In response to an insistent but mysterious luncheon invitation, a shoal of ex-Premiers and other top politicians assembled at the home of a former Cabinet minister in Paris one afternoon last week. To the astonishment of most of them, the principal guest proved to be Moscow's Ambassador to France—busy, birdlike Sergei Vinogradov, one of the new Soviet breed of laughing-boy diplomats. Even more astonishing was Vinogradov's chosen topic of conversation: maintenance of French power in North Africa.
Vinogradov began the discussion by saying his government was convinced that it was only a matter of time until the U.S. openly intervened in the Algerian rebellion and took over from France as the dominant power in North Africa. Artfully he recalled what happened when France, in dealing with the Communists, was obliged to give up its fight for Indo-China. The upshot of the 1954 Geneva Conference, he declared, was that the U.S. got control of South Viet Nam, the Chinese Communists got North Viet Nam, and "all we Russians got out of it was bills." This, Vinogradov confided, did not strike Nikita Khrushchev as an extraordinarily happy state of affairs.
Fact was, said Vinogradov, that in order to prevent Russian exclusion from North Africa at the hands of the U.S., the Kremlin had a vital interest in seeing France retain its position in the area. When one of the French guests suggested that Russia could contribute mightily to this goal by publicly endorsing a "strictly French solution" and "telling the Algerians to quit fighting," Vinogradov affected to find the suggestion both novel and impressive. "Hmm," he said. "I'll communicate the idea to my superiors right away. We are serious about this Algerian business. Don't be surprised by anything we do."
Invisible Participant. Transparent as it was, Vinogradov's attempt to detach France from its U.S. alliance was a measure of the breach made by the Algerian war in the free world's diplomatic defenses. But in fact, last week for the first time in many months, there were signs that the breach might be narrowing. Flying in from foreign refuges as various as Damascus and Switzerland—and carefully avoiding flights that might make an emergency landing on French soil—top leaders of Algeria's rebel National Liberation Front converged on the Moroccan city of Rabat. There, surrounded by Moroccan plainclothesmen, they sat down with representatives of Morocco's dominant Istiqlal Party and Tunisia's Neo-Destour to lay the groundwork for a formal conference in Tangier this week. Prime topic to be discussed at Tangier: prospects for formation of a North African federation composed of Morocco, Tunisia and an independent Algeria.