GENEVA: In Jeopardy

The Geneva negotiations changed abruptly from boring to disturbing.

As the Western foreign ministers, summer-suited and bright-eyed, came bouncing back to Geneva, they found that the climate was no longer the one they had dressed for. A cold and steady wind was now blowing off the steppes of Russia. They had reassembled convinced that the Russians, eager for a summit, would in conciliatory fashion remove the offensive overtones to their Berlin ultimatum; this would be called progress, and a summit would result. Instead, gloomy Andrei Gromyko arrived demanding an increased price for summit talks, and at week's end, for his imperturbable stonewalling, he received the Order of Lenin on his 50th birthday.

Gromyko demanded, as an "indispensable" condition of an interim Berlin settlement, the creation of an All-German Committee, i.e., West Germans and Communist East Germans in equal numbers, to explore German unification. Would there be Big Four control? asked the West. No, answered Gromyko, "free of Big Four control." France's Couve de Murville warned that "to link problems which are quite distinct is to put the whole negotiation back in jeopardy." Gromyko's answer was so elaborately frustrating that Couve de Murville threw up his hands, complained: "We are in the midst of confusion. We don't know what the discussion is all about."

Despite the planned obfuscation of Gromyko's words, his aims were clear. An All-German Committee would for the first time give Communists a chance to intrude in the affairs of West Germany, able to employ Lenin's basic formula: divide and scatter authority in the enemy camp, disrupt basic institutions, create dissension until the will to resist is destroyed. In effect, the Russians had picked up one item from the original Western proposals (which had been carefully conceived as part of interlocking concessions leading to German reunification) and demanded that it be considered out of context. If anyone naively believed that the Russians had the true interests of German unity at heart, he had only to listen to Nikita Khrushchev junketing in Poland last week. Said Khrushchev: "The frontier that we will defend now is between East and West Germany. This frontier is as sacred to us as any frontier of the socialist countries."

Disowned Memo. Alarmed by the Soviet proposal, distressed by W. Averell Harriman's plea for some kind of "acceptance of the East German regime," sure that the West at Geneva was engaged in "capitulation by installments," convinced that there would be no such difficulties "if Dulles were alive," Chancellor Konrad Adenauer dispatched a worried aide-mémoire to the allies that seemed to suggest that Geneva be ended as a bad job and that President Eisenhower and Khrushchev proceed at once to the summit. This reversal of Adenauer's previous opposition to the summit alarmed everybody.