NATO, Former Warsaw Pact Foes Drawing Ever Closer : Military: Poland and Czechoslovakia traded intelligence data with the West on Soviet forces in eastern Germany during Kremlin coup attempt.

During the aborted coup in Moscow, the Polish and Czechoslovak militaries traded intelligence data with Western forces on the readiness of 300,000 Soviet troops in eastern Germany, fearful that they might try to fight their way home to help the plotters, East European sources said Friday.

As it turned out, no major Soviet military units in Germany or in the East European border region made preparations to move. But the sharing of radio intercepts and other intelligence information underscores the growing cooperation on the ground between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and some of its former Warsaw Pact foes.

In words as well as deeds, NATO and the former Soviet Bloc nations are moving closer in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, the aborted coup in August and, most recently, of President Bush’s unilateral move to withdraw all ground-based tactical nuclear weapons from Europe, according to U.S. officials and East European diplomats.

The United States and Germany had said Thursday that a formal NATO decision is likely next month to create a “North Atlantic Cooperation Council,” made up of NATO members plus the five East European nations and the Soviet Union, for formal political and military consultations.

Hungary, Czechoslovakia and other East European states immediately applauded the idea as a step toward the ever-closer relationship with NATO that they have sought since they broke military ties with the Soviet Union in 1989.

NATO has made clear, however, that full or even associate membership for any of these states in the alliance is still years away, U.S. officials said, even though the original rationale for shunning the East Europeans--that their involvement would anger Moscow--has disappeared.

In June, the alliance said that its “own security is inseparably linked to that of all other states of Europe.” It noted that consolidation and preservation of those newly democratic societies and their freedom from coercion and intimidation are “of direct and material concern to us.” But it stopped far short of spreading its security blanket over East Europe.

“No one intends to go beyond that language” at the NATO summit meeting in Rome next month, a U.S. official said Friday. “The membership question is not open, and there is no suggestion that it would be opened at some future date.”

East Europeans are probably the Continent’s strongest supporters of NATO today--and of a continued strong U.S. role in it.

“There would be further destabilization of our region if NATO was disbanded,” Hungarian Prime Minister Jozsef Antall said here this week, “as well as in the Soviet Union itself and in Yugoslavia.”

The region’s desire for the closest possible link to NATO is based on:

- Continuing fear of a powerful Soviet Union or Russia that might be inclined to use its muscle, which, while now small compared to NATO’s, remains great relative to East Europeans’. As recently as four months ago, then-Soviet Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov--now jailed as a coup leader--threatened to keep Soviet forces in Hungary until Budapest signed a friendship treaty forswearing any alliance with nations that Moscow viewed as potentially hostile. Hungary refused and the Soviets left, but the memory remains clear and strong, Hungarian officials said this week.

- The hope that NATO eventually will be forced to step in to stop the bloodshed in Yugoslavia and thereby curb the ethnic violence in the region. Some encouragement was provided Thursday by NATO Secretary General Manfred Woerner who, in an interview with the Washington Post, said that he is convinced that “the future role of NATO will center around stability and risk assurance” for the entire continent, with peacekeeping forces to be eventually put in areas of ethnic or border unrest.

- The conviction that they have already cast their lot irretrievably with NATO. Hungary, for example, permitted NATO aircraft to overfly its territory en route to the Middle East during the Persian Gulf crisis and led its reluctant neighbors to insist on dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. The three northern nations of the region--Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary--consider themselves “part of the democratic West now,” one East European diplomat said. “If there is danger, we should be treated accordingly (protected by NATO) even as we strengthen our physical ties with the West, such as building railroads, pipelines and direct telecommunication links.”

- The view that greater security ties to NATO would substitute for being kept at arm’s length by the European Community. These nations have little chance of becoming even associate members in that community by the end of the decade. France, which is most opposed to a broader NATO role in East Europe, recently vetoed even meat imports from East Europe.

As for Moscow, Woerner said, “we will go as far and as fast as the Soviets like” in such peaceful cooperative efforts as helping distribute food across that nation during the winter in the belief that such cooperation will reduce the risk that what’s left of the Soviet Union or the most powerful independent republics can again become confrontational with the West.