40-Year Career Included Moscow Embassy : Veteran Envoy Walter J. Stoessel Jr. Dies

Walter J. Stoessel Jr., a veteran career U.S. Foreign Service officer who served as ambassador to the Soviet Union and as No. 2 man in the State Department, died Tuesday of leukemia. He was 66.

Stoessel’s 40-year-plus career involved several diplomatic breakthroughs. Chief among them, he liked to recall, was a night in 1969 in Warsaw when he was ambassador to Poland and gave a Chinese diplomat a message from President Richard M. Nixon saying that the United States wished to establish relations with Communist China.

That message eventually led to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s clandestine trip to China two years later and Nixon’s visit in 1972.

Considered a specialist in Soviet affairs, the Russian-speaking Stoessel, a handsome man who turned down a film contract when he was a student at Beverly Hills High School to pursue a career in the diplomatic service, first went to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in 1947 as second secretary. Afterward, he spent a year at Columbia University’s Russian Institute and then spent four years as Soviet desk officer at the State Department.

He returned to Moscow in 1963 and spent two years as deputy chief of mission and then as ambassador from 1974 to 1976. It was during Stoessel’s tenure that the United States accused the Soviet Union of beaming microwaves at the embassy building in what was seen as an effort to eavesdrop on communications. Stoessel was reassigned to West Germany when the furor subsided and served there from 1976 to 1980.

He was the senior member of the Foreign Service when he retired in 1982 as deputy secretary of state, a position normally reserved for political appointees.

Shortly before his retirement, Stoessel was acting secretary of state for a short time after Alexander M. Haig’s resignation in June, 1982, and before George P. Shultz took office.

Stoessel was later recalled to duty and carried out a a number of special assignments, including improving relations with Hungary and meetings with Polish Communist leaders.

Stoessel was born in Manhattan, Kan., but grew up in Massachusetts and Beverly Hills. He was seen at a high school play by a Paramount talent scout who offered him a contract, He turned it down to enroll at Stanford University where he obtained his degree in political science.

He joined the State Department in 1942 and was first posted to Venezuela.

He then served two years in the Navy during World War II, returning to the State Department in 1946.