Bush Warned Him About Coup Plot, Gorbachev Says : Kremlin: Washington sketched a possible scenario last June. The Soviet leader admits he ignored the alert.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev acknowledged Tuesday that he ignored a personal warning from President Bush last summer that hard-line conservatives were conspiring to oust him and reverse his reforms.

“There was a call from the President himself,” Gorbachev told a press conference, recounting a June telephone conversation with Bush. “And the U.S. President said, ‘We have information--please excuse me, but I must tell you, I cannot just keep this information to myself. . . .’ ”

Quoting what he described as “credible intelligence reports,” Bush sketched a possible coup scenario and provided some names and details, according to Gorbachev aides. Bush told him, “My friend . . . take care,” Gorbachev recalled.

Gorbachev said he replied: “President Bush, do not worry. Everything is all right. Well, at that time, it did not happen.”

But just over two months later, on Aug. 18, conspirators led by the country’s interior and defense ministers, the prime minister, the chief of the KGB security police, Gorbachev’s own chief of staff and his hand-picked vice president took him prisoner at his southern vacation home on the Crimean coast and set in motion a 72-hour putsch.

Despite Bush’s warning phone call and even greater alarms raised by some of his closest advisers, Gorbachev said he did not take the threat of a coup seriously--”I was deeply convinced that only a paranoiac, a madman, could attempt a coup.” Then he added: “I had one reason: I was convinced that it was not a solution to the problem and that this was clear to any sensible person.”

Gorbachev spoke Tuesday at a press conference to introduce his account of the putsch, “The August Coup: The Causes and the Consequences,” a 127-page book that will be published in more than 20 countries this month and next. He is receiving an advance of $500,000 for U.S. rights to the book. The money will likely go to Soviet charities, after taxes are paid.

He lamented the reformers’ loss of political momentum in the three months since the coup and warned that this could allow a comeback by conservatives opposed to fundamental changes in the Soviet political and economic system.

“The situation that prevails is still very dangerous and fraught with many risks,” he said. “The disintegration of our country has reached a very critical stage. . . .

“We must not be naive. Reactionary forces are recovering from the shock, but they are consolidating themselves and they have not laid down their arms. I do not know how they will continue the struggle, but they will. . . .”

Gorbachev--as he has done increasingly while the reformers have quarreled among themselves--appealed for unity and concerted action to deal with the country’s multiple crises.

“After the abortive putsch, we took a number of decisive, resolute and determined steps,” he said. “But immediately after the imminent danger was over--and maybe this runs in the family, maybe it’s genetic--we sort of relaxed and sat back. Then, it was the old thing all over again--the eternal tug of war that goes on in this country.

“We started dividing up the country, every single thing that we have. . . . We have not put the opportunities we had after the putsch and its aftermath to the best possible use, and all politicians bear responsibility for this,” he said.

What the country needs now are “specific steps” to implement the broad policies that were adopted after the coup collapsed, he said. Half of Gorbachev’s book is a plea, written before the coup, for such fundamental reforms, including development of a mixed economy through the privatization of small- and medium-sized state enterprises and an extensive property reform program to give farmers their own land to cultivate.

To this, Gorbachev has added his account of the putsch, his efforts to resist it and his moves on returning to Moscow to form a firm political alliance with Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin, who led the opposition to the coup.

Oddly, the account of Bush’s telephone call is not in the book, and only two or three of Gorbachev’s aides knew of it.

In New York, where Bush was delivering two speeches, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater confirmed that the President had called Gorbachev in June, “just to say we did receive information that there was a coup against him.” But it was unclear whether Bush’s warning involved the same plot that ultimately sought to overthrow Gorbachev in August, Fitzwater said, adding, “We don’t know who all the plotters were.”

When the coup came, it was apparently set in motion by two events: the planned signing on Aug. 20 of a union treaty, which was to have laid the constitutional basis for the Soviet Union as a federal state with the constituent republics having extensive powers, and a major shake-up in the central government that was to follow.

“On the eve of that signing--no one yet knows this--we had a very major discussion in a limited group of people,” Gorbachev recounted. “We discussed the future of the country, the steps that should be taken not only to reorganize the power structures but also to reorganize the personnel. There were going to be some major personnel changes. I think that discussion was bugged--that’s my personal opinion. Those who got a transcript of it realized there was no place for them. . . . “

Times staff writer Douglas Jehl in New York contributed to this report.