Getting to Know You-Again

By James Kelly

Haig and Gromyko meet and set a date in Geneva

The adjectives used in diplomacy are almost as precise in their meaning as equations in physics. Thus when a State Department spokesman described last week's meeting between Secretary of State Alexander Haig and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko as "frank and businesslike," his listeners knew that the session may not have been a love feast, but that some progress had been made. At the first high-level dialogue between the two superpowers in twelve months, and the first for the Reagan Administration, Haig and Gromyko soberly spelled out each nation's grievances with a minimum of posturing and propagandizing. "They were not red-faced," said one senior U.S. official. "There was no name-calling, and there was not a lot of rhetoric."

The encounter did, in fact, produce one solid accomplishment: both nations agreed to meet in Geneva on Nov. 30 to begin talks on reducing each side's medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe. The U.S. team will be headed by Paul Nitze, a notable anti-Soviet hardliner who helped negotiate SALT I in 1972; the chief Soviet spokesman will be U.A. Kvitsinsky, a career diplomat with no particular expertise in arms-control talks. The negotiations were long expected: in return for persuading its NATO allies in 1979 to base 572 Pershing II and cruise missiles on European soil as a deterrent to the Soviet arsenal of mobile, multiwarhead SS-20 missiles, Washington pledged to start discussions with Moscow on a mutual whittling down of their theater nuclear forces (T.N.F.) on the Continent. The talks promise to drag on for years, with difficult prospects for agreement. Nonetheless, by at least signaling their willingness to discuss limits on their strategic armories, the U.S. and the Soviet Union may placate an extremely jittery European gallery. Said one State Department official: 'The Europeans would have screamed bloody murder if these talks broke up without a date set."

The Haig-Gromyko conference took place in the office of the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Jeane Kirkpatrick, on the eleventh floor of the U.S. Mission in New York. Sitting on green sofas, the two men chatted while photographers clicked away. In a slip of the tongue, Haig noted that he had been reading the Soviet official's "bibliography" and learned that Gromyko had begun his diplomatic career in the U.S. in 1943 as Soviet Ambassador to Washington. Gromyko, 72, corrected the record by observing that he first came to the U.S. in 1939 as a counselor in Moscow's embassy.

The pair then talked for nearly three hours with only their interpreters present. Gromyko predictably complained about the Reagan Administration's plans for a massive military buildup and faulted its foggy position on arms control. Taking note of Washington's anti-Soviet harangues, he accused the U.S. of wrecking detente. In answer, Haig cited President Reagan's fervent belief that Moscow is to blame for any chilly relations and attacked the Soviets for continuing to press their own formidable military augmentation. He also ticked off a familiar list of examples of Soviet expansionism: Angola, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Cambodia and Central America.

At the end, the two called in aides and spent more than an hour hammering out the announcement on T.N.F. talks.

The Soviets, for example, wanted the negotiations to include medium-range U.S.

bombers and Polaris-armed submarines assigned to NATO. But the Americans refused to budge, since the Soviets have not placed any parallel systems of their own on the table. Gromyko and Haig instead drafted a statement that did not specify which weapons would be discussed. Both sides left bilateral issues, such as trade and the possible resumption of SALT talks, for a second get-together scheduled this week.

If that first meeting went smoothly enough, the diplomatic parrying at the U.N. General Assembly's 36th session did not. Delegates were somewhat surprised that Haig chose to address the assembly on the problems of promoting the economic growth of poor nations, rather than on East-West issues. He rejected a Third World proposal for a massive shift of wealth from rich nations to poor nations as "unrealistic" and emphasized private investment as a potential cure for poverty. The solution did not sit well with many of his listeners.

Gromyko spoke before the assembly the next day. Evoking memories of the icy rhetoric of the cold war, the Soviet minister caustically attacked U.S. policies around the globe, including its "imperialist interference" in El Salvador. He charged that the U.S. Rapid Deployment Force, designed for quick military action around the world, was "nothing but a policeman's billy club." Noting the contrast between Haig's blandness and Gromyko's bellicosity, French Foreign Minister Claude Cheysson quipped that the talks had been given by "Mr. Haig and General Gromyko."

As a counterthrust to Gromyko s speech, Haig issued a statement summarizing the contents of a note that Reagan had sent to Brezhnev the same day Though the President wrote that the U.S hoped to forge "a stable and constructive relationship" with the Soviet Union, he accused Moscow of seeking "military superiority" over the U.S. and using force in regional conflicts to win a "unilateral advantage." Said one aide: "We figured that no matter what Gromyko had to say it was worthwhile trying to get in the last word." --By James Kelly.

Reported by Roberto Suro/UM

With reporting by Roberto Suro/U.N.

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