U.S. Envoy in Moscow Rails at Congress

Abruptly dropping his diplomatic reserve, outgoing U.S. Ambassador Jack F. Matlock Jr. on Wednesday attacked Congress as the source of his greatest frustrations while in Moscow, accusing lawmakers of ignoring the needs of his staff and even endangering their lives by failing to agree on how to replace the decrepit U.S. mission here.

“We have done the nation’s service, and we have done it extremely well, but no thanks to the Congress of the United States,” a clearly incensed Matlock, who will leave Moscow this Sunday after nearly 4 1/2 years as the top U.S. envoy to the Soviet Union, said in an interview.

Although some on Capitol Hill are sympathetic to the difficult working and living conditions of American diplomats here, Matlock said, “collectively, that institution (Congress) has done us a grave disservice and has subjected our people much longer than necessary to abysmal working conditions.”

Since 1985 and throughout Matlock’s tenure as ambassador, the Senate and House have been unable to resolve the problem of the eight-story brick monolith that was built to serve as the new U.S. Embassy in Moscow but which has been deemed unusable because it is honeycombed with KGB listening devices.

In its most recent try, Congress again failed to break the deadlock: The Senate on July 31 voted $130 million to demolish the bugged building and rebuild it from scratch, while the House, although earmarking the same sum, wants the Bush Administration to choose between the “tear-down” option mandated by the Senate and the so-called top hat plan, proposed by the State Department. That plan would mean razing only the top two floors and building four new bug-free ones.

As the congressional debate wears on, many U.S. diplomats in the Soviet capital are working out of makeshift quarters in residential apartments, a converted bowling alley and even an underground parking garage because of a fire that destroyed much of the old embassy building--labeled a crumbling “firetrap” in 1987 by investigating congressmen--last March.

“The biggest frustration, frankly, has been with the inability of Congress to decide on what to do about the new building. I am very resentful of that; I think it was totally unnecessary,” Matlock said, speaking in clipped tones, his anger apparent. “We have to work out of a rabbit warren, a complex of buildings, because of this indecision. We went through a fire where luckily no one got hurt, but easily people could have been killed.”

The bespectacled and habitually placid diplomat blamed ego trips by some members of Congress for the longstanding legislative gridlock.

“A number of senators and a few congressmen made a lot of grandstand statements five or six years ago, and they don’t want to go back on them,” Matlock said. “And these statements, it turned out, many of them were not solidly based on fact.”

Although he offered no names, there is overt feuding on Capitol Hill between the chairmen of the appropriations subcommittees in the two chambers that hold the purse strings for embassy construction and other State Department expenditures--Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.) and Rep. Neal Smith (D-Iowa).

“Five years ago, the rational thing was to tear down and rebuild; for the last year, the rational thing has been ‘top hat,’ which would save us three or four years (of construction time),” Matlock said. “But the two houses of Congress cannot seem to agree, and I think it’s absurd.”

Matlock, 61, an accomplished expert on Russian language and literature, leaves Moscow regarded by many Soviets as the most successful U.S. ambassador in modern times. During his tenure, achievements in U.S.-Soviet relations were numerous and impressive, including the START treaty mandating deep cuts in strategic nuclear weapons, signed at the Moscow superpower summit last month.

A career member of the Foreign Service, Matlock was unfailingly guarded in his public comments about the behind-the-scenes work of superpower diplomacy during his tenure as ambassador, even in his frequent off-the-record sessions with American correspondents, but he said he is now at liberty to be more frank.

“I am leaving post now, and I can say these things--I don’t expect or want to be appointed to anything else,” he said during a wide-ranging interview at Spaso House, the U.S. ambassador’s official residence in Moscow.

Matlock plans to spend the coming year at the W. Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union at Columbia University, where he will work on two books--a history of the Soviet Union during the perestroika era and a study of how foreign policy was formulated when Ronald Reagan was President.

President Bush has nominated Robert S. Strauss, a lawyer and lobbyist and former Democratic Party chairman, to serve as the next U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union.