120.39/9–144
Memorandum by the Chief of the Division of Eastern European Affairs (Bohlen) to the Chief of the Division of Foreign Service Personnel (Davis)
Mr. Davis: EE strongly endorses the views set forth in the attached despatch from Moscow62 regarding marriages of United States Government personnel with Soviet citizens. This question has become a very real problem in the operation of our mission in Moscow. I have recently discussed the whole question with Mr. Hamilton,63 former Minister Counselor there, and he also agrees that some serious step must be taken by the Department to halt the present trend.
From every point of view these marriages are highly undesirable. In the first place, under our regulations it requires the resignation of the American official concerned which involves the inevitable loss to the Service in many cases of efficient clerical personnel. Secondly, although all members of the staff in Moscow are aware of the prohibition against marrying alien wives and the necessity of resignation if such a step is taken, in practice for humanitarian reasons it is very difficult to order the official in question to leave without his wife, and during the period that he remains on in the Embassy with a Soviet wife his value to the Embassy, for obvious reasons, is greatly diminished. Experience has shown that Soviet Secret Police are quick to take advantage of the marriage of a Soviet citizen to a foreign official in order to attempt to obtain information from inside the Embassy. Such a situation is obviously unfair to the American involved as well as to his wife.
In addition as is pointed out in the attached dispatch, the Soviet Government is strongly opposed to the marriage of its citizens to foreigners and in almost every case seeks by failure to act to prevent the departure of the Soviet wife with her husband. Mr. Vyshinski, the Vice Commissar for Foreign Affairs, made the position of the Soviet Government on this question abundantly clear to Mr. Hamilton. He [Page 921] pointed out that the Soviet Government regards Soviet citizens who marry foreigners for the obvious purpose of leaving the country as deserters and for this reason, as a matter of basic principle, is not inclined to permit them to leave the country.
As the despatch points out the only method whereby favorable action can be obtained on these cases is for the Ambassador personally to make a real issue of them with the Soviet Government which is obviously impossible in each case and highly undesirable in principle since it involves the Ambassador personally in a series of continuing disputes with the Soviet Government which might well imperil his usefulness in the discharge of his official duties.
It might also be added that based on past experience even when the Embassy has been successful in obtaining permission for the Soviet wife to depart, these mixed marriages have not worked out well. The Soviet wives are in general unhappy and discontented when transplanted to a completely different environment.
EE, therefore, recommends that the procedure suggested in the attached despatch be followed in regard to any new bachelor personnel assigned to the Embassy in Moscow and in addition suggests that the Ambassador be authorized to obtain from the bachelor members of the staff now on duty in Moscow their signatures to the attached statement.64 In my opinion the recent increase of marriages in the Embassy in Moscow is in large measure due to the leniency on understandable humanitarian grounds which the Department and Embassy have shown in allowing the clerk to remain on in Moscow for an extended period of time after his marriage, in the hope that the Soviet Government will permit the departure of his wife. For this reason it might be well in regard to the proposed statement to make it clear in the last paragraph that a member of the Embassy staff who, despite this warning, marries a Soviet citizen would be required to leave Moscow within a month after such marriage irrespective of the status of his wife. The last paragraph might therefore read: “I realize that if during my period of assignment to the American Embassy at Moscow I contract marriage with a Soviet national I will be required to depart from the Soviet Union within a month after the date of such marriage. I further realize that since the American Embassy in Moscow has no grounds for insisting that the Soviet authorities grant permission for my wife to leave the Soviet Union it is probable that I will be forced to depart without her and that she may be required to remain in the Soviet Union indefinitely, regardless of my own movements.”