Groups Holding Americans Linked, Tied to Iran: Shultz

WASHINGTON —  The Reagan Administration believes the various terrorist groups holding eight Americans hostage in Lebanon are all linked together with very “strong ties to Iran,” Secretary of State George P. Shultz said today.

Shultz, speaking in a U.S. Information Agency television interview beamed to Europe, Israel and Japan, also reiterated American strategic interests in the Persian Gulf.

“We do have forces in the gulf and we have forces moving toward and in the Indian Ocean and we have a general commitment that we’ve made,” Shultz said.

Asked whether the American hostages in Lebanon are being held by one group, Shultz said he would not answer “in a genuinely authoritative way.”

He noted the terrorist groups have used different names in their statements but said, “It is our basic information that with whatever names that may emerge, they are to a substantial degree linked together and we also observe some very strong ties to Iran.”

Shultz said he did not know whether Iran could play a mediating role in efforts to win freedom for the hostages.

But he said contacts with Iran “in the nature they were being carried on” under a secret program authorized by President Reagan last year that involved secret arms sales “have been broken off.”

“We welcome efforts to free our hostages and we and others, I’m sure, will pursue them. However, if the question is should you be willing to pay for hostages, our answer is no,” he said.

Shultz said that even if it meant hostages would be released, the United States will not drop plans to have Mohammed Ali Hamadi, a Lebanese Shia suspect in the 1985 hijacking of a TWA airliner to Beirut, extradited to the United States from West Germany.