Room of One's Own

In Britain's House of Commons early last month. Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd eloquently restated the arguments that Western leaders have been using for a decade past to justify German rearmament. West Germany today, said Lloyd, is a sworn ally of the West, incapable of the diplomatic and military adventurism of the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm or Adolf Hitler. Last week, the misgivings his speech was designed to mollify broke out anew when Germany's allies learned that brash, beefy West German Defense Minister Franz-Josef Strauss had been negotiating a sub rosa military agreement with Franco Spain.

Strauss's scheme began with complaints from West Germany's military men over lack of training space and rear-area supply for their growing forces. With most of West Germany's choice ground and air bases occupied by British or U.S. forces, the Bundeswehr had no range on which it could carry out air-to-air, or air-to-ground missile firings, and what little flying Luftwaffe pilots could get in was done under the noses of Soviet observation posts on the East German border. So precious is space within West Germany's constricted borders that Strauss argued he could not even find storage room for the 90-day supply of materiel that NATO has asked the West German forces to maintain.

Two months ago the West Germans casually informed Washington, London,

Paris and NATO's General Lauris Norstad that they were thinking of asking Spain for military installations of unspecified type. (Strauss apparently did not bother to mention that he had already opened discussion of the matter with Spanish Foreign Minister Fernando Maria Castiella y Maiz two months earlier, and he never did get around to telling the other eleven NATO members.) From all three allies and from Norstad came the same advice: Strauss should forget about Spain and try to get the bases he needed from NATO nations. Undeterred, Strauss sent off a military mission to Madrid.

Fool or Knave? Early last week somebody leaked the story of Strauss's maneuvering to the New York Times's Correspondent Cyrus L. Sulzberger. The infuriated Spanish press charged that Sulzberger's source was NATO Secretary-General Paul-Henri Spaak, "a Socialist and an old enemy of the Spanish regime," and that the whole thing was a Jewish-Masonic plot. With undisguised delight, Russia's Tass bayed that "the two most reactionary states in Europe" had concluded "a backstage deal ... to obstruct the relaxation of international tensions."

What Bonn's allies officially thought was muffled in the need to preserve the spirit of partners. Most Western Europeans had reluctantly come to accept U.S. bases in Spain as necessary to the defense of the West, but they were not prepared to make any such allowances for Germany, mindful of the bonds that once linked Franco and Hitler and the Nazi airmen of the Condor Legion who helped bring Franco to power. In London, 140 Opposition M.P.s signed a resolution protesting Strauss's plan, and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan himself expressed his disapproval to visiting German parliamentarians. Said the Church Times, unofficial voice of the Church of

England: "The slightest suggestion of a new German-Spanish axis is intolerable."

The London News Chronicle concluded that Strauss had been "more of a fool than a knave"; the Economist decided that West Germany's disregard of foreign susceptibilities was probably more lack of imagination than indifference. More serious was the widespread suspicion that the Strauss plan was Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's way of serving notice that if the Western powers failed to stand up to Russia over Berlin, or otherwise took insufficient note of German concerns, West Germany would make political and military arrangements outside the alliance.

The Old Plea. Even in Germany, many doubted Strauss's denial that he was after missile and air training bases in Spain. (His story was that all he wanted was a few supply and medical depots.) Pointing out that the 1954 treaty, which forbids West Germany to manufacture atomic, bacteriological or chemical weapons, applies only to "the territory of the Federal Republic," the London Times unhappily noted: "Indeed, the West Germans could if they wished manufacture rockets and atomic warheads in Spain." Others were quick to remember the 1920s, when Germany's democratic Weimar Republic secretly accepted a Soviet offer to let Germans train with illegal weapons at Russian bases.

At first, Strauss tried to bluster out the storm by calling in the U.S. and British ambassadors to complain at the leak. When that did not work, he grudgingly conceded that he would make no further move on the Spanish project without specific NATO approval--which now may prove hard to get. Even after a stormy 2 1/2-hour session with the West German Parliament's defense committee, Strauss continued to insist that "the logic of our ideas and assessment of strategic necessities cannot be disputed," and West Germans asked in hurt tones how their allies could cherish such unworthy suspicions toward "the new Germany."

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