GENEVA: Out of Breath

GENEVA Out of Breath

The moment of truth for the Geneva conference came in a “secret session” held at the elegant Villa Barakat, once the property of the late Aga Khan and now the temporary headquarters of French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville. Drinks in hand (fruit juice for Russia’s Gromyko), the foreign ministers of the Big Four and their assistants sat in awkward silence last week on Couve’s terrace, looking down through a lovely spring evening at the waters of Lake Geneva. With all the vast range of East-West conflicts as their province, the assembled diplomats could find nothing useful to say.

In four weeks of niggling negotiations and propaganda barrages, Geneva had finally focused down to one essential issue: the future status of Berlin. Last week, to the surprise of practically nobody, Western ministers unveiled to Gromyko the concessions that they were prepared to make over Berlin. The chief proposals, apart from a demand that Russia guarantee Western access to the city:

¶An offer not to increase the 11,000-man garrison that the U.S., Britain and France now maintain in Berlin.

¶Creation of a Big Four commission to investigate specific complaints, Eastern or Western, over the use of both halves of Berlin as propaganda, subversion and espionage centers.

¶Agreement that any interim settlement of the Berlin question should continue in force until Germany is reunited and Berlin becomes its capital.

As a counter to all this, Andrei Gromyko, who has shown a tireless talent for saying the same thing in the same way, offered some apparent concessions of his own. The West, he conceded, does have the victor’s right to maintain occupation forces in Berlin, and the Soviet price for a Berlin settlement no longer requires Western recognition of Communist East Germany. Then came the old stall: Russia would not discuss the question of access until the Western powers agreed that Berlin become a “free city,” i.e., until they renounced their occupation rights. And there matters stopped—approximately where they had been when Nikita Khrushchev first conjured up the Berlin crisis last November.

To the publics of Western Europe and the U.S., the ritual dance at Geneva had become a deadly bore. Dwight Eisenhower said last week that the Geneva talks had not yet made enough progress to justify a summit conference. Nikita Khrushchev was just as candid about the lack of progress as he arrived home from a quick tour of two of the most lackluster outposts of his empire, Albania and Hungary. He was still talking darkly of establishing rocket bases in Albania and Bulgaria if Italy and Greece went through with their plans to accept U.S. missiles.

None of this made a summit seem worthwhile, but neither did it seem to diminish its inevitability. The British, whose avowed policy is to “keep the Russians talking,” continued to argue that they must convince their people that the government is doing everything short of appeasement to find an alternative to the nuclear race. Rocket Rattler Khrushchev insisted: “If no agreement is reached at the Geneva conference, agreements will undoubtedly be reached at a summit conference.”

But the one clear fact that was emerging from the Geneva talks is that if the West has little to hope for at the summit, it has little to fear either. The Western position has proved sturdy despite the allies’ much-publicized suspicions of one another. Perhaps significant concessions by one side or the other might come out of a summit meeting. But, as Geneva has shown, they are not likely to be the result of impulse or mistaken trust by either side.