740.00119 Control (Bulgaria)/2–1945: Telegram

The United States Representative in Bulgaria (Barnes) to the Secretary of State

93. Please see my 36, January 18, 4 p.m. General Oxley is back from his visit to London. He is no more hopeful of real three-way [Page 160] cooperation on the Allied Control Commission than he was at the time of his departure; perhaps even less so, as it does not appear that he learned anything in London indicating a willingness on the part of the Russians to budge one inch from the position taken by them that the Eden-Molotov exchange of correspondence, summarized in my No. 61 January 30, 3 p.m., fixed definitively for the time being the manner in which the Allied Control Commission in Bulgaria should operate. Molotov’s dismissal of the British representatives, seeking application here of arrangements similar to those worked out for the Hungarian Control Commission (reported in Moscow’s 27976 to the Department), appears to be Russia’s last word on the subject for the period before an armistice with Germany. More than three weeks have passed since that report, and in the interim nothing has occurred so far as General Crane and I have observed, to support the view expressed in the final paragraph of Moscow’s No. 279 that in giving his answer Molotov had in mind only the British. The decisions of the Control Commission remain exclusively Russian decisions, without prior or subsequent notice to ourselves or the British, unless some occasion arises for a specific inquiry, and then such replies as we do receive are usually fragmentary and therefore unsatisfactory. Bowing to necessity General Oxley is reducing his “military personnel from about 150 to presumably the limit of 50 set by our Russian partner”.

Repeated to Moscow as No. 29 and to Caserta as No. 36.

Barnes
  1. January 30, 1945, 11 a.m., p. 151.