Ford, PLO Rep Shook Hands in Bucharest

President Ford shook hands with the representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization accredited to Rumania when the President arrived at Bucharest airport for his official visit to Rumania last week, the State Department acknowledged today. Robert Anderson, the Department spokesman, said that the PLO representative, not identified here by name, was present in the diplomatic greeting party “arranged by the Rumanian government” at the airport when the President arrived.

“The President had no substantive exchange with him (the PLO representative) at all,” Anderson said. “I want to stress here that there is no change in our position with respect to the PLO which is that we have no substantive contacts with it.”

Asked whether there had been “non-substantive contacts” with the PLO by the United States, Anderson recalled that at the United Nations General Assembly last November, when a PLO delegation was voted observer status, there “might have been non-substantive contacts on arrangements.”

EARLIER REMARK RECALLED

In commenting on the meeting between Ford and the PLO representative, Anderson said that normally, the top representative or chief of protocol of the host country “will take the chief of state and introduce him to each person” in the greeting party. Questioned as to the extent of the contact, Anderson, said, to laughter by the newsmen, that “I am unaware that the President gave any sign of shock.”

Anderson, who holds the rank of ambassador, said, in reply to another question, that in his overseas service, he had seen occasions when the host country arranged for the presence in a welcoming group for a visiting chief of state an individual who had no diplomatic relations with the country of the visiting chief of state.

The Bucharest incident recalled the remark of Ford, soon after he became President, that Israel would negotiate with Jordan “or the Palestine Liberation Organization.” That statement was never formally repudiated by the White House.