the chief Russian negotiator Vladimir Semenov insisted on settling the ABM part of the agreement first, claiming that Gerard Smith’s call for parallel negotiations on both offensive and defensive weapons contradicted the bargain that Kissinger had recently announced. Unfortunately for Smith, the Soviet representative was on firm ground for his contention. The private exchange of letters between Nixon and Brezhnev that were part of the May 20 agreement had been handled in an irregular way. Ordinarily a State Department translator would have reviewed the Russian-language version of Brezhnev’s
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