How many skeletons will the Reagan Administration find in the closet as a new team opens cupboards and reads documents in the State and Defense Departments? Secretary Alexander Haig has already uncovered Dobrynin in one of the closets, and thereby hangs a tale.
The Reagan Administration quietly terminated Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin’s special privilege of entering the State Department through the underground garage, where he could take the Secretary of State’s private elevator to the Secretary’s seventh-floor office. Dobrynin alone of all foreigners enjoyed this special privilege.
The cocky Dobrynin apparently didn’t believe the Haig order and, in méking his first call on the Secretary of State, headed his car down the ramp into the garage, only to be stopped by a guard. Dobrynin’s chauffeur then backed up the ramp and drove Dobrynin to the diplomatic door for ordinary ambassadors.
That’s how the American public learned for the first time that, some seven years ago, Dobrynin was given this premier status by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The close friendship between Kissinger and Dobrynin was another secret carefully hidden from the American people.
If the U.S. Secretary of State were to give secret elevator passes to a Mafia leader, a drug peddler, or a prostitute, it would be a Profumo-rank scandal. Take a look at mystery-man Dobrynin and ask yourself if he is any less dangerous.
In October 1962, Dobrynin participated with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in telling a direct lie to Pfi%ident John F. Kennedy in their attempt to convince him that the Soviets had no strategic nuclear missiles in Cuba. At the very time that the Dobrynin-Gromyko pair was telling its lie in the White House, President Kennedy had the famous U-2 photographs of these offensive missiles in his desk drawer.
When Kennedy made his October 23, 1962, television-radio address to the nation warning of the Soviets nuclear missiles in Cuba zeroed in on the United States, he publicly denounced the Gromyko assurance as “false.” That should have made his partner-in-lies Dobrynin persona non grata right then. Ambassadors are not supposed to participate personally in direct lies to the head of state; that just isn’t done.
Despite being caught in the act of lying to our President, Dobrynin was allowed to remain. Did he have the same sort of close relationship with high U.S. officials then?
On the afternoon Gerald Ford took office as President in 1974, he attended meetings with diplomats from some 57 different countries. To the Soviet charge d’affaires, he marveled over the then twelve-year tenure of Anatoly Dobrynin in Washington.
“He seems to go on and on,” Ford remarked.
And Dobrynin still goes “on and on.” Now he is in his 19th year in Washington. Each year he becomes more valuable to the Politburo, as attested by his elevation to the become the only nonresident member of the powerful Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union which runs Russia.
As Ambassador from the Soviet Union, Dobrynin is ex officio head of the KGB in the United States and has at his command quite literally hundreds of its best agents. It would be naive to assume that once in a while they do not turn up an official especially vulnerable to blackmail, or who can be bought by money or pretty women.
In the Kissinger-endorsed book by John Newhouse called “Cold Dawn: The Story of SALT,” we learned that Dobrynin conducted an elaborate propaganda campaign with Congress, the media, and academic circles, to bring them around to the Soviets’ viéws on SALT I; The cosy relationship between Dobrynin and Kissinger is one explanation for why the terms of SALT I were so massively weighted to advantage the Soviets, and Dobrynin’s particular lobbying skills and apparatus could help explain why neither Kissinger nor Dobrynin was cross-examined by a Congressional committee before SALT I was passed.
The same techniques could serve any other Soviet plans. Every year, Dobrynin gets to know more and more key U.S. officials better, and he gets to know more and more about each of them, and about the American people. He is a perfect English-speaking diplomat, a polished gentleman, and, of course, a clever, conniving Communist. That’s why he has held his top job for so long.
How many other skeletons will Secretaries Haig and Caspar Weinberger find in the closets of State and Defense?
