Storm Center

Nearly a month had passed since the U.S. and Britain announced their plan to break the eight-year-old deadlock over Trieste. Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia was expected to boil with anger, and he did. But he was also expected to calm down and resign himself grudgingly to the Allies' fait accompli. The disquieting fact last week was that Tito showed little sign of calming down.

Communist Tito stuck firmly to his vow to march into Zone A of the Free Territory of Trieste the moment Italian troops march in to take over from Anglo-American authorities. He continued to build up troop concentrations along the Yugoslav-Italian border, the Zone A border and inside Zone B, which he runs. Not many miles away, on the Italian side, some of Italy's crack military units stood at the ready.

Western diplomats could not believe that the Yugoslav dictator dared carry out his threats, but the nagging question would not quite disappear: Would he?

The Particular Worry. In Rome, it was not Tito's threats that worried Italian leaders so much as the possibility that the Western powers would be influenced into delaying indefinitely or even altering their decision. At one point last week, Premier Giuseppe Pella was disturbed over this possibility; he threatened to resign, but was talked out of it.

In Britain, in both left-wing and conservative journals, the Anglo-American plan was under stiff attack on the grounds that it had been badly handled, and hastily sprung, even though the Foreign Office insists that as long as a year ago, Marshal Tito had indicated to Anthony Eden that partition of the Trieste territory between Yugoslavia and Italy would be acceptable to him. Clement Attlee and his Labor Party forced the House of Commons into scheduling a debate on Trieste. Worried that the Laborites would lean to Tito's side,* the leader of Italy's non-Communist Socialists, Giuseppe Saragat--with Premier Pella's blessing--dispatched a trusted lieutenant to London to explain to Fellow Socialist Attlee how Laborite opposition to Italy's Trieste claims would further damage the deteriorating Socialist position in Italy.

"Policy of Confidence." Pella's Foreign Ministry, determined to be reasonable, notified the Big Three powers that it was willing to withdraw its troops from the border regions if Yugoslavia would do the same. "Obviously hypocritical," replied Belgrade.

Two domestic considerations apparently dictated Tito's continuing bellicosity. His people were totally unprepared to give up all claim to Trieste and Zone A, and had defied Tito police in demonstrating against it (TIME, Oct. 19). Some doctrinaire Communists in Tito's administration have long questioned his siding with the capitalist West (even for several hundred million in military aid), and now were saying I told you so. Dictator Tito announced last week that if the Trieste decision is carried out, "our policy of confidence in the Western Allies will have to be re-examined."

But in case anyone in the West, re-examining in turn its Yugoslav alliance, might be led to some unpleasant conclusions or speculations, Vice President Milovan Djilas felt bound to remark: "It is ridiculous of some in the West to say that Yugoslavia will establish relations with the Soviet Union as they once were . . ."

* Both Attlee and Nye Bevan spent their summer holidays this year in Yugoslavia, and were officially entertained by Tito.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.