With Lack of High-Up Interest, ‘Open Skies’ Treaty Falls By Wayside : Negotiations: Unless the President or a senior official gets involved, a once-desired agreement will never come to fruition.

President George Bush’s proposal for “Open Skies,” first ridiculed and then placed on the diplomatic fast track, has now been shelved by bureaucratic machinations in Moscow and Washington. The hijacking of Bush’s proposal for a treaty permitting nearly unrestricted aerial surveillance demonstrates how old habits die hard--even with glasnost in the Kremlin and a new international climate. The demise of Open Skies demonstrates that the hard realities of negotiating arms-control agreements remain unchanged.

The idea of resurrecting President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s proposal, unveiled during Bush’s first major address on U.S.-Soviet relations in May, 1989, was met with near-unanimous derision. The concept was generated by his National Security Council staff, against the resident wisdom of the State Department, Pentagon, Central Intelligence Agency and Arms Control Agency. At the time, Bush’s key advisers were undecided about how to respond to Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s ambitious initiatives and, in their view, a warmed-over gesture from the Cold War would invite unfavorable comparisons and public scorn. But Bush genuinely liked the idea, and his bureaucracy had nothing better to offer.

After the initial catcalls, second thoughts pointed to the wisdom behind Bush’s initiative. New security arrangements for Europe required the participation of all countries, yet few had the means to monitor developments on the ground by satellites. Aerial surveillance could become not just a confidence-building measure, but an enabling instrument, allowing states with modest means to play a constructive role in the treaty-implementation process. Open Skies could also facilitate new patterns of cooperation with East European countries distancing themselves from the Warsaw Pact.

Unlike the proposed agreement reducing Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE), which covered the Atlantic to the Urals, an Open Skies Treaty would cover all the United States and Soviet Union. This meant even earlier warning of troubling developments and greater difficulties for the Kremlin in circumventing its arms-reduction obligations. If Mikhail S. Gorbachev was truly interested in glasnost, how could he reject the President’s initiative?

The Canadian and Hungarian governments championed the idea, offering to host separate rounds of negotiations, while Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze voiced support in principle. National-security bureaucracies in Washington warmed to the task of crafting a negotiating position, and official sources let it be known that they hoped a treaty could be completed by the first anniversary of the President’s speech.

It was all downhill from there. The U.S. intelligence community was at first unenthusiastic about Open Skies, fearing Soviet espionage and budgetary competition for its photo-reconnaissance satellites. Then it sensed an opportunity to get information because of superior technology. The Pentagon backed the idea.

For negotiating and bureaucratic reasons, this view carried the day. But this meant that the negotiating position sold by Washington to its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies projected intelligence-gathering rather than confidence-building. This, in turn, fed into the Kremlin’s lingering paranoia about the real agenda behind Open Skies.

Casting aside any pretense of glasnost, the Soviet foreign and defense ministries came to Ottawa to begin negotiations in a defensive crouch. While the West wanted Open Skies aircraft to carry 12 separate types of sensors, the Kremlin proposed only the most elementary cameras. The West desired to bring reams of data back home for state-of-the-art processing; the Kremlin wanted a common data processing center and information-sharing. The West wanted complete freedom to operate the sensors on board for 24-hour missions inside the Soviet Union, with more then 100 NATO overflights annually; the Kremlin proposed a three-hour time limit for operating sensors and a grand total of 15 NATO overflights per year. Just in case these provisions weren’t objectionable enough, the Soviets demanded aerial surveillance of participating states’ foreign military bases, inviting other countries into the equation.

While the Open Skies negotiations were cooling down, more important negotiations were heating up. Five months after the unveiling of Open Skies, Secretary of State James A. Baker III announced the Bush Administration had decided to respond forcefully to the “historic opportunity” offered by Gorbachev. Baker left no doubt that he was carrying out Bush’s wishes and taking charge of concluding conventional and strategic arms reduction agreements. But then his diplomatic agenda soon became even more crowded.

Preoccupied by German reunification and the rush to conclude CFE and strategic-arms agreements (START), Baker and his top lieutenants couldn’t get excited about Open Skies--especially since the CFE Treaty would, for the first time, provide for rudimentary aerial inspection.

Since no ranking official within the U.S. government took an active interest in the more ambitious Open Skies agenda, the task of trying to engineer an agreement fell on a Foreign Service officer heading up the U.S. delegation and a handful of relatively junior civil servants. They coaxed useful changes in the Western negotiating position, but the Kremlin barely budged from its initial hard-line stance in a second round of negotiations held last April in Budapest.

The West is now prepared to accept a shorter list of agreed sensors, but not sell them to the Soviet Union. For its part, the Kremlin is prepared to accept radars as well as cameras--as long as the radars are less capable than those available commercially. In a third round of negotiations, the NATO position could be further revised to ameliorate Soviet concerns about Western intelligence-gathering. But there is little interest in making this effort as long as Soviet bureaucrats remain so opposed to glasnost.

Instead, allied officials and Bush’s top advisers have decided to concentrate on more important business. Bush tried, during his June summit deliberations with Gorbachev, to resuscitate the talks, spending more time on Open Skies than on any other arms-control initiative except START. The Soviet leader appeared receptive, but his adviser, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, began to add qualifiers. The farther U.S. officials go down the line of command, the more qualifiers they hear.

So Open Skies is bogged down in the bureaucratic trenches, at least until after the 35-nation summit scheduled for November in Paris.

The strange saga of Open Skies demonstrates anew the enduring verities of arms-control negotiations. Mind-sets within national-security bureaucracies change slowly, and every negotiation has become extraordinarily complex. As a result, strong presidential leadership is always needed to push the process forward and to make decisions that no one else can. But if a President becomes too involved, he faces political risks, while other important business begs for attention. The burden of carrying out the President’s negotiating agenda--and the risks of doing so--have fallen on powerful and trusted lieutenants. If they are disinterested or have more important fish to fry, negotiations languish and bureaucratic inertia rules.