Dustup in Moscow

The phone calls from the U.S. embassy in Moscow last Wednesday struck a note of ominous mystery. Business people, journalists and students in the Soviet capital were "urged to attend" a 9:30 p.m. briefing at Spaso House, the residence of the American Ambassador. They would be asked to sign a list of those attending; no cameras or recording devices would be allowed. Subject: secret until the briefing.

But by the time the Americans assembled, the message read to them by Charge d'Affaires Richard Combs had already been trumpeted to the world by the State Department. The U.S. proclaimed that it had caught the Soviet KGB using a kind of spy dust: an invisible chemical agent "applied indirectly to embassy personnel" and possibly to other Americans in the U.S.S.R., presumably by spreading it on objects such as doorknobs and auto steering wheels that the Americans would be sure to touch. The Americans would then leave traces of it on anything or anyone they touched. Thus the KGB might, for example, determine that a Soviet dissident had been meeting with Americans by finding the chemical tracer in the dissident's apartment.

The chemical, NPPD (for nitro-phenylpentadien) is "potentially harmful" as well, the U.S. contended. Tests show that it is a mutagen, meaning it is capable of altering a cell's genetic makeup; mutagens can be, but are not always, cancer-causing agents. The U.S. conceded it has "no evidence to date" of any serious ill effects. All the same, said State Department Spokesman Charles Redman in Washington, "we have protested the practice in the strongest terms and demanded that it be terminated immediately."

That was one of a series of public challenges delivered to the Kremlin by the Reagan Administration last week. National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane fired the first salvo on Monday by warning, in a speech to the Channel City Women's Forum in Santa Barbara, Calif., that the Soviets must change their basic thinking on security issues and human rights if they are to have much hope of reaching even "incremental" agreements with the U.S. The next day Washington announced over strenuous Soviet objections that it would go ahead, possibly by the end of next week, with an often postponed test of an advanced antisatellite weapon (see box).

At week's end the President joined the offensive. In a Los Angeles speech interrupting his California vacation, Reagan once more defended his Star Wars program to develop a defense against enemy missiles. In the process, he took a poke at the Soviet bear. Noting that domestic critics had called Star Wars "unfeasible," Reagan asked, "Well, if that's true, why are the Soviets so upset about it? As a matter of fact, why are they investing so many rubles of their own in the same technologies?"

Taken together, the words and actions suggest that the U.S. is preparing for the Nov. 19-20 summit meeting in Geneva between Reagan and Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev in a spirit of confrontation. The Soviets are posing as conciliators, but at the same time have launched a wide-ranging propaganda offensive, aimed principally at Western Europe. Its chief elements: a temporary suspension of underground nuclear tests that is attractive to the Europeans but deceptive in the Americans' view, combined with loud charges that the U.S. is accelerating preparations to conduct chemical warfare.