FOREIGN RELATIONS: How Close?

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, in a St. Louis speech last September, served notice on the Chinese Communists. Said he: "There is the risk that, as in Korea, Red China might send its own army into Indo-China . . . Such a second aggression could not occur without grave consequences which might not be confined to Indo-China." This week Dulles told the House Foreign Affairs Committee of the extent to which the Chinese have ignored his warning. The situation: "Rather ominous."

The Communists besieging Dienbienphu, said Dulles, are using new radar-controlled antiaircraft guns that are "operated by members of the Chinese military establishment." A Chinese general with "nearly a score of Chinese technical advisers" is at Viet Minh staff headquarters near Dienbienphu. Some 1,000 Red trucks in Indo-China are "driven by Chinese army personnel."

When Dulles told the House committee all this, Connecticut's Republican Representative Albert P. Morano asked him if the Chinese are not committing the direct aggression that Dulles had said might produce U.S. retaliation, perhaps outside of Indo-China.

Replied the Secretary of State: "They're coming awful close to it."