Office of the Historian

890F.51/10–545

Memorandum by the Assistant Chief of the Division of Financial Affairs (McGuire) to Mr. Willard L. Thorp, Deputy to the Assistant Secretary of State (Clayton)

[Washington,] October 5, 1945.

After I had completed the underlying memo,19 Mr. Collado informed me that he was seriously considering asking the Export-Import Bank to provide the necessary funds without absolute assurance regarding availability of dollars for servicing, in the expectation that we will find some means of assisting the British to make sterling a freely convertible currency. He asked me to draft a memorandum for presentation to Wayne Taylor20 along those lines, and implied that in his judgment the chances of getting the Bank’s approval were good enough so that we need not proceed with further negotiations on Plans I and II21 for the time being. However, I am sending the underlying memorandum along anyway for your files, in case further work on Plans I and II becomes desirable.

  1. Memorandum of October 5 to Mr. Thorp not printed; the memorandum was entitled “Suggested Procedure for Further Negotiations on Plans I and II for Saudi Arabia”.↩
  2. President of the Export-Import Bank of Washington.↩
  3. See footnote 92, p. 942.↩