Analysis : A Look Into Smudged Crystal Ball : Wary Forecasts of Success Replace Visions of Failure

Even before U.S. and Soviet officials pulled a curtain of silence down around the summit Tuesday, Secretary of State George P. Shultz had remarked that “the crystal ball has so many fingerprints on it that you can’t see what’s inside.”

The news blackout itself, together with the fact that the opening day’s sessions extended well beyond their scheduled times, can only mean that President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev are seriously striving to end half a decade of rising hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union.

What the first day’s broad smiles and warm handshakes almost certainly do not mean, however, is that the two sides have moved closer on arms control, regional conflicts or human rights. If anything, greater caution is warranted to avoid over-optimism after weeks in which both sides deliberately played down prospects for success.

Soviet diplomats have often followed tough talk with sudden warming spells, only to revert to the hard line in pursuit of their objectives when they got down to business.

And the speed with which the atmosphere here changed after Gorbachev’s arrival, coming as it did after days of barbed rhetoric and grim forecasts from Soviet propagandists, was a forceful reminder of how fast the climate could change again.

The improved mood in Geneva also suggests that the public facades of both sides in the pre-summit weeks bore little resemblance to behind-the-scenes diplomatic exchanges.

There had been no hint, for example, that Washington and Moscow had agreed in advance to implement a news blackout, and its abrupt and effective imposition raised immediate questions about whether other agreements have been reached in advance--to be unveiled here when the curtain of secrecy is lifted.

As a result, open predictions of failure at the summit have evaporated, but they have been replaced only by wary forecasts of success.

This is partly because the establishment of a rapport between the leaders in past summits has often evaporated rancorously soon afterward: The cheek kissing of President Jimmy Carter and Soviet President Leonid I. Brezhnev in mid-1979 dissolved into bitter recriminations when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan six months later and the United States decided to boycott the 1980 Olympics.

The mood of restrained optimism also springs in part from the difficulty in deciding what constitutes success at the summit.

A joint Reagan-Gorbachev statement of agreed principles on the purpose of U.S.-Soviet arms negotiations would be greeted as a breakthrough, for instance, particularly if it set a common goal for cuts in offensive nuclear weapons and a common approach to the most contentious of the arms issues, space defenses.

Gorbachev, in his arrival statement, called for preventing the arms race “in other spheres,” which some U.S. officials took as an encouraging sign because the Soviet Communist Party chief did not specifically attack the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as “Star Wars.” This omission suggested to some U.S. analysts that the Soviets may be prepared to finesse the point in any summit-ending communique.

But as one senior American official said, the Administration is wary of written communiques after last January’s U.S.-Soviet statement here that followed a meeting between Shultz and then-Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko.

That statement said that three forums would be set up in the arms talks--on long-range offensive weapons, intermediate-range offensive missiles, and space and defensive arms--with the aim of reducing offensive weapons and “preventing an arms race in space.”

Moscow has repeatedly thrown the phrase back at the Reagan Administration with the interpretive spin that the ground rules for the talks called for an end to SDI--an interpretation heatedly disputed by the Reagan Administration.

“They burned us on that communique,” the senior official acknowledged. In fact, Pentagon officials in Washington before the summit opposed even repeating the same January language in any summit communique.

Also, he added, while Reagan and Gorbachev might come to some broad agreement to send the negotiators back to the table for intensified work, “it would be somewhat cosmetic, frankly,” if there were no substantive agreement underlying it.

So even if this summit produces substantive agreements, it will be judged a success only after such agreements are seen to yield positive results during subsequent months or years.

Furthermore, when summits have ended with grand promises--declarations that a “fresh start” has been made, for example, or that a new “Spirit of Geneva” will reduce East-West tensions--the record suggests the aftermath can be disappointing.

In 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev went home with such words of hope. But within a year the Soviets invaded Hungary and another Berlin crisis was spawned.

Indeed, the prospects for disappointment almost seem highest when a summit is judged a success on the basis of the two leaders getting along well.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt seemed to hit it off with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin at Yalta, believing he could do business with “Uncle Joe,” but Americans later found that the Soviets took over East Europe in the aftermath of that summit.

At the opposite extreme, the 1967 Glassboro summit between President Lyndon B. Johnson and Soviet Premier Alexei N. Kosygin was immediately judged as empty of achievement. In fact, however, historians now date the current arms control period from the meeting in a small New Jersey town, because it led five years later to the first strategic arms control agreement and East-West detente.

So if Reagan and Gorbachev end their summit today by signing the several predicted bilateral agreements, lay out some guidelines for resolving their arms and regional differences--and promise to meet again in a year to make sure there has been progress--their summit will be tentatively judged a success.

Pending their next meeting, that is.