State-JCS Meetings, lot 61 D 417
Memorandum of the Substance of Discussion at a Department of State Joint Chiefs of Staff Meeting1
[Extract]
. . . . . . .
Korea
General Bradley: We have prepared a draft message to Ridgway on the question whether he should submit a package proposal on the remaining issues. Do you also have a draft on this subject?2
Mr. Matthews: Yes, we do.
General Bradley: It seems to us that one question is whether we should try to resolve the issue of Soviet representation on the armistice machinery before we submit proposals for the settlement of the other outstanding issues.
Mr. Matthews: We lean to the idea that we ought to put all of these problems, including Soviet representation, into one package proposal.
General Bradley: You might like to look at our draft which was prepared by the Army and which we have been discussing.
(The conferees read the draft army message.)3
Mr. Matthews: It is not clear to me from your draft when the proposal would be made.
General Collins: Your are right, that is unclear.
Mr. Bohlen: The third paragraph gives the implication that this has already been done.
General Bradley: One implication of the amendment proposed by the Navy is that we should try to resolve the small issues before submitting proposals on the three basic issues.
Mr. Johnson: Do you include among these small issues the inspection of “secrets”?
General Collins: Yes, and a few others. I should also point out that we intend to refer at the end of the message to our plan to issue a general warning against a violation of the armistice.
General Bradley: Yes, that is one amendment we intended to make. The two messages relating to the general sanction are still in effect and [Page 83] this should be noted. Do you in the State Department believe that we should try to resolve the minor issues or should we include them also in the package proposal?
Mr. Nitze: Can we concede on the minor ones? Are they of much importance to us? I take it that the question whether there are five or six ports of entry at which we could inspect is not of much importance.
General Eddleman: We have been holding out for six; in fact, six represents a concession for we wanted the right to inspection at eight. However, I believe this one could be settled without much difficulty.
Mr. Nitze: If we could accept five, that would be one more concession that we had made and might improve our bargaining position on the others. I take it from what you have said that the communists’ demand for inspection of “secrets” is a silly demand and one that we could not accept.
General Collins: I think we should just ignore it.
General Bradley: I don’t know what they have in mind.
Mr. Nitze: If it relates to their charges of bacteriological warfare, we might be better off to take the position that they can of course look at such things.
Mr. Matthews: Returning to General Bradley’s question, I still lean to putting all these issues into one package. The decision depends in part, I suppose, on how much time General Ridgway needs for segregation of the prisoners of war who do not wish to be repatriated.
General Bradley: Does anyone disagree with this point of view?
General Collins: General Ridgway’s incoming message4 speaks of the settlement of the Soviet representation issue as a prerequisite to the settlement of the other issues. It is not clear to me whether General Ridgway believes that he should refuse to accept the Soviet Union in the armistice machinery under any and all circumstances.
Mr. Johnson: It looks to me as though he has not paid attention to paragraph 2 of our message5 on this subject.
General Collins: That is a question. Perhaps he disagrees with us on this point and has not explicitly said so.
Mr. Matthews: It has seemed to us that there might be some advantage in having the Soviet Union on the inspection teams provided the Soviets are not called “neutrals”.
Mr. Johnson: I agree with that. I think it might be desirable to spell out our point of view a little and to let General Ridgway shoot at it if he wants to.
General Bradley: It looks to me as though there is no basic disagreement amongst us on this message and that what we have is a drafting problem.
[Page 84]Admiral Fechteler: I would like to ask a question. General Ridgway’s message refers to his desire to adopt inflexible minimum positions on the basic issues. The army draft agrees with respect to the three basic outstanding issues. It suggests that they should be put up in a single package. It does not seem to me that the State draft gives General Ridgway the answers he says he needs. If I were General Ridgway I would interpret the last part of State’s message to mean that positions are not necessarily final positions and might be changed at some time in the future.
Mr. Johnson: That was not our intention.
General Bradley: That is why I say that this is a problem of drafting. I don’t think there really is any disagreement.
Mr. Bohlen: Paragraph 1a of the State draft seems to me to say what Admiral Fechteler thinks we should say.
Admiral Fechteler: But the preceding language refers to the tactics of the negotiations, which puts the issue somewhat in doubt. Where, in your message, does it say that these are final and inflexible positions?
General Bradley: I think we should take these two messages and combine them into one. Could we let Mr. Johnson and General Eddleman work on this?
Mr. Matthews: Do we need to ascertain from General Ridgway the time he requires for carrying out the segregation?
General Bradley: I think that is an important point.
General Collins: As regards the drafting problem I think we might take the first part of Army’s proposed message and use that instead of the first part of State’s draft. In the second part of the message we could use more of State’s language. In that part we would also put in the Navy’s point about resolving the minor issues.
General Bradley: I think we might link that with the problem of segregation. We might advise General Ridgway to try to resolve the minor issues during the time that he is carrying out the segregation process.
Mr. Bohlen: There is one difference between these messages which we perhaps ought to consider. It relates to timing. The Army message seems to refer to an intermediate phase whereas the State message eliminates any intermediate phase and suggests that we get to the final phase as soon as possible.
General Collins: I don’t think there is any real difference on this point. It is our view also that we should get everything ready before we spring the package. I take it that you would prefer to eliminate the intermediate phase and I agree with that. It would be much more impressive if we make the whole proposal at one time.
Mr. Bohlen: The communists may not be willing to accept the top level meeting and may propose that the present elements do the job. I think we have got to be prepared to do the job. It seems to me that it is [Page 85] to our advantage to get a meeting between General Ridgway and Kim Il Sung. What would be the effect of dropping back to Admiral Joy and his opposite number?
General Bradley: You are asking in other words what the effect would be of putting the package forward at something less than top level? I think we might say that we are putting up important proposals on the following day and ask how the communists want to conduct this meeting. Do they want it to be a top level meeting or a meeting of delegates? We would say that we are prepared and ready to meet with their senior commander if they so desire and if they do not so desire we are prepared to meet in the present group. This might be a difficult point to spell out in the message.
General Collins: I think we might say something along those lines. Perhaps we should indicate that we would regard a top level meeting as desirable but that we would be prepared to make our proposals at the present level if the communists prefer that. We should make it clear that we are going to make important proposals on the following day.
General Bradley: I think we should get this thought into the message. I think we should explain the disadvantage we would incur if we proposed a top level meeting and the communists rejected that proposal. In other words, we should explain why it is important in our view to make a double-barrelled proposal. I suggest that Mr. Johnson and Colonel Matthews prepare a new draft. I also suggest that they use all the words necessary to make our position perfectly clear. There is no premium on brevity.
Admiral Fechteler: I hope the drafters will delete any such phrases as “maximum possible support” to General Bradley’s position. That is not nearly strong enough.
Mr. Matthews: Would it not be helpful to him to know that this is going to get a lot of public attention in this country.
General Bradley: I think Admiral Fechteler is right. Your thought is not really expressed by the language he referred to. Again this is a drafting problem.
General Collins: In this connection I think the drafters might look at the last paragraph of our proposed message. It refers to a Presidential statement and to obtaining the endorsement of the other UN countries, etc. Would that meet your point, Admiral Fechteler?
Admiral Fechteler: Yes.
General Bradley: The Navy made one other comment which we did not like too well. That is the comment which relates to the support of the other allied governments. Of course we have got to get their support.
General Collins: Our message assumes that we will get it.
[Page 86]Mr. Johnson: We feel sure that the other governments will give us good support on this thing. I don’t think the proposal will take them by surprise. We have prepared them to some extent for this development.
General Collins: In this connection, there is one word in the British paper which we are about to discuss6 which scares me.
General Bradley: We should circulate the new message and meet on it again tonight or tomorrow morning.
Mr. Bohlen: We will not try to tell General Ridgway, I assume, how to play his hand. However, in this case I feel quite strongly that we should not bat the breeze at length with the communists. We should lay our proposals on the table and say that they remain open. Our closing note will be very important. We should give the impression that here are the important final proposals and that if the communists change their minds we will be glad to hear about it. We shouldn’t slam the door and lock it.
General Bradley: Can we get together later today or in the morning if necessary?
Mr. Matthews: Yes.
. . . . . . .
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A note on the title page read: “State draft. Not cleared with any of the participants.”
Of the Chiefs of Staff, Generals Bradley and Collins and Admiral Fechteler attended, as well as Vice Chief of Staff General Twining. Matthews headed the Department of State contingent and General Ruffner attended for the Department of Defense. Altogether 18 persons were present. Matters other than Korea were discussed at this meeting, including the imminent transfer of command authority in the Philippines-Formosa area to CINCPAC from General Ridgway.
↩ - For text of the Department of State draft, see infra.↩
- Not found.↩
- Supra.↩
- JCS 902160, dated Feb. 27, p. 71.↩
- The next topic discussed at the meeting was a British paper on covert operations.↩