70. Memorandum From the President’s Press Secretary (Salinger) to the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy)0
I had lunch with Mike Sagatelyan, the chief TASS correspondent here, which had several interesting parts to it.
Sagatelyan spent most of the early part of lunch telling me that while I might think his conversations with me reflected the official Soviet line he wanted me to know that he was speaking to me personally and not as a representative of the Soviet Government. He made this [Page 204] point three or four times and then got on to the subject of Berlin. Sagatelyan said he thought the Berlin problem could be solved on the basis of allowing Western troops to remain there but changing the status of the city into a United Nations mandate or some other form. He said that this was so because the Russians did not consider the Western troops in Berlin to be an aggressive force. Despite Sagatelyan’s protestations, this would seem to be an effort on the part of the Soviets to launch another feeler, particularly in view of my own discussions with Khrushchev on Western troops in Berlin. The part about Western troops not being an aggressive force is almost a verbatim quote of what I told Khrushchev. Later in the discussion Sagatelyan told me he had read the latest account of the Dobrynin-Rusk talks at the Embassy which again reinforces my opinion that this is a feeler.
- Source: Department of State, Presidential Correspondence: Lot 77 D 163. Secret. Attached to a July 5 memorandum of transmittal from Bundy to Kohler.↩