Correspondents' Correspondence

...Moscow was now tantalized anew by the promise of a Helsinki summit, if only it would make concessions on what had become the main problem-the basket on travel, dissemination of information, status of foreign journalists, and educational and scientific exchange...

...Moscow's child, the CESC was conceived more than two decades ago...

...opec...

...The immediate consequence of this system would be to cool any desire for further price hikes by opec...

...All they require is firm American leadership to assure the cooperation of the four or five major industrial nations-the powers that every underdeveloped country (opec members included) depends on for most of its sophisticated imports...

...The Soviets suspected ideological war and the negotiations dragged on, moving from the International Conference Center to the vacated former International Labor Organization (ILO) headquarters on the shores of Lake Geneva...

...Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has repeatedly stated the belief (echoed by President Ford) that unless an agreement is reached, another Arab-Israeli war is certain- which would lead to a second oil embargo that would spell economic disaster for Western Europe and Japan...

...The fact is there are ample solutions to the oil problem that have yet to be explored...

...And the "freer flow of information, people and ideas," as I have already reported in these pages ("Ratifying Soviet Censorship," NL, July 21), was offset by the prerogatives of "national sovereignty...

...In July 1973, with moderate pomp and ceremony, foreign ministers and secretaries gathered in Helsinki's attractive Finlandia House for five days, to open and close "phase one" of the conference: Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and then Secretary of State William Rogers, surrounded by a hot mob of cameramen and correspondents, sipped champagne...

...Some Baltic emigres were jailed for passing out critical leaflets...

...Tired diplomats worked over tired phrases, "bracketing" words set aside for later discussion, "registering" full texts that had passed the inspection of all the conferees, and simply delaying the hardest questions of a document that had grown to a hundred pages until the necessary compromises could be hammered out in corridor bartering...

...Should they change the price, the tax would be adjusted accordingly...

...By July of this year, the men meeting in uncounted sessions in the ex-ILO wood-paneled rooms, decorated with WPA-like murals of muscled proletariat and New World progress, finally talked themselves out...

...Among the more ingenious proposals-and a relatively simple one -is a strategy put forth by an Israeli economist and publicist, Avraham Schweitzer...

...Since Kissinger can hardly expect the Arabs to get the jitters at the thought of an energy-starved Europe, one may assume such talk was intended to make Jerusalem more "flexible...

...In the end, the Soviet Union's long sought "inviolability of frontiers" was diluted by the West's "peaceful change of borders...

...But the majority of them were still dissatisfied at this point, and the talks went on...

...Kissinger is apparently trying to construct a 1975 version of the ill-fated Baghdad Pact, with Cairo, Teheran and Riyadh cast in the roles formerly held by Ankara, Baghdad and Karachi...

...In short, the key that sets the oil price level would still be in opec hands...

...It is amazing that the Secretary of State is devoting so much time and effort to building castles of questionable strength south and east of the Mediterranean when U.S...

...Rogers' replacement, Henry Kissinger, peeling off from the third Nixon-Brezhnev meeting and surely reflecting the Soviet Union's desire as well, tried to persuade West European leaders to wind up the conference...

...Thus it was not until November 1972 that nato condescended to "preparatory" consultations among 35 nations in Helsinki...

...He suggests that the advanced nations agree on an equitable rate for crude oil and impose a levy on industrial goods exported to opec countries to make up any price difference...

...And an American diplomat said that phase two should be wrapped up in about six or seven months...

...Malta's Prime Minister Dom Mintoff said he wanted the Middle East brought into the conference...

...The United States and Canada were finally invited to participate in the initial planning stages after the Soviets realized that there would not be any conference without them...

...It would also contribute to a partial-but very significant-restoration in the economic balance between the oil importers and exporters...

...A Finnish official, surveying the long, tedious months, thought there were neither victors nor vanquished...

...Actually launched in Helsinki on July 3, 1973, the effort reached a climax of sorts at the 35-nation summit meeting convened in the Finnish capital this July 30...

...But most of the participants were too weary-and perhaps leery-to do much celebrating...

...The United States and the Western European countries were never much enthralled with a conference that clearly had one overriding aim, namely making permanent the post-World War II boundaries...

...The hard bargaining began that September in Geneva's International Conference Center, where a dozen subcommittees, each assigned to a specific segment of the agenda, settled down to the task of matching wits over multiplying notions of security and cooperation...

...Even more amazing is the lack of ideas coming out of Washington for dealing with the exorbitant fourfold increase in oil prices by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries...

...When all the arguments had been made, the negotiating instructions cabled and the last compromises offered and accepted, the bracketed lines were disposed of one by one...

...positions are crumbling along the ocean's European rim...

...This flexibility-i.e., unilateral Israeli concessions-would put more distance between Cairo and Moscow, while improving American relations with Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat...

...Geneva Notebook Geneva-Some 375 foreign affairs experts and three dozen ambassadors contributed to the Geneva working phase of the Conference on European Security and Cooperation (CESC...

...The USSR's hunger for confirmation of the status quo on the Continent was such that it reluctantly agreed to what became known as the "Blue Book," a 25-page pamphlet outlining in some detail the four main subjects to be discussed by CESC diplomats...

...Its gestation spanned the West German Ostpolitik treaties with the Soviet Union and Poland, former President Richard M. Nixon's first summit with Communist party General Secretary Leonid I. Brezhnev, an agreement improving conditions in Berlin, and the Kremlin's willingness to begin talks in Vienna on troop reductions in Central Europe...

...Roughly 300 working journalists rewrote 35 eloquent speeches about peace and mankind...

...And by driving a wedge between those opec states engaged in large development projects and those that spend only a fraction of their revenues on imports, the Schweitzer plan could, in the long run, destroy the producers' united front...

...These "baskets" covered principles of relations between states, economic cooperation, human and cultural contacts, and conference review machinery...

...For brief moments, it looked like there would be a grand Helsinki summit in the summer of 1974...

...These negotiations, held in a futuristic Helsinki student union set amid lovely pine clusters, continued to June 1973, with the United States and the Common Market Nine dangling before Moscow the tantalizing carrot of a full-scale European Security Conference, if only it would deal with "concrete" issues rather than generalities...

...But any turn of that key would result in more damage to their own growth projects than to the economies of the West.-Eliahu Salpeter...

...If, for example, the "acceptable" rate were set at $5 and the oil producers insisted on maintaining the per-barrel price at the present $11, a 120 per cent export tax would be placed on merchandise sold to them...

...Albania spurned the proceedings early on, taking its cue from China, which dubbed the whole affair the "Conference on European Insecurity...

...Others, who themselves are further removed from the shadow of the USSR, are somewhat less certain.-Mark Hopkins A Modest Oil Proposal Tel Avtv-Amid the diplomatic hustle and bustle involving the Middle East-from the policy "reassessments" in Washington to the various peace maneuvers-one can easily lose sight of the West's primary concern in the area: the present price of oil...

...Even then, it was an uphill struggle for Moscow...

...Every other European state was involved, though, including not only nato members and Warsaw Pact countries but the Vatican, Liechtenstein, San Marino, and Malta...