January 7, 1984

Israeli officials have told the United States that they are willing to remove most of their troops from Lebanon without waiting for a simultaneous pullback of Syrian forces, Reagan Administration officials said today. But the Israelis have stressed that they will not pull back until security arrangements for northern Israel are guaranteed and there is political coordination with Lebanon and the United States, American officials said. The stress on coordination, American officials said, is to avoid the problems that arose when Israel withdrew its troops from the Shuf mountains in September. That move touched off a sharp conflict between the Lebanese Army and Druse forces for control of the area, and it created political strains with Washington, which felt that the Israeli move was precipitous.

Texaco Inc. offered to buy the Getty Oil Company yesterday for about $10 billion, in what would be the biggest merger ever. Getty's board promptly and unanimously agreed in principle to approve the offer of $125 a share, just two days after the company and its major shareholders had accepted a complex merger proposal from the Pennzoil Company that valued Getty Oil's shares at about $112.50 each. Pennzoil, which thought it had a deal to buy Getty Oil in partnership with Gordon P. Getty, said it would sue. J. Hugh Liedtke, chairman of Pennzoil, sent a telegram yesterday to Getty directors saying that he expected them to ''comply with the terms of your agreement.'' Gordon Getty Controls 40.2% Mr. Getty, son of the late oil billionaire J. Paul Getty, joined the 15 other members of the board in voting to approve the Texaco offer in a telephone conference. As sole trustee for the Sarah C. Getty Trust, Mr. Getty controls 40.2 percent of the company's stock.

Each morning scores of Soviet citizens arrive in front of United Nations headquarters in a small convoy of buses. Late in the afternoon, the buses reappear and take the Russians back to a housing compound in Riverdale owned by their Government. The Soviet citizens, who arrive together, leave together and live together, are not members of the Soviet Mission to the United Nations, which is on East 67th Street. They are international civil servants who are among the 474 Soviet citizens who hold positions at all levels, both high and low, in the sprawling United Nations Secretariat, the administrative body of the world organization.

The nation's unemployment rate dropped last month to 8.1 percent from 8.3 percent in November, the Government reported today. It attributed the decline primarily to widespread success of men in either regaining factory jobs they lost in the long recession or finding work in other industries. Most parts of the labor force shared in 335,000 jobs that were filled last month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said, but some stubborn soft spots remained. These included black workers, especially black teen-agers, who have benefited little from the economy's recovery, and former employees of declining basic industries, notably steel and heavy machinery.

President Reagan today strongly supported Charles Z. Wick, the director of the United States Information Agency, who has acknowledged that he tape-recorded some of his telephone conversations without asking permission. Mr. Reagan said that Mr. Wick ''has done a splendid job'' as head of the information agency and ''he's going to continue there.'' ''I don't think that Charles Wick is a dishonorable man in any way,'' Mr. Reagan told reporters as he left the White House for Camp David. As to Mr. Wick's failure to ask permission to tape the calls, Mr. Reagan said, ''I can understand his forgetting sometimes when he was talking to people, particularly that he knew.''