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Successful Negotiation: Trieste 1954
An Appraisal by the Five Participants
By John C. Campbell PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1976 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05658-6
CHAPTER 1
The American N egotiator, Llewellyn E. Thompson
In November 1971 Llewellyn Thompson was interviewed in his home in Washington, D.C., by Joseph E. Johnson and John C. Campbell, both of whom were old personal friends. Although seriously ill at the time, Thompson cooperated fully in the enterprise because he shared the belief that the Trieste negotiation merited detailed study, of which an indispensable ingredient was the first-hand evidence of the participants.
On some points he frankly conceded that his memory did not serve him well, and he did not wish to go beyond his area of certain knowledge. In general, his remarks were more guarded than those of the other participants. This was not the result of his illness, but reflected his usual restraint in discussing official matters and his desire to avoid doing injury to others. Thompson remained in active service virtually to the end of his life. He did not write his memoirs, and did not intend to, believing they would inevitably involve secrets that were not his to give out.
The diplomatic career that Thompson began in 1929 was long and distinguished. He held diplomatic posts in Colombo, Geneva, and Moscow, and the Soviet desk in the Department of State, before acting as an adviser to the Secretary of State at a wide range of international meetings, including the San Francisco Conference in 1945, the Berlin Conference in 1945 and the Council of Foreign Ministers in London in 1945. He participated in the negotiations on the Italian peace treaty, where Trieste was interminably discussed and ultimately settled by a compromise — the Free Territory — which did not work. It was during his later service as Ambassador to Austria, a post he held from 1952 to 1955, that he participated in the final and successful phase of the Trieste negotiations.
During his two periods of service as Ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1957 to 1962 and 1967 to 1969, Thompson's remarkable diplomatic intelligence and skills became well known. But well before then he had won the admiration of his professional colleagues. Of the various architects of the Trieste settlement he probably contributed the most. As representative of the government having the greatest weight with the two contending parties, but no power to impose a solution, he used his influence with wisdom and restraint. Throughout the proceedings he had the confidence of his fellow negotiators.
On the American side of the enterprise his was by far the leading role. Secretary Dulles followed the negotiations but not in detail, approving the broad strategy, and backing his principal negotiator on his chosen tactics. Clare Boothe Luce and James Riddleberger, Ambassadors in Rome and Belgrade respectively, did well in their supporting roles; Mrs. Luce was instrumental in getting the process started, and also in the initiative for the Murphy mission. Murphy himself, with his customary aplomb, brought off the final success. But the greatest credit must go to Thompson.
Less than three months after this interview was completed, on February 6, 1972, Llewellyn Thompson died of cancer.
QUESTION: If you cast your mind back to the time when your part in the negotiations started, which I take it would be around December 1953, can you talk a bit about the situation at that time between the two parties, and the attitudes of the British, ourselves, and of course the French, who were in the picture, to indicate what was the situation from which the decision came to start the special mediatory negotiation which began in January 1954? Was there a feeling of urgency at that time that a negotiation of this new type had to begin?
THOMPSON: Well, I was then stationed in Vienna, and had very little to do with the negotiations. I understand Mrs. Luce kept pounding away to try to get them started. That was really almost her only role, but it was an important one. As you recall, there had been a number of attempts at different levels, including high ones, to settle this problem. They had all failed, I think, because the negotiations were more or less public, or leaked to the public, so that each side had pressure on it to take a firm position from which it could not retreat. I think the real basis for the success of the negotiations I was involved in was their secrecy. I went to London and hid out really successfully for three months, though it gradually became known by some people that I was there.
QUESTION: When did you first go to London?
THOMPSON: Early in January 1954, just before the negotiations started.
QUESTION: Do you have any recollection of the reasons why you and Harrison were the ones chosen for this? In your case was it because of your prior experience with the Yugoslavs or other negotiations or because you could be more easily disguised?
THOMPSON: I think actually it was not very easy to disguise me. I believe it was that they were looking for somebody they thought could handle it. So many other people were tied up or unsuitable for one reason or another. They picked me because of the experience I had, and, of course too, there was the Russian reaction to this. That was somewhat involved, I guess. It was hard to get away from Vienna, however, because meetings on the state treaty were still going on.
QUESTION: Did you have a set of instructions from the State Department?
THOMPSON: Yes, they were hopeless. That became quite clear to me.
QUESTION: Hopeless?
THOMPSON: Basically they were favorable to Italy and did not give us room to negotiate with the Yugoslavs. Also, the department sent over to London a huge delegation, including Phil Mosely [Philip E. Mosely, United States Representative to the I g46 Commission for Investigation of the Yugoslav-Italian Boundary], who was to serve as a territorial expert, a military representative, and others. So when we started, both sides — the British and the Americans on one side and the Yugoslavs on the other — had quite high-powered delegations. The Yugoslavs opened with long statements of their claims, and quite clearly they were speaking for the record. These were polemical speeches. We were getting absolutely nowhere, so one day I suggested to Harrison that we talk to Velebit alone. He readily agreed, and so did Velebit. We went to Velebit's house, and just the three of us sat down with nobody else present.
QUESTION: This was after a couple of weeks?
THOMPSON: Yes. At that time we still kept our delegations in London, but this new tack was so successful — we did more in this one session than we had done in the previous two weeks — that we just continued on that basis thereafter. I don't know the exact period of time, but within a relatively short time we just dismissed our delegations and carried on — the three of us.
QUESTION: Was that when Velebit began to show some indication of what the Yugoslavs really would take, rather than what they were demanding?
THOMPSON: Yes, except that Velebit was always very discreet. I'll give you one example of the problem. It eventually boiled down to a situation in which, if he had told us what was bothering him in the negotiation far earlier, we might have moved forward more rapidly. The problem was that our proposals, which I had from Washington, gave the whole coastline, in Zone B as well as Zone A, to Italy, but all the hinterland said Yugoslavia on the map. The part you would color red for Yugoslavia was big compared to the part you would color green for Italy, but each time I would summarize the pros and cons, Velebit would dismiss the concession as not worth very much. I suddenly realized that practically all the coastal people were fishermen. If we had settled the thing the way we had it drawn, for the Yugoslavs to continue their profession of fishing, they would have had to opt for Italy and move over, and this would have been very embarrassing to the Yugoslavs — to have an exodus of Yugoslavs into Italy. So I tried this out on the department: a new deal in which I reshuffled the proposals. The department resisted this change at first but finally let it go forward, and the minute it did, Velebit said, "I will recommend to my government that they accept this."
QUESTION: You gave up the idea of holding those towns in Zone B, Piran, Koper, and Izola, for Italy?
THOMPSON: As I recall it, we had wanted to save for Italy those towns in Zone B because they were Italian in population. And the Yugoslavs, I gather, really could not take that. They wanted to have that coast. I think also that when it became clear they were going to have to give up Trieste itself, there was the question of an alternative port that could be developed. They did not get the one they wanted, but they did keep the Zone B ports, and in the final deal they got a bit of Zone A. But I frankly don't remember the details now.
When we finally got Yugoslav agreement on a territorial bargain, the Yugoslavs proposed that we put forward a position which was worse for Italy than the one we had agreed upon, so that we could have a concession to make to the Italians. But we were afraid to do that for fear it would leak, and so we refused. Then when we went to the Italians, Brosio and the Italian government felt that to save face they had to get some further concession. Otherwise they said they would be accepting a diktat. Actually I think they were quite pleased with what we had gotten for them. It was much more than they had expected. But they still felt, as the Yugoslavs and all of us had anticipated, that they had to get something more. That's when Murphy went to Yugoslavia to get for Italy what turned out to be a place just a few city blocks in size overlooking Trieste. Their argument was that a man could sit up there with a rifle and shoot at Trieste. It was nonsense. I mean, it was just purely a face-saving thing. Getting it was the final thing that clinched the whole negotiation.
QUESTION: Was the Murphy mission a kind of playing out of a final action which everybody knew would succeed, or was the thing really hanging between success or failure?
THOMPSON: The Yugoslavs felt, Velebit made quite clear, that they had made their absolutely maximum concessions, and more too, and that they were not going to give anything more. So it was a real question of whether they would listen to this final proposal at all.
QUESTION: The Italians were sitting on the sidelines during the Yugoslav part of the negotiations. Were they kept entirely in the dark? Had anybody let anything out to them or did they just wait?
THOMPSON: Neither Harrison nor I did, and I think officially neither of our governments did. Now, whether Mrs. Luce was slipping them something or not, I don't know. I don't think so, because we made quite a point of keeping things secret, and from Brosio's reaction when we presented him with the proposals, we had the impression he had not known what was going on. There was one period in the middle of the negotiations when somebody, I think it was an Italian, sounded off and the Yugoslavs replied, and this set the negotiations back by a couple of months. It took us a couple of months to get over this surfacing of issues.
QUESTION: Was this before you went into the three-man negotiation?
THOMPSON: No. This was the period when we were in it, but anyway, the Yugoslavs then dug in, and it was very hard to get them to move again. It showed how difficult it became with publicity, how essential it was that the negotiations be secret. So that I don't think the Italians really knew anything of our talks with Velebit. They must have done a lot of guesswork, and they probably picked up a little bit, but they had no real knowledge, as far as I know, as to what was going on.
QUESTION: You spoke of Brosio's reaction to the terms you got. Did you get the idea from him that basically there could be a deal on those terms?
THOMPSON: Sure.
QUESTION: But they just wanted something to save face — a little more so that they could say they negotiated?
THOMPSON: He pretended, of course, that this was a terrible settlement, but you could tell the way he reacted, without saying so, that they were quite pleased with what we had worked out.
QUESTION: What you had worked out initially was Zone A for the Italians, Zone B for the Yugoslavs, with a little slice of Zone A also going to the Yugoslavs. Would you agree that, although there were some discussions of parts of Zone B going to them, when it came down to it the Italians did not really care much whether they got a few useless square feet in Zone B as long as they got Trieste and the southern suburbs?
THOMPSON: As I say, I am very vague on this now. I would not want to commit myself to what the terms were.
QUESTION: Of course, the essential bargain was the status quo except for a very slight change enabling the Yugoslavs to get something they had not been able to get before for their people. Right?
THOMPSON: Not the status quo. The Italians really did not have Trieste. We had it. We, the Italians, and Yugoslavs were all cultivating the Triestini by special concessions of all kinds. They got more bread and lower electricity prices from the Italians than anybody else. We were putting in all kinds of aid projects. In fact we were hard pressed to find things to spend money on. And of course the minute the Italians got Trieste, they transferred a lot of their shipbuilding contracts to Genoa or other places, and the people of Trieste, I think, regretted the deal very shortly. There were some things that helped a lot. One of them was enabling the people to go back and forth with a minimum of formality, and this worked out very well.
QUESTION: One of the things that interests me is how of ten in negotiations there is an added factor such as the introduction of a new person — in this case Bob Murphy's going to Belgrade to talk about a specific thing rather than having it done by you. I suppose that was because it was felt Tito had to be talked to directly about the settlement?
THOMPSON: That's right.
QUESTION: I know that, when I [Joseph E. Johnson] was involved in one of the negotiations on the Middle East, a special trip was made by somebody from the White House to see how things were going before the United States made up its mind as to how far it was going to push in a particular line. So side trips can be extremely important. They sometimes do not even appear in the record of the negotiation. Does Murphy's trip appear in the record?
THOMPSON: No, but this trip was well known.
QUESTION: It was well known? Was the public story that Bob was going to Belgrade for some other reason than this?
THOMPSON: I think so, yes.
QUESTION: Is it your understanding that the Murphy trip was really a part of the same negotiation, in the sense that there was just one point which could not be put over and this was the way chosen to do it?
THOMPSON: Yes, to extract one small concession out of the Yugoslavs.
QUESTION: There is another question, and that is to what extent in talking to both sides you brought in anything such as aid to Yugoslavia or something for Italy to help the negotiations along? Maybe this is what you were referring to as what we — the British and ourselves — might be able to do to make them more receptive to the Trieste agreement.
THOMPSON: Well, there were some things of that nature. One of the things, as I recall, was that there were certain trade arrangements that were worked out that were favorable to the Yugoslavs, and which meant that if they broke the agreement or did not carry it out, they would lose the advantage that was involved. This was really a sideline affair.
QUESTION: Arrangements between Trieste and Yugoslavia?
THOMPSON: Between Italy and Yugoslavia. It gave the Yugoslavs a reason to fulfill the agreement and stick by it.
QUESTION: Another issue which you also touched upon had to do with whether these negotiations could be carried all the way through without being damaged by something happening on the scene, so to speak, in the politics of either one of the two countries, something in their relations with each other or public statements which put the other side in a difficult position. Do you recall any instances when there was the possibility of a breakdown in the negotiations?
THOMPSON: There was only one time when negotiations broke off, to my knowledge. That was quite damaging. You recall that there was a long history of negotiations. Everybody and his brother had tried it, and had not succeeded. I think we hit it at a terribly favorable time as far as both sides were concerned, in that they both wanted to get this thing settled.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Successful Negotiation: Trieste 1954 by John C. Campbell. Copyright © 1976 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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