The Yaltese Cross

"Vice," said Virgil, "is nourished and kept alive by concealment." Last week Yalta's guiltily prolonged secrecy continued to nourish distrust and disquiet among the nations.

Twelve days after Jimmy Byrnes published what he vowed was Yalta's last secret agreement, New York Times Correspondent Herbert L. Matthews got on the trail of what he thought was another one in Rome. He said "an unimpeachable source" had seen the text of a secret agreement by which Roosevelt and Churchill had committed the U.S. and Britain to repatriate by force all those who did not want to return to their former homes in Soviet territory. Matthews wrote:

"Britain and the United States [were pledged] to consider as Russian citizens all those who left the Soviet Union after 1929 and to send back to present Russian territory those claimed as citizens by Moscow, Vatican sources said."

Quite possibly Matthews and his unimpeachable source were wrong. At least, Britain and the U.S. were not keeping any such pledge. They were forcibly repatriating Red Army deserters and Axis sympathizers, but had turned down requests to hand over ordinary refugees.

The point, however, was that so careful a reporter as Matthews, working with responsible Church diplomats, should have heard and believed the report.

The two latest Yalta reports had deeply disturbed two vast entities--the Chinese nation and the Roman Catholic Church. Nothing could stop more Yalta reports from poisoning the atmosphere of postwar politics. The world would long and painfully bear the cross of Yalta's secrecy.

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