Slap for Red Pals

President Sekou Toure of West Africa's overheated little coastal country of Guinea declared last week that "Marxist-Leninists with Machiavellian plans" had tried to overthrow his government and set off a "Marxist revolution in Africa."

Coming from anyone else, this would hardly be clashed as surprising news. Coming from Sekou Toure, it was startling indeed, for Guinea's boss is the deep-dyed Marxist who gave the Communists their first foothold on the Dark Continent. He brought in the Poles to organize his public-works program, let the Czechs manage Conakry's harbor and advise the army, invited dozens of Red Chinese technicians to help with the rice crop. Most important, he welcomed more than 500 Russians who brought with them promises of credits of more than $56 million for an array of technical projects; scores of Guinean students went to Moscow with Soviet scholarships.

Homemade Bombs. All went swimmingly until mid-November. Then suddenly across the country appeared thousands of leaflets denouncing the Toure government. Their source: the Guinea Teachers' Union, an extreme left-wing group with strong Communist ties. Since Toure permits no competition whatsoever with either his own trade union movement or with his tough P.D.G. (Parti Democratique de Guinee), his courts promptly sentenced the rebel leaders to jail terms. Supporters of the teachers' union responded with nationwide demonstrations; at Labe, mobs clashed with the police; in Conakry thousands of demonstrators, some of them students just back from Moscow, attacked the presidential palace with homemade bombs; in the end, Toure called out the army to quell the rioters.

Investigating, the police quickly found the source of the trouble: the Soviet embassy. While Guinea's drift toward Moscow looked alarming to the West, Moscow's Ambassador Daniel Solod had felt all along that the drift was not nearly strong or fast enough. He had no use for what Toure called his policy of "positive neutralism," felt he should move closer to outright Communism. Apparently Solod simply decided to help along a coup d'etat to speed things up.

New Twist. Toure was enraged by this treachery, even if it did come from his ideological pals. At a diplomatic reception, the presidential protocol officer pulled Ambassador Solod out of the crowd, asked him to go immediately to the Foreign Ministry. There, Guinean officials told the Russian he was persona non grata, must leave the country immediately.

It was an astonishing turn of events for Conakry's small community of Western diplomats, and a cold slap for the far-left extremists in Toure's P.D.G. politburo. At a P.D.G. national conference last week, rank-and-file delegates supported Toure, clamored for death penalties for the jailed hard-core Communist teachers.

Few doubted Toure's basic loyalty to Marxism; it was likely that a new Soviet ambassador, perhaps less clumsy than his predecessor, would soon arrive to take Solod's place. And to help smooth things over, Moscow announced that Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan himself would arrive in Conakry soon after the first of the year for consultations. The fact remained that it was clearly too soon for the West -- or for Russia -- to write off Toure as a Moscow puppet.

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