USIA Chief Invites Gorbachev to Take Part in TV Interviews

Charles Z. Wick, director of the U.S. Information Agency, tendered an informal invitation via television Sunday for Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to participate with U.S. officials in a USIA-produced exchange of televised interviews.

“I would like to now invite, on behalf of our country, General Secretary Gorbachev to go on Worldnet (a USIA program) and be interviewed by American journalists, which we would broadcast worldwide and hope, in turn, reciprocally, he would allow us to have Russian journalists interview our policy people,” Wick said during an interview on the ABC-TV program “This Week with David Brinkley.”

There was no comment from the Soviet Embassy here, and Lorrie Secrest, a USIA spokeswoman, said she knew of no immediate Soviet response to Wick’s proposal that Gorbachev, whose title designates him as head of the Soviet Communist Party, appear on Worldnet.

A regular USIA television program, Worldnet presents interviews with prominent individuals that are broadcast worldwide by satellite.

Wick noted during the Brinkley show that there was still no response to a letter he sent last Jan. 25 to Leonid M. Zamyatin, chief of the international information department of the Soviet party’s Central Committee, which suggested a “constructive dialogue “ in which Soviet and U.S. television would carry interviews with “top leaders” of the other country.

Asked if USIA would not be starting with a built-in advantage because its Worldnet programs have a substantially wider audience in the Soviet Union than Moscow’s broadcast have here, Wick conceded that “not too many” Americans monitor the Soviet airwaves. However, he added that “we’re concerned with the rest of the world, too.”