Secretary of State Acheson sat down before his news conference last week, calmly slipped on his spectacles and read the riot act to two foreign nations in terms that might have been fighting words in the old days of hanky-pank diplomacy.
First he took on Czechoslovakia for charging three U.S. embassy staff members with espionage, and jailing one of them. These incidents and charges, said Acheson sternly, were "obviously trumped up in order to intimidate further the local population . . . This government has sufficient knowledge of the police methods and practices employed by the present regime in Czechoslovakia...