Soviets Bar Voice of America Reporter

The Soviet Union has denied a visa to a Voice of America reporter assigned to cover a U.S.-Soviet cultural exchange meeting in Riga, Latvia, and the chief of the U.S. government’s broadcast organization said it will, as a protest, withdraw the other two reporters it had assigned to the conference.

Charles Z. Wick, director of the U.S. Information Agency, the parent organization of the Voice of America, equated the Soviet decision with censorship and said in a telephone interview that Moscow’s refusal to allow reporter Joan Beecher, a Russian-speaking American, to visit, was “part of the consistent pattern of harassing American journalists.”

However, Wick refused to tie the incident to the case of Nicholas Daniloff, the American correspondent who was released from a Soviet prison Friday under an agreement that will keep the reporter in the Soviet Union pending a trial on espionage charges.

Wider Exchange of Ideas

The 200 members of the American delegation to the conference, which is being held to promote a wider exchange of ideas between the superpowers, left Washington on Saturday for Riga, capital of the Soviet republic of Latvia. The weeklong session of speeches and seminars is considered a non-official gathering, although the participants include a number of representatives of the U.S. and Soviet governments, in addition to journalists, former government officials and non-government experts on foreign relations.

Until Daniloff was released, it was uncertain whether the meeting would take place. The American reporter was allowed to leave the KGB’s Lefortovo prison in Moscow under an agreement that also gained the freedom, until his trial, of Soviet physicist Gennady F. Zakharov, who was arrested Aug. 23 on spy charges in New York.

Cause Not Given

Wick said that the Voice of America, whose correspondents’ reports are beamed around the world and can be picked up in the Soviet Union despite jamming, had been told that Beecher’s visa application had been rejected “for cause,” although the cause was not given. He speculated that she “had written something they didn’t like.” The State Department had no comment.

Wick said he decided that if Beecher could not enter the Soviet Union, the other two reporters assigned to cover the meeting--for the organization’s Latvian- and Russian-language services--would be withdrawn.

“It should be all or none,” he said. “We couldn’t allow them to effectively censor what VOA correspondent would cover the news.”

Wick said that the Voice of America will rely on news agency reports to prepare its accounts of the conference.

Breaks Agreement

He said that the Soviet action violates an agreement the United States and Soviet Union reached last Nov. 21, at the end of the Geneva summit conference between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, intended to open up cultural exchanges and such meetings as that taking place this week in Riga under the sponsorship of the Chautauqua Institution of Jamestown, N.Y.

“That agreement encourages open exchange of correspondents. The meeting is to be an open meeting, with access by correspondents, and selectivity is tantamount to censorship,” said Joseph D. O’Connell, a spokesman for the U.S. Information Agency.

Among the participants scheduled to take part are Jack Matlock, senior Soviet policy planner for the National Security Council; Alexander A. Bessmertnykh, a Soviet deputy foreign minister; Alan L. Keyes, an assistant U.S. secretary of state, and Gen. Nikolai Chervov, a key arms control specialist in the Soviet Defense Ministry.