SUMMIT NOTEBOOK : Leaders Cruise River in Confiscated Yacht

For President Bush, a summit isn’t a summit unless some highly visible leisure time is tossed into the mix.

He has made a point of scheduling at least one unstructured meeting at each of his superpower summits.

In 1990, he took then-Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to Camp David for horseshoes and some relaxed shirt-sleeves time together; Gorbachev reciprocated the next year when he invited Bush to his dacha outside Moscow. Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin first got a look at Camp David in February.

The tradition continued Wednesday afternoon, when Yeltsin cruised with the President on Maryland’s Severn River in a 63-foot, luxury motor yacht seized from drug dealers in 1980.

The jaunt, which began at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, included Secretary of State James A. Baker III, Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady, U.S. Ambassador to Russia Robert S. Strauss and American and Russian aides.

The initial premise of a boat trip was to give Yeltsin a close-up look at the federally subsidized environmental cleanup of Chesapeake Bay. It followed by one day Yeltsin’s request that the United States help Russia with the massive cleanup of chemical pollution in the Baltic Sea.

But, in the end, the White House decided that a ride along the Severn--its banks dotted with multimillion-dollar waterfront mansions--would provide prettier scenery.

Along the way, they were greeted by smiling and waving sunbathers on nearby boats, which had somehow eluded a Coast Guard ban on the use of that section of the river.

After stunning Americans with his bombshell on Vietnam-era POWs, Yeltsin offered tantalizing hope that more revelations may be forthcoming about another incident long shrouded in mystery: the Soviet downing of a Korean Airlines jet, Flight 007.

In September, 1983, 269 people, including 61 Americans, were killed when a Soviet MIG shot down the Korean airliner after it strayed into Soviet airspace.

In his joint news conference with Bush on Wednesday, Yeltsin said that, after seizing the archives of the KGB and the Communist Party after the collapse of the coup by hard-liners last August, his new government discovered a document “that might help us to unravel the entire tragedy with the Korean Boeing.”

The document, according to Yeltsin, is a memo from the KGB to party leaders stating documents exist that would “clarify the entire picture.”

“The next line then says these documents are so well concealed that it is doubtful that our children will be able to find them,” he said.

“We are trying to find those documents that were referred to. And I still cherish the hope that we’ll be able to find them, and if we do so, we will immediately make them public.”

With Russia now openly embracing Western-style economics, it should come as no surprise that Yeltsin sought out an American business audience Wednesday to make a pitch for investment opportunities in Russia.

At a U.S.-Russian conference in Washington, Yeltsin stressed that Russia is open for business, despite concerns among Western analysts that he and his government may be backpedaling from controversial economic reforms in the face of conservative opposition.

He noted, for example, that Russia, traditionally one of the world’s largest oil producers, is “prepared to open our energy sector for foreign investment.”

And Yeltsin offered another sign that U.S.-Russian relations are normalizing when he criticized the United States’ trade policies--just as other American allies and trading partners do.

In his speech, Yeltsin chided the United States for imposing duties on Russian uranium exports, which American officials say are being dumped here at artificially low prices.