Robert L. Barry, 89, diplomat who negotiated pact with Soviets, dies

Robert L. Barry, an American diplomat who was the chief American negotiator in reaching a major military agreement with the Soviet Union near the end of the Cold War, died on March 11 at his home in Newton, Massachusetts. He was 89 years old.

His wife, Margaret Barry, said the cause was multi-infarct dementia.

Mr. Barry led an American negotiating team at a security conference in Stockholm in the summer of 1986, when he and his Soviet counterpart, Oleg Grinevsky, reached an agreement on troop inspections that American officials saw as important in easing tensions between East and West .

The agreement stipulated that members of NATO and the Warsaw Pact would have to notify each other at least 42 days in advance if they planned military activities involving at least 13,000 troops or 300 tanks. In addition, any country planning military maneuvers involving 17,000 or more soldiers should invite countries that participated in the Stockholm Conference to observe.

“We have taken an important step toward reducing the risk of military confrontation,” Mr. Barry told reporters after the deal was concluded. The subsequent calm confirmed his comments.

It was the first East-West security agreement since the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty on Nuclear Weapons signed by Jimmy Carter and Leonid I. Brezhnev in 1979.

Mr. Barry had a photo in his bedroom depicting the celebratory vodka toast he shared with Mr. Grinevsky.

The Soviet Union was the main focus of Mr. Barry’s long career in the Foreign Service, which also included posts as U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria from 1981 to 1984 and to Indonesia from 1992 to 1995. In 1971, he became one of the first Western diplomats who were allowed to live as consular officers in what was then Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg.

In an unpublished memoir, he recalled that he was sometimes followed by the KGB as he drove through the city.

“As I often got lost,” he wrote, “there were a number of times when I had to turn around and retrace my steps, which caused considerable confusion among the followers.”

Later in life, Mr. Barry acknowledged that he had missed that era of binary opposites. “Some may find it strange that I am homesick for that simpler world,” with the threat of nuclear annihilation, he wrote. “Despite all that, I felt like I knew who the enemy was, and I felt confident that we understood how to contain the threat.”

Robert Louis Barry was born in Pittsburgh on August 28, 1934, the son of Louis and Margaret (O’Halloran) Barry. His father was a colonel in the Army Air Corps and the family moved from base to base during World War II.

Mr. Barry graduated from Lansdowne High School, outside Philadelphia, and then attended Dartmouth College on a Navy ROTC scholarship. He graduated in 1956 with a degree in international relations and a concentration on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and received a James B. Reynolds Fellowship from Dartmouth to study at the University of Oxford. While there, he traveled to Hungary’s border with Austria in an effort to help refugees during the 1956 Hungarian uprising against the Soviets. He spent three years in the U.S. Navy before joining the Foreign Service in 1962.

In later years, in addition to his posts in Bulgaria and Indonesia, Mr. Barry served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from 1979 to 1981; chief operating officer for Voice of America from 1986 to 1988; and special assistant to Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who coordinated aid to Eastern Europe, from 1991 to 1992.

After retiring from the Department of State, Mr. Barry served as Chief of Mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1998 to 2001.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughter Ellen Barry, a reporter for The New York Times; a son, John Barry; and three grandchildren.

In an oral history for the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Mr. Barry recalled the biggest moment of his career: when he negotiated the inspection agreement with the Soviet Union in Stockholm. It came at a time of personal tragedy for him and his wife Margaret, who had just lost their 20-year-old son Peter in a fishing vessel accident in Alaska.

Mr Barry went to Stockholm anyway and stuck to his mandate. “The idea that they should open their borders for on-the-spot inspection to see if there are any military maneuvers – or to check if there are any reports of where their troops were stationed or where their exercises were held – didn’t really appeal to people . them,” he recalled. “But we kept the pressure on.”