Months of Secret Negotiations, U.S. Role as Broker Led to Gorbachev-Roh Talks : Diplomacy: President Bush will be briefed today by the South Korean leader on the meeting.

The negotiations were so secretive and sensitive that Seoul’s Blue House, the office of South Korean President Roh Tae Woo, kept its own Foreign Ministry in the dark, and U.S. and South Korean officials both agreed not to tell the Japanese.

At one crucial point, Anatoly F. Dobrynin, the former Soviet ambassador to the United States, was sent from Moscow to Seoul to continue the high-level, clandestine diplomacy.

Monday’s historic meeting between Roh and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev was the result of several months of furtive, on-again, off-again negotiations among senior officials of South Korea, the Soviet Union and the United States, which played the dual role of host and marriage-broker. Roh flew to Washington on Tuesday and will tell President Bush today about his groundbreaking session here with the Soviet leader.

The event was a milestone, not only for South Korea but also for U.S. policy in Asia and perhaps Soviet policy as well. Not since the days of World War II has the United States tried so hard to encourage top-level contact between the Soviet Union and an American ally in Asia.

U.S. officials were, in effect, opening the door for the Soviet Union in a country where more than 40,000 American troops remain as part of the U.S. military policy of forward deployment in Asia and the Pacific. The United States was willing to do this because the Roh-Gorbachev meeting enhanced the stature of its South Korean ally and eventually could help spur political and economic changes in the heavily militarized Communist regime of North Korean President Kim Il Sung.

Officially, the Bush Administration has sought to portray the Roh-Gorbachev session as one that was worked out solely by the Soviets and South Koreans.

“We’re just providing the turf,” one State Department official insisted last week.

In fact, however, the United States was intimately involved in arranging the Roh-Gorbachev meeting, according to accounts of American and South Korean sources familiar with the negotiations.

The idea for the meeting dates back to last April. At that time, Kim Young Sam, one of the leaders of South Korea’s ruling Democratic Liberal Party, had just returned from a trip to Moscow in which he succeeded in meeting with Gorbachev.

In Washington, planning was already under way for the impending summit meeting between Presidents Bush and Gorbachev. U.S., South Korean and Soviet officials began talking about the possibility of having Roh come to the United States at the same time. Roh had already scheduled a visit to Canada and Mexico for late May. The idea was that he could stop in Washington during the same trip.

According to one senior Bush Administration official, the United States was worried that the Soviet Union might seek to revive an old idea called “cross-recognition”--asking that the United States make some gesture toward North Korea parallel to the Soviet overture to the south. U.S. officials were prepared with a series of arguments outlining why issues involving North Korea should be kept on a separate track.

However, said this official, “the Soviets never raised the issue.”

At the outset, according to another U.S. source, South Korean officials pressed hard for a three-way meeting in which Roh would meet in Washington with both Gorbachev and Bush. Soviet officials rejected this idea, which would have turned the South Korean leader into one of the star attractions surrounding the summit itself.

“It was just a suggestion,” Ambassador Hong-choo Hyun, South Korea’s permanent observer to the United Nations, told The Times. “A three-way meeting turned out to be impractical, considering all the complications involved.”

And so, through much of May, the secret diplomacy stalled. One U.S. official suggested that the lack of agreement on a meeting with Gorbachev was one of the factors that prompted Roh to cancel his late-May trip to Canada and Mexico. South Korea said that the president needed to remain in Seoul to deal with labor upheavals.

The breakthrough came when Dobrynin, Gorbachev’s top foreign policy adviser, visited Seoul in late May. The Soviets and South Koreans agreed to a Roh-Gorbachev meeting in San Francisco, away from the Washington summit.

“San Francisco was fine with us,” said one Bush Administration official.

One U.S. source said that, until the last minute, the Blue House cut the Foreign Ministry out of the talks to prevent news leaks. The Japanese were kept in the dark for similar reasons.

“That is possible, because these things are very sensitive,” Hyun conceded in an interview. “But once the decision was made (for the Roh-Gorbachev meeting), the (South Korean) Foreign Ministry was the first to be contacted.”

The news broke in Seoul on May 30, as Foreign Ministry officials began to make final plans for Roh’s trip to San Francisco.

Curiously, North Korean officials had scheduled a meeting with U.S. officials in Beijing on that day, May 30. It was the tenth in a series of talks over the last two years between U.S. and North Korean diplomats in Beijing.

At that session in Beijing, however, North Korea had nothing new or far-reaching to discuss. It is not clear whether the North Koreans were aware then of the plans for Roh to meet Gorbachev.

Having helped to orchestrate the breakthrough, some Bush Administration officials now admit that they have a few qualms about possible implications of a rapprochement between Moscow and Seoul.

“The Soviets have their own agenda,” one U.S. official noted.

He said that Gorbachev may attempt to play off two U.S. allies--Japan and South Korea--against each other. Relations between Japan and the Soviet Union remain cool, primarily because of a dispute over four islands off Japan that the Soviet Union has occupied since the end of World War II.

Further, a State Department official said he is worried that Gorbachev may seek to “use the South Koreans for their own purposes” by seeking to revive the old Soviet idea of a collective security conference in Asia. The United States has long opposed these proposals.

But in the glow of Monday’s historic meeting, all such problems seemed minor and manageable.

Asked about the U.S. role in bringing Roh and Gorbachev together, one South Korean official smiled and quipped: “The meeting is a success. So it has many fathers.”