THE SUMMIT AT GENEVA : Interpreters--Backup for History

When President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev spent more than four hours together without their aides this week, their intimate conversations did more than underline the personal nature of this summit. They also raised the possibility of later misunderstandings about just what was said.

White House spokesman Larry Speakes said that Reagan briefed his staff members “from memory” immediately after his conversations with Gorbachev. But it is virtually certain that Reagan’s memory had a backup--the American interpreter who was present.

Although heads of government do not ordinarily permit tape recordings or stenographic records of their meetings, several key staff members usually attend, including at least one to take notes and prepare detailed minutes.

When the leaders meet without aides, however, they must rely on interpreters to supply the record--unless they decide to dictate their own recollections of what they said and heard, as former French President Charles de Gaulle invariably did.

Each leader usually has his own interpreter, who takes notes as he translates his leader’s remarks into the other’s language.

Stephanie Van Reigersberg, the State Department’s chief interpreter, said in Washington that such one-on-one meetings turn the usually ignored interpreter into an instant celebrity, as when she attended a 70-minute encounter between Reagan and Colombian President Belisario Betancur in 1982.

“You know you have to take good notes,” she said. “You get on the airplane and sit at the typewriter and grind out (your report). The staff looks on you with a great deal of interest until you grind it out. Then they never look at you again.”

Sometimes leaders who speak a common language insist on one-on-one conversations, eliminating the interpreters and, consequently, their reports. That has never been the case in a U.S.-Soviet summit, although former President Richard M. Nixon sometimes did not bring an American interpreter and relied on the Soviet-supplied interpreter instead.

Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a key Nixon aide, recalls that, in 1974, Nixon and former Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev had a long personal conversation during a walk by a swimming pool at the Black Sea resort of Yalta.

“There was only a Soviet interpreter present,” Sonnenfeldt said. “In that case, the staff had to debrief the President afterward.”

“Every staff person who ever existed goes nuts about the leaders getting together alone,” said Robert E. Hunter, a National Security Council official under President Jimmy Carter. “A person in a conversation who is intensely preoccupied in that conversation may not remember clearly what happened. Political leaders, like others, sometimes have selective memories.”

What if a head of state gets his facts wrong in a one-on-one meeting or, possibly just as bad, incorrectly hears what he was told by his opposite number? Both Sonnenfeldt and Hunter said there are built-in safeguards to minimize the mischief such misunderstandings could cause.

Even if the two leaders agreed on something specific, Sonnenfeldt said, the pact would not become final until it was put into writing. That would give the two staffs an opportunity to compare notes and make sure both leaders understood the issue the same way.

The one-on-one talks between Reagan and Gorbachev lasted more than four hours, making them among the longest between top U.S. and Soviet leaders since World War II. That was also about the same as the time that President Franklin D. Roosevelt spent alone with Josef Stalin in each of the wartime conferences at Tehran and Yalta.

Roosevelt’s personal interpreter was Charles E. Bohlen, then one of the State Department’s top experts on the Soviet Union and later ambassador to Moscow. Immediately after the private sessions, Bohlen dictated from his notes and memory about what had transpired, providing the key historical record of those meetings. Most interpreters, however, are professionals at that exacting job.

Dimitry Zarechnak, a naturalized American born of Russian parents in Czechoslovakia, is the chief U.S. interpreter at the Geneva summit.

Van Reigersberg said that interpreters always try to read up as much as possible on the issues that are likely to be discussed because “you have to know what you are talking about.”

She said the U.S. interpreter and not his Soviet counterpart usually translates the American position into Russian because he has the benefit of reading U.S. briefing books ahead of time. In addition, she said, Reagan’s baseball, football and movie references might “completely bamboozle” a Soviet interpreter.

Interpreting is a profession in which successes usually are overlooked but failures stand out. Steven Seymour, Carter’s interpreter in Warsaw in 1977, gained sudden--and unwanted--fame when he stumbled over Carter’s speech in which he said he understood the Polish people’s “desires for the future.”

Seymour used a Polish word for desire with sexual connotations, and Carter’s words came out, “lusts for the future.”

Seymour said later that he had not been given an advanced text of Carter’s speech. Besides, he said, he was forced to stand in a freezing rain for two hours awaiting the President’s arrival.

Apparently his excuses were good enough. Seymour is currently under contract to interpret for the U.S. delegation to the strategic arms talks that will resume in Geneva in January.

Don Cook reported from Geneva and Norman Kempster reported from Washington. Times staff writer Doyle McManus also contributed to this story from Washington.