COLUMN ONE : Giving Peace a Chance : Pressed from all sides, Operation Rescue ponders its next move. One chapter tries the quiet approach, but more-militant factions fear undercutting the group’s hard-line stance.

The police department had geared up for the worst and was prepared to open the city’s convention center to handle overflow arrests. Abortion rights advocates had mobilized scores of volunteers, ready to escort fearful patients into blockaded clinics.

Operation Rescue was taking to the streets. Foes of the radical anti-abortion group, as well as the law enforcement officials caught in the middle, were expecting yet another traumatic--and perhaps violent--showdown.

But the Rev. Joe Slovenec and his local Operation Rescue forces surprised them all. Instead of their usual tactics of confrontation--verging on intimidation--they staged peaceful protests and sidewalk prayer vigils.

“We committed ourselves not to ‘rescue,’ ” Slovenec said. “I’m trying my best to be a good boy here.”

The group, which has traditionally sought to shut down abortion clinics through acts of civil disobedience--”rescues” in its parlance--did not blockade a single doorway at the four clinics in the Cleveland area.

Instead, while their foes chanted and jeered, 200 to 300 Operation Rescue members picketed quietly outside the clinics and in front of doctors’ homes for a few hours each day, and packed a local fundamentalist church for a revival-style rally each night.

By Sunday, only six people had been arrested--five of them abortion rights activists.

The placid scene was in sharp contrast to protests held elsewhere as part of Operation Rescue’s seven-city summer offensive dubbed “Cities of Refuge,” which ended Sunday.

From San Jose to Philadelphia, the organization sought, with mixed results, to sustain the controversial tactics of militant confrontation and illegal trespass that gained it notoriety.

In Los Gatos, a suburb of San Jose, Operation Rescue’s attempts to block one clinic last Wednesday led to what police termed a “near riot” and 35 arrests.

Police in San Jose, arrested three other abortion protesters Saturday, including a Florida couple who allegedly hit an officer with their car, slightly injuring him, police spokeswoman Jaclin Cordes said.

A third protester was arrested for allegedly interfering with a police investigation.

But in Cleveland, the local organization seemed to be experimenting, trying through moderation to come to terms with the tough new political climate and the harsh legal realities it faces in the wake of last March’s slaying of Florida doctor David Gunn and the election of President Clinton.

In the wake of last week’s campaign and its scattered reports of violence and arrests, it remains unclear whether Operation Rescue is prepared to go national with a more peaceful approach.

The non-confrontational tactics used here were devised by local leaders acting on their own, but the same political and legal pressures that have prompted Slovenec’s chapter to move to the center have led others in Operation Rescue and other anti-abortion groups to become even more extreme.

The result: Not only has Operation Rescue concluded its summer offensive with its future direction still uncertain, but the threat of internal division and a fracturing of the movement seems to be clearly on the rise.

Nonetheless, everyone in the organization recognizes that Operation Rescue is under unprecedented pressure from all sides, and the events in Cleveland suggest that at least some of the group’s leaders may be ready to employ a more moderate strategy in response.

“For the past year or two, we have allowed ourselves to be defined by our opponents, and now we need to redefine our image,” said Patrick Mahoney, a national spokesman for Operation Rescue who endorses the Cleveland approach.

“We need to let people see that we are not violent, that we are protesting peacefully and prayerfully and that it is safe for people who might not have come out before for fear of arrest to come out and join with us.”

It’s too soon to say whether these kinder, gentler tactics will spread. At its Florida headquarters, in fact, Operation Rescue is still training recruits in confrontational tactics to be used around the country.

Keith Tucci, executive director of Operation Rescue National, said that while he supports the right of local leaders to change their strategy, he acknowledges that the Cleveland approach is controversial in some quarters of his organization.

After all, while peaceful demonstrations may make political and church leaders more sympathetic to the cause, those tactics also generate far less media attention and public debate.

Street theater, not community acceptance, was the secret of Operation Rescue’s early success as a grass-roots movement, and some in the group seem to recognize all that would be lost by Slovenec’s strategy. “Some people in the organization were surprised by what they were planning in Cleveland,” Tucci said.

In addition, more radical tactics are being fostered by activists who have splintered off into militant factions like Rescue America and the Missionaries to the Preborn.

Reports of vandalism and violence against abortion clinics and doctors are also escalating around the nation, now that the anti-abortion movement has lost political momentum.

The National Abortion Federation, along with law enforcement agencies, calculate that acts of abortion-related violence have surged from about 100 incidents in 1990 to 667 last year.

But law enforcement agencies and abortion rights activists acknowledge that they have no evidence linking the violence directly to Operation Rescue.

Yet in some states, Operation Rescue seems to be encouraging an increase in harassment directed at doctors who perform abortions. Physicians around the country report a surge in anonymous phone calls, the targeting of spouses and children for harassment and other threats.

And Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry has said his group has discovered that the doctor is the “weak link” in the abortion system. Even Slovenec’s group in Cleveland is shifting its emphasis away from clinics and toward protests at physicians’ homes in an effort to pressure them to stop performing abortions.

But Operation Rescue will almost certainly have to transform itself if it is to continue as a legal--and effective--organization. For today, four years after it burst onto the national stage as a fearsome force in the abortion debate, federal and state courts, police departments, state and federal lawmakers and abortion clinic defenders have largely tamed Operation Rescue.

The group’s leaders are burdened with growing arrest records and face ever greater jail terms. Tucci was arrested in Melbourne, Fla., on a contempt of court charge when he returned to the state on Saturday to mark the completion of the “Cities of Refuge” campaign.

He had promised to surrender today but was arrested and jailed as soon as he returned to Florida.

He had been arrested last Wednesday in Philadelphia on a Florida warrant for failing to appear as a prosecution witness against dozens of members of his group, who were charged with violating a court-ordered buffer zone outside the Aware Woman Center for Choice clinic in Melbourne.

He was released Thursday on a signature bond and told Melbourne authorities he would surrender this morning, after the 10-day campaign.

He faces six months in jail on the contempt charges, in addition to a 30-day jail sentence for violating the buffer-zone order.

Slovenec said he has lost track of how many times he has gone to jail: “Forty or 50 times, I guess.”

Loyal rank-and-file members have been arrested so often that they face long jail terms in some states for any further illegal activity. “If I ‘rescue’ again in Massachusetts, I’m gone for 2 1/2 years,” said Barbara Bell, a Medford, Mass., anti-abortion activist who joined the Cleveland protests.

Meanwhile, state legislatures have gotten tougher, increasing penalties for blockading clinics. A new Minnesota law, quickly approved before Operation Rescue’s summer campaign, increased the sentence to one year in jail for first-time clinic blockaders. That prompted Operation Rescue leaders in Minneapolis to drop the use of the tactic last week. Instead, they modeled their strategy on the Cleveland approach.

A growing number of suburban communities, scared by the Gunn slaying, have passed controversial ordinances designed to outlaw even peaceful sidewalk picketing in front of doctors’ homes. Two Cleveland suburbs approved such ordinances in anticipation of the summer campaign, forcing Operation Rescue to picket physicians in other towns.

Virtually every major police force has trained its officers in the logistics of clearing protesters from clinic entrances, and Operation Rescue leaders concede that they usually cannot close a clinic for more than a few minutes.

The abortion rights movement, caught off-guard at first by Operation Rescue’s tactics, began training clinic defense teams to escort patients into targeted facilities and are often successful in countering blockade efforts.

“We can out-organize them now,” said Katherine Spillar, national coordinator for the Feminist Majority Foundation in Los Angeles, which has mounted clinic defense teams in six of the cities targeted last week.

“We became too predictable,” Slovenec acknowledged. “The police know exactly how to clear us off a door. And we can’t stop abortions if we are all sitting in jail.”

What’s more, Operation Rescue’s harsh tactics have turned off the mainstream anti-abortion movement. Tucci insists that fund raising remains strong and that the national group’s budget will hit $500,000 this year, up from $400,000 in 1992.

Yet the group seems more isolated than ever, with more moderate anti-abortion leaders openly calling for Operation Rescue to drop its confrontational strategy. “Their tactics are hurting us more than helping us,” said Bill Price, president of the Dallas-based Texans United For Life.

Most troubling for Operation Rescue is the new political climate in Washington. In the place of a mildly anti-abortion George Bush Administration, which never aggressively targeted Operation Rescue for prosecution, the group faces a Clinton Administration that has made tough prosecution a top priority.

On Capitol Hill, Congress is likely to approve legislation this year that would make it a felony to impede access to abortion clinics, punishable by one year in federal prison for the first offense and more time for further arrests.

The group’s leaders concede that the threat of such severe penalties would sharply limit Operation Rescue’s ability to recruit from its traditional base of support in fundamentalist Christian churches. Terry warns that passage of the law would represent a “death blow” to the organization.

Slovenec and other local leaders say they believe that the group must change, must reach out to more mainstream supporters if it is to survive. Tucci said that if the more peaceful approach works, this summer’s events could turn out to be an important transition point for Operation Rescue.

In Cleveland, Slovenec said his main goal was to attract Protestant ministers and their congregations who had shunned the group, both from revulsion over its tactics and fear of arrest.

“I am not promising that we will never do rescues again, I might do one next week after all the attention is gone,” he said. “But I promised the pastors that I wouldn’t rescue this week. And it has gone extremely well, we have gotten pastors and others out who never would have come before.”

Slovenec says Operation Rescue’s rallies attracted larger crowds in Cleveland than in any other city targeted in the “Cities of Refuge” campaign. He credits the change in strategy, and the peaceful approach apparently helped draw some new demonstrators to an organization that had come to rely on a highly committed cadre.

Dona Setzer, founder of a fundamentalist Christian adoption-and-foster-care agency in Chardon, Ohio, was on the picket line outside a doctor’s home in suburban Cleveland for the very first time last Wednesday. “Because of my position at the agency, I never felt that it was part of my call to blockade clinics,” she said. “Getting arrested would have been counterproductive to my agency. But I think more people would come out if they knew that they could stand up for the cause without getting arrested.”

But even as Slovenec is encouraged by the turnout, he warns that the pending federal legislation may prompt others in the anti-abortion movement to go underground--and become more violent.

But the group’s leaders are quick to distance themselves from acts of violence and are constantly frustrated by the fact that Operation Rescue is so often linked in the press and by political leaders to the Pensacola, Fla., shooting death of Gunn and other recent cases.

“I don’t know why we should be attacked because of Gunn,” Tucci said.

Yet Slovenec and other members seem to recognize that continuing the cycle of violence that plagues the abortion debate would be a public-relations and political disaster for the anti-abortion movement.

Slovenec, a former real estate investor and father of five, said he hopes to head that off by counseling Christian patience.

“We are so used to our fast-food mentality: I want it done, and I want it done now,” Slovenec told supporters at a rally last week.

“We say: ‘I went out and rescued once, I picketed once, why is there still abortion in America?’

“We are in the battle for the long haul,” he added. “And if we don’t have that kind of mentality, we are going to be in deep trouble.”

Indeed, Operation Rescue’s leaders now focus much of their message to supporters on their eroding political influence and on how the organization cannot afford to let that distract them from their absolute belief in the rightness of their cause.

“We are not a majority, let’s face it,” Tucci told a rally in Cleveland.

“But I’ve got a theory,” he said. “I believe we are going to win. I don’t know if I’ll live to see it. But remember, life is like a vapor, and we are going to be standing before the King of Kings. And if we can sow some righteousness, then we can reap some righteousness in Jesus’ name.”