U.S. Plays Down Incident Involving Soviet Seaman

Administration officials on Sunday sought to minimize the impact on next month’s U.S.-Soviet summit of an apparent attempt by a Soviet seaman to defect from his ship, moored in the Mississippi River near New Orleans.

Robert C. McFarlane, the national security adviser to President Reagan, declined during an interview on the CBS program “Face the Nation” to agree with a reporter’s suggestion that the incident could grow into “a major East-West issue” at President Reagan’s meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev in Geneva on Nov. 19-20.

“I wouldn’t predict that,” McFarlane said. “I think we have a responsibility to assure that the wishes of the individual are understood, and it is within our legal authority to establish that. Then I would expect the Soviet Union to understand that it is our authority and our interest; then I expect it can be resolved.”

At the State Department, meanwhile, spokesman Pete Martinez said the department is seeking to interview the still-unidentified seaman “in a neutral environment” to determine if he wants to return to the Soviet Union. U.S. officials spoke with the seaman aboard the ship through an interpreter.

In two separate attempts, the crewman jumped overboard and swam ashore Thursday and Friday from the Soviet freighter Marshal Konyev as it was moored off New Orleans. Each time he was returned to the vessel by U.S. immigration officers who were unable to understand the seaman, who does not speak English.

Three U.S. officials, identified as Border Patrol and Customs officials by a Customs worker who would not give his name, boarded the ship Sunday afternoon. Mike Flad, a U.S. agent for the Soviet vessel, said he believes that at least one State Department representative was also aboard Sunday.

The freighter and its 43-member crew are scheduled to go to Reserve, La., to pick up grain, but Flad said he does not know when U.S. authorities will allow the ship to proceed.

During the CBS interview, McFarlane discouraged a suggestion that U.S. officials have a responsibility to use force if necessary to remove the crewman from the ship if he indicates a desire to defect. In words that suggested a desire not to roil the international waters with the Geneva summit only three weeks away, he said “it isn’t really useful to talk about the . . . extremes of a very improbable occurrence.”