The Secret Files of Mr. X

The incident was reported to the U.S. government but has been kept secret ever since -- and never published until now -- for fear of embarrassing the Khrushchevs, despite Khrushchev's fall from power in 1964 and death in 1971.

A similar rationale prevents the U.S. government from releasing any part of the report filed by the State Department escort officer who accompanied Chernenko during his two-day visit in Washington in 1969. (He was in this country to attend a U.N. session and came to Washington to see his daughter, married to a diplomat then at the Soviet Embassy.) To discuss that report would be "inappropriate," says a U.S. official who read it. "If the report said Chernenko is a stupid jerk, it would not be something we would want to make public. But, it so happens, there is nothing fascinating about the report."

According to another U.S. official who read the report, in 1969 Chernenko was interested in a data retrieval system big enough to store information on 20 million people -- which confirmed a Kremlinological contention that 20 million is the maximum the Party has set for its membership.

At the U.S. Bureau of Census, one official recalls visitor Chernenko as "just another dull Soviet." At IBM, a spokeswoman says that files such as visitors' logs are shredded after three years.

"We gave him what he wanted," says Mr. X, recalling American impressions of Chernenko as "a dour Soviet type who asked a lot of questions about data banks but gave us nothing in exchange." Which is the usual tradeoff in U.S.-Soviet contacts, Mr. X adds.

Last year Chernenko represented the Soviet Party at the French Communist Party's congress, and the French government passed on its impressions to the U.S. government, as did West German leaders who observed him during their visits to Moscow.

"What we have on any Soviet leader is highly idiosyncratic," says Mr. X. "Riddled with holes. But I know where the holes are. It's an archaic, hand-operated, paper-and-pencil system. But there is no real alternative to it." He explains that his office has no budget for a computer, but even if it did, a computerized system would be six months behind events.

The process is laborious, he says. The Soviet Union publishes hundreds of newspapers that the U.S. Embassy has to collect and mail from Moscow; the material is then distributed, mostly to nongovernment experts who run a flourishing cottage industry in translation and analysis, indexing and cross-indexing. The translations are done, for an average of $30 for 200 words, by thousands of graduate students and retired Foreign Service officers, East European emigres and ordinary people who happen to know Russian. The analysts contracted to research the Soviet press -- say, study all references to Politburo members -- are scattered among think tanks and universities; they number in the hundreds.

What Mr. X would not discuss what he knows from sources other than press analyses. "I am not going to tell you what else I know about Chernenko," he says, a mite churlish.

"You have to forgive him," says a colleague who admires Mr. X as one of the last of the vanishing breed of Kremlinological craftsmen and is troubled that no one is being trained as a successor to Mr. X. "Anybody who for 20 years reads the Pravda and wades through all that Soviet muck every day has got to be a little crazy."

Across the Potomac at McLean, rules are even more stringent. The CIA turned down a request to interview Mr. X's CIA equivalent, singled out by his colleagues as another old-fashioned craftsman with shoeboxes, which, according to Mr. X, contain far more material than his because the CIA has a larger budget for such operations.

But Washington is not monolithic in sharing Moscow's penchant for secrecy. A little diligence uncovers enough new information about Chernenko to paint a cameo portrait: