Double Talk

In 1941, a young girl Communist named Vjera was caught by the Nazis in Zagreb, Yugoslavia. They jailed her, questioned her, tortured her. One of their most urgent questions: Where was Communist Leader Vladimir Popovich? Vjera replied truthfully that she had never heard of him before.

Popovich was a hamhanded, 6 ft. 3 in. Montenegrin hillbilly who had quit his medical studies in Belgrade to fight with the Reds in the Spanish Civil War. In 1938, in Paris, he met the new secretary of the Yugoslav Communist Party, one Tito, who took a liking to the big Montenegrin. In Tito's guerrilla war against the Nazis, Popovich rose to general. He also met Vjera, and in 1946 he married her.

Last week Popovich, now 36, arrived in the U.S. with pretty wife Vjera, to take up his new job as ambassador from Communist Dictator Tito. Dressed to the nines, like an oldtime bourgeois-diplomat swell, Popovich portentously told reporters in New York: "I am confident, and so is my government, that we will meet [in the U.S.] with ever-increasing understanding and ever greater assistance." He criticized "bloc systems" in the world, charging with lofty impartiality that they led to war--"from whichever side the blocs originate."

The day before, U.S. reporters in Belgrade had cabled more explicit views by Comrade Popovich. In Tito's theoretical organ Kommunist, a few weeks before setting off for Washington, he had written a long piece about the irreconcilable struggle in the world between Marxists and U.S.-led "imperialists." Excerpts:

"American leading circles announce that they recognize Communism . . . on the condition that states which have adopted this ideology do not interfere in the affairs of states with other ideologies; and promise that they will not meddle in the affairs of those states which practice the Communist ideology. This bears witness to the weakness of capitalism . . . In 1949 . . . it is a fact that the main imperialist forces . . . did not have the political strength or daring to carry out a policy of open intervention in China."

The first duty of an ambassador is to explain the regime of the country he represents. In this sense Comrade Popovich had made a good start. He had demonstrated to the people of the U.S. that a Tito Communist is still a Communist.

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