165. Memorandum From Secretary of State Shultz to President Reagan1
SUBJECT
- My Meeting with Dobrynin, January 30
I met with Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin for a little over an hour this afternoon to follow up on my meeting with Gromyko in Stockholm and reestablish contact with him before I left for Latin America.2 Dobrynin had read a transcript of the Stockholm session, and we generally agreed in our assessment of it:
—We agreed that, as Gromyko had said, the meeting was “necessary,” and that it had produced a real exchange of views.
—Establishing a private channel for confidential communications, with Dobrynin the key interlocutor for the Soviets in Washington, was especially useful, and we should make a real effort to get something accomplished.
—Nuclear arms negotiations are on hold for now, so that the immediate future would see us concentrating on negotiations in the non-nuclear field and other issues.
On the nuclear talks, I said we are ready to talk and waiting for their ideas. He responded by suggesting that while they were not prepared to negotiate now, they want our thoughts on relating INF and START, and more generally any ideas we have for making progress on strategic arms. He hinted that our views could influence their internal arms control debate.
I raised human rights as a category we need to talk about, and expressed our particular concern about rising anti-semitism in the USSR. He gave the pro forma answer that anti-semitism is not and has never been Soviet policy.
We touched briefly on the Mideast, and I said that if regional tensions explode anywhere it is likely to be there.
I also brought up KAL. As I had with Gromyko, I said we hoped our representatives in Montreal could make progress toward agreement [Page 593] on technical steps to ensure that nothing like it ever happened again.3 Dobrynin confirmed Soviet willingness to listen to our ideas on this.
We concluded with a one-on-one session. Here I mentioned that we would be getting back to them on our idea for a joint space rescue project, and noted we hope for progress when MBFR talks resume. Dobrynin gave me the text of a letter from Andropov in response to your last letter to him, delivered in Moscow December 24.4 We will be transmitting this separately together with an analysis.
- Source: Reagan Library, George Shultz Papers, Box 11, Executive Secretariat Sensitive (01/29/1984–01/31/1984); NLR–775–11–13–3–2. Secret; Sensitive. A cover memorandum shows that it was drafted by Burt.↩
- See Document 159. Shultz was on official travel to El Salvador, Venezuela, Brazil, Grenada, and Barbados from January 31 to February 8.↩
- In early 1984, the ICAO Council considered the report of the ICAO Secretary General requested by the resolution adopted at the September 1983 session (see footnote 2, Document 112).↩
- See Documents 149 and 164.↩