Walters, Once No. 2 CIA Man, Gets U.N. Post

President Reagan today named roving Ambassador-at-Large Vernon A. Walters, former No. 2 man in the CIA, to be ambassador to the United Nations, replacing Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, who has decided to return to teaching.

Walters, 68, who speaks seven foreign languages including Russian, will be given Cabinet rank.

Walters has been involved in diplomatic missions since the 1950s and since July, 1981, under Reagan, has traveled to many countries as a White House emissary on special missions, among them a futile talk with Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

His nomination had long been rumored. Kirkpatrick announced last week that she was quitting to return to her teaching and writing career.

Walters, a retired lieutenant general, was in the Army from 1941 to 1976 and served either in intelligence or as a military attache through most of his career.

Under 3 Presidents

His special assignments included serving directly under Presidents Truman, Eisenhower and Nixon. He also was an aide to W. Averell Harriman at the Marshall Plan headquarters in Paris and was an assistant to Eisenhower on all his foreign trips.

He conducted negotiations with the North Vietnamese and Chinese in Paris during the Vietnam War and has probably undertaken more secret missions on behalf of Presidents than Henry A. Kissinger in his diplomatic heyday.

Walters was with then-Vice President Richard M. Nixon when they were surrounded by a mob in Venezuela in 1958, and they gained a mutual admiration for each other that was to affect their lives and careers.

When Nixon became President in 1969, Walters accompanied him abroad on several trips and eventually became deputy director of the CIA, where he had a brush with the Watergate scandal. He told the Senate Watergate Committee in 1973 that he rejected White House attempts to involve the CIA in the Watergate cover-up when he was the agency’s deputy director.

Walters was out of government during the Carter Administration, and was a consultant, lecturer and author in those years.