USIA Chief Presses Drive on Soviet Disinformation

Charles Z. Wick, director of the U.S. Information Agency and one of the Reagan Administration’s most aggressive critics of Soviet information policies, said Thursday that the summit may have produced a breakthrough in East-West communications, but he added: “It may all be like putting love letters in a hollow log.”

Wick made the assessment after meeting for three hours with the heads of Soviet broadcasting and the Tass and Novosti news agencies. He said he had pressed for a halt to an “outrageous disinformation” campaign being carried on by Moscow.

He said he cited a resurgence of material falsely alleging that U.S. intelligence agencies developed and spread AIDS--acquired immune deficiency syndrome--and were behind the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986 and accusing U.S. businessmen of kidnaping Latin American children to obtain organs for surgical transplants.

Claims Denial Lacking

“Soviet scientists last summer finally concluded that AIDS had developed normally, but they didn’t deny the earlier stories that the United States was responsible,” Wick said. “And now, the story (of U.S. involvement) is resurfacing again in the Soviet media, based on third-country sources.”

The United States has acknowledged, however, recent Soviet efforts to stamp out the AIDS story. State Department spokesman Charles Redman, in a statement Nov. 7, noted that a scientific article published Oct. 30 in the official Soviet newspaper Izvestia had disavowed assertions that U.S. agents designed the AIDS virus.

A more favorable sign in Soviet policy, he said, came last May in the decision to stop jamming Voice of America broadcasts made in the major languages of the Soviet Union. He said, however, that broadcasts in the two languages of Afghanistan, Pushtu and Dari, are still being jammed.

He said the Soviets also continue to jam broadcasts of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which are semiofficial U.S. agencies.

The Soviet officials who met with Wick were Alexander N. Aksenov, chairman of the State Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting, Sergei A. Losev, director general of Tass, and Valentin M. Falin, chief of the Novosti press agency. Wick said he walked out on similar talks in Moscow last June, after Falin unleashed a scathing attack on the United States.

Media ‘Tough Guys’

“These are three tough guys,” Wick said. Still, he said, there was a cordial atmosphere during the talks Thursday.

“We were quite pleasantly surprised,” he said. “They said the future of the planet is at stake, depending on how the superpowers conduct themselves. It was a dramatic occasion.”

Wick said he was disturbed on hearing, shortly after the meeting, that Voice of America had been denied access to Gorbachev’s by-invitation-only farewell news conference at the Soviet Embassy.

“We had hoped the new spirit would last more than four or five hours,” Wick said.

The episode ended happily, however, when the Soviet Embassy issued an invitation to VOA reporter Joan Beecher.