TEXT OF TERM OF REFERENCE 1) b) OF DECEMBER 12, 1988 REGISTERED LETTER TO THEN-U.S. PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN:

Soviet archives have U.S. angles

The writer, a former New York Times bureau chief in Moscow, is managing editor of the influential quarterly journal Foreign Affairs.

NEW YORK

IN HIS campaign to restructure Soviet society, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has turned his historians loose in the dusty back shelves of long-sealed archives, hoping that scholarly inquiry can purge some of the skeletons of Stalinism.

It sounds like a Freedom of Glasnost Act. So let me get in the lineup with a request for documents to illuminate some of the things going on in the United States back in the Stalin era.

There are surely some dossiers over there that would not jump out for priority attention by Soviet scholars, but would greatly help Americans in understanding some of our own Cold War mysteries.

Why not, for instance, let Americans have the Kremlin file on Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss? Chambers confessed to working for the Soviets in the 1930s, so there is obviously material on him in Moscow. What do the old files show about the famous "pumpkin papers" that led to Hiss's conviction and imprisonment, generating a decade of bitter controversy in American politics?

Traitors or scapegoats?

What records did Moscow keep about the Rosenbergs, Julius and Ethel, who were executed in the U.S. in 1953 for treason? Did they indeed serve as conduits of atomic technology to the Soviet Union, or were they scapegoats, as their defenders claim?

Episodes such as these have been studied almost to death in the United States, but without benefit of credible Soviet documentation--no small shortcoming.

Isn't there more that can now be discussed about Lee Harvey Oswald's sojourn in the Soviet Union, before he settled in Dallas? It was after Stalin's time, of course, but is there anything in the Soviet archives about Jack Ruby, the shady cabaret manager who killed Oswald the day in 1963 after Oswald shot President John F. Kennedy?

Expanded Oswald file

We know that in the immediate shock of mourning, the Soviets turned over some rather paltry police records on Oswald to the state department. But maybe 25 years later, urged on by the general secretary himself, Russian archivists can do a little better.

Aside from the central issues involved, the Soviet Union's Washington watchers might derive mischievous amusement at the commotion any new documentation like this would provoke acrss the American political spectrum, so great is the lingering intellectual investment in one side or another of these remote episodes.

President Richard Nixon, for one, built his early political career on his assertions of Hiss's perfidy. Any new evidence confirming Hiss's usefulness to the Soviet cause, or, conversely, exonerating him from suspicion of espionage, would require certain readjustments, to say the least, of convention political wisdom.

Evidence supplied by the Kremlin would have to be considered suspect, of course. Wise historians approach any archives with some degree of skepticism as they search for ulterior motives.

But in notorious cases like the Rosenbergs or Chambers, it is a fair bet that none of the American advocates on either side will charge "doctored evidence" until they see what the Soviet archives produce. Once it is clear which camp is supported, and which one is threatened, the vested interests will hunker down and only the general public will admit to being the wiser.

The paucity of even indirect Soviet evidence about the early atomic spy cases is in itself tantalizing, raising questions of who has what to hide.

Since Hiss's conviction on perjury charges in 1950, numerous Soviet defectors have become available for debriefing by responsible intelligence services; some, like Peter Deriabin (who defected in 1954) or Anatoly Golitsyn (1961), held sensitive posts in the Soviet apparatus and would clearly have been in position to know something about Chambers, Hiss, and the Rosenbergs.

For many months the American counter-intelligence chief, the late James J. Angleton, pressed Golitsyn for every snippet of information about Soviet intelligence. It is hard to imagine that the controversies of the 1940s and '50s were never raised, even for their historical interest, in these debriefings.

Yet nothing of this evidence has leaked out to the public, through testimony or more or less authorized studies of American intelligence activities. Why are American authorities reluctant to re-open discussion of episodes that so troubled earlier generations?

In any case, the initiative passes to Moscow.

"We need truthful assessments," Gorbachev declared in November, "not to settle political scores or, as they say, to let off steam, but to pay due credit to all the heroism in the past, and to draw lessons from mistakes and miscalculations."

While Soviet historians concentrate on controversies of their own past, they could well serve the cause of international glasnost by supplying whatever evidence they have on some of these American controversies. For on this side of the Cold War, too, there may be mistakes, miscalculations, and heroism to sort out.*

*-When i did the 1978 elements of this "International Diplomatic Work...on a direct basis" for the world's children, it was documented for all those involved that when i was finished the "temporary, part-time work" i would be allowed to write a book, or books, about the work. I recall that the documentation involving the Vatican in particular underlined this anticipation. So, i was hardly surprised at their policy (all 3 elements of it ) in response to my 1983 correspondence to Pope John Paul II in evidence if YOU TAKE A BRIEF SIDESTEP HERE. Unless the New York Times article reports on the Holy Father's 'preference in architecture,' i expect that when i imminently resume the correspondence with the Vatican--simultaneously with resumption of the correspondence with the Israeli Government and "The Islamic Conference Organization"--he would be expecting that his faith's followers will be entitled to total access to every relevant document revealing what was done to date by each individual and party involved in 1978 in response to this "International Diplomatic Work...on a direct basis" for the world's children.
Not least of all because of what you (and he) will find if you TAKE ANOTHER BRIEF SIDESTEP HERE, to consider the text of the term of reference affixed to page 3. of the Christmas, 1988 statement i sent to then-Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev--with a copy going simultaneously to then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
Or what you will find if you TAKE ANOTHER BRIEF SIDESTEP HERE. If you proceed from there to what you will find if you TAKE A SERIES OF BRIEF SIDESTEPS HERE, the first something contradicting what you find after you take the second footstep, RESUME HERE==== LINK TO SOVIETS DEFERRING TO WORLD COURT The key thing i did in 1978 as SENIOR ADVISER TO THE YEAR OF THE CHILD was to write the former members of the Beatles and ask them if they would do a reunion concert for the 1979 United Nations Year Of The Child. It was appreciated then that it would be unrealistic and unreasonable to expect them to be party to any enterprise that involved