Trying to Have It Both Ways

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Ronald Reagan, wimp? Dove? More wishy-washy than (gasp!) Jimmy Carter? Not only were those strange-sounding accusations ringing out last week, they were coming from people who are normally among the President's staunchest supporters. Reagan, they charged, is letting his eagerness for an arms-control deal and a summit with Mikhail Gorbachev prevent him from precipitating a full-scale showdown with the Kremlin over the seizure of Nicholas Daniloff, the American reporter being detained in Moscow on what the U.S. regards as trumped-up espionage charges. Why, they asked, was Reagan being so cautious and pragmatic about not making a firm link between such Soviet behavior and progress on arms negotiations?

To his conservative critics, Reagan appeared to be swallowing outrageous Soviet insults, the latest delivered by none other than Gorbachev on Soviet television. Chatting on Thursday with residents of the southern Russian city of Krasnodar, the Soviet leader called Daniloff a "spy caught in the act." Since Reagan had assured Gorbachev in a personal letter that Daniloff was only a journalist, Gorbachev was in effect calling the President a liar.

Through it all, Reagan spurned demands that he break off all U.S.-Soviet negotiations unless Daniloff is freed. Indeed, the President took a hand in Washington talks between Secretary of State George Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. After the diplomats had met on Friday for two hours and 45 minutes at the State Department, Shultz picked up his private phone to the White House and suggested that he bring Shevardnadze to a meeting with Reagan. Shevardnadze startled the President by handing him a letter from Gorbachev about Reagan's July arms-control proposals; White House Spokesman Larry Speakes had just told reporters the President intended to complain about Soviet unresponsiveness in a speech at the United Nations on Monday. Radio Moscow later paraphrased the Gorbachev message this way: "We don't rule out the possibility of our meeting and signing something."

Still, Reagan insisted on confining the 45-minute discussion to the Daniloff case, which Shultz pronounced a "cloud hanging over" any chance for progress between the two nations. Although neither side budged on the Daniloff issue, Shultz and his counterpart were nevertheless surprisingly upbeat about the results of their two-day talks. "Quite a few items that seemed insoluble a year ago are now working themselves out," Shultz said after the meetings ended Saturday. He cited strategic arms and "especially" intermediate-range missiles based in Europe as the most promising areas for agreement. For his part, Shevardnadze implied that he and Shultz had recommended that the U.S. and Soviet Union proceed toward a summit. "We have no doubt that this meeting is necessary," he said. The two ministers plan to continue discussions this week at the U.N., said Shevardnadze.

In other forums, U.S. negotiators, on Reagan's orders, offered concessions to keep arms-control bargaining going. At the 35-nation Stockholm conference on ways to prevent accidental war in Europe, the U.S. accepted a Soviet formula for aerial and ground inspection of military maneuvers. An agreement in Stockholm would be the first security deal negotiated by the Reagan Administration. When far more important bilateral talks on nuclear arms resumed last Thursday in Geneva, the U.S. indicated it would make a new "interim" proposal that would reduce the total of long-range strategic weapons by 30%. The new offer would allow the U.S. to keep more bombers and the Soviets to retain more large land-based missiles than would have been possible under earlier proposals. American bargainers also indicated that they were ready to respond favorably to a Soviet proposal to reduce intermediate- range missiles to mere "token" numbers.

Only one concrete move looked like U.S. retaliation for Daniloff's confinement. On Wednesday American officials handed Soviet U.N. Ambassador Alexander Belonogov the names of 25 members of the Soviet, Belorussian and Ukrainian U.N. missions who are to be expelled from the U.S. by Oct. 1. All 25 were intelligence officers, Administration officials said at a briefing in Washington. Six months ago, the U.S. had ordered the swollen mission staffs to be reduced by about 38% -- from 275 to 170 -- in four stages beginning Oct. 1, but had left it to Moscow to choose whom to send packing.

The U.N. move, however, did nothing to quiet the ferocious criticism Reagan had to endure. Conservatives were most vehement in criticizing the President for even thinking about a summit or an arms-control deal while Daniloff awaits trial on a charge that could theoretically be punished by death. Columnist George Will sneered that the Administration had collapsed "like a punctured balloon," and the Washington Times editorially flung the conservatives' supreme insult: "Jimmy Carter, by comparison, was tough and crafty."

The thunder was not confined to the right. In Congress, liberal Democratic Senators Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio and George Mitchell of Maine insisted that no prospect of a summit deal is worth Daniloff's continued detention. Ironically, that is exactly the way Reagan used to talk as a candidate and in the early days of his presidency. Now, however, he is running not for election but for the history books. He wants to be remembered as the tough realist who negotiated the most favorable arms-control bargain the U.S. ever won from the Soviets. He has been encouraged in this by Nancy Reagan, who wants her husband to be remembered as a peacemaker, and by pragmatic advisers like Shultz. So Reagan has opted for a trying-to-have-it-both-ways policy: demanding Daniloff's freedom while continuing to negotiate on an arms bargain and a summit. Though Soviet Foreign Ministry Spokesman Boris Pyadyshev expressed hope that the Daniloff affair could be settled "quietly," Gorbachev's nearly simultaneous comments in Krasnodar caused some Western diplomats in Moscow to fear that the Kremlin was digging itself into a position that would force it at least to put the journalist on trial. It is possible, of course, that Daniloff could then be sent home, expelled rather than released. But the only terms on which Moscow so far seems willing to do even that would be a trade of the reporter for Gennadi Zakharov, the Soviet U.N. employee whose arrest for espionage in New York City triggered the frame-up of Daniloff in Moscow a week $ later. And the Reagan Administration has sworn never to accept a straight swap of a real spy for an innocent American.

If the deadlock continues, Reagan will eventually have to deliver on his repeated warnings that continued detention of Daniloff will sour all U.S.-Soviet relations. But for the moment, the President is acting like anything but the hip-shooting cowboy of liberal legend and his own past oratory. That he is willing to risk alienating his own bedrock conservative constituency for the sake of keeping the hope of an arms-control deal alive says much about the pressure of presidential responsibility in reshaping the attitudes of any occupant of the Oval Office.

With reporting by James O. Jackson/Moscow and Johanna McGeary/Washington