Mr. McKittrick of Basel

A Believe-It-or-Notable character is Thomas Harrington McKittrick, 54, of Milton, Mass. and Basel, Switzerland. Though he is a U.S. citizen, and his country is at war, he is a neutral in office hours. For he is the President of the Bank for International Settlements.

Next week he will probably arise in the empty board room of the bank's five-story building in the old Swiss city of Basel and, as he has three times before, go through the motions of presenting and accepting the annual report. He will have been authorized to do so by proxies of the bank's 17 directors, 13 of whom are controlled by the Axis powers, and one of whom is Walther Funk himself (Reich Minister of Economics).

Spies and 6%. In a world at war, in a world busily inventing new types of international currency and banking instrumentalities, the Bank for International Settlements has passed almost completely from public notice. (It was created primarily for the purpose of handling German reparations under the now-moribund Young Plan.) Periodically the B.I.S. is accused, in the House of Commons, the U.S. Congress and else where of being: 1 ) a clearing house of international espionage; 2) a shelter of international finance; 3) an instrument of possible appeasement.

On such occasions high U.S. or British officials come to the bank's defense and explain that its business, under McKittrick, is so conducted that none of its operations could possibly confer an advantage on any belligerent nation at the expense of another. These operations consist chiefly of: 1) collecting interest; 2) semi-automatic renewal of maturing investments (no new ones are made); 3) extending limited credits to central banks; 4) handling payments under the international postal agreement and prewar treaties; 5) acting as banker for the International Red Cross organizations operating from Switzerland. Last year the bank had to dip into its reserves to pay its usual 6% dividend of 7,500,000 Swiss gold francs ($2,323,000).

Nazi Restraint. The self-effacing but worldly-wise McKittrick was in the U.S. this year--he came out through southern France before the Nazis occupied it, and returned through Italy on a diplomatic visa (which the State Department did not obtain for him). While in the U.S. he did not comment on the fact that the Nazis refrain from using the Axis majority on the board of directors for unneutral undertakings. To all such queries he replied: "Remember, I'm neutral." Once he amplified this: "The policy of the bank can only be to remain entirely outside all matters of politics."

Born in St. Louis, graduated from Harvard (where he edited the Crimson), McKittrick was a partner in Higginson & Co. of London when he was elected to the B.I.S. presidency in June, 1939. He speaks four languages, which is necessary, for on his staff of 100 are Germans, French, Italians and other nationals. In his leisure time he studies the life habits of seabirds. He hopes that the bank will be important after the war. But while the B.I.S. may somehow survive the war, its future is probably that of a vermiform appendix which may have to be removed.

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