Robert L. Barry, US diplomat who negotiated breakthrough Cold War pact; at 89
Robert L. Barry, an American diplomat who helped open the US Consulate in Soviet-era Leningrad and was Washington’s chief negotiator in a breakthrough military agreement with Moscow just weeks before a Cold War summit in 1986, died on March 11 at his home in Newton. He was 89.
The death was caused by health problems following a fall, said his wife, Margaret.
Mr. Barry’s Foreign Service career brought him into the center of events in Europe during the final decades of the Cold War, including being part of US policymaking as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union disintegrated two years later.
Even before joining the diplomatic corps, Mr. Barry traveled to Austria’s border with Hungary in 1956 as a postgraduate student in Eastern European affairs to assist people fleeing a Soviet crackdown on an uprising challenging Moscow’s control. Mr. Barry slipped across the frontier into the few areas still controlled by the anti-Soviet forces. “The last remnants were coming out,” Mr. Barry recalled, “going across the mine fields, getting themselves blown up.”
Fifteen years later, Mr. Barry was one of the few Western diplomats allowed to live in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) after being named a consular officer in 1971 at the new US Consulate. The offices and staff were first housed at the Hotel Astoria, a czarist-era centerpiece in the city.
“It was at least a step up from where they wanted to put us, which was the Hotel Baltiskaya, fit only for spies and dogs,” he recounted in a 1996 oral history for the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training.
He and others were constantly followed by KGB agents, he said, but he could sometimes slip into Communist Party gatherings dressed as a “grungy” local. His handwritten reports to the US Embassy in Moscow were passed to an American courier on a train from Helsinki to the Soviet capital. “We sometimes got very interesting information that ended up on the president’s desk,” Mr. Barry said.
In 1986 in Stockholm, he sat across from Soviet envoys in the final rounds of talks seeking to set new protocols for military forces from NATO and nonmember allies and the Moscow-controlled Warsaw Pact countries. Mr. Barry was the lead negotiator for the West. On the other side was Oleg Grinevsky, a senior Kremlin adviser who had once served at the Soviet Embassy in Washington.
In speeches and interviews during the talks, which were held sporadically over three years, Mr. Barry framed the effort as a key step toward possible future negotiations between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
By mid-September, a deal seemed close. But a deadline loomed. Envoys used a diplomatic maneuver — in effect stopping the clock — to give some breathing room. The deadline passed, but not according to the diplomats’ watches. Mr. Barry said the decision was made to “adjust” the time to deal with final points still on the table.
“Nothing helps so much as a date when you have to deliver your homework,” said the head of West Germany’s delegation, Klaus-Jürgen Citron.
The agreement was announced a few days later. “We have been able to say ‘yes’ to each other,” a smiling Mr. Barry told journalists. “I hope it is an experience we will be able to repeat.”
The 35-nation agreement required long advance notice of major military exercises across Europe and the western Soviet Union, as well as allowing both sides to send observers and conduct limited spot inspections. The overall goal was to limit the chances of accidental conflict.
The Reagan administration was initially cool toward the talks, fearing limits on NATO. As a deal neared, the White House publicly threw support behind Mr. Barry. The accord was the first major East-West security agreement since the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty on nuclear weapons in 1979.
Yet Mr. Barry’s Soviet counterpart, Grinevsky, left Stockholm saying that the military agreement, while groundbreaking, was “not the main event” in superpower relations. That came the following month in Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik, when Reagan and Gorbachev held a two-day summit that included some of the most substantive discussions between the leaders on human rights issues for Soviet dissidents and others.
The Iceland summit ended without firm agreements, but it helped pave the way for the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty that banned some ground-launched cruise and ballistic missiles. (In 2019, the Trump administration unilaterally pulled out of the INF Treaty.)
Decades after the end of the Soviet Union, Mr. Barry expressed a view not uncommon among those who were in the trenches of the Cold War: a sense that policymaking had a greater clarity during the grand ideological struggles between nucleararmed powers.
“For all that, I felt that I knew who the enemy was,” he wrote, “and I was confident that we understood how to contain the threat.”
His diplomatic assignments included stints in Zagreb, then part of Yugoslavia, and as a consular political officer in Moscow from 1968 to 1971. After two years in Leningrad, he worked in the Soviet division for the Voice of America and in various State Department positions. He received his first ambassador posting in 1981, serving in Bulgaria until 1984.
Beginning in the late 1980s, he was a high-ranking envoy on US policies in Eastern Europe. He then served as ambassador to Indonesia from 1992 until his retirement from the State Department in 1995. He headed the Bosnia mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe for three years beginning in 1998.
For decades, Mr. Barry and his wife backed calls for greater safety regulations on fishing vessels after their son, Peter, died in August 1985 in the sinking of a salmon boat in the Gulf of Alaska, where he was working during the summer break from Yale University. Besides Mr. Barry’s of wife of 64 years, the former Margaret Crim, he leaves family including children, Ellen and John; and three grandchildren.