768.00/2–1653
No. 672
The Counselor of Embassy in Yugoslavia
(Wallner) to
the Counselor-designate of the Department of State (MacArthur)
official–informal
Dear Doug: The papers say you are to be Counselor of the Department, and George Allen, who just returned from Washington, reports that this is likely, but that whatever your title you will have a good job in the new setup. I see that you took the trip with the Secretary and Stassen.1 This is to the good all around, and I am particularly delighted.
I have fallen into a world quite strange to me—Balkan, Communist, dynamic, conspiratorial and on our side of the fence. I am working hard to learn the game and the change of Ambassadors is pushing me a little faster than I would have liked. These people crossed some sort of a watershed late in the fall and we are exhilarated [Page 1340] by the speed of the descent. This irritates a lot of people in Washington who seem to take it for granted that they should be sliding down our side of the hill—something they fell all over themselves to get them to do—and criticize their clothes and their manners. Neither is good now and neither will ever meet our standards. However, they need us and we need them and they feel stranger about being on our side of the hill than they appear. A great deal, in a hard-boiled realistic way, remains to be done. They are almost ripe for NATO. NATO is far from ripe for them.
There are several interim steps, first of which would seem to be the early resumption of US–UK–French-Yugoslav military conversations on as realistic a basis as possible (I know some of the problems). All such talks point inevitably to the necessity of Yugoslav-Italian military cooperation, which to my mind is next on the must list. There is a better feeling on both sides about this than before, but both sides need to be pushed, not only by diplomatic action, but by constant reiteration of the military facts of life. Trieste, like all territorial disputes, is going to be hard to settle and probably can be settled only in a larger context. For the moment, what with Italian elections etc, the two sides cannot get around a table. Our contacts with Italians are constant, inside and outside NATO. Let us press on with the Yugoslavs in the military sphere in the interim. They are working out some of their southern problems with the Greeks and Turks, but I understand that what really interests us is the Ljubljana Gap.
The above may sound amateurish, but one of my troubles here is being kept in the dark about what Washington is thinking. For instance we have never even seen the Handy Report.2 Many telegrams about Trieste never reach us and we have never had one word about the Secretary’s recent conversations in Rome and London (and perhaps Paris) on the subject of Italo-Yugoslav relations on which the Italian Legation and the British and French Embassies are kept fully posted. I am told that the constant row between WE and EE has something to do with this, but if you can manage to remedy the blackout I should be grateful.
[Here follow brief personal remarks.]
- Reference is to the visit to Western Europe by newly-appointed Secretary of State Dulles and Director for Mutual Security Stassen, Jan. 31–Feb. 8; for documentation, see vol. V, Part 2, pp. 1548 ff.↩
- For a summary of the Handy Report, see infra.↩