What was going on when I was born?

''He is a psychopath with no defined ideology,'' the Istanbul security chief said today of Mehmet Ali Agca, the 23-year-old Turk who is under arrest in Rome on charges of shooting Pope John Paul II. But a former Cabinet minister said that Mr. Agca had appeared ''normal'' and had spoken of having an ''organization'' when he was arrested in 1979 for the murder of a Turkish editor. The minister suggested that Mr. Agca was still a militant terrorist linked to international right-wing organizations. These represented the main views of Mr. Agca as senior officials pondered the attempt to assassinate the Pope in St. Peter's Square on Wednesday.

The United States said today that it was sending its special envoy, Philip C. Habib, to Saudi Arabia tomorrow to seek help in averting a Syrian-Israeli clash over the presence of Syrian antiaircraft missiles in southern Lebanon. Israel has said that if diplomatic means fail to bring about removal of the missiles it will destroy them. Senior Reagan Administration officials said a military confrontation could erupt as early as next week. Because of this concern, the State Department ordered the American Embassy in Beirut to accelerate what has been a slow evacuation of dependents from Lebanon and also to advise Americans there in nonofficial capacities to leave. Some dependents have been quietly leaving in the last week or so, it was reported.

President Reagan discussed African issues today with Foreign Minister Roelof F. Botha of South Africa in a meeting described as ''friendly'' by a White House spokesman. Mr. Botha's meeting with the President was announced late yesterday after talks between the South African and Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. apparently made progress on a long-delayed plan to establish an independent nation of Namibia in the territory of South-West Africa, now administered by South Africa. Mr. Reagan also received an invitation today from President Nicolae Ceaucescu of Rumania to make an official visit to his country . The invitation was delivered to the President during a 10-minute meeting with the Rumanian Foreign Minister, Stefan Andrei. Mr. Reagan told Mr. Andrei that he could not give an immediate answer but that he hoped ''very much'' that he could accept at a later date.

The Police Department will assign lawyers to the Manhattan District Attorney's office starting Monday to find out why it reduces 50 percent of the arrests made on felony charges to misdemeanor cases. In the past, city police officials and Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan District Attorney, have engaged in some public disputes, each side blaming the other for the gap between the number of felony arrests made by the police and the smaller number of felony complaints brought by the prosecutor's office. Mr. Morgenthau said yesterday that he welcomed the new project, which will have two or three police lawyers assigned to his office for 30 to 60 days. The lawyers will be monitoring cases in which the police have made felony arrests that have immediately been reduced to a misdemeanor charges.

The Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Film Corporation is buying United Artists, one of the world's largest film distribution networks, for $225 million to $250 million in cash, film industry sources said yesterday. The price to be paid to the Transamerica Corporation involves $250 million in cash and the baalance in ssix-year notes, the sources said. M-G-M will thus acquire not only the company that haas been distributing its movies under contract, but also the huge United Artists film library, going back to the early days of the film industry. United Artists is the film distribution and entertainment company founded just prior to the 1920's by Mr. Fairbanks, Miss Pickford and Mr. Chaplin, along with D. W. Griffith, the motion picture director. In more recent times, much to its embarrassment, it has become known as the company that financed the film ''Heaven's Gate,'' Michael Cimino's box-office disaster.

Although suffering piercing pains from his bullet wounds and surgery, Pope John Paul II continued to gain strength today as the Italian police sought to establish whether the attack on the Pope resulted from an international conspiracy. A medical bulletin said the 60-year-old Pope, who was shot in the stomach, the right arm and the left hand, allegedly by an escaped murderer from Turkey, was running a mild temperature. But he was described by Father Romeo Panciroli, the Vatican spokesman, as ''serene,'' and he was strong enough to recite prayers and impart blessings to his doctors and nurses. His doctors were optimistic because of the progress he has made in the 48 hours since the attempted assassination, but they warned that there was still a risk of peritonitis or other infection. Newspapers Charge Conspiracy Major Italian newspapers carried large headlines announcing that the head of the Roman Catholic Church had been the victim of a conspiracy.

The White House signaled today that President Reagan was prepared to compromise with Congress on some of the details in reducing tax rates. ''The basic thing is a tax bill that will do the job that we think is essential for the economy,'' said Larry Speakes, the deputy press secretary. ''Now what that is, we'll have to wait and see. There has been no detailed proposal that has come forward from the Congress.''

''Just because this may be a new era for France doesn't mean that it is a new era for the rest of the world. We are a medium-sized, vulnerable country and we can't change foreign policies just because we change Presidents.'' The words were spoken by a French foreign policy analyst associated with neither Francois Mitterrand, who takes office as President next Thursday, nor with President Valery Giscard d'Estaing. The statement represents a wide consensus, however. Advisers to Mr. Mitterrand are stressing the notion of continuity in the vital aspects of foreign policy. So are members of the present Government.

Foreign Minister Masayoshi Ito and a key aide unexpectedly resigned last night in a controversy over the degree of Japanese military cooperation with the United States. Mr. Ito was understood to have resigned to take responsibility for confusion here over the wording of a United States-Japanese communique issued after Prime Minister Zenko Suzuki met with President Reagan in Washington last week. Mr. Ito accompanied the Prime Minister to the United States. The controversy arose from the use of the word ''alliance'' in the communique. The word was used in the context of United States-Japanese relations to imply, Foreign Ministry officials said later, that a military relationship was developing between the two countries, as hoped for by the Reagan Administration.

There is a haiku by the 17th-century poet Basho about this remote inlet: ''Yes, lonely, more remote than Suma, this beach in autumn.'' The poet referred to Suma, a traditional place of exile, and he found Urazoko to be a still more melancholy spot, but beautiful. Now there is a nuclear power station around the corner of the bay. There is a road around the coast, constructed since the power station was built 10 years ago, that runs past the white beaches that Basho admired. And Urazoko, a hamlet with fewer than 100 people, according to the local policeman, has visitors in the summer, except this year. ''Why no one comes here?'' asked Mitsue Tone, an elderly woman sunning herself on a jetty while she read a newspaper. ''Are we all right?''

The Irish Republican Army today buried Francis Hughes, the latest casualty of the prison hunger strike, with what it called the ''full military honors due a brave soldier.'' Like the ceremony last week for Robert Sands, the first I.R.A. man to die in the fast for political status in prison, the funeral procession this afternoon to a country churchyard in this peaceful little village 25 miles west of Belfast was accompanied by masked paramilitary commandos in battle dress. Just outside the Hughes family home, which is two miles from the church, they fired three ceremonial volleys of rifle shots over the coffin, which was draped in the green, yellow and orange flag of the Irish republic. The tense military mood - set not only by the hard-looking young men with their masks and guns but also by four British Army helicopters that clattered overhead - contrasted harshly with the peaceful, sun-soaked countryside, a picture-postcard land of ancient stone cottages with thatched roofs and gentle green meadows grazed by fat lazy sheep.

An election poster on the wall inside Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, one of Rome's loveliest and most famous churches, shows a stark picture of an embryo in the womb, and beneath it is the caption: ''It is a child. It is 90 days old. From its 18th day its heart is beating. Now you know. Vote yes in the referendum for life.'' Italy has many thousands of Roman Catholic churchs - Rome alone has about 500. In most of them, an intensive campaign has been waged for the last six months for the repeal of Italy's three-year-old liberal abortion law, the first in the nation's history. The referendum on repeal will be Sunday, and if the voters follow the advice of the church and the ''Right-to-Life Movement,'' abortion will be illegal except in cases where the mother's health is directly at stake.