Secret Negotiations

"Llewellyn Thompson, the U.S. Ambassador and High Commissioner in Austria, hasn't been seen at his Vienna post this year. The Embassy employees say they don't know where he is."--Leonard Lyons, June 7.

Readers of Lyons' Broadway gossip presumably shuddered momentarily before leaping to the next item, wondering whether the missing U.S. diplomat had disappeared behind the Iron Curtain. The fact, which was no secret to conscientious readers of the New York Times last week, was that Ambassador Thompson was hard at work in London conducting a behind-the-scenes effort with British experts to defuse a diplomatic time bomb--the problem of Trieste.

Farmhouses & Gardens. The talks were private. By last week the Anglo-American negotiators had traversed half the hard ground to a meeting of minds between Italy and Yugoslavia. Tito's representatives had now tentatively accepted the Anglo-American plan; the next step would be to take it up with Italy. The secrecy was designed to prevent either side from claiming prematurely it had got the best of the deal. The secrecy had been fairly well honored, except for two conspicuous leaks by Tito to newsmen.

The plan is essentially the same as that proposed publicly by the U.S. and Britain last Oct. 8, which had set off patriotic protests first in Yugoslavia and then in Italy.

Under the plan, Italy would get Zone A, including the city of Trieste itself (pop.

280,000), which has been occupied since war's end by U.S. and British troops.

Yugoslavia would get title to Zone B.

which it already occupies. Yugoslavia and landlocked Austria would get access to the port of Trieste.

In the months of negotiating, Tito's men haggled over a farmhouse here, a truck garden there, until they had won the cession of approximately a mile more territory than proposed in the Oct. 8 plan.

The Yugoslavs also wanted the U.S. to build them a new port, to compensate them for the permanent loss of the city of Trieste, perhaps in Yugoslavia's Zone B, but preferably far to the south, at Bar (Antivari) on the Albanian border, which would be of more strategic use in case of a war with Russia. The U.S. opposed that, suggested giving Tito access to facilities in Trieste.

Italy's Turn. The haggling with Tito over for the moment, the negotiators called in Italy's London Ambassador Manlio Brosio last week and advised him of the terms. He flew to Rome, nominally to attend his niece's wedding, but actually to inform Premier Mario Scelba's government, which has done its best to keep the subject quiet. Now it would be Italy's turn to negotiate, to redraw the map, and to bargain for advantages. This would take weeks, perhaps months. But progress was being made--and that was good news, for a change, for the West.

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