Almost Everyone vs. Zbig

By Strobe Talbott

But the National Security Adviser hangs tough

Zbigniew Brzezinski. For most Americans the name is still a tongue twister, but it has become well known nonetheless, just as the proud, ambitious and dynamic Polish-born professor hoped it would when Jimmy Carter appointed him White House National Security Adviser nearly four years ago. But with his fame has come more notoriety and criticism than he expected. Aside from the President himself, Brzezinski is the most controversial member of a highly controversial Administration. He is widely blamed for many of the troubles that have beset the U.S. since he came into office.

During a brief appearance at last month's National Democratic Convention in New York City, Brzezinski was booed by many of the delegates. Last week Brzezinski was the target of a scathing indictment by William H. Sullivan, former U.S. Ambassador to Tehran. In the latest round of one of Washington's favorite parlor games, "Who Lost Iran?" Sullivan pins the tail squarely on Brzezinski, accusing him of undermining diplomatic efforts to open contacts with the Ayatullah Khomeini and thus blunt the anti-Americanism of the revolutionary regime. Writing in the fall issue of Foreign Policy magazine, Sullivan also claims that Brzezinski first scuttled a U.S. plan to mediate between Khomeini and the Iranian armed forces, then tried to organize by remote control an anti-Khomeini military coup, even after the Shah had fled the country.

Citing the delicacy of ongoing efforts to secure eventual liberty for the hostages, Brzezinski refuses to respond point by point to Sullivan's bill of particulars. (Khomeini last week specified the conditions for freeing the 52 captives: the return of the Shah's fortune to Iran; release of Iranian funds now blocked in American banks; cancellation of U.S. claims against Iran; and guarantees that the U.S. will not interfere in Iranian affairs.) But in an interview with TIME last week, Brzezinski characterized the Sullivan charges as "totally self-serving." He also denied one charge that, if true, would be especially damning. Sullivan writes that in November 1978 Brzezinski dispatched Ardeshir Zahedi, then the Shah's envoy to Washington, on a fact-finding mission to Iran, thus circumventing and humiliating Sullivan, and that Brzezinski consulted with Zahedi every day over an open long-distance telephone line, with the Soviets presumably listening in. According to Brzezinski, however, Zahedi returned to Tehran on his own initiative and phoned only two or three times. "I have no regrets," says Brzezinski.

This week Brzezinski is preparing to defend another aspect of his performance during the Iran crisis, and he is scheduled to do so in an inquisitional setting that his predecessors have been spared. The White House has waived the Executive privilege that normally protects National Security Advisers from congressional summonses, and Brzezinski has agreed to testify before the special Senate Judiciary subcommittee investigating Billy Carter's ties with Libya.

In November Brzezinski asked the President's brother to invite a Washington-based Libyan diplomat to the White House. The purpose of the meeting was to persuade the Libyans to press Khomeini on the release of the hostages. "It was a reasonable thing to do in very trying circumstances," Brzezinski maintains, adding that soon after--and perhaps because of--Billy's intercessions, Libyan Strongman Muammar Gaddafi did indeed send the desired message to Khomeini, although Gaddafi's appeal had no discernible impact on the crisis.

But the question remains: Why was it necessary for either the President's brother or his National Security Adviser to act as intermediary with a member of the Libyan embassy in Washington? Such contacts are routinely handled by the State Department. This case, like that of Brzezinski's dealings with Zahedi, left an inescapable impression that he was attempting an end run around his supposed colleagues in Foggy Bottom and the Foreign Service. As a result, Brzezinski was more mistrusted and even despised than ever at the State Department and among career diplomats--hardly a desirable attitude toward the official who is supposed to coordinate the various agencies of U.S. foreign policy.

Brzezinski also faces questions from the Senate panel on why, in late March, he warned Billy that one of his Libyan business deals--an attempt on behalf of the Charter Oil Co. to obtain additional quotas of Libyan crude--could be embarrassing to the Administration. Brzezinski knew about the deal because he had received from CIA Director Stansfield Turner a top-secret report based on intelligence sources who would be extremely vulnerable if their identities were revealed, or even guessed.

Once again Brzezinski has no regrets. "I would have been in a reprehensible position if I had sat on it," he says of the report. Besides, "no classified information was conveyed to Billy. He knew what he was doing." Justice Department officials, looking into the possibility that Brzezinski may have violated the nation's espionage laws, say privately they think there is little chance he will face criminal charges. But they question his judgment.

So do many others, on many other issues. A man of dazzling intellectual virtuosity and erudition, Brzezinski has sometimes seemed to be badly served by his brilliance. He is so deft at formulating fancy theories, and he so likes to hear himself spin them out, that he has tended to pay less attention than he should to making those theories work in practice--and, indeed, to figuring out whether they can work. Brzezinski was a principal author of the Carter human rights campaign, which has survived only in drastically modified, and more modest, form after its collision with Realpolitik in South Korea, Iran and the U.S.S.R. Early in the Administration he promoted the idea that the U.S. should relegate Soviet-American relations to a less central position in the seamless web of international affairs. Trouble was, the Kremlin refused to accept the demotion.

It was Brzezinski who unveiled in 1977 the concept of Iran and Saudi Arabia becoming "the regional influentials" on whom the U.S. could rely in the Persian Gulf. Now that Washington's relations with Tehran are severed and those with Riyadh are strained, Brzezinski is fascinated by the potential of radical, traditionally pro-Soviet Iraq as "the new regional influential."

Brzezinski's labels too often seem facile, even interchangeable, and his theories too flexible, too clever by half. In 1977-78 he argued that the U.S. must learn to live with revolutionary change in Third World countries. Then, in 1979, without admitting a major shift in policy, he pushed vigorously, though unsuccessfully, for a policy of backing Nicaraguan Dictator Anastasio Somoza to the bitter end.

Brzezinski has also shown poor judgment in indulging his visceral anti-Russian sentiments and his combative, provocative personality in public. During a trip to China in 1978, he challenged an aide to a race up the Great Wall, saying, "Last one to the top has to fight the Cubans in Ethiopia." It would have been a harmless joke, except that the Soviets as well as some State Department officials were already quivering with anxiety about the anti-Soviet overtones of the trip, and the reporters gathered round were sure to overhear the quip and make news out of it. They did.

Similarly, on a visit to the Afghan-Pakistani border in February, he allowed himself to be photographed posing with a Chinese-made AK-47 automatic rifle. Good fun, maybe, but definitely not statesmanship.

In private, Brzezinski is far less pugnacious. Says former Aide Samuel Hoskinson, "He's a gentleman and a scholar in the true sense of the words." Seweryn Bialer, a fellow Polish American who succeeded Brzezinski as director of the Research Institute on International Change at Columbia University, calls him "extraordinarily decent and honest." Bialer says he has profound disagreements with the Carter Administration, particularly over its difficulty in promulgating clear and steady policies, but he does not blame Brzezinski alone: "It's the President's fault. My disappointment with Brzezinski is that he cannot change the President to make him less spasmodic."

Brzezinski believes that he is under attack because of the politically supercharged atmosphere and because he is vulnerable to both the left and the right: the left resents him, in his view, for being correct about the dangers of Soviet expansionism, while the right criticizes him for supporting the embattled SALT II treaty and the human rights policy. Brzezinski argues that despite the setbacks of the past few years, the Administration has laid the ground for effectively countering the Soviets, for repairing frayed ties with Western Europe and Japan, for consolidating the new Sino-American relationship (for which Brzezinski takes personal credit, with some justification), and for improving its dialogue with the Third World--if, of course, Carter gets another four years.

Whether Brzezinski, too, would be around that long is an underlying issue in the current controversy about him. Says Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington, a former colleague at the White House, and one of his few public defenders: "A lot of this criticism has erupted now because people who disagree with his views are trying to keep him out of a second Carter Administration." Certainly there are many people at the State Department who hope Brzezinski will go even if Carter stays. But there is a good chance that if Carter is reelected, Brzezinski will prevail over Edmund Muskie's State Department as decisively--and sometimes brutally--as he did over Cyrus Vance's.

For one thing, Muskie has been something of a disappointment to his own troops. He has the ego and the stature to compete with Brzezinski, but so far he has not shown the energy. He has complained about the amount of paperwork and the complexity of the problems, and he has tended to take off for long weekends at his seaside home in Maine. Brzezinski, by contrast, is an indefatigable, even exuberant worker. Between now and the election, Muskie can get his way by going public with his annoyance at Brzezinski's methods, as he did last July when the National Security Adviser completed plans for the Administration's revised nuclear targeting policy without consulting the new Secretary of State.

Despite the problems he causes, presidential political advisers are not likely to press for Brzezinski's ouster. The reason, according to a close aide: "Zbig may be feeling some heat, but Ronald Reagan is his best insulation. Carter is not going to dump the house hard-liner just as he is fighting to prove he is tough on defense."

By all accounts, the bond between the President and his adviser is still strong. Carter remains loyal to and dependent on Brzezinski as his mentor in foreign affairs, a role he acquired in 1973 when the Columbia professor met and hit it off with the Georgia Governor. Brzezinski's name is still the first on the President's daily calendar, and he is often the last adviser. Carter speaks to at night. Says Defender Huntington: "Brzezinski retains the President's confidence, and that is what is important." Leslie Gelb, who fought numerous battles with Brzezinski when he was a State Department official and has criticized him publicly since leaving the Government last year, says, "I think Brzezinski has been damaged irreparably everywhere except with Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter."

As he demonstrated in his stubborn support for Bert Lance three years ago, Carter tends to reject even the most persistent and often justifiable criticisms of a close friend and trusted adviser. The President's loyalty is more commendable than his wisdom in Brzezinski's case, just as it was in Lance's.

While the National Security Adviser cannot be blamed for the recent misfortunes that have befallen the U.S. or for the President's own failures of leadership, Brzezinski is personally responsible for exacerbating institutional tensions within the Government, needlessly agitating foreign leaders with his penchant for braggadocio, and sowing confusion with pronouncements that too often sound like geostrategic gobbledygook. Thus he has contributed to the impression so widespread at home and abroad of an Administration that is impetuous and in disarray. In that sense, Brzezinski is unquestionably part of Carter's overall political problem, now as the President faces the election and later if he gets a second term.

--By Strobe Talbott, Reported by Gregory H. Wierzynksi and Robert Suro/Washington

With reporting by Gregory H. Wierzynski, Roberto Suro/Washington

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