Terrorism Furtive Swap

The scene is a spy-thriller staple: idling autos drawn up at opposite ends of a bridge or a shadowed street or a landing strip; a swift, furtive swap of two men, pawns in an international power struggle. This time, though, the drama was real. At 12:40 p.m. last Monday, an Iranian passenger jet landed at Karachi Airport and taxied toward a French Falcon 50 waiting on a cleared section of the tarmac. Pakistani security police held off newsmen and photographers while French and Iranian consular officers supervised the exchange of two passengers. A few moments later, the First Secretary at France's embassy in Tehran, Paul Torri, wearing a tweed sport coat and a scarf against the cold, was in the Falcon en route to Paris. Within 30 minutes, Wahid Gordji, former interpreter at the Iranian embassy in Paris and a suspected member of a terrorist network that killed 13 people and wounded 160 in a wave of bombings last year in France, was also airborne, heading for Tehran.

Thus ended the so-called war of the embassies, the diplomatic standoff in which the French diplomat and the Iranian interpreter were held for five months as virtual prisoners in their embassies. Only 48 hours before the . exchange, Premier Jacques Chirac's government had won the release of two French hostages in Beirut.

Had some form of comprehensive French-Iranian deal been arranged? The British suspected so. Reflecting Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's fury, London's major dailies charged that the French had betrayed the spirit if not the letter of a European Community agreement to refuse dealings with terrorists. Just as hotly, Paris denied the charge. In Washington and other allied capitals, uneasy questions were raised about what the French were up to. But the Reagan Administration, saddled with the Irangate scandal, was hardly in a position to castigate the French too harshly. At the E.C. summit meeting at Copenhagen, Chirac assured Thatcher that no ransom had been paid for hostages and no agreement made to sell arms to Iran.

Chirac faced relatively mild criticism from the opposition Socialists, who were reluctant to argue with what looked like success. If he manages to win the release of the three remaining Frenchmen held in Lebanon, he will be a hero to many of his countrymen and will thus improve his chances in next spring's presidential elections. But the Premier's high-risk dealings with Tehran could backfire if there is an Iranian double cross. As for France's allies, they were nervously wondering last week just what kind of deal, if any, Chirac had cut with Iran.