U.S. Reportedly Vetoed Broadcast Featuring Soviet Cardiologists

The State Department has vetoed the domestic broadcast of the first U.S.-Soviet scientific dialogue since the Geneva summit because it included Dr. Yevgeny Chazov, the Nobel laureate who has denounced Soviet dissident Andrei A. Sakharov, congressional sources said Tuesday.

According to these sources, who spoke on the condition that they not be identified, a high State Department official ordered the blackout because he is opposed to granting “major publicity” to Chazov.

The televised live broadcast took place Monday. Members of the American College of Cardiology spoke from the National Institutes of Health in suburban Bethesda, Md., and Chazov and other Soviet cardiologists spoke from Moscow on a two-way channel.

Abrupt Cancellation

The U.S. Information Agency had invited American scientific journalists to view the seminar in several cities, including Los Angeles, but abruptly canceled the sessions Monday. In Los Angeles, reporters were told that a USIA receiver was not functioning.

On Tuesday, a USIA official in Washington said the agency was unable to relay the broadcast within the United States because a federal statute prohibits the domestic dissemination of news by USIA without congressional permission.

But Mark Blitz, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff who deals with such requests, said that no permission usually is needed to show USIA or Voice of America programs in press centers such as those in Los Angeles, Washington and New York.

Physician Surprised

Dr. Elliot Corday, chairman of USIA’s Medical Science Advisory Committee and a senior cardiologist at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, said in a telephone interview that he was surprised by the blackout.

Corday said he arranged the dialogue as a follow-up to an agreement, reached at the November summit by President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, to allow resuming such exchanges, broken off after Moscow’s invasion of Afghanistan five years ago.

He said U.S. cardiologists helped set up the program with the Soviet Academy of Sciences, which is headed by Chazov, a deputy minister of health.

Chazov, who once was personal physician to the late Soviet President Leonid I. Brezhnev, shared the Nobel Peace Prize earlier this month as co-chairman, with U.S. physician Bernard Lown, of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.

Accused Sakharov of Slander

The choice of the organization was vehemently attacked by human rights advocates because Chazov signed a letter in 1973 that accused Sakharov of slandering the Soviet Union and led to Sakharov’s falling into official disfavor.

But “there was nothing political in the discussion” during Monday’s broadcast, Corday said. “Everything was written ahead and read. . . .”

Corday said the program was similar to a televised dialogue with Hungarian cardiologists a month ago and an earlier dialogue with Arab cardiologists. China, India and Brazil also have requested exchanges.

Chazov and Lown were scheduled to meet today with Gorbachev in Moscow to urge him to extend a five-month, Soviet nuclear-test moratorium past the Dec. 31 expiration date.