No. 848
Editorial Note
On April 4, the Joint United States Military Group, under the leadership of Major General August W. Kissner, USAF, and including Major General Garvin Crump, USA, Captain H. B. Sanchez, USN, and Colonel Jack Roberts, USAF, arrived in Madrid. The Mutual Security Agency Economic Group, with George F. Train as chief and Hubert Curry, Rifat Tirana, N. Carter DePaul, and Ivan B. White as members, arrived April 13. The talks which the two groups began on April 7 and April 17, respectively, were of a preliminary [Page 1833] nature, directed toward eliciting from the Spanish a sense of what the United States would have to pay, in military, economic, and political terms, in order to acquire the base rights. (See Document 870.) On both the military and economic sides, the negotiators were subordinated to the authority of the Embassy in Spain, and all reports from the groups were to be transmitted to Washington through the Embassy, using the series indicator “USNEG” to identify the messages as pertaining to the negotiations. The reports, the most important of which are documented below, are in file 711.56352.