Ghost of Disastrous Meeting Haunts Preparations for Israel-Syria Talks : Mideast: December discussions broke down amid generals’ personality clash. The delicate process of picking the new players is now under way.

Having agreed to resume high-level military discussions on Golan Heights security arrangements, Israel and Syria are now engaged in the delicate process of deciding whom to send to the talks, sources said Friday.

U.S. peace envoy Dennis Ross arrives in the region sometime next week to make final the details of the negotiations, expected to begin in Washington before the end of June.

Ross’ first priority is to avoid the sort of disaster that struck when the Israeli and Syrian chiefs of staff met for the first time in Washington last December.

Syrian President Hafez Assad sent Hikmet Chehabi, his military chief of staff, to the December talks. The gesture was considered significant because Chehabi is not only the senior military officer in Syria but also a political force to be reckoned with, a man Assad entrusts with the regime’s survival.

Israel sent then-Chief of Staff Ehud Barak, who now is retired from the army and negotiating for a position in Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s Cabinet. Sources said the choice of generals was unfortunate.

“Chehabi is a very proud man, a man of gravitas, of discipline, with a real military bearing,” said one source who monitored the eight-hour talks between the generals. “His presentation was very precise, focused, specific.”

In contrast, Barak, although highly regarded within the army as an intellectual and a powerful strategic thinker, wears his uniform casually and has an informal manner.

Chehabi, Syrian ambassador to the United States Walid Moualem and a note-taker for Assad ate nothing during the talks. Chehabi drank only water--without ice. He frowned when Moualem accepted a cup of coffee.

In contrast, Barak ate sandwiches by the plateful; his advisers munched away beside him as they talked through the day with their Syrian counterparts.

In a rambling presentation, Barak laid out an Israeli wish list of security arrangements that included demands that the Syrians reduce the size of their army and pull their forces back close to the outskirts of Damascus. He said Israel wanted to maintain early warning stations on the Golan Heights and wanted U.S. supervision of the security arrangements.

The atmosphere, though strained, was described by participants as “polite.”

But Assad reacted with alarm when he later read the transcript of the meeting and went over the many Israeli demands. He then broke off the talks and put forward his demands for “equal” security arrangements, including an equal withdrawal of Israeli and Syrian troops.

“Those talks went wrong because Assad expected to get more substantial Israeli concessions in return for sending Chehabi,” a senior Israeli diplomat in Washington said. “He was disappointed by our position, which was our maximalist position.”

Ross, Secretary of State Warren Christopher and ultimately President Clinton spent the next five months trying to repair the damage caused by the generals’ meeting.

The State Department announced Wednesday that the Syrians and Israelis had finally agreed to resume their military talks.

On Thursday, Syria’s information minister welcomed the resumption of talks. Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres tried to improve the atmosphere by telling a Labor Party meeting that Israel will have to relinquish the Golan Heights to sign a peace treaty with Syria.

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“We must not allow the chance of comprehensive peace in the Middle East to slip through our fingers. No one will forgive us if children learn one day that it was possible to end the wars . . . and we ran away from a decision,” Peres said.

But Israeli political leaders are being cautious about the prospects for the meetings.

“All the negotiations [with Syria] will be very slow, with very small steps, sometimes forward, many times backward,” Police Minister Moshe Shahal told reporters Friday in Jerusalem.

Rabin told reporters Thursday that the gaps remain wide and that Syria has not abandoned its insistence on equal pullbacks--a demand Rabin has said he will never accept. The Syrians merely agreed to accept a U.S. formulation that both sides will be free to raise any security demands they wish during the talks.

Rabin also pointed out that the two sides have yet to agree on the extent of the withdrawal Israel will make from the Golan, the pace of withdrawal and the pace of normalization.

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Christopher is due here the second week in June to finish preparations. U.S. diplomats believe that Syria and Israel will have decided by then whom to send to the talks.

The Americans expect chiefs of staff to either open the meetings or conclude them. But they believe that lower-ranking generals may participate in the nuts and bolts of troop configurations and other measures.

The Americans hope that months of painstaking negotiations will prevent the sort of breakdown that occurred after December’s single round of talks.

“The importance is in the resumption of the negotiations,” Rabin said in an interview on Israel Radio.