Getting Together

By Henry Muller

The Administration's first close encounter with Moscow

After eight months of lobbing intercontinental accusations and insults at each other, the U.S. and the Soviet Union have the first opportunity this week to engage each other at close quarters. In New York City to attend the 36th session of the U.N. General Assembly, Secretary of State Alexander Haig and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko will twice meet in private. Those sessions will be the first eyeball-to-eyeball contacts at the policymaking level since President Reagan's Inauguration.

The tone of the two meetings, which will take place at the U.S. and Soviet missions to the U.N., is sure to be less hostile than the long-distance non-dialogue would suggest, since Haig is primarily interested in determining whether cooperation with Moscow is still possible. In preparation for the sessions, he held a rehearsal over the weekend, with a veteran State Department official who has watched Gromyko in action playing the Soviet and asking questions he is likely to raise. The Secretary has decided to be sober and businesslike in presenting U.S. complaints, on the logical ground that there is little prospect of cowing a wily old diplomatic pro who has dealt with seven of Haig's predecessors. (In 1943, when Haig was still a student at Notre Dame, Gromyko presented his credentials to F.D.R. as Soviet Ambassador to Washington.)

In his tour d'horizon, Haig is expected to recite the Administration's now familiar bill of particulars about Soviet misbehavior. High on the list are the continuing arms buildup that threatens to upset the global military balance; Soviet support for terrorism through Libya, Cuba and the Palestine Liberation Organization; the continued occupation of Afghanistan; and Soviet intervention in such Third World nations as Angola, Ethiopia, South Yemen and Cambodia.

The Secretary will also tell Gromyko that U.S.-Soviet relations can improve only if Moscow stops trying to gain unilateral advantages on the world scene. Partly in preparation for his encounter, Haig presided over a still secret interagency study of U.S.-Soviet relations, which concluded that the new watchwords of the superpower relationship must be "restraint, reciprocity and linkage." Each term, as Haig may explain to Gromyko, puts the onus for improvement on Moscow.

> The Soviets must restrain themselves from seizing geopolitical opportunities in the Third World.

> They must realize that if they undermine U.S. clients, Washington will reciprocate by trying to make trouble for theirs --and, conversely, the Soviets must reciprocate any gestures of restraint by the U.S.

> Under the concept of linkage, the Soviets must accept that if they attempt to seek gains in one area, they will pay a price on other issues at the bargaining table.

Haig will also try to convince Gromyko that something fundamental has changed in the U.S. --namely, the Reagan Administration not only talks tougher than its predecessors, it is tougher. As evidence, the Secretary may cite the new military programs that the President has proposed.

Gromyko, of course, will bring his own list of grievances. U.S. diplomats expect him to blame the Administration's systematically anti-Soviet line for ending the era of detente. He will object to the Senate's failure to ratify the SALT II treaty. He will accuse the U.S. of launching its own dangerous military buildup, in a futile effort to regain nuclear superiority.

The Soviet Foreign Minister may not be persuaded by Haig. To the contrary, every passing month has provided evidence to the Kremlin that the Administration is having difficulty deciding who is in charge of policy. Already Gromyko and his colleagues have seen Reagan dither over deployment of the MX missile and back away from souped-up charges of Soviet-inspired meddling in El Salvador. Finally, the Soviets are encouraged by an outbreak of pacifist sentiment in Western Europe that could undermine the already precarious support there for deployment of new missiles. Haig's visit to West Berlin last week elicited some of the worst anti-American rioting since the Viet Nam War.

The European missile problem is the single most pressing item on the Haig-Gromyko agenda. In 1979 the U.S. persuaded its NATO allies to install 572 Pershing II and cruise missiles to counter the threat posed by the Soviet Union's buildup of mobile, multiwarhead SS-20 missiles. To placate domestic opposition, the Europeans posed a key condition: that the U.S. and the Soviet Union launch negotiations to reduce the awesome nuclear arsenal on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Ideally, as West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt explained to Haig in Bonn last week, the Soviets should dismantle some of the 250 SS-20s already in place, thereby eliminating any need for new NATO missiles. Few experts believe Moscow is ready to do so, despite its oft-proclaimed willingness to start theater nuclear force (TNF) negotiations.

Thus the Haig-Gromyko meeting may be, in the words of Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies Kremlinologist Dimitri Simes, "a battle for the hearts and minds of Europe." By casting the Soviet Union as a patient, long-suffering peacemaker trying to reach agreement with an erratic, bellicose U.S., Moscow hopes to weaken European support for the new U.S. weapons. The Soviets argue that the SS-20s only replace older SS-4 and SS-5 missiles, while the new U.S. missiles would increase the vulnerability of their territory. "It would take NATO 4 1/2 minutes to hit the Soviet Union from European bases," retired General Svyatoslav Kozlov told TIME Moscow Bureau Chief Erik Amfitheatrof last week, "whereas it would take Soviet rockets more than 20 minutes to reach the U.S." Haig is under pressure to convince the Western Europeans of American commitment to negotiations. Although the Administration does not yet have a unified position on TNF, Haig will try to get from Gromyko an agreement on a date and venue for preliminary talks.

Perhaps the most that can be expected from this week's session is that the two men may develop a rapport based on the understanding that--for everyone's good --the relationship between the two superpowers must improve. Says William Hyland, a former Kissinger staffer who is now a Soviet expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: "The real results of the meetings may take time to develop. They could set the tenor of superpower dealings for some time." --By Henry Muller. Reported by Robert Suro and Strobe Talbott/Washington

A particularly bitter battle in the war of words between Moscow and Washington centers on American charges that Soviet-backed forces in Southeast Asia have been using highly toxic biochemical weapons. Speaking in Berlin last week, Secretary Haig charged that "potent mycotoxins," superpoisons derived from grain molds and known to be produced by the Soviets, were found in the region. Experts at the State Department said that the toxins were isolated on a leaf from Cambodia, where the Soviet-backed government is fighting Khmer insurgents.

The Soviet news agency TASS called the allegations a "big lie." American officials answered that the evidence would be submitted to a United Nations panel investigating chemical weapons. Five additional samples from Southeast Asia are currently being analyzed, and officials think they will show that the toxins were also used in Laos. Intelligence specialists are seeking evidence to confirm widespread reports that Soviet forces have used the poisons, known as T2 toxins, in Afghanistan.

A top deputy to Haig noted last week that the use of toxins is a violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol on chemical and biological weapons and that their production is prohibited by the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. Soviet technical journals, however, openly discuss methods for mass-producing mycotoxins. In a new book called Yellow Rain, Journalist Sterling Seagrave cites evidence that the Soviets first used T2 during the Yemen civil war in the early 1960s. Military officials in Egypt, which was then a Soviet client, confirm that biochemical warfare equipment was deployed during that conflict. Seagrave also says that a biochemical weapons depot stocked with T2 poisons has been set up by Soviet advisers in Cuba.

In 1969 President Nixon banned any U.S. production of biological weapons. Within the past two years, the Army has been granted $23 million for a factory in Pine Bluff, Ark., to manufacture "binary" chemical weapons, in which components of nerve gas are loaded separately into artillery shells and become lethal only upon explosion. Ronald Reagan, however, has yet to authorize production.

With reporting by Roberto Suro, Strobe Talbott/Washington

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