Following for Pearson from Robertson. Reference my telegram No. 2446 of December 31st.†

You will have already received through the Washington Embassy the invitation issued on behalf of the Council of Foreign Ministers. I had been assured earlier in the day that no invitations were likely to go out until after the Deputies¹⁰ had met in London to determine their own procedure. I suggested that if this was in fact the case, the other Governments should be notified of The position at once. I nave only now received the text of the invitation, which was in fact despatched three days ago. Its terms confirm the fears expressed in your telegram No. 2186 of December 2lst,† and make our position anything but easy.

2. I had put our case as plainly as I could to Lord Addison and to Hector McNeil, as well as to Machtig and Sir Oliver Harvey, who is the Under-Secretary in charge of German questions in the Foreign Office. They all professed to take our point, and McNeil undertook to see whether the other members of the Big Four would agree that the invitation should take the form of an invitation "to consult with" the Deputies, rather than "to submit observations" to them. Such language, I thought, would make the invitation more acceptable to our Government.

3. It now begins to look however as if the text had already been agreed in New York before the Ministers here had an opportunity of commenting on it, for the United Kingdom Ministers and officials with whom I talked all recognized the difficulty of our position and were anxious to do what they could to meet it. They do not relish a repetition of the procedures followed at the first meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers in London in September 1945, nor of the procedure of the Paris Conference, but they are at a loss to suggest methods of consultation and association which would avoid the objectionable features of these two precedents.

4. The Foreign Secretary, the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, and the Minister of State are meeting on Tuesday afternoon with the High Commissioners, to explain the United Kingdom conception of how the German and Austrian settlements will be worked out. I think it likely that what they will have to say will follow the lines of my immediately succeeding telegram, No. 7, which is based on a conversation with Sir Oliver Harvey.

¹⁰Les suppléants pour l'Allemagne étaient : M. Couve de Murville, France; F. Gousev, Union Soviétique; Sir William Strang, Royaume-Uni; R.D. Murphy. États-Unis.
The Deputies for Germany were: M. Couve de Murville. France; F. Gousev, Soviet Union; Sir William Stang, United Kingdom; R.D. Murphy, United States.