East-West There Will Be a Summit

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"The Soviets obviously intend to come here this year." That was the conclusion of a White House official after a week of intensive U.S.-Soviet diplomacy. For the past four months, Washington and Moscow have moved further and further away from the tentative feelings of cooperation engendered by the "spirit of Geneva," highlighted by the face-to-face meetings of Ronald Reagan and Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev in November. But last week, after a round of busy sessions in Washington, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were edging toward another summit. Declared Secretary of State George Shultz: "It's clear that both sides agreed that there should be a next meeting, in the U.S., that it should be successful, and something should come out of it."

That optimistic assessment stemmed from last week's visit to Washington by Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin, who has just completed 24 years of service as Moscow's man in the capital and who now takes on a job as a senior foreign policy adviser to Gorbachev. In his talks with Reagan and other Administration officials, Dobrynin continued to refrain from setting an actual date for a summit. But he did bring word that Soviet Foreign Minister Edward Shevardnadze was prepared to come to Washington for talks with Shultz on May 14 and 15 to lay the groundwork for a summit conference later this year. Dobrynin assured the President that while Gorbachev was setting no "preconditions" for the meeting, the Kremlin wanted to know ahead of time--presumably by prior agreement--what could be accomplished. The U.S. reply: fair enough. At his press conference the following evening, President Reagan sidestepped questions about recent Soviet criticism of his policies. "We're trying to go forward," he maintained. "We're planning for a summit here." As part of his ritual of leave-taking, Dobrynin presented Reagan with an electric samovar for making tea and nine blue-and-white porcelain figurines. More important, he gave the President a letter from Gorbachev in which the Soviet leader expressed his desire for "concrete agreements" at the next summit and said that he was "still serious about maintaining the dialogue" begun at Geneva.

Dobrynin last week spelled out the Kremlin's current views in a series of three meetings: a 90-minute breakfast Monday with Shultz and National Security Adviser John Poindexter, a 75-minute session Tuesday in the Oval Office with the President and his top aides and a follow-up discussion with Shultz on Wednesday. Dobrynin described Soviet "confusion" over U.S. motives toward the Soviet Union, citing nuclear tests, Administration efforts to reduce the number of Soviet diplomats at the United Nations and U.S. maneuvers in the Black Sea. American officials, in turn, expressed "confusion" over such Soviet activities as supplying surface-to-air missiles to Libya and stepped-up attacks in Afghanistan. Each side complained that the other was stalling on arms negotiations, and then agreed that there was a "reason to re-engage."