Reagan, Not Kremlin, Deceitful on Space Defenses, Tass Says

The Soviet news agency Tass charged Sunday that President Reagan, not the Kremlin, engaged in deception when he accused Moscow of concealing work on its own version of a space-based missile defense program.

In an unusually rapid response to the President’s Saturday radio address accusing Moscow of a “dangerous deception” on the issue, Tass belittled Reagan’s words as more “prattling” scare talk.

The President said the Soviet Union has 10,000 scientists and engineers working on a project that could put an anti-missile system in space by the year 2000 but would not admit it has a strategic defense program.

While the Tass report did not specifically deny the President’s accusation, it said:

“It is well known that the Soviet Union proposed at the initial stages of the Geneva (arms) talks that a moratorium be introduced on the development, including the research, testing and deployment of strike space weapons. The United States rejected these proposals.”

Tass said the United States began testing anti-satellite weapons in 1959, established two ground-based anti-satellite systems on the West coast in the 1960s and recently tested a fundamentally new space weapon.

“Why did the American leaders resort to deception once again? It seems that this is being done in order to substantiate their own most dangerous plans of establishing a large-scale network of space-based strike forces,” Tass said.

In another attack on U.S. policy, the government newspaper Izvestia charged Sunday that the United States and Israel were silent partners in the kidnaping late last month of four Soviet diplomats in Beirut. One of the Soviet envoys was killed by his captors, reported to be Muslim fundamentalists.

Konstantin Geivandov, writing in Izvestia, asked what goal the kidnapers could have been pursuing.

“The answer is unequivocal,” the article said. “The masterminds behind the Beirut criminal action as well as their American and Israeli partners are in no way pleased with the fact that the Arab peoples have such a powerful ally as the Soviet Union.”

Tass reported on student rioting in Cairo, staged to protest the American interception of an Egyptian airliner carrying four Palestinian hijackers of an Italian cruise ship.

It also carried details on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s charges that the U.S. action was “air piracy” and that Reagan had agreed to the transfer of the four captives to the Palestine Liberation Organization in Tunisia for trial.

Tass repeated charges by the Union of Arab Lawyers that the American interception was a “bandit assault,” although the agency did not make such accusations on its own.