The meeting, in the offices of the United States Mission to the United Nations, represented the first high-level encounter since January 1991.

The meeting was the first high-level encounter between the two sides since the Chinese civil war ended in 1949, and the Nationalist Government was forced to flee to Taiwan.

It was the first high-level encounter between the two Governments since the 1973 peace agreement.

And it is surely in keeping with the Kremlin's efforts to win trust abroad, to remove once and for all an issue which intrudes into every high-level encounter with Sweden.

But aides said that its simple accommodations would not be adequate for a high-level diplomatic encounter.

The meetings' participants, using terms usually reserved for high-level diplomatic encounters, later described the session, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, as "businesslike" and "candid."

I am not kidding you: for this high-level encounter he goes to the news-agents' next door and gets the key that hangs behind the counter.

Thus this week's high-level encounters will probably be brief, pictorial and, by definition, successful.

The Israeli-Syrian negotiations are even more ripe for such a secret high-level encounter.

What was also striking about this meeting was the way it underscored how much these high-level encounters are no longer the stage for testing the mettle of an American, or even Russian, leader.