790.5/4–2254: Telegram
The Secretary of State to the Department of State
priority
Dulte 3. For Acting Secretary. I lunched with Eden today. I opened by saying I wanted to clear up any misunderstanding which might have arisen re formation of informal working group to examine possibilities for united action in southeast Asia. Eden replied that he would speak very frankly. When he had agreed in London last week to informal working group, he had overlooked Colombo conference which opens April 26.1 He felt it would be most undesirable to give any public indication of membership in program for united action before the end of the Colombo conference. The establishment of a working group of the ten countries we envisaged would certainly be known and since it would not include three Commonwealth countries, there would probably be criticism emanating from Colombo which would be most unhelpful at Geneva. Re membership in SEA united action program, Eden said he wished to state categorically that contrary to the Newman article in Herald Tribune, the UK had issued no invitations of any kind to participate. He had sent messages informing the Commonwealth countries of the discussions with me in London last week, but there had been no question of invitation. Eden obviously has in mind eventual participation of India, Pakistan and Burma, but recognizes this raises question of Formosa, ROK and Japan.
He said that the Burmese were much worried over possibility of Communist take-over of Indochina and he did not exclude possibility that eventually they might participate in united action although perhaps not immediately. But all the Commonwealth countries had stressed that a sine qua non for any program was grant by France of real independence to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia including right of future withdrawal from French Union if they so desired.
I asked Eden how long Colombo meeting would last. He was unsure, but had impression not more than a few days. I then outlined to Eden my conversation with Bidault this morning2 and said that we [Page 1363] might be faced at Geneva with a sudden collapse of French will re Indochina. If we took no steps and had no alternatives at Geneva our chances of achieving anything were very slight. On other hand if Communists knew we were working with other like-minded people to unite in defense of southeast Asia, our hands would be greatly strengthened at Geneva and the Communists might be brought to realize that their extravagant ambitions re southeast Asia would be opposed by a common will and therefore they might be brought to renounce them. Furthermore, we must ourselves have plans for holding of remainder of SEA should Indochina collapse and a point of departure was a common assessment of what was possible from the military viewpoint. We discussed very generally and without reaching any conclusions the possibility of a secret military appraisal of what we could do to bolster Thailand. One very tentative idea was that a US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Thai military group might secretly examine such possibility. (French would not be included because basic assumption on which such a group would carry out study would be French collapse in Indochina). Eden said he was prepared to recommend to London the establishment of above secret military group if we wished him to but after further discussion it was agreed that we would make no recommendations to our respective governments till we had probed the French further here and had a clearer picture of what is in their minds. I would appreciate your reaction to above possibility since Eden may wish to talk about it again in the next several days.3