740.00119 Control (Korea)/10–3146
Memorandum of Conversation, by the Deputy Director of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs (Penfield)
In a conversation with General Arnold this afternoon I told him that Ambassador Bedell Smith had expressed the opinion a few days ago that a mutual withdrawal of Soviet and US forces in Korea would leave us in a weaker position in Korea vis-à-vis the Soviets than we are now and asked whether General Arnold agreed with this opinion. He said that he felt that under a trusteeship perhaps one regiment of troops from each of the four interested powers (USSR, UK, China [Page 753] and US) would be all that was needed and that a mutual reduction at this time in US and Soviet forces to that level would be quite practicable and not disadvantageous to us. He appeared to base his opinion on his belief that Koreans, while childishly irresponsible, are not by and large difficult to control, that with the aid of the carefully picked and trained constabulary which we are building up in southern Korea it would be practicable to control any Communist-inspired political disorder, and that we have much more genuine support among the people of southern Korea than the Soviets have among the people of northern Korea so that the Soviets would find it relatively more difficult to maintain the same degree of control they now have if they withdrew the major portion of their troops.