800.51W89 U.S.S.R./192: Telegram
The Chargé in the Soviet Union (Wiley) to the Secretary of State
[Received February 27—10:55 a.m.]
82. My 71, February 18, 4 p.m. Foreign Office summoned Duranty this morning. Reference was made to allegations in the American press that the negotiations in Washington between the President and Litvinov concerned credits, not a loan, and that the Soviet Government had insisted on disposing freely of such a loan even for purchases outside of the United States.
Duranty was authorized to state on the “most competent authority and most categorically” that the word credit was not even mentioned in the negotiations, only the word loan was employed. Though there was no mention of any limitation of the right of the Soviet Government to dispose of the “loan” as it pleased, the Soviet Government in the course of conversations in Moscow with Ambassador Bullitt offered to stipulate that the loan be used exclusively to finance Soviet purchases in the United States. The Soviet Government never requested that the loan be paid over. It had merely expected that the “loan” would be placed at the disposal of the Soviet Government in order to cover purchases.
Duranty is filing a dispatch to the Times in the sense of the foregoing.15
- New York Times, February 28, 1935, p. 10, col. 2.↩