"It Could Be Useful"

The morning after Ronald Reagan's surprise announcement that he would meet with Mikhail Gorbachev in Iceland, Secretary of State George Shultz breakfasted with TIME editors and writers in New York City to discuss the week's drama. Excerpts from the interview:

How the Iceland meeting came about. We didn't have any advance idea that this particular suggestion would be made. We viewed it very much as it was described in Mr. Gorbachev's letter, namely an effort to further the preparations for a U.S. summit meeting. Given the evident desire of Mr. Gorbachev to give this whole thing additional impetus, it could be useful. But we of course said that it just wouldn't make any sense as long as we had the Daniloff case unresolved. To have a meeting in Reykjavik under those circumstances would be a waste of time. When we were clear of those problems, we announced it.

On the nature of the talks. Our object is to describe to each other not just that there are disagreements, but precisely what is the disagreement -- to focus on that and to try to energize people a little bit to work on those identified disagreements.

I'm quite confident that our guy can handle himself, and I say that in full recognition that Mr. Gorbachev is a very capable man.

On the possibility of an INF agreement. In this kind of thing, you can say you're "this close," but "this close" can be as good as a mile if you don't have an agreement. The facts are that if you take their INF position and ours at the start of these negotiations and compare the situation now, as Shevardnadze and I did in Washington, you see that there is a great deal of change, and you can identify perhaps three or four areas that need to be the focus of negotiations. With respect to three of the four, there are statements in play that show the possibility of working out answers. But there isn't an agreement on verification, and that's a very complicated matter.

On Shevardnadze. He strikes me as a bright, strong, direct kind of individual who learns rapidly and has a certain self-confidence. In U.S. organizational terms, he's right out of the line management, not a staff man, so to speak. You can see lots of cases where people on the other side read from pieces of paper that somebody gives them, and that's all they have to say. That's not the way he is.

On Shevardnadze's meeting with Reagan. When Mr. Shevardnadze gave the President the Gorbachev letter, he described it a little bit and then the President told him what he thought about the Daniloff matter in a very strong way -- the President gets this stern look and fire in his eyes. And when I met with Shevardnadze, the next thing he said to me, "The President's really concerned about this, isn't he?" I said, "You better believe it."

On the Daniloff affair and its aftermath. When we arrested their spy, they took Daniloff as a hostage. I think they have paid a price for doing that, at least in the Western press. It brings everybody back to see that however much we may want to solve these problems, their society is very different from ours, has different values and standards, and is not a place we'd particularly like to live.

People are lopping off large portions of (what happened) and saying what this amounts to is that Zakharov and Daniloff were traded against each other. And that's not a description of what took place. (The Zakharov arrest) stands for a much sharper and stronger effort on our part to stop the use of the United Nations as a platform for espionage against the U.S. This whole basic objective of ours seems to have been lopped off.