Top Soviet Aide to See Pentagon Crisis Center

In an unprecedented display of Pentagon openness, Moscow’s second highest-ranking military officer has been invited to two meetings at the Pentagon, including a tour of one of America’s most sensitive military facilities, the National Military Command Center, Pentagon officials announced Tuesday.

Marshal Sergei F. Akhromeyev, the Soviet first deputy defense minister and chief of general staff, will be the guest of Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci and Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, at a meeting in Carlucci’s office today. Akhromeyev will the the highest-ranking Soviet military man ever to visit the Pentagon, U.S. military officials said.

On Thursday morning, Crowe and Akhromeyev will meet one-on-one for breakfast. Then Crowe will take the Soviet official into the National Military Command Center--known inside the Pentagon as “the tank”--where he will be greeted by Carlucci and other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The tank is the American military nerve center, with instantaneous computer and secure telephone communications to every U.S military installation, ship and airplane everywhere on the globe. The facility is manned seven days a week, 24 hours a day by a watch team of roughly two dozen officers.

Displays Will Be Darkened

The room’s wall-sized displays, which will be darkened for the Soviet visit, can show U.S. and Soviet military deployments worldwide. American nuclear missile submarines and airborne nuclear-armed bombers can be pinpointed precisely and instantaneously on the high-tech displays.

The tank is plugged into the communications networks of the World-Wide Military Command and Control System, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. Data from spy satellites, early-warning radars and the major news wire services are also received around the clock.

“You can be sure we’ll cover up all the displays, make them all go blank” while the Soviet delegation is in the room, a Pentagon spokesman said.

Akhromeyev, 64, is one of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s closest military advisers and one of the Kremlin’s most knowledgeable officials on arms control.

His manner is straightforward, according to Americans who dealt with him at a previous summit.

Carlucci met Akhromeyev in Moscow in October, when Carlucci, then national security adviser, and Secretary of State George P. Shultz went to the Soviet Union to work on details of the summit and the arms control treaty signed by the two nations’ leaders Tuesday.

Carlucci was favorably impressed by the Soviet official and extended the invitation to the two Pentagon meetings to broaden the contact.

Pentagon officials would not divulge the agenda for the meetings, though it is expected that the military men will discuss future arms control treaties and the verification provisions contained in the INF treaty signed Tuesday.