Bush Hopes for Recall of Soviet Iraq Advisers : Summit: The President will seek more Gorbachev support in the crisis. Preparations for talks are speeded.

President Bush hopes that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev will offer to withdraw his country’s 193 military advisers from Iraq when the two men meet to discuss the crisis in the Persian Gulf, U.S. officials said Sunday.

With an impromptu summit only seven days away, White House and State Department officials launched a furious round of preparations on Sunday to get ready for the conference, the first such U.S.-Soviet meeting ever called on such short notice.

“A week from now, perhaps at this minute, I will be sitting in Helsinki, Finland, talking with President Gorbachev,” Bush told a church congregation in Kennebunkport, Me., where he was finishing a three-week vacation. “These are challenging times.”

Bush is scheduled to return to Washington this evening, but other Administration officials met at the White House beginning on Sunday morning to prepare a specific agenda, U.S. position papers and a mountain of logistic details for the one-day summit next Sunday.

The summit is expected to consist of a morning and an afternoon session, and one of those may focus almost entirely on the crisis over Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, officials said.

Bush and other officials hope to win more concrete support from Gorbachev on the Persian Gulf crisis, including a pledge to withdraw the Soviet military advisers, they said.

The Soviets initially rebuffed U.S. requests that the advisers be removed, “but over time, their position may converge with ours,” an official said Sunday.

U.N. sanctions against Iraq do not explicitly require the withdrawal of foreign advisers, but the Administration has told the Kremlin that the Soviets’ continued presence in Iraq sends “the wrong kind of signal,” the official said.

In Moscow, Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze acknowledged at a news conference that the advisers’ presence was “a problem” that should be solved in time.

U.S. officials said Bush would also welcome an increased effort by Gorbachev to persuade Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. However, Bush said Saturday that he does not believe the Soviet Union should play “a mediating role” in the crisis, because his aim is to keep Moscow on the side of the countries putting pressure on Iraq, not in between, officials said.

Despite the summit’s short time span, officials preparing the agenda said they were instructed on Sunday to add U.S.-Soviet economic cooperation to the list of likely subjects. The probable agenda also includes negotiations on reducing conventional armed forces in Europe as well as peace efforts in Cambodia and Afghanistan, they said.

Meanwhile, two influential senators said they see no need for quick military action against Iraq and called for patience to give the U.N. economic embargo against Iraq a chance to take hold.

“I think we ought to give the present strategy an opportunity to work,” Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on NBC television’s “Meet the Press.” “If we use military force in a way that alienates a lot of our partners in this operation, we will lose the embargo . . . in which case we will be counterproductive to our own aims.”

Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.), the Senate Republican leader, agreed. “I think we still have a great deal of time,” Dole said on CBS television’s “Face the Nation.” “It’s only been . . . about 20 days since the United States became directly involved.”

Nunn said he would support the use of military force to end Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait if economic sanctions failed. But he added: “In getting them out of Kuwait, that doesn’t necessarily mean a frontal assault with ground forces. It may mean air attacks. It may mean cutting off their supply lines. It may mean furthering the squeeze.”

Nunn urged Bush to seek a declaration at the summit “that the long-term goal of the United States and the Soviet Union is not only to get the Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, but, most importantly, to begin to erode (Saddam Hussein’s) ability to make war, and particularly . . . to deny him the ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction beyond the chemical capability he already has.”

He said a Soviet pledge to withdraw advisers from Iraq “would be a strong message to Saddam.”

Meanwhile, a senior government official said Saudi Arabia has offered to assist U.S. covert operations against Iraq with funding and other aid.

Newsweek magazine reported in its Monday issue that Bush has signed a directive approving covert operations to overthrow Hussein but needed to seek outside funding because of budget cuts, and so turned to the Saudis.

“The Saudis and other Arab countries are natural people to assist in certain operations, and they have in the past,” a senior official said, partially confirming the report. “There is nothing specifically earmarked for Iraq, though.”

The official refused to say whether the U.S. operations are aimed specifically at overthrowing Hussein but indicated that the Administration is most interested at the moment in covert operations to cripple Iraq’s ability to use chemical weapons.

“We are not in the business of assassination,” he said. “But sabotage, including wrecking their chemical warfare capability, is not prohibited against a hostile power.”

Saudi Arabia has helped fund several U.S. covert operations in the past, including more than $1 billion to support CIA-backed rebels in Afghanistan and $32 million to the U.S.-backed Contras in Nicaragua.

At the White House, members of the presidential advance staff met Sunday morning to go over logistics for the summit, an exercise that for past summits has consumed weeks, sometimes months, of meticulous planning.

“From a bureaucrat’s point of view, the short notice is something of a mercy,” said one official involved in the planning. “It limits the number of things we can do.”

Meetings to refine the agenda for the summit, however, were not expected to begin in earnest until Tuesday, White House officials said, and Bush has not called any of the Administration’s Soviet policy experts--or any other senior aides--to join him in Kennebunkport for the waning days of his vacation.

Detailed planning may not be as necessary for this meeting as for some past sessions, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said, because the two leaders “both know what they want to talk about.”

One less-than-substantive question, aides said, is whether Bush would travel to Helsinki in the new, larger, faster Air Force One, a modified Boeing 747 that was delivered less than two weeks ago.

Administration officials had worried that the maiden voyage of the costly new plane might draw criticism at a time when the federal budget is being tightened--but the urgency of the summit might solve that problem, they noted.

Times staff writers David Lauter in Kennebunkport and Jack Nelson in Washington contributed to this story.