Malta Chosen as Base for Bush-Gorbachev Sea Talks

The Mediterranean island of Malta will be the base of next month’s informal summit at sea between President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, U.S. and Soviet officials said Wednesday as they scrambled to arrange a superpower session not quite like any other.

Planning at the White House for the Dec. 2-3 event moved forward on two tracks--the issues the President will face during a free-form conference at which any topic will be fair game, and the unusual logistics involved with having the entire affair on the water.

The independent republic of Malta offers a neutral site convenient to the U.S. 6th Fleet, the American host, and to Rome, the site of a Gorbachev visit before the summit.

Located 58 miles south of Sicily, Malta is actually a grouping of five islands--two of them uninhabited--where vacationing Britons reflect the colonial status that Malta shed in 1964. The country’s main island is also called Malta. Visitors from Libya, 220 miles farther south, reflect the islands’ present ties to North Africa.

While each side is emphasizing the informal and unstructured tenor that they hope the summit will achieve, they diverge in their expectations of its results.

U.S. officials held out few specific goals. Not so the Soviets.

“I think that this meeting can just be the end of the Cold War,” said Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady I. Gerasimov on ABC-TV’s “Good Morning America” program. “The Cold War will be dumped down to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea.”

An initial White House survey team planned to leave Washington Friday to begin preparations in Malta. The team will be led by Sig Rogich, a Las Vegas political consultant and advertising executive who joined the White House staff several weeks ago as assistant to the President.

“Logistically, we’re working with the military to firm up plans for appropriate ships, and travel between the mainland and the ships, and communications equipment for the meetings themselves,” White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said.

While many Presidents have visited U.S. Navy ships, summit conferences at sea are rare events. The last major one was in 1941, when Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met aboard a British warship shortly before America entered World War II.

Administration officials said they expect the Navy to suggest to the White House this week the U.S. ships that could serve as host during one of the two days of meetings. The other day will be spent on a Soviet warship.

With military symmetry taking on diplomatic importance, Pentagon officials have indicated that the likely vessels will be cruisers. But, said Fitzwater, “it might change to another kind of ship. It’s not set in concrete, or even high water.”

Bush and his aides stressed that they and the Soviets would prepare no specific agenda for the meeting. Even so, teams of officials from the State Department and the National Security Council staff at the White House have been at work for some time preparing briefing materials and background papers on the wide range of issues that the two leaders could raise, officials said.

To maintain the secrecy under which initial preparations for the summit were conducted, the groups were given no idea why the material was sought, one Administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“A lot of the work has been done,” he said. “People just didn’t know what they were working on.”

Although no minute-by-minute agenda is being prepared, leaving Bush and Gorbachev free to pursue a line of discussion as long as they wish, Bush nevertheless will arrive in Malta armed with a lengthy list of topics to be addressed, the official said.

At the top of the list will be the Soviet economy and the political and economic upheaval in Eastern Europe, he said, with Soviet support for Nicaragua close behind.

“Basically, what you’ve got is a bunch of provocative themes you want to raise--’What are you trying to do in Nicaragua, what is the purpose of the aid, what is it you think you’re accomplishing?’--and seeing what the guy says,” said the official.

As portrayed by Fitzwater, the trip will take Bush out of the country no more than three days, including the two days of the summit.

The spokesman said Bush has no current plans to make any stops on the way to Malta or on the way back to preview the meetings with Western allies or to report to them on the talks. But an emissary is likely to visit the European mainland after the meetings to review the talks with other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

To play down expectations in America and Europe, the President and his assistants have emphasized that they do not consider the meeting a full-dress, formal summit conference to be entered with a precise agenda and exited with specific agreements.

But Fitzwater slipped in one reference to the conference on Wednesday.

“We have begun preliminary meetings to plan the summit,” he said, quickly catching himself and adding: “Let me retract the ‘S’ word.”

“Let’s call this ‘the meeting,’ “he said. “ ‘The Big M.’ The Big M planning is under way.”