Shultz Mission ‘Probably a Setback,’ Official Says

The “central message” gleaned from Secretary of State George P. Shultz’s two-day mission to Moscow is that the Soviets are not yet ready to conclude major new agreements with the United States, particularly in the arms field, a senior Administration official traveling with Shultz said Wednesday.

Indeed, the Shultz visit was “probably a setback” in prospects for improving U.S.-Soviet relations at the summit meeting between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev two weeks from now, this official said.

He said that Gorbachev, in office for less than a year, “really hasn’t yet absorbed the technical aspects of arms control,” including the conceptual basis of nuclear deterrence and the Administration’s arguments for its missile defense program, commonly known as “Star Wars.”

As an example, he noted that the Soviets now have backtracked on a remark Gorbachev made last month on “Star Wars” by demanding “a complete ban” on all aspects of the program.

Earlier, the Soviet leader had indicated that his country would not object to fundamental research being conducted on the system, officially known as the Strategic Defense Initiative.

In addition, the Soviets redefined space weapons to exclude their existing anti-missile network that rings Moscow, the official said.

“But we’re undismayed,” the official declared as he briefed reporters during a stopover in Iceland. “We’re ready--readier than they are (for an arms control agreement)--but we can wait.”

Ambassador Paul H. Nitze, the Administration’s chief arms control adviser and a participant in the talks, acknowledged Wednesday that less progress was made in Moscow than officials in Washington had wanted.

“It wasn’t possible to achieve a substantive narrowing of the differences in point of view on individual issues to the extent we had hoped,” Nitze told reporters in Brussels, where he flew to brief North Atlantic Treaty Organization members. National security adviser Robert C. McFarlane also was among officials who participated in the Moscow sessions.

Reagan put a less somber face on the Shultz trip, however. Asked about reports that the secretary of state was not optimistic after his meetings with the Soviets, the President quipped, “Moscow has a way of making it that way.”

And despite the Shultz delegation’s conclusion that Gorbachev was combative and assertive, Reagan said in an interview with wire service reporters that there is “every indication he is a reasonable man.”

Shultz, speaking to reporters on the plane en route to Washington, where he was to brief the President, also took a somewhat less critical line than the senior official traveling with him.

“I won’t use words like disappointed, pessimistic or optimistic to describe what took place,” he said. “We narrowed differences in some respects, and it’s not as if we were surprised” by the talks with Gorbachev and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze.

The senior official on Shultz’s plane, in a detailed assessment, predicted it would be an uphill fight to reach substantive “agreement in principle” on arms control or move significantly on regional issues such as Afghanistan.

The greatest progress has been made on bilateral U.S.-Soviet issues, such as a new cultural exchange agreement and civil aviation accord, he said. But he made no comment on prospects in another major summit topic area, human rights.

Perhaps the most striking remarks by Shultz and other members of the U.S. team were characterizations of Gorbachev that tended to erode the positive public image he projected during visits to London and Paris and in interviews.

The senior official described Gorbachev as “argumentative, self-assured and on occasion impulsive,” but also “intellectually curious, vigorous, active, articulate.”

This official said “it was surprising” that Gorbachev was not aware of U.S. concerns about Soviet missile programs, particularly the new mobile missiles, whose development is one of the rationales for the Administration’s space defense program.

“I don’t think he’d been told everything about our positions,” the official said, suggesting a degree of disarray within the Kremlin.

Among other things, economic problems and four leadership changes in four years have kept the Kremlin from focusing deeply on foreign affairs, he said.