PROFILES: PRESIDENT REAGAN’S TOP AIDES AT GENEVA

George P. Shultz, secretary of state: Long considered the ultimate “team player,” Shultz had already held three Cabinet-level positions in the Nixon Administration when President Reagan picked him in June, 1982, to replace Alexander M. Haig at the State Department. In public, the 64-year-old former college professor has raised blandness to an art form, preferring always to give Reagan credit for foreign policy successes and to gloss over failures. A Princeton-trained economist who served on the faculties of the University of Chicago and Stanford University, Shultz was a skilled labor negotiator as a younger man and brought with him to government a strong belief in the effectiveness of give-and-take bargaining to solve problems. As secretary of state, Shultz has been a strong advocate of negotiations with the Soviet Union, although he supported the use of American armed force in Lebanon after concluding that negotiations there would be bootless. Despite a deeply conservative personal philosophy and a demonstrated readiness to employ U.S. troops in support of diplomacy, Shultz has been a frequent target of U.S. conservative groups who accuse him of following soft-line policies. In the 1970s, he served as secretary of labor, secretary of the Treasury and as director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Robert C. McFarlane, national security adviser to the President: A skilled bureaucratic infighter, McFarlane has held the White House’s top foreign policy staff position since October, 1983. The 48-year-old Naval Academy graduate and former Marine Corps lieutenant colonel lacks the academic credentials of such former national security advisers as McGeorge Bundy, Walt W. Rostow, Henry A. Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, but he brought a broad practical background in defense and foreign policy, having served on the National Security Council staff under three Presidents. Before taking his present job, McFarlane was Reagan’s special envoy to Middle East peace negotiations. After a somewhat low-key start, McFarlane has emerged as one of the most elequant spokesmen for Reagan Administration policies, although he seldom reveals his own views in public, reserving his advice for the Administration’s inner councils. Nevertheless, Administration insiders say McFarlane often supports Secretary of State George P. Shultz in bureaucratic contests with Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger and other Pentagon hardliners. During the preparations leading up to the Reagan-Gorbachev summit, McFarlane often worked in double harness with Shultz, accompanying him to each of his preliminary meetings with Soviet officials, including a meeting earlier this month with Gorbachev.

Donald T. Regan, White House chief of staff: A life-long stock broker before his selection as Treasury Secretary in Reagan’s first Administration, Regan was not known as a foreign policy specialist before his selection last January as White House staff chief. The 66-year-old Harvard graduate won his place at the summit table by an often-abrasive determination to be involved in every phase of the government from his key White House post. Like Secretary of State George P. Shultz, Regan was a Marine Corps officer during World War II. After the war, he joined the Wall Street firm of Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith immediately after the war, eventually rising to the position of chairman of the board.

Arthur A. Hartman, U.S. ambassador to Moscow: The only career diplomat in the U.S. “core group” of summit advisers, Hartman joined the Foreign Service in 1948 after completing graduate school at Harvard. In August, 1981, President Reagan picked him as ambassador to the Soviet Union, possibly the most sensitive of all U.S. diplomatic posts. Before that, he had been ambassador to France during the Carter Administration and had served as assistant secretary of state for Europe and in embassies in Saigon and London. In Moscow, Hartman sought to carry the American message to the average Russian. Earlier this year, he delivered a Fourth of July speech on Soviet television, resuming a tradition that Moscow had interrupted the previous year as friction between the two countries increased. Earlier this year, Hartman wrote a letter to the government newspaper Izvestia recalling the meeting of U.S. and Soviet soldiers on the Elbe River 40 years ago. To the surprise of the ambassador and other U.S. officials, the letter was published. The 59-year-old Hartman graduated from Harvard in 1944 when he was only 18 years old.

SOVIET LEADER GORBACHEV’S TOP AIDES AT GENEVA

Eduard A. Shevardnadze, foreign minister: When the silver-haired Shevardnadze was named foreign minister July 2, he had almost no experience in foreign policy. In fact, he was so little known outside the Soviet Union that a senior State Department official said all Washington had to go on before his first meeting with Secretary of State Geroge P. Shultz was his photograph. Shultz and Shevardnadze apparently have developed a rapport during their five formal meetings leading up to the summit. Shultz says of Shevardnadze, “You can talk to him.” The 57-year-old Shevardnadze succeeded Andrei A. Gromyko, the dour Russian diplomat who had participated in U.S.-Soviet summit meetings going back to the 1944 session at Yalta. Although Soviet foreign policy is little changed from the Gromyko era, Shevardnadze has emphasized a friendly manner that contrasts with Gromyko’s habitual glower. Before his selection as foreign minister, Shevardnadze served as Communist Party chief in Soviet Georgia.

Anatoly F. Dobrynin, ambassador to the United States: With Gromyko’s promotion to the largely ceremonial post of Soviet president, Dobrynin became the Soviet diplomat with the longest experience as a Washington-watcher. The 66-year-old Dobrynin has been in the Soviet diplomatic service since 1944, has been ambassador to the United States since 1962 and has attended every U.S.-Soviet summit meeting since Lyndon B. Johnson met Alexei Kosygin at Glassboro, N.J., in 1967. For the last six years, he has been dean of the Washington diplomatic corps, an honorary post conferred on the ambassador with the longest continuous service that puts him at the head of the protocol line when diplomats attend such events as the President’s annual State of the Union address. On a substantive level, U.S. secretaries of state going back to Dean Rusk in the 1960s have used Dobrynin as the “channel of choice” for U.S.-Soviet foreign policy, a practice that often rankled U.S. ambassadors in Moscow, who complained privately of being bypassed. Prior to Shevardnadze’s selection as foreign minister, there had been rumors that Dobrynin was in line for the post.

Georgi M. Kornienko, first deputy foreign minister: A Soviet diplomat since the Stalin era, he is one of the Kremlin’s leading experts on the United States. The 60-year-old, bespectacled Kornienko was one of three Soviet officials selected to give Moscow’s side of the downing of Korean Air Lines flight 007 in 1983. Kornienko spoke infrequently at that press conference but, when asked if it was worth killing 269 persons to prevent penetration of Soviet borders, he said: “Protection of the sacred, inviolable borders of our country and our political system was worth to us, as you know very well, many millions of lives.” Born in the Ukraine, Kornienko joined the Communist Party in 1947 and entered the diplomatic service two years later near the end of the long era of Josef Stalin. He served under former Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko as first deputy minister--the second-ranking post in the Foreign Ministry--from 1977 until Gromyko’s promotion to the ceremonial post of president last July. He retained the position under Shevardnadze. Before his present job, Kornienko served in the Soviet embassy in Washington from 1960 to 1963 and was chief of the American department of the Foreign Ministry from 1965 to 1978, holding that post for a time in conjunction with his first deputy position.

Leonid M. Zamyatin, chief Communist Party spokesman: Zamyatin, 63, has been a Soviet foreign policy specialist for most of his adult life and a member of the Soviet inner circle at least a decade. He has been chief of the information department of the Communist Party since 1978 but, even before attaining that position, was the chief spokesman for Soviet leaders in summit meetings with the United States in 1972, 1973 and 1974, when he was director general of the official Tass news agency. Zamyatin attended the Moscow Aviation Institute during World War II and moved to the Foreign Ministry immediately after the war. He has been a member of the Communist Party since 1944 and a member of the Central Committe since 1981. As a diplomat, he was the Soviet representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency, was a counselor in the Soviet mission to the United Nations and headed the American Countries department of the Foreign Ministry from 1960 to 1962 when he was named head of the ministry’s press department, a post he held until he was picked to head Tass.