Relief Agencies Swap Horror Stories on Aid : Russian winter: Groups learn to deal with bureaucracy, corruption and logistic barriers.

Jim Garrison knew it wouldn’t be easy when he took his first planeload of medical relief supplies to the former Soviet Union last December. But the difficulties came quicker than he had expected.

“As soon as we landed in Moscow, the Russians took us into an airport lounge for a press conference,” recalled Garrison, who runs a San Francisco-based relief effort called Russian Winter Campaign.

“Not more than five minutes later, one member of our delegation discovered she had left her purse on the plane,” he said Wednesday. “She went back to get it and then we heard her scream. We hadn’t been gone five minutes and the soldiers guarding our plane were already breaking open the cases with their rifle butts and making off with the supplies.”

Garrison was able to retrieve the supplies--medicines and other pharmaceuticals for Moscow, St. Petersburg and other major cities in the former Soviet Union--and to distribute them to doctors.

While foreign ministers from 47 nations assembled Wednesday in the rarefied atmosphere of the State Department’s antique-adorned diplomatic receiving rooms, representatives from several hundred private relief groups met in the less formal surroundings of a downtown hotel.

There they exchanged insights and swapped stories about their efforts to cut through the bureaucracy, circumvent the corruption and leap-frog the logistic barriers in the former Soviet empire.

Their experiences, which have been widely reported in recent weeks, have taught philanthropists a lesson about transporting medicine, food or winter clothing: “Never, ever, let your eyes off the stuff” until it is injected, eaten or worn by those who need it, said Jeffrey Gloss, president of Carelift International, another nonprofit group airlifting medicines to Moscow.

“When I took 40 tons of medical equipment into Moscow last Dec. 5, I refused to let the Russians warehouse the shipment and I refused to leave the tarmac until they agreed to provide the trucks to take the supplies directly to the hospitals for which they were intended,” Gloss said. “It took all night, but it was the only way. You learn quickly to never ever take the word of a local official who comes up to you and says ‘No problem, I’ll take care of it.’ In Russian, ‘no problem’ invariably means lots of problems.”

The conference was sponsored by the Citizens Democracy Corps, a group of business leaders organized by the White House to coordinate private aid to the former Soviet republics. The session brought together officials from relief groups that ranged from giants such as the International Red Cross, CARE and the Catholic Relief Services to newer, smaller outfits like Carelift, which, founded last year by Gloss and his wife, is the relief agency equivalent of a Mom and Pop store.

“The value of a meeting like this,” said Arthur A. Hartman, a former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union who is moderating the two-day conference, “is that we can all learn a lot from each other about what works, what doesn’t work, who has the authority over there and who misuses that authority.”

The message that emerged from the first day was that the aid will get through--if supervised by Western officials all the way. “The Germans did it all wrong,” one participant said, referring to reports that as much as 80% of the food aid donated to Russia by Germany had disappeared soon after arriving. “They gave it to Russian government officials, instead of making sure it went where it was supposed to go.”

Many groups reported that they have sharply limited pilferage by setting up their own offices and warehouses to control distribution.