199. Telegram From the Mission at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and European Regional Organizations to the Department of State0
Polto 2583. Spaak, Frank Roberts, De Leusse and I met at 11:30 this morning.
Spaak began by somewhat lengthy statement of position as he saw it in relation to French paper on withdrawal of fleet.1 He said it raised three sorts of questions: question of procedure, question of substance of withdrawal of fleet to national mission, and question of Algeria.
With respect to procedure, he said there was ambiguity because paper was submitted under CM(55)82 which called for advance consultation but on other hand appeared to record a decision.
On matter of withdrawal of fleet, this was seriously embarrassing to Alliance and raised many difficult questions. Assignment to NATO did not mean that a military unit no longer had responsibility for national defense, which was indeed one of duties of Alliance.
With respect to Algeria, he said these questions had never been submitted to NATO.
Spaak then referred to conversation with General De Gaulle2 which indicated to him that questions French had raised were not the real [Page 426] questions, but real questions were rather control of atomic weapons and the chain of command.
He said this made discussion in NATO Council extremely difficult because there was really no use in discussing details of the superficial questions when the underlying questions were the real problem and those questions were extremely embarrassing and difficult to discuss, partly because French had not provided any specific indication of what they wanted.
With respect to procedure to be followed at Wednesday’s meeting, he said he thought next step was to refer question of fleet to the military authorities for their recommendations. He said this frankly had advantage of gaining some time, during which he hoped French would try to give us some more specific indications of what were their real desires.
De Leusse said he expected they would have some specific suggestions in few days which they might submit to tripartite group in Washington. I pointed out certain of their suggestions should be made directly to NATO.
Spaak turned to me for comment and I simply said that I agreed in general with analysis he had made of situation; that we were greatly troubled by situation which was very serious and holding up work of Alliance at time when I was sure French were just as anxious as we were to have strength and solidarity; that we did not like idea of having quarrels before Council and would welcome indication by French of exactly what their recommendations were.
Frank Roberts also stated general agreement with Spaak’s summary and went on to say that British had been giving careful study to question of line of command, were not frozen in fixed ideas on this score, and were willing to consider possible changes.
[1 paragraph (11 lines of source text) not declassified]
In reference to infrastructure financing of IRBMs, Spaak also referred to difficulties about forcing action into bilateral channels, which had effect of giving Alliance less control of situation. I picked that thought up also and said there were two general ways of conducting operations here: one was by bilateral undertakings and the other was using Alliance just as fully as possible. We had tried in our operations to utilize Alliance and share our responsibilities with it. We thought in that way it gave all members of Alliance better opportunity to participate in decisions.
With respect to tomorrow’s meeting, Spaak indicated he would suggest referring to the military French paper on fleet without inviting any substantial discussion by Council. Spaak agreed that our meeting this morning should be completely secret.
[Page 427]After we left Spaak, the three of us agreed that we must avoid having us set up here anything parallel to tripartite group in Washington and that our meeting this morning was strictly ad hoc. I also pointed out again some questions were more appropriately taken up directly with NATO authorities.
- Source: Department of State, Central Files, 740.5/3–1059. Secret; Niact. Repeated to London.↩
- See Document 196.↩
- Reported in Document 198.↩