May 28, 1983

Rita M. Lavelle, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency's toxic waste cleanup program, was indicted today by a Federal grand jury for contempt of Congress. The indictment charged that after being served with a subpoena, she ''wilfully'' refused to appear to testify March 21 before a House subcommittee investigating allegations of wrongdoing at the agency. If convicted of the charge, a misdemeanor, she could be imprisoned for up to one year and fined up to $1,000. The indictment grew out of a unanimous vote in the House of Representatives last week citing Miss Lavelle for contempt. She is the first person indicted in the controversy that since February has resulted in the resignations of more than a dozen of President Reagan's senior appointees to the environmental agency.

A Puerto Rican terrorist who escaped from a hospital prison ward in New York City in 1979 was recaptured in Mexico Thursday, lawenforcement officials in New York said yesterday. Two people were killed and three wounded in gun battles with the Mexican Federal police after the capture, the officials said. The terrorist, William Morales, had lost his hands and was nearly blinded in the left eye when a bomb he was making exploded in a Queens apartment in 1978. In one gun battle Thursday, the officials said, two police officers were wounded, one critically, and one of two companions arrested with Mr. Morales was killed after a car sped up alongside a police car carrying the captives.

President Reagan arrived here today for the economic summit conference after insisting that his strategy for dealing with continuing high budget deficits would not aggravate world economic problems. Asked before he departed from Washington whether he expected pressure on this point from other summit participants, Mr. Reagan said he was ''quite sure'' they would question him about domestic budget plans. ''Since our plan is working,'' he added, ''I don't care what the pessimists say and what the opponents say about it.'' The deficits are expected to draw strong criticism at the conference from President Francois Mitterrand, who contends that American economic policy is keeping the dollar excessively high against European currencies and undermining worldwide recovery.

The United States cautioned Syria today that its latest military buildup in Lebanon and along the Syrian-Lebanese border was threatening ''the uneasy peace'' in the area. The public statement followed several days of diplomatic messages back and forth between the United States and both Israel and Syria, officials said. It underscored concern here that the firing on an Israeli plane by a Syrian fighter two days ago might have been the start of a deliberate Syrian action to begin limited fighting with the Israelis. Officials said such a development was highly risky for the Syrians and could set off a wider Israeli-Syrian conflict.

The Soviet Union warned today that the scheduled deployment of new American missiles in Europe would bring inevitable countermeasures, possibly including the stationing of new nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe. A Government statement in Pravda said that the Soviet Union ''finds it necessary to warn with utter clarity: If agreement on the limitation of nuclear arms in Europe, ruling out the deployment there of new American missiles, is frustrated and an additional threat to the security of the U.S.S.R. and its allies is created as a result, the Soviet Union will take timely and effective reply measures in this field as well.'' (A senior Reagan Administration official said in Williamsburg, Va., that most of the warnings and accusations in the Soviet statement had been made before and that its purpose seemed an attempt to divide the NATO allies on the eve of the economic summit meeting of industrialized nations. )