EGN NEWS DESK
Robert L. Barry, an American diplomat who was the chief U.S. negotiator in reaching a key army settlement with the Soviet Union close to the tip of the Cold War, died on March 11 at his residence in Newton, Mass. He was 89.
His spouse, Margaret Barry, stated the trigger was multi-infarct dementia.
Mr. Barry led a U.S. negotiating workforce at a safety convention in Stockholm in the summertime of 1986, when he and his Soviet counterpart, Oleg Grinevsky, reached an accord on troop inspections that American officers considered vital in decreasing East-West tensions.
The settlement established that NATO and Warsaw Pact members must notify one another a minimum of 42 days prematurely in the event that they had been planning army actions with a minimum of 13,000 troops or 300 tanks. In addition, any nation planning army maneuvers involving 17,000 or extra troopers must invite nations that had participated within the Stockholm convention to watch.
“We have taken an vital step towards decreasing the danger of army confrontation,” Mr. Barry advised reporters after the accord was struck. The subsequent calm bore out his remarks.
It was the primary East-West safety settlement because the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty on nuclear weapons signed by Jimmy Carter and Leonid I. Brezhnev in 1979.
Mr. Barry saved {a photograph} in his bed room that depicted the celebratory vodka toast he shared with Mr. Grinevsky.
The Soviet Union was the principal focus of Mr. Barry’s lengthy Foreign Service profession, which additionally included postings as U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria from 1981 to 1984 and to Indonesia from 1992 to 1995. In 1971, he turned one of many first Western diplomats allowed to dwell in what was then Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, as a consular officer.
In an unpublished memoir, he recalled that he would typically be adopted by the Ok.G.B. when he drove across the metropolis.
“Since I typically acquired misplaced,” he wrote, “there have been various events after I needed to flip round and retrace my steps, inflicting appreciable confusion among the many followers.”
Late in life, Mr. Barry acknowledged that he missed that period, with its binary oppositions. “Some will discover it unusual that I ought to really feel nostalgia for that less complicated world,” with its menace of nuclear annihilation, he wrote. “For all that, I felt that I knew who the enemy was, and I used to be assured that we understood how one can comprise the menace.”
Robert Louis Barry was born in Pittsburgh on Aug. 28, 1934, to Louis and Margaret (O’Halloran) Barry. His father was a colonel within the Army Air Corps, and the household moved from base to base throughout World War II.
Mr. Barry graduated from Lansdowne High School, outdoors Philadelphia, after which attended Dartmouth College on a Navy R.O.T.C. scholarship. He graduated in 1956 with a level in worldwide relations and a concentrate on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and obtained a James B. Reynolds Fellowship from Dartmouth to check at Oxford University. While there, he traveled to Hungary’s border with Austria in an effort to help refugees through the 1956 Hungarian rebellion in opposition to the Soviets. He spent three years within the U.S. Navy earlier than becoming a member of the Foreign Service in 1962.
In later years, other than his postings in Bulgaria and Indonesia, Mr. Barry was deputy assistant secretary for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from 1979 to 1981; chief working officer for Voice of America from 1986 to 1988; and particular assistant to Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, coordinating help to Eastern Europe, from 1991 to 1992.
After his retirement from the State Department, Mr. Barry was head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1998 to 2001.
In addition to his spouse, he’s survived by his daughter, Ellen Barry, a reporter for The New York Times; a son, John Barry; and three grandchildren.
In an oral historical past for the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Mr. Barry recalled the best second of his profession: when he negotiated the inspection settlement with the Soviet Union in Stockholm. It got here at a time of private tragedy for him and his spouse, Margaret, who had simply misplaced their 20-year-old son, Peter, in a fishing-vessel accident in Alaska.
Mr. Barry went to Stockholm anyway and held quick to his mandate. “The concept that they must open up their borders to on-site inspection to see about army maneuvers — or to verify about whether or not studies of the place their troops had been stationed or the place their workout routines had been being held — didn’t attraction very a lot to them,” he recalled. “But we saved the stress on.”
