Into the "Evil Empire"

By Johanna McGeary

He has been cast as the arch-antagonist of arms control and Moscow's most ardent adversary in Washington. But for all his oft-quoted disparagement of the Soviet Union, Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle had never been there. Last week Perle, as one of the key members of a seven-man U.S. mission to Moscow, finally found himself in the land that he, like President Reagan, considers to be the "evil empire," and talking about arms control to boot.

With his incisive mind, infighting skills and intense dedication to a hard- line ideology, Perle, 44, has emerged as the most influential Assistant Cabinet Secretary in 25 years. His pessimistic approach to arms control, along with a swarthy complexion punctuated by the dark circles of his eyes, has earned him the nickname Prince of Darkness. He can be haughty, yet in person he hardly fits the role of dark prince: he has a soft voice, sophisticated Francophile tastes and a willingness to work amiably with bureaucratic colleagues while remaining fiercely loyal to his beliefs.

As a bureaucratic power player, Perle has been adroit at reinforcing the vehemently anti-Soviet philosophy of his boss, Caspar Weinberger. He has a knack for choosing the right time and place to force decisions and for making key bits of information public as part of his effort to obstruct any serious compromises by Washington that could woo Moscow into an arms agreement. But + when it comes time to deal with the outside world, Perle can be an effective team player. Indeed, he was among the first officials picked as part of the U.S. delegation to Moscow last week because he had proved himself constructive in two crucial meetings with the Soviets. This time as well, Perle was praised by his teammates for working with them, not against them.

The mission, led by Chief Arms-Control Adviser Paul Nitze, originated with a Soviet invitation ostensibly designed to get the stalled nuclear arms negotiations moving by clarifying the latest positions of each side. Yet when Perle and the six other Americans arrived on Sunday, they found their Kremlin counterparts to be unresponsive and even a bit uncivil. There was no fanfare in the Soviet press, nor was there a welcoming delegation at the Moscow airport. Under the current Soviet sobriety crackdown, there was no vodka either. The choice of an elegant suburban dacha for the talks was intended to encourage constructive informality for discussions normally cemented in rigid protocol. But behind the lace curtains, the Soviets proved standoffish.

It was "four of them against seven of us," reported one U.S. official. In effect, it was also Communist Party Leader Mikhail Gorbachev's June 23 letter outlining Soviet arms proposals vs. President Reagan's July 25 counteroffer. With those documents as their bibles, the two teams sparred across a green felt table for two days as each exhaustively ran down its prepared script. Only in the last hours did the discussions get intense, as each side sought to pin down more precisely what the other side's complex and often ambiguous proposals meant. Explained a senior U.S. official: "We talked a lot about broad concepts of offense and defense, what is related, how it would work."

As expected, most of the discussion centered on President Reagan's Star Wars proposal to deploy defensive weapons in space and on his new, veiled offer to discuss the issue. But if the Soviets had hoped that Nitze might offer a more promising interpretation of the President's hints, they were disappointed. Nor did they show much interest in Reagan's latest proposals or offer new positions of their own. American spokesmen contrived to put a positive spin on the mission to Moscow, labeling the talks "serious, substantive and businesslike." (Translation: there was no outright fighting but also no progress.)

The most encouraging result was that the Soviets said they want to go through the procedure again. They have agreed to reconvene in Washington, probably early next month. The President told reporters at a press conference in Chicago that he fully expected a second summit would be held this year, despite Moscow's continued refusal last week to set a date.

Before Monday's talks, Perle spent an afternoon afoot in Moscow like any first-time tourist. His "immediate impression," Perle said from his vacation home in France, was that the U.S.S.R. is "not a rich country. The thought kept occurring that this country is able to field a very powerful military machine when there are so many obviously unmet needs of its citizens." He found Moscow even "drabber" than he had anticipated and noted how Soviet soldiers at Lenin's tomb marched in Nazi-style goose step. "You would think the Soviets would go out of their way to avoid anything even remotely evoking the Nazi past," said Perle. "But then there is so much that is inexplicable."

Perle recalled a news item extolling Soviet ice cream. But, he complained, "there was none. Someone told us that by afternoon all the ice cream was usually sold out." When he did eventually taste some, he dismissed it: "My only comment is that whoever thinks the Soviets make the best ice cream has never been to Baskin-Robbins."

Perle's presence in Moscow reflected the Jekyll-and-Hyde nature of his influential role. He originally went to Washington in 1969 and became a protege of Nitze, 79, the smooth patrician who started dealing with the Soviets 40 years ago, when Perle was still a toddler. Together they did more than anyone else to block ratification of the SALT II treaty, a union that eventually brought both into the Reagan Administration.

But today the Prince of Darkness and the Silver Fox represent the polar opposites of the President's advice on arms control. Perle remains deeply committed to the deployment of Star Wars and sees little hope of trading off defensive and offensive systems -- the "grand compromise" that Nitze seems to feel might cap his distinguished career. Despite his role as a team player in Nitze's delegation last week, Perle, by his very presence, served to keep the delegation strictly faithful to the President's determination to deploy Star Wars and to symbolize for the Soviets the tough American demands they must accommodate.

With reporting by James O. Jackson/Moscow and Adam Zagorin/Paris