740.00119 Control (Austria)/4–945
The Chief of the Division of Central European Affairs (Riddleberger) to the Political Adviser to the United States Delegation to the European Advisory Commission (Mosely)
Dear Phil: As you know, our machinery for giving you official U.S. views is so cumbersome and slow that our power to speak to you is almost paralyzed, except for the most important formal matters. It therefore occurred to Ware18 and me that you might like to have informal comments on some of the matters on Austria now coming up in EAC which do not actually call for official expression of views from Washington.
The Soviet proposals for amendments of the U.K. draft on control machinery in your 3450, Cornea 206, of April 4, are interesting. Their suggestion no. 1 to add “recognized by the four powers” to the preamble is one which we ourselves had actually written into our first statement of views, with the concurrence of all members of the informal working party. It does not appear in the final draft merely because we tried to simplify the whole thing by a later different approach.
[Page 58]Their suggestions 2 and 4 were also almost identical with a suggestion which had been considered, at least in the State Department part of the working party, for having one department of security, or department of the armed forces, to contain both a military and air personnel, and the relatively fewer naval personnel, without trying to line up three coordinate units for these separate services.
Soviet suggestion no. 3 for deleting paragraph 2–B was also suggested here by our military people.
Soviet suggestion no. 5 to omit the last sentence of Article 9 is also the sort of thing our military people were thinking of when they commented that the British draft was too complex in trying to pre-judge conditions which might develop later.
Thus, the first five Soviet suggestions all seem entirely acceptable to us, provided we do keep a place for naval as well as air personnel, whatever it may be called.
With respect to the sixth and last, we still hope that it will be possible to do something better than “the city of Vienna”, if not the Vienna Gau line itself.
On the reparations question we are sending a full statement of the Department’s own views by telegram.19
Sincerely yours,