Agenda ‘Flexible’ for U.S.-Soviet Talks

U.S. officials, acknowledging that next week’s meeting of Soviet and U.S. leaders will go beyond the usual courtesies, said Wednesday that the session will have a “very flexible” agenda of “substantive” issues, including arms control, the Berlin Wall, human rights and Afghanistan.

The session in New York next Wednesday, including Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, President Reagan and President-elect George Bush, previously had been portrayed as little more than a goodby lunch with Reagan and a get-acquainted chat between Bush and Gorbachev, who is visiting to address the United Nations.

But White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater, saying that “the agenda is very flexible,” Wednesday cited several contentious subject areas that have concerned the superpowers for years and will continue to confront the incoming Bush Administration.

“The President unquestionably will raise the human rights issue,” Fitzwater said during his daily briefing. “He will discuss the status of arms control. He will talk about bilateral issues and also regional conflicts, Afghanistan and other areas.”

Secretary of State George P. Shultz even raised the issue of the Berlin Wall, saying that the United States would welcome from the Soviets the “brilliant gesture” of tearing it down.

Surprising gestures are not alien to meetings between Reagan and Gorbachev. In October, 1986, in what had been billed as a “mini-summit,” the two men flirted with the historic prospect of eliminating all offensive nuclear weapons in both nations’ arsenals. Those talks collapsed amid disagreement over the Strategic Defense Initiative, Reagan’s space-based missile defense system, also known as “Star Wars.”

On Wednesday, U.S. officials said that the Soviets have stopped jamming Radio Liberty in an apparent good-will gesture just before Gorbachev’s visit, meeting one Western condition for a 1991 human rights conference proposed by the Soviets.

‘Visible Symbol’

In his remarks about the Berlin Wall, made in an interview on a government-sponsored television broadcast to Western Europe, Shultz called it a “visible symbol of everything that goes with the Cold War and with the era that we would like to see behind us.”

His comments reflect the President’s deep feelings about the wall, expressed most dramatically in a June, 1987, speech at the Brandenburg Gate, when Reagan challenged Gorbachev to “open this gate . . . tear down this wall.”

In his televised remarks Shultz said, “I hope (Gorbachev) makes a lot of forthcoming statements” about reductions of conventional forces in Europe, adding that he is certain that “there will be a lot of substantive discussion” during the luncheon meeting.

Nevertheless, U.S. officials sought to play down expectations of any breakthroughs in the session. “We’re not going there with proposals,” Fitzwater said.

Noting that Reagan leaves office in January, he said the President is “not going to have promises to make.” Of Bush, he said that “it’s unlikely he’ll have commitments to make.”

Fitzwater said that Gorbachev “wants to ensure continuity and progress in dealing with this government and this Administration.” He said that “the most important reason for this meeting is to review where the relationship between the two countries is, to reflect on the historical strides that we have made in our relationship.”

The session is expected to last “two to three hours, certainly no longer than that,” Fitzwater said. Reagan then will return to Washington.

In New York, meanwhile, officials are discussing plans for Gorbachev to visit the New York Stock Exchange and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Staff writers John J. Goldman in New York and Don Shannon in Washington contributed to this story.