Reporter’s Notebook: Gorbachev Stays on Wagon for Soviet Viewers

With television back home in Moscow offering unprecedented coverage of Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s meetings with President Reagan, the Soviet leader is showing himself as adept as American politicians at protecting his image.

Take his long lunch at the State Department Wednesday.

When it came time for the speeches, Secretary of State George P. Shultz gave one of his characteristically droll toasts, turned to the general secretary and lifted a glass of California bubbly.

Gorbachev responded in a similar tone, reaching, as he has earlier, a level of eloquence uncommon to any Soviet leader familiar to Americans.

When he concluded his remarks on the need for world peace, he just sat down. There was no toast.

The gesture was not lost on viewers in the Soviet Union, where Gorbachev’s campaign for sobriety has become a part of the landscape along with glasnost and perestroika .

With vodka as the Soviet Union’s national drink, Gorbachev took over a country where alcoholism was an entrenched and devastating social problem.

Gorbachev, in the worldwide television floodlights, did not surreptitiously dodge a toast; it was a dream chance to flaunt his image as a paragon of sobriety at home.

For Rick Latham, of Springfield, Va., the summit represents a personal triumph. He was the winner of a contest sponsored by Remington’s, a Capital Hill saloon, “as a joyous celebration of glasnost and the potential of the summit.”

Latham beat out six other contestants--two of them women--in the watering hole’s Raisa Gorbachev look-alike contest, which had been heavily advertised in Washington’s gay community. He was judged best in resemblance to the wife of the Soviet leader, originality of costume, poise, and “being most communist-looking.”

Latham’s victory apparently didn’t please the State Department. Event organizer James Lovell said he got a call from a department employee who had wished him well for the competition but had also delicately expressed the hope that a woman would be named winner.

About 200 Washington members of the Council on Foreign Relations, who did not make the guest list to dine with Gorbachev during his three days at the summit, had planned for weeks to share a sandwich luncheon Wednesday with Alexander Nikolayevich Yakovlev.

The secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, Yakovlev is Gorbachev’s “minister of glasnost ,” his confidant, adviser and best-known proponent of the much-publicized policy of openness.

Alton Frye, director of the council’s Washington office, began making arrangements several months ago to bring Yakovlev together with council members. But on Tuesday, Yakovlev notified his would-be hosts that Gorbachev would require his presence throughout the day, and there was no chance to reschedule the luncheon.

While Gorbachev was getting his first view of the capital of capitalism, the Soviet press got a practical demonstration of a quick way to turn a ruble.

Pat Clawson, who reports for a Los Angeles magazine called Radio and Records realized last week that many of the 7,000 reporters and technicians were unhappy with the flimsy paper credentials issued to them for the historic occasion.

Just as the horde was beginning to arrive, he arranged to have two laminating machines set up in his office in the National Press Building, next door to the International Press Center.

In three days, he grossed $5,000, much of it from Soviet journalists anxious to preserve their credential with the colorful logo combining the American and Soviet flags.

Customers were still knocking on the door when Clawson had to shut down his going enterprise and get to work on the next issue of his magazine.

“You good capitalist,” said one Soviet customer who went away with a laminated press pass, and $6.75 less in his pocket.

Before Gorbachev even reached Washington, 200,000 demonstrators mounted a massive protest against his government’s denial of emigration visas to Soviet Jews. Since then there have been dozens of protests, some frivolous, some launched by well-financed lobbies.

On Wednesday, there was a small, poignant, quiet demonstration at the security barrier sealing off the Soviet Embassy, a few blocks from the White House.

Four Afghan children, ages 4 to 16 and all disfigured in the war between Soviet troops and Afghan rebels, waited to deliver flowers and a message to Gorbachev. Two of the children had lost their legs, another an arm. The fourth suffered serious burns.

“We have come halfway around the world to make an important plea to you,” said their letter to Gorbachev. “We really need your help. Although we will no longer be able to live and play like other children, we hope that our friends will be able to play and live without being hurt like us.”

Khowaja Mohammad, their father, was with them, as was Charles Brockunier, a Persian rug merchant from Boston who paid their way to the United States.

After his peaceful protest, Khowaja Mohammad said he would be returning to Afghanistan to fight. “If I and other Afghan brothers stay here, who is fighting in Afghanistan?” he asked. “Everybody must go to Pakistan and Afghanistan and fight the Russian forces.”

Watch what you say, Mikhail Sergeyevich. The waiter is eavesdropping.

According to United Press International, U.S. intelligence sources say FBI lip-readers, electronic security experts and psychiatrists have put the Soviet leader under a blanket of surveillance to try to determine what makes him tick. Dozens of bureau counterintelligence specialists are posing as hotel bellhops, waiters, interpreters and guards in downtown Washington to observe every move of Gorbachev and senior members of his entourage during the summit.

The Soviet KGB has responded in force, the sources said, deploying even greater numbers of intelligence operatives to both guard against American penetration and to collect every pertinent tidbit on the Reagan Administration.

Several U.S. intelligence sources told UPI that psychiatrists working for the FBI have been assigned to try to learn from the Soviet leader’s body language how he thinks and makes decisions.

One source said some of these experts have posed as “security people, interpreters or hotel bellmen” to monitor Gorbachev or his aides who are staying at the exclusive Madison Hotel.

Government intelligence sources said that lip-readers will study countless hours of secret films of the Soviet leader as he goes through an ordinary day.

“You want to get his confidential asides to his aides,” a CIA source said. “He may be looking over a podium and say something snide or he may say something funny--which would make him the first Soviet leader in history to have a sense of humor.”

In the excitement of the treaty signing and the first U.S.-Soviet summit in Washington in 14 years, the critics of the suddenly more congenial relations with Moscow have not found it easy to get their words of caution heard. Perhaps Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus used up all their megatonnage when he labeled President Reagan a “useful idiot for Soviet propaganda” before the meeting began.

But conservatives are still trying.

Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned against being taken in by the charismatic Soviet leader and his chic wife.

What the admiral said was that “Gorbachev wears Gucci shoes and eats with a knife and fork, but he still believes in world domination.”

He didn’t go so far as to say he will man his battle station against the new missile treaty, but he said the United States ought to move out smartly on strategic defense--ABM treaty or no ABM treaty.

And, he said, he has a petition already signed by 1,100 retired admirals and generals who agree with that proposition.