Smear Technique

Craignez honte--Fear disgrace--is the motto of Britain's Cavendish-Bentinck family. It does not mean "Fear accusations." Poland's Communists, abetted by their comrades in London, used the technique of the personal smear campaign against British Ambassador Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, who faced it coolly. Then Polish Government officials simply refused to see Cavendish-Bentinck. Last week, his usefulness in Warsaw ended, he announced that he had been transferred to another post. London sources said it was a better one.

Cavendish-Bentinck's Polish experience had been bitter. To find out what was going on, he had driven around Poland, visited old friends, including some aristocrats he had known since 1919, when he was assigned to Warsaw as Third Secretary. Last November the Polish Government arrested his friend Count Ksawery Grocholski, whooped up an espionage trial that pointed to Cavendish-Bentinck (without naming him) as the recipient of "military and state secrets."

Cavendish-Bentinck went right on seeing Poles of all shades, of opinion. The London Daily Worker opened the attack on another front, "discovering" that Cavendish-Bentinck had been separated from his American wife for seven years. He had filed suit for divorce in 1945; his wife filed a countersuit shortly after. The contents of neither complaint have ever been made public in Britain. A Warsaw paper, Express Wieczorny, took up the Daily Worker's cry under a headline: "One Wife and Five Mistresses," asserting that Cavendish-Bentinck had "five women, each in a different country." Next, the Polish Government arrested Cavendish-Bentinck's 56-year-old translator, Maria Marynowska, hinting that she was implicated in the Grocholski "plot."

Cavendish-Bentinck did not let the charges against his friends or himself prevent him from discharging his obligation of observing last month's Polish election; he made no secret of his belief (shared by U.S. Ambassador Arthur Bliss Lane) that the election was neither free nor unfettered, as Britain, the U.S. and Russia had guaranteed at Yalta. Apparently, he felt that it would be a personal and a national disgrace to duck a responsibility his country had assumed.

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