Robert S. Potter

Robert S. Potter

Soviet visit

On April 10, 1982, an IPS-sponsored group visiting Moscow for a week of meetings with high-level Soviet officials responsible for disseminating disinformation and propaganda for U.S. consumption, met with U.S. reporters to serve as the unofficial means for floating the possibility that Brezhnev might agree to a New York summit meeting in New York at SSD-II. The IPS group, led by its principal spokesman, Marcus Raskin, IPS cofounder and senior fellow, included Robert Borosage, IPS director, National Lawyers Guild activist and former director of the Center for National Security Studies; Minneapolis Mayor Donald M. Fraser; Rt. Rev. Paul Moore, Episcopal Bishop of New York; New York lawyer Robert S. Potter; and Roger Wilkins, journalist and senior fellow of the Joint Center for Political Studies which specializes in "black issues."

The IPS group identified only two of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Central Committee officials they met - Georgi A. Arbatov, head of the Institute of the USA and Canada, a "think-tank" that provides research and analysis and also cultivates and develops contacts with Americans at the direction of the KGB and the International Department of the CPSU Central Committee; and Vadim V. Zagladin, first deputy chief of the International Department.

In various U.S. interviews, Borosage has floated such standard Soviet themes as the Soviet Union is satisfied by "rough parity" with the United States; that the United States is restarting the arms race; that the Soviets want to go back to SALT II and get U.S. ratification; that if the United States starts another round in the arms race, it will seriously hurt the Soviet economy and ordinary Soviet citizens-but they'll still go ahead, so competition is futile; and the threat that the modern U.S. weapons proposed for deployment are "very dangerous... and would lead to much more dangerous stages that would make both sides insecure, not more secure."

Borosage took pains to say that the Soviets are "skeptical" of the disarmament movement and "they hadn't expected it. It was much more powerful and widespread than they'd ever imagined."

Institute for Policy Studies

In 1993 Robert Potter was listed among former "Trustees" of the Institute for Policy Studies, Washington DC.