Senior allied diplomats at the headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization believe that President Reagan and the new Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, are almost certain to meet in Helsinki around the first of August.

There is, the diplomats here point out, a ready-made occasion for such a meeting--a planned ceremonial gathering to mark the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Helsinki Agreements on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Hope for Government Heads

Finnish officials are said to be hopeful that the heads of the 35 signatory governments will be present for the anniversary.


“It really seems now to be only a question of who makes the first move,” one diplomat said. “If Gorbachev accepts the Finnish invitation, then all the East Bloc leaders will follow suit, and of course the NATO heads of state will also agree. If Reagan and the NATO governments decide to make it a summit in Helsinki, than the Soviet Bloc can scarcely stay away.”

The 10 governments of the European Community informed the Finnish government more than six months ago that they would send their foreign ministers to Helsinki for the anniversary. However, at the last meeting of NATO foreign ministers, in Brussels in December, this position was modified to keep the door open for the heads of government to go. The final communique from the December meeting said the NATO governments will be represented in Helsinki “at an appropriate political level.”

According to NATO sources, it was at American insistence that this wording was used in the communique. These sources said Washington had expressed irritation at the action of the European Community governments for what was regarded as jumping the gun on the Finnish invitation. Even while the late Soviet leader Konstantin U. Chernenko was still alive, the United States wanted to keep the possibility of a Helsinki summit open, an American source said.

With the death of Chernenko and President Reagan’s clear invitation to Gorbachev to visit the United States, the prospects for a summit meeting have changed completely. Talk of preconditions and careful preparation has subsided.


So far, Gorbachev has not responded publicly, and NATO diplomats doubt that he is prepared to travel to the United States within the next six months. They reason that Helsinki, as the site of a gathering of heads of government, would be an attractive alternative.

In August, 1975, at the Helsinki ceremony where the agreements were signed, President Gerald R. Ford met with Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev to thrash out some preliminary steps in the SALT II agreement on limiting strategic nuclear weapons. Ford and Brezhnev followed up with a meeting in Vladivostok, in Siberia.

No Shortage of Topics

NATO diplomats pointed out that a Reagan-Gorbachev meeting under similar circumstances in Helsinki would not be lacking in issues. The two leaders could discuss the new round of nuclear arms talks that has opened in Geneva, along with proposals that have been put forth at the Stockholm conference on security and confidence-building measures in Europe, an outgrowth of the so-called Helsinki process.