More Dustups on the Road to Detente

By an odd coincidence, foreign policy in both the U.S. and the Soviet Union is increasingly focusing on one date: Feb. 24, 1976. In the U.S., it is the day of the New Hampshire presidential primary and the official opening of the 1976 political season. In Russia, it is the first day of the 25th Communist Party Congress. On both sides, the whole structure and direction of the still experimental Soviet-American accommodation known as detente are becoming part of the domestic political debate. Under fire from some quarters for being too conciliatory, President Ford and Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev are showing greater toughness in the East-West exchange. As one Western intelligence official describes it, "Brezhnev is moving toward Mikhail Suslov [a veteran hard-liner on the Politburo], and Ford is moving toward Ronald Reagan."

No Trip. In the U.S., Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is the chief target of those attacking the Ford Administration's foreign policy. Only 24 hours after he had returned to Washington from his trip with Ford to China and the Pacific, Kissinger held a one-hour press conference at which he defended his record and revealed that he was canceling plans to go to Moscow this week to discuss the stalemated negotiations over the second phase of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II). Said Kissinger: "I think there is no sense in going to Moscow until we have our positions prepared in great detail and until we are confident that on the Soviet side there is sufficient understanding on what is needed."

The Administration insists that it decided to postpone the Moscow trip on its own and that the decision somewhat annoyed the Russians. However, there were indications from the Russians themselves that the Kremlin was not displeased. According to one theory, Brezhnev still wants a SALT II agreement, but he is also anxious to give potential opponents at the Party Congress no chance to suggest that he has given the U.S. concessions under pressure of a deadline. Says one Kremlin watcher in Moscow: "If Brezhnev goes into the Congress and says he is not ready to sign the SALT agreement because the Soviet Union cannot live with it, he is likely to receive a standing ovation."

Brezhnev gave this interpretation some credence last week by delivering a particularly bellicose speech at a party meeting in Warsaw. In the very week that Andrei Sakharov was being prevented from going to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, the Soviet leader attacked Western critics who complain that Moscow has not been living up to the promises to expand personal freedoms that it made at the Helsinki Conference on European Cooperation and Security. He accused "some influential circles in the West" of waging "campaigns of misinformation, all sorts of pinpricks to ... poison the situation." Brezhnev charged that critics were emphasizing some parts of the Helsinki agreement, notably the ones that call for a greater flow of people and ideas across borders, while ignoring the overall spirit of the accord, which endorses mutual coexistence.

Harsh Tones. Some of those in the "influential circles" also happen to be Kissinger's chief detractors, and the Secretary denounced them--for different reasons--in tones scarcely less harsh. Most of his attention was directed at retired Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, former Chief of Naval Operations (1970-74) and a possible Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate from Virginia. Zumwalt has accused the Secretary of State not only of giving up too much to the Soviets in SALT I, an old complaint of Kissinger's critics, but of deliberately hiding Soviet violations of the agreement from Congress and President Ford.

After declaring that he would "not get into a debate with aspirants to political office," Kissinger did just that. He spelled out in considerable detail the means by which the U.S. monitors Soviet arms deployment. He said that a special CIA committee on intelligence has been making quarterly reports on SALT developments to the White House since July 1973 and that the verification panel of the National Security Council, which Kissinger chairs, has met 40 times to discuss SALT in the same 2 1/2-year period--four times just to consider possible Soviet violations. President Ford, he went on, has been briefed six times on questions of Soviet compliance. Kissinger then recounted in detail the two most important cases of questionable Soviet activity:

THE SUSPICIOUS SILOS. On June 20, 1973, while Brezhnev was in the U.S. for a summit meeting with President Nixon, U.S. intelligence turned up evidence of large new silos under construction in Soviet missile fields. Six days later, U.S. officials questioned the Russians; they said that the silos were not new missile launch sites, which are prohibited under the SALT agreement, but rather command and control silos, which are allowed. By mid-1974, said Kissinger, it was "the unanimous opinion" of all U.S. agencies concerned that the Soviets had been telling the truth.

THE RADAR CAPER. In 1973 the U.S. discovered that the Russians were testing a new radar that could be used to track incoming American missiles. Under SALT I, each side is allowed to deploy such equipment to check the guidance systems aboard its own missiles, but the installation of new radars to track incoming enemy missiles is prohibited. The U.S. was understandably suspicious when it uncovered the new radar, but for fear of revealing the means of its discovery, Washington delayed complaining to Moscow. Seventeen days after it finally did so, early this year, tests of the radar were stopped. Last week Kissinger conceded that in this "ambiguous" case the Soviets had been "at the borderline of violation." Zumwalt, on the other hand, has charged that the Soviets were clearly cheating.

Kissinger is furious at Zumwalt's charges, which are seconded by Senator Henry Jackson, the Secretary's longtime adversary. Kissinger believes that his critics are in effect accusing him of knowingly endangering the security of the U.S. At his press conference, Kissinger angrily protested that the charge against him of hiding Russian cheating on SALT "may tempt the very non-compliance which it claims to seek to avoid, because it may create the impression that the U.S. Government would make a serious agreement on a matter affecting the survival of the U.S. and that its senior officials would then collude in a violation of this agreement."

Kissinger's rebuttal is not likely to end the growing debate over detente. Nor is he receiving much help on the issue from the Soviets. They are helping to fan doubts about detente by their vigorous intervention in the civil war in Angola (see following story).

Still, Kissinger had at least some encouraging news to savor late last week as he was beginning a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels: Representative Otis Pike's House Committee on Intelligence dropped a request that he be held in contempt of Congress. The Administration had angered the committee by refusing to give it internal State Department documents on U.S. covert activity abroad. But Pike finally agreed to a compromise under which the White House told the committee what was in the documents without actually handing them over. The White House's capitulation rescued Kissinger from a potentially nasty confrontation on Capitol Hill. If the Secretary's congressional skirmish had gone the other way, the repercussions would have been profound. Had he actually been cited for contempt, Kissinger might well have resigned, and detente, battered and bruised already, would have been seriously wounded.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.