Moscow Gets Ready to Trade

The plain iron span over the Havel River joining Potsdam, East Germany, to ^ West Berlin has long been legendary as the "Bridge of Spies." Across it walked Francis Gary Powers, pilot of the ill-fated U-2 reconnaissance plane shot down over the Soviet Union, who was freed in 1962 in exchange for Soviet Master Spy Rudolf Abel. Last June the bridge was used to trade four Communist- bloc agents for 25 Europeans who had been imprisoned in the East for espionage. Usually such prisoners are traded in secret, often in the foggy predawn hours. Last week, however, the western end of the 128-meter Glienicker Bridge was teeming with reporters and camera crews. They were eagerly staked out for what the West German tabloid Bild Zeitung melodramatically heralded as "the biggest human swap ever."

If all goes according to plan this week, the famous Soviet dissident Anatoli Shcharansky will join the ranks of cold war captives who have crossed the Glienicker Bridge to freedom. The news that Shcharansky and several others would be swapped for a number of East bloc spies in Western custody leaked to Bild Zeitung by what it called "Moscow Kremlin circles" and confirmed last week by European officials, caused an instant sensation in the West.

Before he was sentenced to 13 years of prison and hard labor in July 1978, Shcharansky had been a visible and articulate spokesman for human rights activists and Jewish refuseniks denied emigration from the Soviet Union (see box). His conviction on trumped-up charges of spying for the U.S. was widely regarded as a sign of crumbling detente. Moscow's apparent decision to free Shcharansky--and to telegraph it in advance--no doubt reflects more concern for propaganda than for human rights. But the Kremlin's willingness to swap a dissident whose freedom has been long sought by the West may also be an important sign that the Soviets are serious about improving superpower relations.

Indeed, diplomacy was breaking out on a number of East-West fronts last week. In Washington, President Reagan approved a proposed counteroffer to the Kremlin's sweeping new arms-reduction proposal, which calls for the abolition of nuclear weapons by the year 2000. The tentative U.S. reply, which must still be reviewed with U.S. allies before being presented at the Geneva arms-control talks, embraces Moscow's plan to eliminate U.S. and Soviet missiles from Europe but rejects the Soviet proposal that Britain and France halt any upgrading of their nuclear arsenals. It calls for a 50% cut in the Soviet intermediate-range missile force in Asia.

In Moscow, meanwhile, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev told visiting Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts that the next summit with President Reagan must produce concrete results rather than the general statements about reducing the threat of war that concluded the first Gorbachev-Reagan meeting in Geneva last November. In a striking turnaround, Gorbachev seemed to enhance the prospect for a deal on missiles in Europe by stating that the Soviets would not insist that the U.S. first agree to abandon research on a space- based defense system (Star Wars). According to Kennedy, Gorbachev said "in emphatic and unmistakable terms that there are no preconditions for negotiating immediate reductions" in intermediate-range nuclear forces.