Senior Reagan Administration officials said today that the Geneva agreement to begin three sets of arms negotiations had left unresolved the key question of whether a failure in one set of talks could derail progress in the others. As a result, officials said, the new negotiations could be imperiled even before they start by a disagreement over “linkage” — with progress on the American goal of reducing nuclear weapons possibly held hostage by a Soviet insistence that the United States agree to halt its program of research into space weapons. Edward L. Rowny, the head of the American delegation to the strategic arms talks in Geneva, said in a televised interview today that he could not deny that there could be problems in negotiations if the Soviet Union demanded that agreements on the nuclear arms issues depended on an accord on barring space weaponry. “There is an ambiguity there, I grant you,” one official said, “and only time will tell if it stands in the way of an agreement.”
As Belgium’s Prime Minister prepares to meet with President Reagan on Monday, pressure is increasing on the Belgian Government to reject the immediate deployment of NATO cruise missiles, officials and diplomats here say. The Government of Prime Minister Wilfried Martens has agreed in principle to deploy 48 cruise missiles on Belgian soil unless the Soviet Union reduces the numbers of SS-20 intermediate-range nuclear missiles that it has aimed at western Europe. To that end, the Belgian Government has been carrying out major construction at an air base in Florennes, 40 miles south of Brussels, preparing for the eventual arrival of the missiles. But the major opposition parties have turned the deployment of the missiles into the top political issue of the day in Belgium. Even Mr. Martens’s own Christian Democratic Party formally took the position last fall that the final decision should be delayed to give time for Soviet-American arms talks to produce some results.
Pope John Paul II used sharp language today in remarks on defending human and religious rights around the world. The Pope, making his annual welcoming speech to the Vatican diplomatic corps, also praised the resumption of arms negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Pope’s annual welcome to the 111 diplomats accredited to the Vatican is regarded as his “State of the World” message.
A gas explosion ripped through a crowded meat market in a Warsaw suburb Saturday, killing at least six people and injuring about 30 others, official news organizations reported. The explosion occurred in the suburb of Falenica, 12 miles east of Warsaw, according to the official Polish press agency, P.A.P. Five women and a 7-year-old boy were known dead and some 30 others were injured in the explosion, P.A.P. said. Rescue workers searched for bodies believed to be buried in the rubble, Polish television said.
The Israeli Cabinet plans to discuss proposals for a phased withdrawal from southern Lebanon at its weekly meeting on Sunday, officials in Jerusalem said today. Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin said in a radio interview that he was confident of a majority for the proposals. He did not give details of the withdrawal plan but the goal was said to be to pull back to the border in six to nine months. According to unconfirmed reports here, the plan calls for a three-stage withdrawal. Each stage would remain in effect for a testing period lasting some weeks while Israel review its effects.
The Lebanese Army began deploying its forces down the coastal road south of Beirut today in a much-heralded step in the Government’s attempt to extend its authority beyond a few neighborhoods in the capital. The effort came after weeks of haggling between rival Christian and Druse militias. By nightfall, the lead elements of a 1,200-member force had reached a point within two miles of the Israeli occupation line at the Awali River north of Sidon.
The U.S. Embassy in Amman, Jordan, is planning a relocation for security reasons, a spokesman said. “We are looking into several possibilities that include some hotels,” according to John Wilcox. The three-story building that now houses the embassy is situated on one of Amman’s most congested streets. After the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Marine headquarters in Beirut, American diplomatic missions around the world were ordered to increase security against attacks.
An Iranian bulk carrier, the 18,000-ton Iran-Emdad, was attacked and crippled by an Iraqi jet fighter in the northern Persian Gulf, shipping executives said. They added that no one was wounded in the attack, which blasted the stern of the empty freighter as it headed for the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas. The attack occurred south of Iran’s Kharg Island oil terminal.
Arab officials in countries around the Persian Gulf dismissed as a hoax a distress call supposedly from an airliner that had crashed in the gulf, killing 135 people. The Mayday message, received by air controllers in various gulf nations, said an airliner had gone down and was sinking in the gulf. But a check throughout the region turned up no missing plane. One source traced the hoax to a ham radio operator.
President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq announced today that elections would be held February 25 to replace the Parliament that was disbanded in July 1977 with the imposition of martial law, which is still in force. In a broadcast address, General Zia said the elections would be followed on February 28 with voting for provincial legislatures, each of which would then elect members to the upper house of Parliament, the Senate, in mid-March. General Zia overthrew the civilian Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, on July 5, 1977, and banned political party activities two years later. Mr. Bhutto was executed in 1979 after being convicted of state crimes, including corruption. Mr. Zia said that although the coming elections were expected to start the process of power sharing between the armed forces and elected representatives, political parties would not be allowed to take part in the campaign.
Secret CIA aid to Afghan rebels fighting Soviet forces has become the largest U.S. covert-assistance program since the Vietnam War, the Washington Post quoted informed sources as saying. Congress has nearly tripled the Reagan Administration’s initial request for aid to the guerrillas, to about $250 million for the fiscal year that began in October, 1984. This would amount to more than 80% of annual CIA expenditures for covert operations, the sources said. They cited discussions to the effect that the insurgents could use a total of $600 million in aid from the United States and other countries in the next fiscal year.
New fighting was reported today in the Cambodian rebel camp of Rithisen. More than 20 artillery rounds hit guerrilla defensive positions there while Vietnamese forces and Cambodian rebels exchanged light-weapons fire, according to officers of the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front, a non-Communist group. They said four of their soldiers were killed and three wounded during the day and previous night. Rithisen, near the Thai border, was once the largest camp occupied by the Liberation Front. It has been under siege for 19 days, and Vietnamese occupation forces have been holding most of it. Recent fighting has been light.
The Reagan Administration has reached a preliminary understanding with China to provide that government with modern antisubmarine warfare gear, a Reagan Administration official said today. The official said a formal agreement to sell Peking submarine-detection devices, as well as torpedoes and ship-defense weapons, is expected when Melvyn R. Paisley, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for research and engineering, visits China later this month. The statement came as General John W. Vessey Jr., Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, began talks in Peking at the start of a weeklong visit. General Vessey is the first high-ranking American military officer to lead a delegation to China since 1947.
[Ed: And 40 years later, one can only say that this was an absolutely terrible fucking idea.]
France is sending 1,000 more troops to New Caledonia, its South Pacific territory, where there are already 2,280 French military police and 3,000 regular army troops. The announcement in Paris followed rioting that left three people dead and dozens injured and the declaration of a state of emergency.
About 3,000 Salvadoran troops were reported moving into Morazan province in what appeared to be a military push against a leftist rebel stronghold. Residents of the area, about 100 miles northeast of San Salvador, said the region was pounded by artillery and a C-47 gunship. The rebels’ Radio Venceremos said fighting has started but gave no details. Many towns in the region, long a stronghold for guerrillas opposed to the U.S.-backed government, are deserted as residents fled the fighting.
Aid to Nicaraguan rebels is coming principally from Honduras and El Salvador, which have replaced the United States as the main provider, according to Reagan Administration officials and members of Congress. They said Israel had also stepped up aid to the rebels.
Sudanese officials and relief workers in this chronically impoverished country say the drought-related famine here could reach Ethiopian proportions by midsummer. The relief workers, interviewed here over the last three days, said that two million to four million people, both Sudanese and refugees who have fled here from neighboring Ethiopia and Chad, faced starvation this year. The relief workers asserted that an already desperate situation had been made worse by the delay in the Sudanese Government’s recognition of the severity of the drought affecting its own citizens, the lack of a single, Government-coordinated relief program and by some corruption. “We are only a season behind Ethiopia,” said a relief worker who has traveled throughout the country. “We are heartsick because it’s so clear what is unfolding here. But this Government hasn’t a clue about what needs to be done in time.”
Tanzanian President Julius K. Nyerere told diplomats at a new year reception that he will not run for reelection when his term expires at the end of the year, the official radio reported. Nyerere, 62, has headed the East African nation since it gained independence in 1961. He has expressed the intention to quit many times since 1975, but changed his mind in 1980 when he accepted his party’s nomination for another five-year term. He said at the time that it would be his last.
Zimbabwe opposition leader Joshua Nkomo said supporters of Prime Minister Robert Mugabe fired bullets and threw stones at a car carrying him to a political rally in the southern province of Masvingo. According to Nkomo — a former ally of Mugabe who has split with him — nine bullets were fired into his bulletproof vehicle. Nkomo said the crowds were organized by Eddison Zvobgo, the justice, legal and parliamentary affairs minister.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy said in Windhoek, South-West Africa (Namibia) today that he did not believe the white authorities in South Africa were committed to “meaningful progress” on changing their racial policies, and he indicated he would seek punitive legislation designed to force change. “Support for the measures will be broader than the South Africans think,” he told reporters after a three-hour visit to Windhoek, capital of South-West Africa. The territory, widely known as Namibia, is ruled by South Africa in defiance of the United Nations. Black nationalist insurgents have been fighting a low-level guerrilla war in the territory for 18 years.
The Senate majority leader, Bob Dole, said today that there was no chance of a tax increase this year. “No one is pushing taxes and I think the chances this year are zero,” the Kansas Republican said in an interview. “We just ought to face up to that.” Mr. Dole reiterated his insistence that limiting increases in Social Security benefits be considered as part of a package of spending cuts aimed at reducing huge Federal budget deficits.
President Reagan spends the day at Camp David.
President Reagan has approved new procedures that spell out how the Defense Department will exercise its increased authority to block the export of high-technology products to non-Communist countries, Administration officials said today. The procedures, which are to be applied in cases where it is feared that high-technology products might be diverted to the Soviet bloc and used for military purpose, are embodied in a classified directive from the White House National Security Council. Export-licensing has traditionally been dominated by the Commerce Department, but last March the President gave the Defense Department greater opportunity to review and comment on applications from companies that want to export to non-Communist countries products of potential military importance. The Defense Department has long had the right to review the export of such products directly to Communist countries.
The Federal Government and state and local governments spent $592.6 billion on social welfare programs in the fiscal year 1982, or 19.3 percent of the combined value of all goods and services produced in the nation, according to a study by the Social Security Administration. That was an increase of $42 billion, or 7.6 percent, from the previous fiscal period, primarily because of the the growth of Social Security benefits and Medicare, the study’s researcher reported.
Indian tribal leaders have voiced strong opposition to proposals from a Presidential panel to direct economic development efforts on reservations away from social goals and toward private ownership and the profit motive. But the proposals were accepted by some Indians as a basis for further discussion of their relationship with the Federal Government. At a meeting that ended here Friday, the National Tribal Chairmen’s Association voted 84 to 18 to reject 36 recommendations presented to President Reagan on Nov. 30 by the Presidential Commission on Indian Reservation Economies. The recommendations also included abolishing the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which represents Indian interests in Washington, and waiving the tribes’ immunity from lawsuits on some issues.
The Drug Enforcement Agency said security has been tightened at its headquarters in Washington, and a large truck, presumably to ward off terrorist attacks, has appeared in front of the building. The New York Daily News reported that Colombian drug traffickers have threatened to blow up the building in retaliation against U.S. efforts to extradite alleged drug kingpins from the South American nation. Charles Hill, agency spokesman, acknowledged the tighter security but denied that there have been bomb threats against the DEA.
A computer is providing neurosurgeons at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, with three-dimensional “road maps” to navigate deep into a patient’s brain during surgery and pinpoint tumors that can be vaporized with lasers. Dr. Patrick J. Kelly, who developed the procedure and has performed more than 100 computer-assisted operations since July, said the method relies on a computer to guide a laser beam more precisely than it would be possible to do manually.
Former North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford announced his candidacy for national chairman of the Democratic Party and said the party should change the way it nominates presidential candidates. Sanford, 67, stepping down as president of Duke University, said that if he is chosen to succeed Charles T. Manatt, he hopes to devise a nomination system that would make delegates to the 1988 Democratic National Convention “more representative of voting Democrats” nationally and make the nominating process “deliberative.”
The Education Department, following legislation approved by Congress last summer, has proposed a rule prohibiting school districts from spending certain federal funds on any course that a district “determines is secular humanism.” However, the proposal does not say what it means by “secular humanism,” used by some fundamentalist and conservative groups to describe the teachings of atheism and Darwinism. The prohibition is part of an act that earmarked $75 million over two years for “magnet schools” in districts undergoing desegregation.
Brigadier General Richard F. Abel, director of public information for the Air Force, told a journalism class at the University of Georgia in Athens that a Washington Post article about the next space shuttle’s military mission contained little or no information that was not on record, according to several persons who heard him. But Abel said he had told the class only that “some” of the information in the Post story came from published sources. The Post was criticized by the Pentagon for reporting that the shuttle will launch a satellite that will “eavesdrop” on the Soviet Union.
Led by a man posing as an agent of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, four Chinese men kidnapped a wealthy 26-year-old Chinese woman from her home in this Los Angeles suburb last fall. Then they called from Japan to demand ransom of $1 million, to be paid in Tokyo. Just before the victim was to be shot, the police rescued her and arrested three of the kidnappers. They turned out to be members of the Four Seas Gang, a powerful criminal syndicate from Taiwan whose members include movie stars and prosperous business executives. The incident is one of a growing number of cases of Chinese organized crime in the United States, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the President’s Commission on Organized Crime and police departments around the country.
The FBI played cat and mouse in Manhattan for 12 days last November to trap a native of Czechoslovakia suspected of being a Soviet-bloc spy. He was identified by authorities as Karl Frantisek Koecher, who, with his wife Hana, was arrested. An account of the FBI’s pursuit of the couple and their lives in America has emerged from court statements, and interviews with friends and co-workers of the couple. Sometimes it consisted of lie-detector tests and long separate interrogations of Mr. Koecher — a former Central Intelligence Agency employee — and his wife, Hana, in suites used by FBI counterintelligence agents at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel on Central Park South. At other times, for undisclosed reasons, the agents played the game differently. Believing the Koechers were planning a permanent move from their East Side apartment to Austria, agents helped them with their last-minute arrangements.
A North Carolina Ku Klux Klan leader has agreed not to hold demonstrations by his group in predominantly black neighborhoods, not to operate paramilitary camps in the state and not to harass blacks or whites who associate with blacks. The agreement, filed Friday in Federal District Court in Raleigh, North Carolina, settles part of a civil suit brought last June against Glenn Miller, 44 years old, of Johnston County, leader of the Confederate Knights, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and three others said to be members of the group. The suit was brought by Bobby L. Person, a black Moore County prison guard, who charged that members of Mr. Miller’s group, which has 600 members, had harassed him when he tried to get a promotion in 1983. Mr. Miller, a former Army sergeant, said his group was already following the stipulations in the agreement, so its program would not have to be changed. The suit will continue against the three other defendants.
The Occidental Petroleum Corporation’s 18-year bid to drill for oil along the Pacific Palisades shore was approved today by Mayor Tom Bradley, who had vetoed the project twice before. The drilling proposal must still be reviewed by the California Coastal Commision. In a brief news conference at his office Mr. Bradley said he had “no choice” but to approve the plan, which opponents say will harm the environmentally sensitive area. The City Council approved the project in a 10-to-4 vote last Tuesday. The project calls for drilling 60 wells to recover an estimated 30 million to 60 million barrels of oil.
The Dallas Police Department came looking for recruits today in Boston, where there are few law-enforcement openings and many candidates. The recruiters, who had the blessing of the Boston police, said 425 men and women came for interviews. The Dallas department, which pays starting officers with college degrees $23,196 a year, invited applicants older than 19 with 45 hours of college courses, a “C” average, no criminal record and no history of drug use to Dallas for tests, at their own expense. The Dallas police previously visited Lexington, Kentucky, Columbus, Ohio, Philadelphia and New York.
Plain brown envelopes full of $100 bills are turning up in residents’ mailboxes in central Florida, according to Federal agents, who say the money is counterfeit. “The bills are all being mailed out of Inglewood, California,” said Donald A. Stebbins of the Orlando office of the United States Secret Service. “They contain no advertising literature, no note, no return address, nothing!” Mr. Stebbins said 12 people had reported receiving 90 of the counterfeit bills since the first report on Monday. He said the recipients were of varying ages and received their income from diverse sources. He said counterfeit $100 bills were passed in Orlando last month. Richard Wayne Gibson of Winter Park, Florida, a retired man, has been indicted by a Federal grand jury in that case.
Charging that racism “is accepted once again in polite society,” the head of the New York state chapter of the NAACP announced a five-point program to combat what she called the new assault on civil and human rights. Hazel N. Dukes said reaction to a highly publicized subway shooting in New York City is an example of changing attitudes. The five-point program will include summit meetings of parents, teachers, clergy, members of fraternal organizations and civic groups that will seek “to provide the services and direction that will renew the vigor, stabilize family life and build healthier families.”
A Florida state medical board outlawed Laetrile, saying the substance is toxic and that cancer victims who believe in its effectiveness fail to seek conventional treatment. The Board of Osteopathic Medical Examiners, which had refused to outlaw Laetrile in 1980 and 1982, voted 4 to 3 for the ban. Laetrile, trademark name for a substance derived from the chemical amygdalin, is found naturally in the pits of apricots, peaches and bitter almonds.
Charles E. Kelly, a World War II hero known as “Commando” Kelly, died Friday at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Pittsburgh. He was the first enlisted man in the war to receive the Medal of Honor. He was 64 years old.
Steady snow fell in wide areas of Texas yesterday, while high winds knocked over trucks in southern California and Georgia felt winter cold. Snow blanketed much of Texas. By evening, there was seven inches of snow at San Antonio and Alpine, four inches at Midland, and two at Austin. Travelers advisories were in effect in North Carolina and Maryland, and a winter storm watch was in effect in southern Louisiana. Snow squalls continued over the lower Great Lakes, with up to 12 inches reported in western New York State. In southern California, winds gusting up to 80 miles an hour blew over tractor-trailer trucks on highways and knocked down power lines, leaving about 131,000 customers without electricity for several hours.
Born:
Chris Hatcher, MLB pitcher (Florida-Miami Marlins, Los Angeles Dodgers, Oakland A’s), in Kinston, North Carolina.
Gerard Lawson, NFL defensive back (Cleveland Browns, Philadelphia Eagles), in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Cynthia Addai-Robinson, American actress (“Spartacus” series), in London, England, United Kingdom.
Issa Rae, American actress, writer and producer (“Insecure”), in Los Angeles, California.
History Diaries 