U.S., Moscow begin talking again

Press, 23 November 1983, Page 10

U.S., Moscow begin talking again

NZPA-AP Washington The Reagan Administration had reopened the highlevel talks with the Soviet leadership that were broken off after the Soviet downing of the South Korean airliner on September 1, a senior State Department official said yesterday. The development appears to mean that Washington will no longer regard the airliner tragedy, in which 269 passengers, including 61 Americans, were killed, as a stumbling-block to relations with Moscow, even though the Soviets so far have failed to meet Washington’s demands for compensation and an apology. Officials said that the two recent meetings between the Secretary of State, Mr George Shultz, and the Soviet Ambassador, Mr Anatoly Dobrynin, had signalled the resumption of a high-level WashingtonMoscow dialogue. The meetings — a lunch, given by Mr Shultz on October 28 and a meeting at the State Department on Friday — were revealed at the time they were held, which was unusual.

Yesterday officials sought to underline the significance of the meetings. “It’s an effort to get the dialogue moving again,” said a senior official. Mr Shultz had issued the invitation for the lunch and Mr Dobrynin had been eager to accept. “They had a number of sessions before the shooting down of the airliner, and I would cast these (the meetings) as a resumption of that,” said the official. The senior State Department official said that the sessions had been “businesslike.” The State Department disclosed the meetings and sought to emphasise their importance apparently to let the rest of the world know that the two superpowers were holding highlevel talks again.

The West German Government has pushed for resumption of high-level talks between Washington and Moscow. West European governments generally are nervous about the super-Power relationship when the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation

countries are preparing to install new cruise and Pershing 2 nuclear missiles. Moscow also has indicated that it is nervous about the relationship. Unofficial Soviet envoys have sought American Soviet experts in and out of the United States Government to emphasise Moscow’s concern and ostensibly to try to learn whether Washington was purposely raising the level of tension with Moscow. An informed American official who related these contacts said that Washington and Moscow had handled the downing of the airliner badly, Moscow failing to take responsibility for the tragedy and Washington refusing to acknowledge that Moscow might have had cause to make a mistake because there had been a United States spy plane in the same general area.

After initially declaring that Moscow must have known it was shooting down a civilian airliner, State Department officials later said -publicly that the Soviets may not have known after all.