Shevardnadze, Baker Clash on 3rd World Policy

Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze clashed sharply over Afghanistan and Nicaragua on Friday but also moved close to signing several technical agreements on arms control, officials said.

Baker and Shevardnadze, meeting in a luxurious lodge beneath the snow-topped crags of the Teton mountains, spent almost two hours of an intense one-on-one session sparring over their policies on the Third World conflicts, officials said.

The two men became so absorbed in the argument that their meeting ran more than an hour later than scheduled, leaving dozens of senior aides waiting in lobbies and hallways.

But U.S. and Soviet officials said the forceful exchange did not derail the two countries’ plans to sign an agreement today on “trial verification” of their nuclear arsenals and to announce the timing of a first summit meeting between President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Bush Administration officials often have pointed to Soviet behavior in the Third World as a key test of whether the “new thinking” proclaimed by Gorbachev has any real impact on the Kremlin’s foreign policy.

According to a senior aide, Baker told Shevardnadze bluntly “that when we take a look at some of the patterns of Soviet involvement (in the Third World) . . . there is, from our standpoint, a disturbing flow of arms.”

He said U.S. intelligence reports have detected “a surge of arms” to pro-Soviet regimes in Cambodia and Ethiopia, “a tremendous increase” in weapons shipments to the pro-Moscow government in Afghanistan and a continued flow of weaponry from the Soviet Bloc to the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.

“That doesn’t seem to fit our understanding of what ‘new thinking’ is supposed to embody,” he quoted Baker as saying.

Shevardnadze rejected the criticism and accused the United States of acting irresponsibly by continuing its military aid to Muslim rebels in Afghanistan, officials said.

“In our view, the United States is violating its obligation as a guarantor of the Geneva accords (reached in 1988 to end the Afghan war),” a senior Soviet official said, pointing to continued U.S. arms shipments to the rebels. That agreement calls for an end to foreign aid to the rebels, but the Bush Administration has said it will continue sending supplies as long as Moscow continues active support for the Kabul regime.

U.S. Officials Annoyed

In the case of Nicaragua, Shevardnadze annoyed U.S. officials by sticking to his position that the Kremlin has stopped sending arms directly to the Sandinistas but is powerless to stop its allies like Cuba from doing so.

The Baker-Shevardnadze argument, as recounted by their aides, sounded like a return to the days of U.S.-Soviet polemics before Gorbachev came to power. But officials on both sides took pains to stress that the dispute did not poison the two countries’ discussions on other issues.

“It was a discussion that was carried on in a way that suggested that these two men have established a working relationship” in which both sides “have to be honest and candid,” a U.S. official said.

Soviet officials said they were neither surprised nor upset by the U.S. criticism, but they also appeared anxious to turn the meeting’s attention toward arms control, the subject the Kremlin wants to keep at the center of the superpower agenda.

Shevardnadze and Baker spent much of the afternoon discussing the proposals advanced by Gorbachev in a nine-page letter that the Soviet foreign minister delivered to Bush on Thursday.

Among Gorbachev’s offers was a suggestion to break a long-running U.S.-Soviet deadlock over testing weapons to defend against nuclear missiles, a dispute that has been a major obstacle to the conclusion of a strategic arms reduction (START) treaty.

Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Viktor P. Karpov told reporters that his country was willing to agree to “some testing of devices in space” and suggested that the two sides agree to a list of permissible tests. U.S. officials, who have long asserted a right to test exotic beam devices in space under the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, said they were willing to consider the Soviet approach.

Two years ago, some U.S. officials suggested such an approach, and the Soviets seemed to endorse it. But then-President Ronald Reagan, who feared limiting tests could cripple his controversial Strategic Defense Initiative, rejected it.

Officials said the expected agreement on “trial verification” would formalize a surprisingly fast acceptance by the two countries of a new principle in arms control talks: that experiments to test the feasibility of systems to verify the size and location of nuclear weapons can be conducted even before a treaty to reduce them is complete.

The Bush Administration proposed the idea in June, but Soviet officials insisted that the agreement to be signed today was devised by their experts in Moscow. The pact is a general agreement by both sides to begin working on ways to begin mutual verification of each others’ arsenals, a key part of any arms reduction effort.

Baker and Shevardnadze are also expected to sign an agreement to exchange information before any major test or exercise of strategic nuclear forces, a Soviet official said.

They also may sign an agreement to swap information about the size and location of each others’ chemical weapons, a step toward reducing those arsenals, officials said--although some officials said last-minute snags could delay that pact.

Baker and Shevardnadze met here, at a resort built by the late John D. Rockefeller III, as part of an agreement to begin varying their twice-yearly meetings beyond Washington and Moscow.

Before they began, they took a moment to survey a breathtaking vista of glacial mountains, gaudy yellow aspen trees--and a pair of courting moose.

“We had to tie the moose down with chains,” Baker quipped.

“Yes, I noticed that the moose were tied up,” Shevardnadze said with a laugh.