In Confidence.

• Author: Sestanovich, Stephen

Washington has lived by leaks and rumors for a very long time, but until the collapse of communism there was one person in town with whom it was always safe to let your hair down. During his quarter-century tenure as Soviet ambassador, you could tell Anatoly Dobrynin whatever you wanted about your superiors, about American foreign policy, or about America itself, without fear that the Washington Post would get wind of your indiscretions. "One good thing I know about you", Richard Nixon told him, 'there has not been a single leak."

Other Americans were equally confident that the Soviet system would keep their secrets. What else but such trust would have led Brent Scowcroft, as President Ford's National Security Adviser, to apologize to Dobrynin when his boss publicly endorsed the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate? Or Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to welcome an abusive letter from Leonid Brezhnev, in hopes that it might encourage Jimmy Carter to reconsider his approach in the strategic arms talks? Or Senator Ted Kennedy to complain to Dobrynin that Moscow's disgracefully mild handling of Ronald Reagan was weakening the anti-nuclear movement, and with it the Democratic party?

After long years of such kissing, Anatoly Dobrynin is now ready to tell. He has become a real Washingtonian at last, and it shows on every page of his book. In Confidence has an ease and breeziness that one might think impossible in recording a lifetime of Soviet diplomatic conversations. It has almost none of the strangeness, false notes and mistranslations that one expects to encounter in American editions of foreign leaders' memoirs. The reason is simple. This is an American book. Its principal characters, its audience, its editors, even those who supported the author in writing it (from Columbia University's Harriman Institute to former Pepsi Chairman Donald Kendall) are all American. (Only when there is a Russian edition will reviewers perhaps have to wrestle with strangeness and mistranslations.)

Here, in short, is a man who really has our number, particularly when it comes to insinuating himself with the leading figures of our establishment, and he tells us how he did it. He didn't develop cozy relationships with American big shots by taking good notes and keeping his mouth shut. To the contrary, Dobrynin says, if you want people to be indiscreet with you, you have to pay them back "in the same coin." You have to offer them a tidbit or two in return, some scandalous Kremlin anecdote or rumor that they can pass along to their next lunch partner -- all in the strictest confidence, of...