ASSAD OFFERED FRANCE RAID TO FREE HOSTAGES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000201060001-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 19, 2012
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: March 17, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

ST Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/19: CIA-RDP90-06965R000201060001-5
WASHINGTON TIMES
17 'larch 1986
Assad offered France raid to
free hostages
By Curtis Cate
SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON MMES
PARIS - In a secret gesture of good-
will to France, Syria recently offered to
try to free four French hostages held by
Shi'ite fundamentalists by launching a
helicopter commando raid in Lebanon's
Bekaa Valley, where the hostages are
thought to be held.
The offer according to French intel-
ligence sources, was made by -Syrian
leader Hafez Asga4t4_PresidentFrancois
Mitterrand shortly after behindie-
scenes _negotiations-.for frppinLy
collapsed Jan. 5. The French were
oTlered a choice between a purely Syrian
commando operation or a joint Franco-
Syrian military venture.
The offer was reluctantly turned down
by Mr. Mitterrand and his advisers as too
risky. It was feared that if the slightest
thing went wrong, it could result in a
blood bath similar to the one last Novem-
ber when Egyptian commandos stormed
the hijacked Boeing 737 jetliner at
Valetta airport in Malta.
A botched operation would have led to
the immediate execution of all four
French hostages by their captors - a
fiasco that would have boomeranged on
Mr. Mitterrand's hard-pressed Socialist
Party at the start of a decisive parliamen-
tary election campaign.
Enormously complicating - for nego-
tiators as well as for potential rescuers -
was the fact that the four hostages were
abducted at different times by two differ-
ent Shiite clans.
Kidnapped on March 22, 1985, were
diplomats Marcel Fontaine, a 45-year-old
vice consul, and Marcel Carton, 62-year-
old protocol chief of the French Embassy
in Beirut.
On May 22, 1985, two other Frenchmen
were kidnapped by another Shi'ite group.
They were Jean-Paul Kauffmann, a jour-
nalist working for the Paris weekly
L'Evenement du Jeudi, and Michel Seu-
rat, a 38-year-old, Tunisian-born sociolo-
gist and Islamic scholar who had spent
the previous nine years in Lebanon,
where he had met and married his wife,
Mary, a Christian Lebanese born in the
Syrian town of Aleppo.
The claim was made last week that Mr.
Seurat has been executed, and photos
purporting to show him dead were re-
leased to the press.
The two Shi'ite factions, according to
the same French intelligence sources,
are influenced by Ayatollah Khomeini
and his Iranian fundamentalists but are
not directly controlled by Tehran. In-
deed, the sources suspect that the orig-
inal aim of the kidnappers was to make a
name for themselves as "warriors of Is-
lam" in the eyes of Islamic fundamental-
ists, and that for a long time they were
unclear about the exact demands they
should make to the French government.
When negotiations broke down in Jan-
uary, the chief stumbling block was the
kidnappers' demand that Paris free all
five members of a Khomeini-inspired
death squad that tried in July 1980 to
assassinate the former Iranian premier
Shapour Bakhtiar, in exchange for the
liberation of the four French hostages.
In assaulting Mr. Bakhtiar's
apartment in the Paris suburb of Neuilly,
the hired assassins killed a French
woman, shot a French policeman to death
and maimed another policeman for life.
The French government feared that if
it gave in, hundreds of outraged police-
man would demonstrate in front of the
Foreign Ministry, as they did several
years ago in front of the Ministry of Jus-
tice to protest the "scandalous laxity" of
Minister of Justice Robert Badinter, au-
thor of the bill banning the death penalty.
Mr. Assad's offer of help to the French
does not depart from the habitual sub-
tlety of the "Machiavelli of the Middle
East," as he has been called. Basically
secular, he has no use for religious zeal-
ots of the Khomeini type.
Syria depends on free Iranian oil and
other Iranian financial help. But Mr. As-
sad detests and fears the kind of Islamic
fumdamentalism that the Iranian leader
represents - as he made clear in 1981
when he ordered Syrian army units to
slaughter thousands of Moslem
Brotherhood adherents in the cities of
Horns and Hama.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/19: CIA-RDP90-00965R000201060001-5