Summit Ended With Tough Words : ‘No Way,’ Reagan Told Soviet Leader

Outside the white clapboard guest house overlooking Reykjavik Bay, the landscape of Iceland was cloaked in the gloom of a rainy autumn night. Inside Hofdi House, in the room where he had met for nearly 12 hours over two days with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, gloom also was etched in President Reagan’s face.

Through interpreters, the leaders of the world’s two superpowers had spent the afternoon parrying over disarmament. As the President saw it, Gorbachev had offered breathtaking across-the-board concessions on arms control but now was insisting on an all-or-nothing price: abandonment of the “Star Wars” plan for a space-based anti-missile shield that Reagan sees as the only way to end the threat of nuclear holocaust.

Finally, after two hours of circular argument, Reagan picked up his papers from the table, stuffed them into a plain manila folder and pushed himself up from his wood-and-leather chair.

“No way,” he told Gorbachev.

That, according to presidential aides, is how the Reykjavik summit ended last Sunday. In the two days since, Administration officials have sought to seize the public relations initiative with interviews and briefings intended to explain why the talks collapsed--and why there is still hope for future negotiations. In the process, they have given an extraordinary glimpse into the small but dramatic scenes intertwined in superpower summitry.

There was, for instance, the scene as Reagan and Gorbachev stepped into the chilly rain outside Hofdi House to enter their waiting limousines.

Reagan, looking grim, told the Soviet leader: “I don’t think you really wanted to deal.”

Gorbachev, according to those within earshot, responded: “There is still time.”

“No there isn’t,” Reagan shot back.

With that, the President got into the back seat of the long, black automobile, where--in the 45-minute ride to Keflavik air base--he vented his frustrations to White House Chief of Staff Donald T. Regan.

It was, Regan told a breakfast meeting with Times Washington Bureau reporters and editors Tuesday, “quite a session.”

Asked about reports of presidential profanity, Regan, motioning to a female journalist at the breakfast table, said “we can’t” discuss the conversation.

Pledges Silence

“There were only the two of us, and I will never reveal what he said in the car,” he said. Then, holding up his thumb and index finger an inch apart, Regan said with a laugh:

“Well, how would you like to be the chief executive that came that far to wiping out nuclear weapons forever?”

“So, yeah, frustration,” he added.

The President, Regan said, was “disappointed, not disconsolate.”

Until the Reagan-Gorbachev talks snagged on the Soviet demand that the United States, in effect, abandon the Strategic Defense Initiative--the formal title of his so-called “Star Wars” space-based missile defense program--stunning progress had been made on other disarmament issues.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz described as “breathtaking” the advances on resolving differences over such sensitive issues as the number of medium-range missiles in Europe and Asia.

Shultz told reporters Tuesday of one scene Sunday morning: “After what seemed like an endless amount of back and forth, finally Gorbachev said: ‘Well, all right, Mr. President--bang, bang, bang, bang--I’ll accept the U.S. position on Asia.’ And the President said: ‘Agreed.’ ”

Resumed Hours Later

But, within hours, the talks stalled on the SDI issue. The sessions were scheduled to end by mid-afternoon Sunday, but the two leaders decided to take a break and resume at 4 p.m.

At that point, Regan recalled at Tuesday’s breakfast meeting, “we could see that the thing was deteriorating . . . and the President came upstairs and we huddled . . . and that’s when we decided to go for broke.”

The President and his aides drafted what Reagan called “the final offer”: The United States would delay deployment of the space-based system if the two countries agreed to eliminate their arsenals of ballistic missiles over the next 10 years.

When the two leaders resumed their talks, Reagan placed his proposal on the table and, the White House chief of staff said, Gorbachev rejected it “immediately.”

“After the President put it on the table and so forth, he (Gorbachev) just seemed to, using the parlance of the negotiators, pocket it and say no,” Regan recalled.

‘Going Round and Round’

For the next two hours, though, the discussions continued with the two leaders “going round and round and round on this,” Regan said.

The aide quoted the President as telling his Soviet counterpart repeatedly that he could not and would not halt the research, development and testing of the SDI system. He quoted Reagan as saying: “You know, I cannot do that. I promised the American people I wouldn’t. There’s no way.”

John M. Poindexter, the President’s national security adviser, also described the end of the talks when he briefed reporters at the White House on Monday. About 7 p.m. Sunday, he recalled, “the President said that, after they had discussed it for a good long period of time, he realized they weren’t going to get anyplace and so the President pulled his papers together and got up.”

When Reagan put his papers in a folder, Poindexter said, “Gorbachev folded up his folder and he got up, and they both got up, and they both walked out of the room.”

Poindexter said that “the President was somber.” And Shultz described the end of the talks as businesslike.

They Were Driving Hard’

“In the end,” Shultz said, “it was clear that when it came to agreeing to things that, as we saw it, would cripple the program to get a strategic defense, we couldn’t do that. And it was clear that they were driving hard at that and they weren’t going to give up on that, at least not there. And, so, I think it was a good judgment on the part of both leaders to say, well, we’ve probably accomplished all that we can in these two days. . . .”

Upstairs, in a bedroom with green silk wallpaper that had been converted into a temporary White House office, presidential aides were preparing for any eventuality.

“We were trying to write the President’s remarks that he would deliver both at Keflavik (the Air Force base where Air Force One was parked) and either an arrival statement or a departure statement,” Regan recalled. “We were going with an ‘A’ and a ‘B’ at all times. We would have one group writing the ‘A’ part, that is if we reached an agreement, and a ‘B’ if we didn’t reach an agreement.”

As it turned out, Reagan delivered a version of the ‘B’ statement, but not before a final exchange with Gorbachev as they approached their limousines outside Hofdi House.

Times staff writers Jack Nelson, Eleanor Clift, Norman Kempster and Robert C. Toth contributed to this story.