Plan Summit, Reagan Urges : Asks Gorbachev for Meeting of Top Aides

President Reagan has written to Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev proposing that their top foreign policy advisers meet soon to plan for the next summit meeting, White House officials said Saturday, confirming a report in the Observer of London.

The newspaper said in today’s editions that the letter was warm and conciliatory in tone and was delivered to Gorbachev in Moscow last week by U.S. Ambassador Arthur A. Hartman.

The White House officials said Reagan’s letter proposed to Gorbachev that Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze meet soon, perhaps in Europe, to work out an agenda for the next summit.

Shevardnadze had been scheduled to meet Shultz in Washington in May, but the Soviets canceled the meeting after the U.S. bombing of Libya on April 15.

But Gorbachev has not replied to Reagan’s latest overture because he is confused about U.S. intentions, the Observer said.

The President’s proposal to restart the planning for a summit came as he was defending his May 27 decision to abandon the limits of the unratified second strategic arms limitation treaty, known as SALT II, because of alleged Soviet violations. That decision has drawn criticism from the Soviets, U.S. allies and members of Congress.

Reagan and Gorbachev agreed at their Geneva summit last November to exchange visits--the Soviet leader to Washington this year and Reagan to Moscow in 1987.

The letter to Gorbachev also apparently coincided with a new Soviet proposal on reducing strategic weapons, placed on the negotiating table in Geneva on Wednesday.

U.S. officials have differences of opinion over the seriousness of the latest Soviet proposal, but unlike its reaction to previous offers from Moscow, the Administration has avoided public criticism of it, and top officials have suggested that the Soviets may be prepared for more serious negotiations than in the past.

Hammer Makes Rounds

In an effort to get the summit schedule back on track, the head of Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum Corp., Armand Hammer, engaged last week in a round of personal diplomacy, the Observer said, quoting unidentified diplomatic sources.

Hammer, whose contacts with the Soviet hierarchy date almost from the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, reportedly met in Washington with Reagan and then called on Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in London and also on the Soviet ambassador to Britain, Leonid M. Zamyatin.

He assured them that Reagan genuinely wants a summit and wants to reach agreements with the Kremlin despite his recent hard-line statements, the Observer said.

The President, in his nationally televised news conference Wednesday night, appeared to go out of his way to describe Gorbachev as the first Soviet leader to want arms reductions.

Previous Meetings

A series of Shultz-Shevardnadze meetings were held in Washington and Moscow in the months leading up to the first Reagan-Gorbachev summit meeting last Nov. 19-21 in Geneva.

A senior White House official said that before Reagan’s letter was sent, the presumption had been that Shultz and Shevardnadze would not meet until the U.N. General Assembly convened in September.

Officials had assumed that the summit would follow in November or December. Reagan predicted in his news conference last week that there would be another summit with Gorbachev but did not say when.

Seeking ‘Better Deal’

Reagan said several times last week that he is seeking a “better deal” and a “replacement” for the unratified SALT II pact, which the United States had previously vowed not to undercut.

Reagan said the United States would not exceed the limits of SALT II until the 131st B-52 bomber is armed with air-launched cruise missiles later this year.