Mission to San Francisco

A Kremlin official roused U.S. Ambassador Alan Kirk on a peaceful Moscow Sunday to hand him a polite little note. The Russians were pleased to accept a U.S. invitation to sit down at the Japanese Peace Treaty conference in San Francisco early next month. Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko would be in charge of a four-man delegation including the Russian ambassadors to Washington and London.

In Washington, the State Department had braced itself for a thundering Russian denunciation of the conference and a refusal to attend. Only last week Secretary Acheson warned reporters to expect an all-out Russian propaganda campaign against the signing of the treaty. Moscow has already demanded that Communist China be invited to the conference and has blasted the treaty-draft as illegal, a violation of the Cairo, Yalta and Potsdam agreements, and an invitation to "rebirth of Japan as an aggressive state."

Wearily, State's conference planning experts eyed their tidy plans for a quick, five-day session in San Francisco. Best guessing was that Russia has decided to transfer her noisy and disruptive arguments to the conference-table microphones, where they will get a better hearing, may try to keep the conference tied up for a long, long time.

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