money was to be channeled through federal drug agents to a Lebanese group that contended it had enough influence with Islamic fundamentalists to win the Americans’ release.

But the arrangement fell apart when the Lebanese insisted on receiving Perot’s $2 million cash first--and the agents refused. When a furious Perot complained that North had lost his $200,000 in the process, National Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane entreated Perot “not to be too hard on Ollie,” according to the report of Congress’ Iran-Contra investigating committee.

Bruce Buchanan, a political scientist at the University of Texas, says Perot may have relied on money and unconventional proposals in his past efforts “simply because those are the resources that have been available to him as an ordinary citizen. As President, he might be more restrained,” and more willing to use diplomacy to solve international problems, he said.

Yet, “most people are creatures of habit and repeat what’s worked for them in the past,” Buchanan said.