Editorial Note
During the afternoon of Saturday, February 7, Dulles and Stassen, accompanied by Ambassador Cowen and several other United States officials, met in Brussels with Belgian Prime Minister Van Houtte and Foreign Minister Van Zeeland and their advisers. The majority of the meeting involved a discussion of the European Defense Community and the related problem of the length of the military service term; other topics discussed were European unity, currency convertibility, and offshore procurement. Following this meeting, Stassen, accompanied by Matteson and Fox, met with Prime Minister Van Houtte and his advisers to continue the discussion of offshore procurement. Informal memoranda of these two conversations, based on the recollection of several of the participants, are in the Conference files, lot 59 D 95, CF 137; no telegraphic summaries of these meetings were found in Department of State files.