President Reagan arrived here Saturday night with one of his own aides accusing someone in the U.S. government of trying to sabotage Reagan`s summit meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
The explosive show of disarray in U.S. ranks cast an early shadow over the first American-Soviet summit in six years even before Gorbachev got to town.
How long the cloud will linger and what effect it might have on the summit was uncertain.
It centered on a letter to the President from Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger that was leaked to the New York Times on the eve of Reagan`s departure for Geneva.
In the letter, Weinberger urged Reagan not to make any new commitment at the summit on U.S. observance of the SALT II and Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaties. Weinberger, who was left behind in Washington, takes a hard-line, negative view of nuclear arms-control agreements with the Soviets.
A senior official with Reagan aboard Air Force One en route here from Washington was asked whether the leak amounted to an ”attempt to sabotage the summit.”
”Sure it was,” he replied.
White House spokesman Larry Speakes said Reagan would have ”preferred to read (the letter) in the privacy of the Oval Office and not in the New York Times.”
Speakes, who made no effort to conceal Reagan`s displeasure with the episode, implied but did not express a suspicion that the leak came from the Pentagon.
Robert Sims, chief Pentagon spokesman, said in Washington that the Defense Department had nothing to do with the leak.
An administration official closely associated with Weinberger said he was ”told it (the leak) did not come from the Pentagon.”
”It is very unfortunate because it is a signal of some discord within the administration,” the official said. ”It discredits Weinberger and his position.”
The Weinberger letter accompanied a report, still unreleased, to the White House on alleged Soviet violations of arms-control treaties.
The SALT II treaty, signed by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 but never ratified, is due to expire Dec. 31, but Reagan has indicated the U.S. would continue to observe its terms for the time being.
Both the Soviets and the U.S. have said they are observing the treaty but the U.S. has accused the Soviets of violating its limits on strategic nuclear weapons.
Weinberger`s letter urged Reagan not to commit the U.S. any further because such action would ”limit severely your options for responding” to Soviet violations.
Weinberger also cautioned the President against committing the U.S. to any ”restrictive” interpretation of the ABM treaty of 1972, which limits defensive systems.
The Soviets contend that the treaty bars research on Reagan`s Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as ”Star Wars.”
Weinberger`s Defense Department recently came up with a controversial interpretation of the treaty that, the Pentagon says, allows for not only
”Star Wars” research but for testing and development.
Reagan has endorsed that interpretation but has said the U.S. will not rely on it to justify expanded ”Star Wars” development.
Weinberger and Secretary of State George Shultz have been openly at odds over the U.S. approach to the Soviets on arms control at the summit.
Many of Reagan`s most ardently conservative political supporters have been bitterly critical of the decision not to include Weinberger in the summit delegation.
Reagan called an in-flight huddle with Shultz, White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan, National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane and other aides aboard Air Force One, apparently to discuss the case of the leaked letter.
But he made no reference to the controversy in his brief arrival remarks at the Geneva airport.
The President, wrapped in an overcoat and scarf, and First Lady Nancy Reagan, bundled in fur coat and boots against the freezing cold, were greeted by Swiss President Kurt Furgler and his wife.
In his remarks Reagan recalled that he told the United Nations last month that a ”fresh start” was needed in U.S.-Soviet relations.
Differences between the two superpowers run deep and strong, he said, and he and Gorbachev cannot resolve them in their summit talks Tuesday and Wednesday.
But, Reagan said, ”I`m here in the fervent hope that on behalf of all the people of the world we can at least make a start.”
Gorbachev will not be arriving until Monday, but the Soviets had their own pre-summit mishap here Saturday.
Soviet officials, who have been eagerly briefing reporters for days as part of a public relations effort, were scheduled to discuss regional conflicts and the so-called human-rights issue Saturday.
The press conference dealing with regional conflicts, particularly Afghanistan, was held as scheduled. But the human-rights press conference was canceled. Some reporters were told the Soviets were having trouble finding an interpreter, though this had not been a problem earlier.
The human-rights issue is a particularly touchy one with the Soviets, and Reagan intends to confront Gorbachev with it.
McFarlane told reporters on Air Force One that the Soviet decision last week to grant exit visas to a handful of Soviet spouses of American citizens and members of ”divided families” was a positive development going into the summit.
But he also noted that those cases were ”but a few of the many, many, many” such cases still unresolved.
Reagan, saturated with briefings over the last several weeks to prepare him for the encounter with Gorbachev, planned to spend Sunday and Monday mostly resting up for the opening summit session Tuesday morning.
This is the first such summit since Carter went to Vienna in 1979 and came home with a kiss on the cheek from Leonid Brezhnev and the never-to-be-ratified SALT II.
Administration officials, who have been hard at work for weeks to restrain expectations about any major substantive results from this summit, say they are sure there will be no kisses from Gorbachev and no new nuclear-arms agreement either.
Reagan, who has spent much of his political life denouncing what he has called the ”evil empire” of Soviet communism, and the scrappy, aggressively assertive Gorbachev, who became top man in the Kremlin last March, will hold a total of eight hours of formal talks Tuesday and Wednesday.
They will start off before the first formal session Tuesday morning with a private 15-minute chat accompanied only by their interpreters.
Later they will take turns hosting dinners for each other before Reagan flies back to Washington Thursday and proceeds immediately to the Capitol for a nationally televised summit report to a joint session of Congress.
The one area in which a substantive new agreement is likely to be reached is in cultural, scientific and educational-exchange programs.
In his television address to the nation last Thursday night, Reagan said the U.S. would propose at Geneva ”the broadest people-to-people exchanges in the history of American-Soviet relations” and said the two sides ”are close to completing” an agreement in that area.
Many such programs, not to mention SALT II, have dried up since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December, 1979. Furthermore, it remains doubtful that the Soviet Union–where the tradition of closed borders, tight censorship and other restrictions runs deep–will go along with an exchange plan as ambitious as Reagan outlined in his call for a more ”open world.”
Reagan and other administration officials also have indicated they expect the two leaders to agree to meet again, perhaps next year.
But beyond that, major agreements of any kind are expected to prove both elusive and highly unlikely.
Prospects for any progress in the arms-control arena appear to have darkened steadily since Reagan sent Shultz, McFarlane and a posse of other top aides to Moscow two weeks ago in a last-ditch effort to narrow the gap between the White House and the Kremlin.
Both sides have endorsed the idea of a 50 percent cutback in offensive nuclear weapons, but they disagree thoroughly on which weapons to cut.
Shultz returned to report that after 14 hours of talks with Gorbachev and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, the two sides could not even agree on the language of a communique to be issued at the conclusion of the summit. So there probably will be no communique.
