Robert L. Barry, an American diplomat who was the US' chief negotiator to succeed in a key navy settlement with the Soviet Union close to the top of the Chilly Warfare, died March 11 at his dwelling in Newton, Mass. He was 89 years outdated.
His spouse, Margaret Barry, stated the trigger was multi-infarct dementia.
Mr. Barry led a US negotiating crew at a safety convention in Stockholm in the summertime of 1986, when he and his Soviet counterpart, Oleg Grinevsky, reached an settlement on troop inspections that American officers thought of it necessary to cut back East-West rigidity.
The settlement established that NATO and Warsaw Pact members needed to notify one another at the least 42 days prematurely in the event that they have been planning navy actions with at the least 13,000 troops or 300 tanks. As well as, any nation planning navy maneuvers involving 17,000 or extra troopers ought to invite nations that had participated within the Stockholm convention to watch.
“We’ve got taken an necessary step to cut back the danger of navy confrontation,” Mr. Barry advised reporters after the settlement. The following calm introduced his remarks.
It was the primary East-West safety settlement for the reason that Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty on nuclear weapons signed by Jimmy Carter and Leonid I. Brezhnev in 1979.
Mr Barry stored {a photograph} in his bed room depicting the celebratory vodka toast he shared with Mr Grinevsky.
The Soviet Union was the principle focus of Mr. Barry's lengthy profession within the Overseas Service, which additionally included posts as United States Ambassador to Bulgaria from 1981 to 1984 and to Indonesia from 1992 to 1995 In 1971, he grew to become one of many first Western diplomats allowed to reside in what was then Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg, as a consular officer.
In an unpublished memoir, he recalled that he was generally adopted by the KGB when he drove across the metropolis.
“As I typically bought misplaced,” he wrote, “there have been many events once I needed to flip again 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 opposites. “Some will discover it unusual that I longed for that less complicated world,” with its menace of nuclear annihilation, he wrote. “For all that, I needed to know who the enemy was, and I used to be assured that we understood find out how to comprise the menace.”
Robert Louis Barry was born in Pittsburgh on August 28, 1934, to Louis and Margaret (O'Halloran) Barry. His father was a colonel within the Military Air Corps, and the household moved from base to base throughout World Warfare II.
Mr. Barry graduated from Lansdowne Excessive Faculty, exterior of Philadelphia, after which attended Dartmouth School on a Navy ROTC scholarship. He graduated in 1956 with a level in worldwide relations with a deal with the Soviet Union and Jap Europe, and acquired a James B. Reynolds Fellowship from Dartmouth to review at Oxford College. Whereas there, he traveled to Hungary's border with Austria in an effort to assist refugees in the course of the 1956 Hungarian rebellion towards the Soviets. He spent three years within the US Navy earlier than becoming a member of the Overseas Service in 1962.
In later years, along with his posts in Bulgaria and Indonesia, Mr. Barry was deputy assistant secretary for the Soviet Union and Jap Europe from 1979 to 1981; Chief Working Officer of Voice of America from 1986 to 1988; and particular assistant to Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, coordinating help to Jap Europe, from 1991 to 1992.
After his retirement from the State Division, Mr. Barry was head of the Group for Safety and Cooperation in Europe mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1998 to 2001.
Along with his spouse, he’s survived by his daughter, Ellen Barry, a reporter for the New York Occasions; a son, John Barry; and three grandchildren.
In an oral historical past for the Affiliation for Diplomatic Research and Coaching, 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 non-public tragedy for him and his spouse, Margaret, who had simply misplaced their 20-year-old son, Peter, in a fishing accident in Alaska.
Mr. Barry went to Stockholm anyway and caught to his mandate. “The concept that they needed to open their borders to on-site inspection to see navy maneuvers – or to examine if the experiences of the place their troops have been stationed or the place their workouts have been held – didn’t not a lot enchantment to them,” he recalled. “However we stored the strain on.”
