Ex-CIA Chief Hails INF Pact Verification

Former CIA Director William E. Colby said Thursday that the verification provisions in the new U.S.-Soviet treaty banning ground-based intermediate-range nuclear missiles amount to a “remarkable breakthrough” in arms control negotiations.

Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he called for ratification of the pact “by a resounding vote without harassing amendments.”

Colby’s enthusiastic view of the verification provision put him at odds with INF treaty critics, who see a variety of opportunities for Soviet cheating, as well as some supporters, who contend that full Soviet compliance with the agreement can never be verified.

Impossible to Hide

He conceded that if the Soviets choose, they could violate the intermediate missile ban by hiding “a single weapon, or several weapons,” but he added, “It is not possible to hide an effective military force.”

As the Senate hearings neared the end of a third week of testimony on the treaty, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl called for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to unify behind new initiatives to reach a conventional arms agreement with the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies.

At the same time, he urged the West to resist Soviet pressure to “denuclearize” Europe with a ban on short-range tactical weapons.

The West German leader will meet with President Reagan today, but he spent much of his first day in Washington on Capitol Hill. All members of the Senate were invited to a meeting with him Thursday morning, and he later had lunch with members of the Foreign Relations Committee.

The panel expects to conclude its hearings next week and then begin consideration of several amendments and reservations. Kohl, in meetings with senators who visited Europe last week, urged ratification of the agreement without any amendments that would send U.S. and Soviet representatives back to the negotiating table.

Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), the chief opponent of the treaty, has contended that the Soviet Union may have hundreds more of the SS-20 mobile missiles, designed to hit European targets, than it acknowledged in documents associated with the INF agreement.

Because the missiles are mobile and because they are fired from canisters nearly identical to canisters for the SS-25 intercontinental missile, which is not covered by the treaty, Helms contends there is opportunity for significant cheating.

Questions about verification, Colby said, have hounded arms control efforts all the way back to Bernard Baruch’s arms control proposals in the first years of the nuclear age and remain “the easiest excuse” for killing arms control arrangements now.

Prof. Sidney Drell, co-director of the Stanford Center for International Security and Arms Control, agreed with Colby’s characterization of the treaty’s provisions for on-site inspection at missile facilities as a “breakthrough,” telling the committee: “The provisions for verifying compliance give the United States everything it wants.”

Skeptics’ Views

Far more skeptical were Joseph Douglass Jr., a former deputy director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and William R. Harris, an analyst for the RAND Corp.

While endorsing ratification of the agreement, Harris told senators that he did so “despite an immersion in the record of selective Soviet treaty non-compliance.” Soviet President Leonid I. Brezhnev, he said, had violated more arms control commitments than any leader in the world.

Cheating on treaty obligations, Douglass told the committee, is a carefully planned element of Soviet strategy.

“In the case of arms control,” he said, “cheating and deception are in the planning process even before negotiations begin.”