124.493/4–2850
The Czechoslovak Foreign Minister (Široký) to the Ambassador in Czechoslovakia (Briggs)1
At the recent trials before the State Tribunal in Praha the extensive espionage and hostile activity of numerous employees of the diplomatic and consular offices of the United States of America, directed against the security of the Czechoslovak Republic, has been once more proved in all its width. This activity rested in the direct organization and leading of espionage as well as in the granting and supplying of the material equipment in order to carry out this activity. The employees in question are mainly employees who held important positions in the diplomatic and consular offices of the United States of America. The Minister of Foreign Affairs has, pointed to this fact already several times and has drawn provisional conclusions from it.
Many employees of the diplomatic and consular offices of the United States of America therefore carry out an activity which is directed against the security of the state which is affording them hospitality, and which is in sharp contradiction to diplomatic customs and to international law. This activity further has nothing in common with the usual activity of functionaries of diplomatic and consular offices, that is to say with the protection of the interests of the state in question in the Czechoslovak Republic, an activity which these employees were pretending to carry out.
These facts necessarily lead the Minister of Foreign Affairs to the conclusion that for carrying out a normal activity in order to fulfill their own actual tasks in conformance with international customs and with international law the disproportionately excessive number of the employees of the diplomatic and consular offices of the United States of America in the Czechoslovak Republic is not justified. And this particularly as reality shows that this high number—by the above described activity of the employees—leads to the aggravation of the relations between the USA and the Czechoslovak Republic.
[Page 552]The Minister of Foreign Affairs therefore requests that the Embassy of the USA within reasonable time reduces the number of employees of the diplomatic and consular office of the USA in the Czechoslovak Republic—i.e. the Embassy of the USA and the American Consulate General in Bratislava—by two-thirds of the number registered by the Embassy of the United States of America with the diplomatic protocol of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and this in all categories of employees.
- The source text was transmitted to the Department of State in telegram 617, April 28, not printed.↩