Office of the Historian

740.00119 EW/8–1643: Telegram

The British Foreign Office to the British Embassy in the Soviet Union 1

most secret
London, August 14, 1943.

Sir Orme Sargent told Soviet Chargé d’Affaires2 on August 14th that His Majesty’s Government had reached the conclusion, after consultation with United States Government, that of the three approaches at Lisbon and Tangier and Barcelona, the one through Signor Berio at Tangier should be regarded as an official approach from Badoglio Government which should be used as a channel for demanding unconditional surrender. No reply is being sent to other approaches through d’Ajeta at Lisbon and Busseti at Barcelona. Gascoigne who had now returned to Tangier had therefore been instructed to give Signor B. a reply …3

2. As the Soviet Government might have doubts about the phrase “honourable capitulation” in our reply, it was explained to Monsieur Sobolev that the terms we would impose are in fact those with which the Soviet Government have already expressed agreement.4

  1. Printed from a copy made available to Hull on August 16, 1943, by the British Embassy at Washington.↩
  2. Arkady Alexandrovich Sobolev.↩
  3. At this point in the source text appears the following explanatory passage inserted by the British Embassy at Washington: “(the text of which was enclosed in a letter from Sir. R. Campbell to Mr. Hull dated August 13th).” See ante, p. 579, fn. 2.↩
  4. The reference is to the Soviet response to a summary of a draft of the “long” or “comprehensive” surrender terms which the British Foreign Office had made available to Sobolev on July 30, 1943. See Foreign Relations, 1943, vol. ii, pp. 341–342.↩