Yalta's Fruit

Last April Secretary of State Stettinius (presumably with the knowledge and consent of President Roosevelt), swore there were no more secret agreements at Yalta except military ones. This week, on Yalta's first anniversary, his successor released what he swore was Yalta's last secret agreement.

Its text had been kept secret even from Jimmy Byrnes until last week, six months after the time when military necessity might have excused a hush-hush policy. While it had a military consideration (Russia's joining in the Japanese war), the agreement itself was as political as a pork barrel. Stalin's help in the Far East was to be rewarded with the Kuril Islands, an "independent" Mongolia and all Tsarist Russia's Far East rights. Roosevelt promised to get China's concurrence. This Yalta deal was the basis of last year's Sino-Russian pact (TIME, Aug. 27).

Expediency and an extraordinary personalization of government had made possible this disposal of men and territories in private conversation. Just how binding the word of three men could be on the whole world was evident in their statement in the text: "The heads of the three great Powers have agreed that these claims of the Soviet Union shall be unquestionably fulfilled."

But expediency was not enough to cover the loss to the U.S. moral position from secret diplomacy. The U.S. had come so far from Wilson's "open covenants openly arrived at" that no one knew whether Byrnes himself knew that the latest Yalta disclosure would be the last.

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