Office of the Historian

315.3/10–2353

Memorandum of Conversation, by William O. Hall of the Mission at the United Nations

secret
[New York,] October 23, 1953.
  • Subject:
  • Certain F.B.I. Activities at UN
  • Participants:
  • Mr. Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary-General, United Nations
  • Mr. Constantin A. Stavropoulos, UN Legal Advisor
  • Mr. William O. Hall, US Mission to the UN

At the conclusion of my conversation on the personnel question this evening, the Secretary-General said he wished to give me advance warning of a formal note he would send to Ambassador Lodge on Monday or Tuesday concerning certain inadmissible activities by the F.B.I.

He said his note would deal only with the questioning of the head of the UN Washington Information Office by the F.B.I. concerning a luncheon which he had had with an official of the Soviet Embassy, but that he wished to tell me personally that an F.B.I. agent had recently attempted to question the secretaries of Madame Pandit, President of the General Assembly, concerning the identity of certain of Madame Pandit’s visitors to her 38th floor office. The Secretary-General said the agent had apparently shadowed the visitors to the 38th floor and had approached the secretaries immediately after their [Page 361] departures. Madame Pandit is aware of this incident and, in reporting it to the Secretary-General, specifically asked that no action be taken.

The Secretary-General said he was asking his people to make certain that this did not recur. He said he thought the U.S. security agencies were assuming that inasmuch as the former Secretary-General had permitted personnel investigations on U.N. territory other investigations could also be conducted there. He said this was not correct and that he agreed with Ambassador Lodge that it had been a mistake to carry on the security and loyalty interrogations in the UN building, but that he did not wish to change this practice.

I did not comment except to express certain disbelief that the F.B.I. would engage in such activity and to promise the Secretary-General that his note would be given prompt and full consideration by the Department of State and Department of Justice when received. I then pointed out that the F.B.I. and Immigration Service did have the necessary and essential duty of questioning from time to time aliens concerning their activities even though they were employees of the Secretariat, and cited the recent example of a group of Chinese nationals employed by the Secretariat who were suspected of irregular entry into the U.S. The Secretary-General said he fully recognized the necessity for this activity and for security surveillance, but that such activity should not take place in the Headquarters building, should be selective, and should not concern itself with official UN acts.