A Man to Watch Carefully

The last time Tito saw Paris was as an undercover Communist agent during the Spanish civil war. Traveling on forged papers as a Czech named Jaromir Havlicek, he set up headquarters in a Left Bank fleabag to arrange the dispatch of 1,500 Yugoslav volunteers to fight for Loyalist Spain. The police kept an eye on him.

Last week, resplendently uniformed in sky blue, Yugoslavia's Dictator-President Josip Broz Tito arrived in Paris on a visit of state, and was even more thoroughly watched--this time as an endangered rather than a dangerous individual. A jittery French government could not help remembering that the last visit to France of a Yugoslav head of state, in 1934, had ended in the assassination in Marseille of both Yugoslavia's King Alexander and France's Foreign Minister Louis Barthou, who was riding with him.

Clearing the Way. Long before Tito and his Junoesque wife arrived at the Bois de Boulogne Station in their special blue and silver armor-plated train, all known anti-Titoist refugees in Paris were placed under surveillance. The most ardent of them were rounded up, along with a motley crew of anarchists, royalists, diehard Yugoslav Catholics and Cominform Communists, and shipped off to Corsica for a week's vacation--food, wine and sightseeing--at France's expense. A small army of about 15,000 police, plainclothesmen, helmeted Gardes Republicaines and firemen were deployed over Paris to help keep the peace. Along the route of march from the railroad station to the Elysee Palace, where the visitors were to stay, Parisian firemen stood watch on rooftops, and every chestnut tree shaded a cop or a detective. Public sewers and private houses along the way had been combed by security men, and wooden barriers, well guarded by the police, had been set up to hold the welcoming crowds out of bomb-throwing range. Even Tito himself was impressed. "Things are not even this tight in Russia," he remarked. "I never saw anything like it."

Neither, many a Parisian agreed, had Paris itself, not even in the dark days when Adolf Hitler came to town as a conqueror. While the Yugoslav dictator and his official hosts swept freely along cleared boulevards in the city, the plain citizens of Paris found their own progress blocked at every turn. Never smooth flowing, the city's traffic became a nightmare of confusion as main thoroughfares were blocked off for hours at a time.

Quiet Talk. Here and there in the confusion tempers flared, and small angry clashes occurred between police and citizens. Newsmen and photographers were beaten, a priest was arrested, teen-age boys were hauled off to jail for demonstrating with posters (RETURN GOD TO YUGOSLAVIA) and shouting, "Free Cardinal Stepinac!"

In the midst of it all and far removed from the madding and maddened crowds, Tito and his host, Premier Guy Mollet, found time for some quiet talk. Together they agreed on the necessity for disarmament and the necessity to maintain a wary attitude toward Russia in spite of its new face. Tito also expressed to his host a hope for "a liberal solution of the Algerian problem," which was considered a most tactful thing to say at this moment.

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