Confidential report from Robert Brennan to Frederick H. Boland (Dublin)
(Pol./46)

My courtesy call on the Yugoslav Ambassador, Mr. Sava N. Kosanovic, was delayed owing to the fact that he was absent in Paris for the past three months. I called on him on Monday, the 7th instant. I was ten minutes late owing to the fact that I called at his residence in the first place instead of at the chancery. He was very profuse in his apologies for the mistake, which was, of course, mine and not his.

He is a man of, say forty-two, with thinning reddish hair and Slavic features. He was very effusive and anxious to please.

After the usual small talk, I said that his country was having a bad time in the American Press. He said that was so and launched into a voluble defence of his Government's policy. I asked him if he wanted my opinion, and he said that of course he would welcome it.

I said that I thought the policy was stupid. Putting Archbishop Stepinac¹ on trial was a blunder of the first magnitude.

He replied that it was necessary, and said that the Archbishop had given his blessing to the rebels in the hills.

I said that the Archbishop was being tried, not for any recent activities, but for collaboration with the Ustashi. If he were guilty one hundred per cent - even if he were a hundred times more guilty - his trial was a mistake. They might convict and execute him, but nothing would convince the opinion of America - and particularly Catholic America - that this was not, in Senator Taft's phrase, 'Vengeance clothed in the form of Law', and that Stepinac would become a martyr. I did not attempt to argue ideologies at all. I said that a sensible policy would be to forget what happened during the war.

He said that I should appreciate the stand taken by this Government, since I came from a country which had gone through so much for the principle of Freedom.

I said that of course we could understand a people fighting for Freedom, but with us, when the fight was over, we did not think of vengeance. I pointed out that the American people, after their Revolution, did not seek vengeance on the one-third of the people who had sided with Britain.

'That is so', he said, taken aback.

I further said: 'What you are doing will achieve nothing but to antagonize the opinion of the world and to keep your own people divided'. I said that after our Revolution, I could meet in the street and shake hands with the man who had given evidence against me at my court-martial by the British. In that way, I might be able to bring him to my side. I told him that he should tell them to lay off. It would make his job here easier.

'Don't I know it!', he said.

He told me that he was the nephew of Nikola Tesla, the renowned Electrical Engineer and Inventor who had harnessed Niagara Falls, and whose electric motors in the United States were now producing one hundred fifty million (or is it billion?) horsepower units per year.

I did not tell him that he was the representative of a Quisling and a redhanded murderer. I did not mention Mihailovich.² In other words, I wanted to do what I could to save Stepinac.