835.24/8–746
Memorandum of Conversation, by the Assistant Chief of the Division of Northern European Affairs (Trimble)
During the course of a conversation with me this afternoon, Mr. Aminoff92 said that on the basis of the recommendations which he had made to his Government following his conversation with Mr. Spaeth, Mr. Brown93 and myself several days ago, the Foreign Office had instructed the Legation to inform the Department that it would delay, for “technical reasons” issuance of export licenses covering armaments manufactured by Bofors for the account of the Argentine Government until the latter part of September, but that it would probably have to make “token” shipments at that time. I told Mr. Aminoff that this delay would be useful but that I hoped it might be possible to extend further. In this connection, I pointed out that the manifests of all ships arriving at Buenos Aires are published and, hence, even if a Swedish vessel should bring only ten machine guns, the news that Sweden was resuming arms shipments to Argentina would spread all over the country and would naturally have an extremely adverse effect on our efforts to prevent the British and Canadians from shipping arms and munitions to that country. I, therefore, ventured the hope that additional “technical reasons” could be found to postpone such shipments and told Mr. Aminoff that we would let him know as soon as the Argentine Government has taken action looking toward the nationalization or sale of Nazi firms in Argentina and the actual deportation of the Nazi agents there.