COLD WAR CONFIDENTIAL

By Christopher Ogden

His father was a plumber, his mother an usher in a Moscow theater. He was an aircraft-design engineer in 1944, when Stalin ordered Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov to start recruiting technicians rather than intellectuals and independent thinkers to staff the U.S.S.R.'s postwar diplomatic corps. From such implausible roots, Anatoly Dobrynin rose to become ambassador to the U.S. for five Soviet leaders and interlocutor for six U.S. Presidents--Kennedy to Reagan.

From 1962, when Nikita Khrushchev sent him to Washington, until 1986, when Mikhail Gorbachev brought him home, the warm, wary and perceptive Dobrynin saw the cold war from an extraordinary vantage point: as the main conduit for a quarter-century of Kremlin-White House secret negotiations. As dubious exposes and skimpy memoirs poured out of the Soviet Union following its 1991 collapse, Dobrynin's remained the great untold story. Now the diplomat who had such confidence in his memory that he never took notes until meetings were over has put it all down in writing and delivered it to the world.

He does not disappoint. His memoir, In Confidence, is a no-pulled-punches page turner of a diplomatic history, spiced with anecdotes and insights. He recounts how Stalin once told his Ambassador to the U.S., Andrei Gromyko, to learn English by listening to sermons in American churches. How Dobrynin, during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, communicated with Moscow via Western Union, which sent a bicycle messenger to pick up coded cables. How Moscow secretly offered financial aid to Vice President Hubert Humphrey for his 1968 presidential campaign against Richard Nixon (Humphrey declined the offer). How Soviet Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev got drunk while visiting Nixon at San Clemente and vilified Soviet President Nikolai Podgorny and Premier Alexei Kosygin. Hours later, a sleepwalking First Lady Pat Nixon appeared in a nightgown and was carried back to her bed by a kgb agent. How Brezhnev collapsed with seizures just before and after his 1975 summit in Vladivostok with Gerald Ford-and, while summiting with Jimmy Carter in Vienna in 1980, was so out of touch that his interpreters ad-libbed his drooling replies. How Ronald Reagan, when told Dobrynin was returning to Moscow in 1986 to become a Communist Party executive, asked in amazement, "Is he a communist?"

He always was one, Dobrynin insists, though some days it must have been difficult. During the Cuban missile crisis, Moscow told him "absolutely nothing at all" of plans to place the missiles, then made him "an involuntary tool of deceit" by maintaining that they were defensive only. Khrushchev's lack of a fallback plan once the missiles were discovered was a lesson, Dobrynin notes, that was forgotten by his successors when they invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Ignoring warnings from his generals and ambassador, Brezhnev told Dobrynin not to worry: "It'll be over in three to four weeks."

Other "gross miscalculations" included Moscow's panicky fear of Jewish emigration; failure to realize that breaking diplomatic relations with Israel in 1973 would nearly wipe out Soviet influence in the Middle East; refusal to negotiate an early ban on antiballistic missiles and placement of SS-20 intermediate-range missiles in Europe; and a habit of "fixating" on U.S. military research.

Over three decades, during which he received but one paltry raise, Dobrynin worked from a windowless Washington embassy office surrounded by a magnetic field, a defense measure against outside monitoring. The conditions never dulled his insights. Some of the best came late and involved Reagan and Gorbachev. Conservatives will appreciate Dobrynin's conclusion that Reagan was "a much deeper person than he appeared," who could make "great decisions" and forced Soviet strategists "to reconsider their positions" when he put Pershing missiles in Europe and stuck to his "Star Wars" defense. Dobrynin insists, though, that Reagan did not end the cold war and crack "the back of the Evil Empire"; Gorbachev did by not rearming. In Dobrynin's view, Gorbachev neither foresaw the collapse of Eastern Europe nor understood that the Soviet economy has been "outwitted and outplayed" by the West .

Dobrynin also explains how he survived in the job. Though never overly cautious, he always tried to be prudent. It helped that he was not out for anybody's job in Moscow, "and my superiors knew it." He used humor to reach "the heart as well as the mind" and traded information because he knew that "people do not invite you back if you just ask questions and do not tell them anything in return." This monumental memoir shows why he was invited back so often. He's told plenty.