Gates signals US could delay E. Europe missile shield plan

WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, seeking to mollify Moscow, gave the clearest sign yet yesterday that the United States might delay the activation of missile defense sites in Eastern Europe - even as President Bush pleaded with Congress to fully finance the plan to fill what he called an urgent need for European missile defense.

Gates's remarks, which expanded on recent comments by other US officials, were made at a news conference in Prague with Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek of the Czech Republic. Gates said US missiles might not be activated until Iran became a confirmed threat by taking action like testing its own missiles.

He also said that the United States planned to make any radar site in the Czech Republic and any missile site in Poland more transparent to Russia, perhaps through an exchange of observers.

Gates's talk of linking US missile activation to Iranian actions seemed counter to the message of urgency Bush delivered hours later in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington. "With continued foreign assistance," Bush said, "Iran could develop an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States and all of Europe before 2015." He said the time to act was now.

But linking the two messages were references by both men to an apparently cooperative new approach with Russia that might clear the way for the project.

US officials have spent months trying to assuage bitter opposition from Moscow, which sees the American missile facilities as a threat. One Russian official even warned of targeting Europe in response, and relations between the two powers seemed headed for a post-Cold War low.

After concerted US efforts to calm the Russians, Moscow's tone on missiles began to change this summer. At the Group of Eight summit in Germany in June, President Vladimir V. Putin offered the United States the use of radar facilities in Azerbaijan to help track Iranian missiles, an idea Bush did not reject.

This month, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Moscow with Gates. They reportedly presented proposals that included an invitation for Russia to join the United States and NATO in designing and operating an antimissile system meant to protect all of Europe, and suggested that Russian and American officers be stationed at each other's missile defense sites.

The visitors seemed at first to meet a frosty reception - Putin made a snide reference to building missile-defense sites "somewhere on the moon" - but officials said Rice and Gates were greeted more warmly behind closed doors.

The officials said the US proposal was presented as part of a larger package to include the future status of Kosovo and the question of whether Russia will carry out a threat to withdraw from the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty.

In Prague, Gates said the contacts with Russia continue. "We continue to encourage the Russians to partner with us in missile defense and continue our efforts to reassure them that these facilities are not aimed at Russia and could benefit Russia."

While saying that he expected the US negotiations with Poland and the Czech Republic to be concluded this year, Gates also proposed linking the activation of both sites to "definitive proof of the threat, in other words, Iranian missile testing and so on."

Although he said this proposal was not yet "fully developed," Gates's comments confirmed a report Saturday that quoted Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the NATO secretary general, as saying: "The Americans have made a substantial and fundamental offer. I sincerely hope the Russians will pick it up."