April's Spy Scare

...Won't it tend to "delink" the defense of Europe from the defense of the United States...

...And they don't count on it...

...In Berlin that preceding weekend, I heard Ambassador Richard Burt rehearse the arguments to be made to NATO: The Soviets would be giving up roughly twice as many warheads as NATO...

...When the Soviets said "yes" to the American-proposed "zero option" on intermediate missiles in Europe, the "squeezers" came up with the problem of shortrange missiles...

...Since then the United States government has gone into the intelligence business on a big scale, yet public attitudes have not quite come to terms with that reality...

...In less than a month, the Army reported receiving roughly 2,000 calls, although none was deemed worth pursuing...

...At the Berlin conference there was some discussion of the U.S...

...risking devastation by launching a nuclear strike from its soil in response to a nonnuclear attack on a European country...

...should advertise its security defeats...

...As revealing as anything was a conversation I had on April 10 with Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle (who had announced his resignation, but was still in office awaiting the confirmation ofasuccessor...

...What they do not see as part of the game is permitting the spy sensations—any more than the controversy last August over the arrest of diplomat Gennadi Zakharo ? and journalist Nicholas Daniloff—to impede the climb up the foothills to the summit to ratify an arms control agreement...

...Previously, the Administration had difficulty taking "yes" for an answer...

...An agreement would reduce the danger of nuclear war, ease East-West tensions, and improve the prospects for further arms reductions...

...How can President Reagan meet with Gorbachev when Secretary Shultz can't even find a safe room in Moscow to talk to his staff...

...but we don't stop doing business...

...Nor was there any public Soviet reaction when an American spy in Moscow fed back to Washington a telegram from former Ambassador Anatoly Dobrinin, reporting on his breakfast conversation with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger...

...Disappointing those of his supporters who have sought to derail the pursuit of an accord, he said: "We recognize espionage takes place...

...Still, say the Europeans, isn't this proposed agreement a step toward "denuclearization" in Europe...

...Won't it leave Western Europe at the mercy of superior conventional forces...

...As far back as 1978, however, in a Brussels speech, Kissinger warned Europeans not to count on the U.S...

...Army Counter Intelligence set up a national toll-free "hot line" that permitted soldiers to dial 1-800-CALLSPY to report suspicious persons or activities...

...to the Soviets, it is merely part of the game...

...As he battles to consolidate power and dismantle the late Leonid I. Brezhnev's team, they must wonder when they will face challenges and power struggles...

...The outcome of the Moscow talks the week of April 13 brought to a head the latent schizophrenia of Western Europe, which has dreamed of abating the nuclear confrontation between the superpowers even while it has dreaded the removal of the American nuclear umbrella...

...The Soviets must have thought it peculiar that the U.S...

...Meanwhile, Gorbachev's visit to Prague was short...

...Once Gorbachev also said "yes" to phasing out short-range missiles, the Administration appeared ready to accept his answer—after a suitable period for "stroking" the allies in West Europe...

...President Reagan, under the pressure of Congressional hearings on the Iran-contra scandal, seems very much in his "dealer" mode...

...Hecame late because of "a cold" (subsequently amended to "slight cold"), and left early because he had bigger fish to fry back in Moscow...

...No corresponding headlines appeared in Pravda after American intelligence tapped Soviet underwater cables by submarine, or in East Berlin by tunnel...

...Gorbachev has been assiduously campaigning to unseat the Party leader in the Ukraine, Vladimir Shcherbitsky, last of the Brezhnev men in the Politburo...

...So early this April, when the Czech regime that came to power on the backs of the Soviet tanks had to play host to Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the prophet of openness and reorganization, I couldn't help noticing a sardonic Prague joke that made its way through the diplomatic pipeline to Washington: Party chief Gustav Husak planned to invoke the Brezhnev Doctrine and ask for fraternal tanks to be sent to Moscow to stamp out the Gorbachev heresy...

...Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR April's Spy Scare In 1968 I was in Prague when Soviet, East German and even Polish tanks occupied Czechoslovakia to stamp out the budding liberalization called the "Prague Spring" or "Socialism with a human face...

...There followed lurid accounts of Marine-conducted tours for the KGB and of the betrayal of Soviet spies working for the CIA, some of them unconfirmed...

...Administration being divided between "squeezers" and "dealers"—those who want to keep pushing the Soviets and those anxious to reach an agreement...

...In 1959, Nikita S. Khrushchev jokingly suggested to President Eisenhower at Camp David that, as an economy measure, they should share the salaries of double agents...

...They consider it routine to run hostile espionage and friendly diplomacy on separate tracks simultaneously...

...It would bea historic irony if out of the mess of arms for Iran and the contras came nuclear arms control...

...After that, will it be the time for reckoning for the relics of the Brezhnev era in Eastern Europe...

...Especially rankling, I found, were the gibes of Soviet spokesmen, making jokes like, "We thought Americans saw a Communist under every bed, not in every bed...

...The bugged new U.S...

...In any event, anuclear "presence" would be maintained through tactical, or "battlefield," weapons that the United States would in no case bargain away...

...position...

...Have no fear, says the Reagan Administration, citing the "extended deterrence" of America's intercontinental missiles, the ultimate nuclear umbrella...

...Embassy in Moscow into a broadcasting studio is carrying glasnost alitile too far...

...Husak and other hardline dictators, like Erich Honecker in East Germany, have much reason to worry about the new man at the top in the Kremlin, and not alone because of his calls for glasnost and economic reform...

...embassy in Moscow, built with Soviet labor, was not really news...

...I asked West German Defense Minister Manfred Wörner, during a dinner meeting, what his greatest worry was about America...

...A meeting with Secretary of State George ? Shultz was coming up, on which hinged whatever chance remained for an arms control agreement and a summit meeting during the final quarter of President Reagan's tenure...

...When Khrushchev stormed out of the Paris Summit in 1960, it was not because the United States had flown a U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union, but because President Eisenhower had taken public responsibility for the action...

...He paused for a long time before replying with one word, "Unilateralism...

...The string of security disasters, from the John Walker spy ring to the penetration of our Moscow embassy, seized the country's attention...

...Its origins were somewhat mysterious...

...On a coast-tocoast lecture tour during this period, I received numerous questions, such as "How can the Russians be asking for our friendship and arms control while bugging our embassy and seducing our Marine guards...

...Europe will have to live with changing realities...

...In the U.S., it was not much longer than a half-century ago that Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson closed down a code-breaking unit established during World War I, saying, "Gentlemen don't read each other's mail...

...American surprise and indignation about Soviet spying underscores a deep difference of culture and mentality between the two countries...

...The sex-spy activities of the Marine guards that compromised the old embassy were news, but news which had been successfully withheld for months until there was a leak, last January, to the Los Angeles Times...

...The first week of April, as Shultz was preparing to fly off, the United States was in the grip of a full-fledged spy scare...

...Perle had no trouble recognizing himself as the high priest of the "squeezers," but clearly this was the time when the "dealers" in the Administration had finally come into their own...

...The President, who once could have been easily led into inveighing against "the evil empire," talks more soberly and moderately these days...

...Perle listened with interest to the details of the Post report, then said this was the first he had heard of them, not having been involved in the process of defining the U.S...

...The Soviets would lose an important military option and an instrument for blackmail against Western European countries...

...In the USSR, spying and surveillance are accepted as normal...

...As justification for the invasion, the Soviet Union proclaimed the "Brezhnev Doctrine," guaranteeing the "fraternal assistance" of the Warsaw Pact armies to preserve Communism in any country where it might be threatened...

...We were both in Berlin attending a German-American conference...

...Daniel Schorr is currently the senior news analyst for Motional Public Radio...

...Hours prior to his departure for Helsinki to join the Shultz party, I asked him about a Washington Post story outlining the President's instructions to his Secretary of State...

...The momentum toward agreement, and a summit, seems wellnigh irreversible...

...And in April, as in August, Ronald Reagan has seemed willing to go along...

...Playing the Game To Americans today, turning the U.S...