196. Letter 14 from McConaughy to Johnson1
You raise some basic questions in your letter No. 7 of September 7. Of course these questions had occurred to us and had already been given some thought. But the answers are not easy and Messrs. Robertson and Phleger feel I should not write anything on policy questions to you until the Secretary returns and gives us some guidance. He is due back tomorrow the 17th from Duck Island. He leaves after the close of business on the 19th for the opening of the UNGA Session in New York. We hope to have some time with him over the week end. The telegram containing the instructions to you for your Tuesday meeting will not be drafted until after we get the benefit of the Secretary’s thinking. I hope to be able to give you some helpful background thinking in my next letter of Monday morning the 19th. We have prepared a summary of developments at Geneva since September 1 for the Secretary to read on the plane enroute to Washington so that he will be fairly current when he gets here. For your background information the Secretary will return to the Department from New York on Friday, September 23. He will be absent again from September 26 through September 28.
[Typeset Page 258] [Facsimile Page 2]We have been concerned about insuring that the Americans in jail get word of the Agreed Announcement and can get in touch with O’Neill. We are of course caught in a box because we must avoid giving the Chinese Communists and the Indian Embassy access to Chinese in this country other than those who express a wish to return to the Mainland. We are considering sending individual letters to each of the 18 Americans still denied permission to leave, signed by Mr. Robertson, for delivery by Wang Ping-nan with the request that he effect their delivery to the addressees. The letter would read as follows: (attached).
We have some misgivings about this since it may give Wang an opening wedge for insisting that you accept undesirable communications from him for delivery in this country. Please give us your reaction to (1) the idea of direct Departmental communication with the detained Americans, (2) the proposed mode of transmittal through Wang Ping-nan and (3) the content of the draft letter which is attached. If you do not like this proposal we would like your recommendations for alternative means of satisfying ourselves that all American have the word.
I have taken up your code clerk problem with senior administrative people in the Department. They asked me to tell you that two regular code clerks who have just been assigned to European posts are leaving Washington this week end for Geneva. They are assigned elsewhere but our instructions read that they should stay on detail at Geneva [Facsimile Page 3] until further notice. The intention is to keep them there as long as your talks continue. They are due to arrive in Geneva on Monday. It is true that these two will merely take the place of two others who have been detailed to Geneva who are going back to their regular posts but the situation will be more stable since you can count on having these people as long as you are there. This will give Geneva a total of four people in the code room staff, and the specialists here say that this is enough to give you good service on Saturday and Sunday as well as some overtime on regular working days. The volume is down a lot since the Atomic Energy Conference ended. They think the problem is essentially one of overtime rather than heavy volume. They believe these four can handle the occasional peaks as well as the overtime. Bob Stufflebeam asked me to assure you that the Department has not dealt lightly with this problem. The seriousness of it is recognized and a special effort has been made to solve it. The administrative people are confronted with a chronic shortage of code clerks coincident with an increase in volume in all geographic areas. They feel that Gowen has chiefly been worried by the uncertainty of the temporary assignments. That problem is now solved. You may wish to pass the foregoing on to Gowen as coming from authoritative administrative sources here, if he has not already received it by telegram. If your talks are still going on around mid-October, you will be [Typeset Page 259] more than [Facsimile Page 4] amply covered for a big influx of code people will be going in in preparation for the Foreign Minister’s Meeting, October 27.
The telephone exchange on Wednesday was very satisfactory from our standpoint although we were sorry to have kept you waiting on the line so long. You handled Wang’s unexpected move well and there is no reason to worry about the slight misunderstanding of his intentions in the course of the session. I would have expected Ralph or Doug to pass you a note if they suspected that you did not get the purport of what Wang intended to do, but it turned out all right. Under separate cover we are sending you the five items you requested in your last letter.
We are instructing Drum to try to record very systematically the stories of all the Americans who are now beginning to come out. The same instructions will go to Japan. We are also going back over the old records here in an effort to compile a complete story of the maltreatment of Americans from the beginning. There may be no occasion to use it at Geneva but we want to have it in reserve in readily useable form in case it should be needed.
I take Wang’s sudden unilateral public move on the 14th as a bad augury. I doubt if he would have made a public demand for moving the talks to a higher level at that moment unless a Communist decision had been made which depreciated the value of further talks at the Ambassadorial level, from their standpoint. It may be increasingly difficult to keep the ball rolling. We will give you all the ammunition we can before your next meeting.
[Facsimile Page 5]Good luck and warmest regards,
Sincerely,
- Source: Department of State, Geneva Talks Files, Lot 72D415. Secret; Official–Informal.↩