The Secret Files of Mr. X

For three hours, Chernenko sat across the table from Malcolm Toon, the Russian-speaking U.S. ambassador in Moscow, who tried hard to strike up a conversation. Nods and grunts from Chernenko established that this was his first visit to Vienna and that the weather was to his liking. "But he just would not discuss anything substantive such as the treaty we signed," Toon says. "He was not unpleasant, only uncomfortable."

Toon remembers not a single smile flickering across Chernenko's expressionless face. Stolid and somber, he ate his way through the 10 courses, from pheasant-in-flight to strawberry plombiere, from the consomme with Siberian dumplings to the sturgeon a la Russe and roast suckling pig.

(At the same dinner, Brezhnev's jaw muscles would not function well and food kept falling out of his mouth.)

During his three tours of duty in Moscow totaling seven years, Toon failed in his efforts to meet with Politburo members -- except for Foreign Minister Andrey Gromyko and for Brezhnev, whom he saw a record eight times during his tenure as ambassador, between 1976 and 1979. "I kept asking for appointments with members of the Politburo, but didn't get any," Toon says. "It was one of the things that really bothered me.

"Chernenko is a faceless apparatchik," says Toon. (Apparatchik is the Russian word for bureaucrat, and it is the Kremlinologist's synonym for servility.) "He has consistently played the role of an aide to Brezhnev. He has never put his stamp on anything. If Brezhnev dies, Chernenko may take over in the interim. But in the long run . . ." Toon thrusts his palms upward in a gesture of hard unpredictability.

"If Brezhnev died today and President Reagan would call me to find out what kind of person Chernenko is," Toon says, "I would have to say I don't know."

The failure to get to know Soviet leaders is a permanent American frustration. The conflict is between a closed society's instinct for concealment and an open society's demand for exposure. The Soviets insist on hagiography; the West looks for the lowdown.

Foreigners don't receive invitations to the private residences of Politburo members or meet their wives. There is no sharing of a bottle of choice wine or spending a weekend together in the country to develop the cordiality that is the rule among Western leaders. Soviet protocol calls for their leaders' points of personal contact to be kept to a few words exchanged at a reception.

"It took us years to establish for certain what Brezhnev's birthday was," says Mr. X. "We don't even know Mrs. Chernenko's name."

Communists condemn as "prurient" Western interest in private lives. "The forces of history are objective," a Soviet Embassy press spokesman explains. "It doesn't matter whether someone in charge smokes a cigarette or a pipe." He says that journalistic inquiries aimed at detecting "subjective influences," such as personality traits, amount to "bourgeois sensationalism."

Allied governments share information about Soviet leaders with the United States, but the data are classified for fear of "burning" sources.

One such instance of classified information concerns Mrs. Nikita Khrushchev. When she visited Paris about 20 years ago with her husband, she went on a tour of Paris. As she entered Notre Dame, her French escort officer was astonished to see her making a tiny, hurried, but unmistakable sign of the cross.