763.72119 P 43/44: Telegram
The Commission to Negotiate Peace to the Acting Secretary of State
[Received January 1, 1919—6:30 a.m.]
122. [From Lansing.] After having studied the question of sending agents into the field to obtain political information, it seems to me [Page 210] advisable that these men should go not as representatives of the Department of State, which would give them a diplomatic status and which might be misunderstood, but as agents of the Commission itself. We have accordingly sent Ellis Dresel into Germany to make a general survey of the situation and to return to Paris to report to the Commission within a few days.17 The following men have also started for Vienna under the leadership of Professor A. C. Coolidge:18 Captain Walter Davis, Captain W. A. Pashkowski, Professor Robert Kerner, F. E. Parker, Lieutenant R. C. Foster, Lieutenant F. R. King, Lieutenant H. G. Campagnoli; and also officers to act as couriers who will be selected before the party leaves Berne. Their purpose is to establish a nucleus in Vienna, and they will be joined from time to time by other men to be selected by the Commission who will be sent by Coolidge to various points in Central Europe. The Commission will report the names of these men to you for your information as soon as they are definitely selected. We already have a large list of well qualified Army officers to draw from. Their reports will be forwarded to the Department as well as to the Commission. It is intended that Army officers shall go in civilian clothes, permission first having been obtained through military channels from the governments of enemy countries to which it is intended to send them. Lansing.
- For correspondence concerning the Dresel Mission to Germany, see vol. ii pp. 130 ff.↩
- For correspondence concerning the dispatch of the Coolidge Mission, see vol. ii, pp. 218 ff.↩