The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

Here were all those weary Americans in Vladivostok, about as far away from home as you could get, and they were coming down to the crunch on a nuclear- arms agreement. They needed a place and some time for secret talk among themselves. There was no place to go.

At least they figured there was no place that was not rigged for cameras or bugs or eavesdroppers or all of the above. After all, Soviets are, well, Soviets. Next to hockey, bugging is what they do best.

Jerry Ford put on his big fur hat and heavy coat, and ordered his retinue out into the Primorskian night where it was 10 degrees F and snowing hard. Bill Hyland, then a Ford aide and now editor of Foreign Affairs, chuckled inwardly at the bizarre spectacle of some of the world's most powerful men walking in a strange courtyard at midnight, befurred heads together like so many frozen caterpillars, clouds of steam rising from their whispers about throwweights and MIRVs.

That's a strange way to run the world. It would be hilarious if it were not so serious. But the Soviet penchant for bending and breaking the rules of civilized behavior has plagued every modern President. Not that we don't try our hand at the game, but it's not a way of life, and so we are not very good at it.

When John Kennedy came back from his Vienna summit with Nikita Khrushchev in 1961 he was full of stories about the Soviets' possible intrigue, from smuggling a small atom bomb into the attic of their Washington embassy to monitoring his calls from the White House. How should the U.S. counter it? Kennedy was asked. Go into a protective cocoon? No, he replied, if we did that we would soon be like them. There probably was no answer, he insisted, until the Soviets changed a bit.

There is just the faint suspicion that the stories told about all this skulduggery may be exaggerated. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger liked to tell the one about a visit to Moscow when he was a bachelor. The KGB big shot assigned to his tour kept talking out of the side of his mouth about all the lovely girls he could make available to Kissinger at the slightest signal. Kissinger declined each of the three invitations, but he was tempted to say, "Look, send one around, get your pictures and then leave me alone." After that Kissinger carried a "blabber tape" with him whenever he headed for the Kremlin. The trouble with the tape, which was a jumble of incomprehensible words designed to overwhelm bugging devices, was that when turned up to the required volume, the blabber nearly drove the people in the room out of their skulls.

Richard Nixon, having a conspiratorial bent himself, knew he had to take some precautions on his 1972 visit to Moscow, so he asked to have his limousine with its secure cabin shipped in. The Soviets hassled the Americans, but Nixon was tougher. The car was flown in, and Nixon and his aides repaired there for their discussions.

It was at that summit, as Hyland relates in his new book Mortal Rivals (Random House; $19.95), that the Soviets offered the Americans a special safe for their secret papers, assuring the visitors it was a reliable model. The Americans for once said no. But some of the veterans of that diplomatic foray now wonder if the offer, such an apparent snare, was not really a kind of high-level gesture of hospitality. Soviets spy on Soviets more than on Americans. And since the Soviets wanted the meeting to be a success, the top apparatchiks may have been trying to shield their visitors from the uncontrollable tentacles of the Red bureaucracy.

The comforting thought occurs, as the preposterous story of the great embassy standoff unfolds, that both superpowers are spending so much time, manpower and money on that shady struggle that they will be too depleted for real war.