Moscow Loses Its Immunity

Like other communiques from the shadowy Islamic Jihad, the chilling message arrived in a brown paper envelope at the offices of the Beirut newspaper An- Nahar. American Hostage William Buckley, said a long typewritten statement, had been "tried and executed" to avenge the Palestinians and Tunisians killed in the Israeli raid on Palestine Liberation Organization headquarters in Tunis. Buckley, 57, was a political officer at the U.S. embassy when he was kidnaped on his way to work on March 16, 1984.

The report of Buckley's death was still unconfirmed at week's end, but it dashed any hopes that he and five other Americans held hostage by Shi'ite extremists might soon be released unharmed. The announcement came only five days after the U.S.S.R. for the first time fell victim to Beirut's endemic lawlessness. Terrorists abducted four Soviet diplomats from their cars in separate West Beirut incidents and later shot one of them dead. It was the first confirmed killing among the more than 30 foreigners kidnaped in Beirut for political reasons in the past 18 months. At least 17 remain missing.

Islamic Jihad initially took responsibility for the Soviet kidnapings too. But then anonymous callers claiming to represent the Islamic Liberation Organization, a group previously unknown, told Western news agencies that they were to blame. Within hours, Polaroid photos of the four Soviets, guns held to their heads, were delivered to news organizations. The kidnapers demanded an immediate end to the fighting in Tripoli between Tawheed, a Sunni Muslim Fundamentalist group, and several Syrian-supported militias. The terrorists seemed to be targeting the Soviet Union because it supports Syria with large amounts of military aid.

Syria immediately sought assistance from its allies in Beirut to secure the release of the hostages. On Wednesday an anonymous caller phoned Western news agencies with word that one of the Soviets had been killed. "We have carried out God's sentence against one of the hostages," he said, "and we shall execute the others, one after another, if the atheistic campaign against Islamic Tripoli does not stop." Another caller warned that the Soviet embassy in Beirut would be blown up if it was not evacuated within 48 hours. A short time later, a passerby found the bloodstained body of Consular Secretary Arkadi Katakov, 32, a gaping bullet wound in his head, near a bombed-out sports stadium in Beirut.

The Soviets were outraged. The news agency TASS condemned the Katakov killing as an "atrocity that cannot be pardoned." Israel, TASS added, was indirectly responsible because it was the "prime cause of internal Lebanese strife." In Paris, where Mikhail Gorbachev was meeting with French officials, a Kremlin spokesman said that the Soviet leader was doing "everything possible" to free the three remaining hostages.

The State Department quickly condemned the Katakov killing, saying that "there is no place in international discourse for this kind of act." It was a correct if somewhat magnanimous gesture. The Soviet Union has never condemned the kidnaping of American citizens by terrorists, preferring to suggest that U.S. travails in Lebanon were the result of Washington's misguided policies.