News for September 29, 1984 by The CBS World News Roundup.
Busy news day – starting with Andrei Gromyko, the man who sat down this week with George Shultz. Walter Mondale and President Reagan is a dour, watchful, thin-lipped intellectual who doesn’t smoke, who rarely if ever drinks, and who once dismissed a U.S. reporter’s questions about his life with the remark. “My personality does not interest me.” He seldom relaxes. When he does, he either plays chess with his wife or takes long walks at such a rapid pace that he tends to leave his companions behind.
Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko, in fact, is one of the most remarkable and durable diplomatic phenomena of this century. He has been in the Soviet Foreign Ministry 45 years. Promoted rapidly to fill posts vacated by Stalin’s purges, he headed the American desk just after he turned 30. He was ambassador to the United States at 34. While still in his mid- 30s he attended the Tehran. Yalta and Potsdam conferences, and took part in the Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco conferences that established the United Nations. And he – shook hands with his 11th U.S. president last Sunday. When Reagan was making movies. Gromyko was making headlines as Soviet ambassador to the U.N. where he has cast 26 vetoes in the Security Council, earning the nickname “Old Stone Face.” Here is a man who spans Soviet leaders from Stalin to Chernenko. who has been foreign minister for 27years, who has done business with 14 U.S. secretaries of state. Gromyko has risen from the status of a foreign affairs functionary to a senior Politburo figure now at the peak of personal influence as the voice of foreign affairs under a leader who is ill, and unversed in foreign ways. Gromyko is the classic survivor. He spoke for Stalin to Franklin Roosevelt. He cast the famous vetoes, stood implacable over Berlin, denied that there were any Soviet missiles in Cuba and then negotiated the two symbols of Brezhnevian detente with the United States, the SALT I and SALT II arms control treaties. Since then, he has reverted to confrontation as Poland, Afghanistan. human rights, NATO’s cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe. Reagan policies, and Kremlin leadership changes have all worked to encase detente in blocks of diplomatic ice. “Basically. Gromyko is a cautious man,” said a U.S. diplomat with considerable experience at close-up Gromyko-watching. “He works in a system and in a society where there are definite penalties for taking risks and failing.
And North Korean officials have agreed to South Korea’s conditions for delivering relief goods to South Korean flood victims, the official Radio Pyongyang said Wednesday. announcement was made by Ung Sik, vice chairman of the Korean Red Cross Society’s Committee, said Radio a radio-monitoring agreement marked one of the times the rival governments of The Han North Central Press, agency. The few times the rival governments of North and South Korea have been able to get together on any issue and was seen as an important reopening of contact. HAN LED A five-member delegation to a Red Cross meeting Tuesday at Panmunjom, in the demilitarized zone between the Koreas. The two sides were unable to work out details of North Korea’s offer to deliver about 7,000 tons of rice, 500,000 yards of fabric, 100,000 tons of cement, and medicine to floodvictims in the South. North Korea had insisted on sending a fleet trucks to Seoul, in addition to delivering some goods by sea to South Korean ports. The two sides agreed to the sea arrangements, but the South Koreans insisted that supplies shipped by land be turned over at Panmunjom. A South Korean official who refused to be identified had said North Korea was trying to use the food aid for propaganda by delivering it in Seoul. RADIO PRESS quoted Han as saying it would be “faster and convenient to deliver part of the relief goods by our side to Seoul, where the flood sufferers are concentrated.” However, he was quoted as saying North Korea “will respect the South Korean side’s proposal that we deliver the relief goods to Panmunjom, the port of Inchon [on the west coast] and the port of Pukpyong [on the east coast]. The South Korean side will be informed of further details regarding the delivery.” Pro Western South Korea was hit by serious floods early this month, and communist North Korea, its bitter rival, offered aid. Both sides had spurned similar offers in the past, but South Korea said it accepted this time in a spirit of reconciliation.
And finally The Irish navy foiled the biggest Irish Republican Army gun-smuggling operation in 11 years today when two cutters intercepted a trawler carrying a “huge consignment” of weapons from the United States, a government spokesman reported. The 50-foot trawler refused to stop after being challenged just inside Irish territorial waters, near the Skillig Rocks off the southwest coast. But it came to a halt when four rounds of tracer bullets were fired across its bow from the 972- ton navy cutter Emer, according to a joint statement by the Irish police and defense forces. The Martina Anne from the small County Kerry fishing port of Fenit was then boarded by police and armed navy personnel who arrested five men, the statement said. Two were described by the government official as “well-known IRA men.” No injuries were reported.
The five men were transferred to the Emer as a second cutter, the Aisling, stood by. The two cutters and the trawler then headed for the Irish naval base on Cobh Island in Cork Harbor where forensic experts waited to examine the cache of arms and ammunition.
And that’s just a sample of what went on, this September 29, 1984 as reported by The CBS World News Roundup.
