U.S. Gets Assurances on Pullout of Soviet Advisers Still in Iraq : Summit: They are to leave when contracts expire. But no crisis settlement is in the works at Helsinki.

The Soviet Union has assured the Bush Administration that Soviet military advisers still in Iraq will be withdrawn as soon as current service contracts expire--this fall for at least some of the advisers--Administration officials said Monday.

Although President Bush may push for quicker and more complete withdrawals of the advisers, the assurances that current contracts will not be renewed could smooth over a potential source of friction between Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev at their summit meeting in Helsinki this weekend.

As the President left Maine to return to Washington, where he will begin today to meet with advisers on his summit agenda, officials also reiterated that Bush and Gorbachev will not attempt to negotiate a settlement of the Iraq crisis at the weekend meeting. U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar had suggested Sunday that a solution to the standoff could come out of the Helsinki session.

“The President said it is not going to be a negotiating session, and it is not going to be a negotiating session,” an Administration official said.

Bush and his advisers have been careful to fend off any suggestions that the two leaders could settle the crisis this weekend for at least two reasons.

First, there is not much Bush and Gorbachev can do right now to force a settlement short of the use of military force, and Bush wants to avoid raising public expectations, fearing a disappointment that could sour the public mood about the anti-Iraq campaign.

A second reason for downplaying the possibility of superpower negotiations on the conflict involves international opinion. Although U.S. officials have been delighted to see the Soviets and Americans on the same side of a major international conflict for the first time since World War II, they realize that for many in the Third World, the idea that the two superpowers might “gang up” to impose a settlement on a smaller country is disconcerting.

That sort of worry about superpower domination could play into the hands of Iraq President Saddam Hussein, who has been trying to rally Arab support by picturing himself as an Arab champion standing up to the “imperialism” of outside powers.

Nonetheless, Administration officials say, Bush does want to make sure that the Soviets continue their unprecedented cooperation with U.S. efforts in the Middle East. For that reason, Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, have emphasized a conciliatory line on the issue of Soviet advisers in Iraq, praising Soviet “cooperation” with the United States in the crisis and the Soviet cutoff of arms to Iraq while avoiding public discussions about the military personnel.

Gorbachev “has cut off Iraq’s arms flow. We’re not going to get upset about 100 or so advisers shuffling paper,” said one Administration official, reflecting that line. Before the crisis, the Soviets were Iraq’s largest arms supplier.

U.S. officials in Washington said they have considered the possibility that it might be useful for some Soviet military advisers to remain in Iraq to gather intelligence on Baghdad’s military moves, but that apparently turned out to be impractical.

The Soviet government said last week that it will not use its military relationship with Iraq to pass intelligence to the West. After the Soviet military attache in Washington, Gen. Grigory D. Yakovlev, visited the Pentagon to discuss Iraq’s military capabilities, Soviet Defense Ministry officials hastened to say that he supplied no secret information to the United States.

“In accordance with treaty commitments to Iraq and established practice in this sphere of international relations, there was no talk of the quantity, tactical and technical characteristics,” the government newspaper Izvestia quoted them as saying.

“The Soviets are quite worried about the safety of their people there,” a State Department official said. “After all, there’s nothing to stop the Iraqis from turning them into hostages too.”

In any case, it seemed unlikely that the Iraqis would allow their Soviet advisers access to any tactical information if they suspected that the intelligence might be channeled to the Pentagon, he said.

In Washington, members of a 22-member House delegation that returned from a trip to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt late Monday said the United States must press its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies to assist the multinational peacekeeping efforts with ground forces, and not just weapons.

“We need more help and we need our NATO allies to have troops on the ground, and we will be calling for that in the days ahead,” said House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), who led the delegation on the three day trip.

Gephardt and House Minority Leader Robert H. Michel (R-Ill.) also said the United States must press its allies for economic assistance. “We need burden sharing,” Gephardt said.

Times staff writers Doyle McManus and Robert W. Stewart, in Washington, contributed to this report.