East and West in accord on major Madrid issue

East and West reached one of their few agreements since the 1979 Soviet intervention in Afghanistan when they overcame the last barrier dividing them at the three-year-old Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, diplomats said.

Agreement on the major issue was reached when the Soviet Union softened demands to link the human contacts meeting, the last major Western human rights demand to have survived negotiations here, to progress on detente, they said.

The West, however, accepted a reference to detente and a Soviet demand to put the mandate in a document separate from the text of the main agreement, they said.