By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
Anatoly F. Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to Washington from 1962 to 1986, whose behind-the-scenes diplomacy was credited by many historians with helping to resolve the Cuban missile crisis and ease tensions in the cold war era, has died, the Kremlin announced Thursday. He was 90.
News agencies throughout Europe, including Itar-Tass, reported that he died on Tuesday.
To a generation of Washington officials in a perilous nuclear age, Mr. Dobrynin was the pre-eminent channel for Soviet-American relations: a tough, nuanced, charming ambassador who was, as admirers and detractors put it, no more duplicitous than he had to be.
Known to American colleagues as Doby, he served six Soviet leaders: Nikita S. Khrushchev, Alexei N. Kosygin, Leonid I. Brezhnev, Yuri V. Andropov, Konstantin U. Chernenko and Mikhail S. Gorbachev. In his 24 years in Washington — the most by far of any Soviet ambassador — he became dean of the diplomatic corps and worked with six American presidents and seven secretaries of state.
American leaders were under no illusions about him. Behind the affability, they knew, was a hard man dedicated to Soviet interests. Those who pressed him about human rights in the Soviet Union or the repression of satellite states were answered with coldness, if at all.
But successive administrations found it expedient to conduct affairs through him, rather than the American ambassador in Moscow, because of his professionalism and, after 1971, his membership in the Communist Party’s Central Committee, with its access to Kremlin power centers.
With longevity rare for Soviet officials abroad, Mr. Dobrynin became a Washington celebrity, photographed meeting with presidents in the Oval Office or bantering with diplomats and reporters at receptions. But he was also comfortable with back channels, meeting officials secretly at the White House or slipping into the State Department garage in his limousine for delicate talks upstairs.
His tenure began in 1962 with the most dangerous confrontation of the nuclear age. Khrushchev, gambling for strategic advantage, had set up missile bases in Cuba, and President John F. Kennedy had blockaded Soviet ships that were carrying missiles. As pressure on Kennedy to bomb or invade Cuba mounted, his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, met secretly three times with Mr. Dobrynin in October.
Those meetings were critical, enabling President Kennedy and Khrushchev to communicate freely. After each, Mr. Dobrynin cabled Khrushchev, and the attorney general briefed the president. Robert Kennedy later disclosed that Mr. Dobrynin had remained calm through the crisis, analyzing options and speaking carefully.
The solution to the crisis had two parts: a public American pledge not to invade Cuba in exchange for withdrawal of the Soviet missiles, and a private Kennedy agreement to withdraw obsolete missiles from Turkey and Italy. Historians say that the latter was a face-saving device for Khrushchev, and that the president wanted it private so that it would not seem a concession to nuclear blackmail.
In later years, Mr. Dobrynin’s diplomacy covered much of the cold war: American and Soviet roles in Vietnam, strategic arms control talks, wars in the Middle East, summit meetings, Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979, the downing of a Korean jetliner by Soviet warplanes in 1983, and other flash points.
Officials said his close ties to President Lyndon B. Johnson required a private phone line. He had good working relationships with Presidents Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter, but a cooler relationship with President Ronald Reagan.
In 1986, Mr. Dobrynin returned to Moscow as a senior Central Committee official. He retired in 1988, but remained an adviser to Mr. Gorbachev, the leader when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. A Dobrynin memoir, “In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to Six Cold War Presidents,” appeared in 1995.
Mr. Dobrynin is survived by his wife of 68 years, Irina; a daughter, Yelena; and a granddaughter, Yekaterina.
Anatoly Fyodorovich Dobrynin was born on Nov. 16, 1919, in Krasnaya Gorka, near Moscow. He became an engineer, earned a master’s degree in history and designed aircraft during World War II, but was selected for diplomatic training and assigned to American affairs because he had studied English.
In 1952, he became a Soviet counselor in Washington. By 1955, when he went home, he was the embassy’s No. 2 official. In 1957 he went to New York as under secretary to the United Nations secretary general, Dag Hammarskjold. He accompanied Khrushchev on his visit to the United States in 1959, returning to Moscow the next year to prepare for his ambassadorship.
Soon after arriving in Washington, he established himself as an unusual Soviet diplomat. While many predecessors had been hostile to all things American, Mr. Dobrynin steeped himself in American culture, literature and music. He spoke without interpreters, met privately with President Kennedy and Secretary of State Dean Rusk and entertained congressmen, business leaders, academics and reporters with his wit.
“I don’t know, things seem to have changed since I was last in Washington,” he was quoted in The New York Times as saying in 1962. “Now, suddenly, all the diplomats talk like newspaper men and all the newspaper men talk like diplomats.”
He traveled the country, fishing in Florida, taking in the Kentucky Derby. He did not parrot a Soviet line and banished the obvious K.G.B. agents from his staff. Even in the dark days of the cold war, embassy guests found it hard to imagine hostility in the portly, gregarious man with the hearty, infectious laugh. He struck many as amiable Uncle Anatoly.
But the career diplomat Malcolm Toon, America’s ambassador to Moscow from 1976 to 1979, offered another perspective in 1984, near the end of the ambassador’s tenure. “Dobrynin is one of the ablest diplomats of the 20th century,” he said. “But you shouldn’t treat him as a friend at court. He’s a representative of a government, a system, a philosophy that is hostile to everything we stand for.”
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