Cash Considerations

When Britain sold six Viscount turbo prop planes to Peking last month, one official said wryly: "We've sent six Viscounts to Communist China--seven if you count Lord Montgomery.''* But to the U.S. it was no joke. "We are not very happy about that sale." said Secretary of State Dean Rusk. The Treasury Department told the International Telephone & Telegraph Corp. that it would withhold a U.S. license permitting its British subsidiary to supply British-made navigational gear for the Viscounts.

Last week Britain brushed aside U.S. protests. Said an official spokesman: "This sale will go forward." As for the navigational equipment, he added, it can no longer be considered strategic material since Eastern European planes already have it. Besides, "U.S. regulations do not apply in this country."

To London the cash-on-the-line sale (an estimated $8,400,000) meant a break in Peking's isolation from the West, perhaps a further widening of the Sino-Soviet rift. With the Vickers Viscounts go technicians and spare parts, spelling an end to Russia's grip on Red Chinese aviation. Word of new deals followed --trucks, fuel and lubricating oil. more planes.

"A completely unjustifiable deal," said New York's Republican Senator Kenneth Keating about the Viscounts. Added a State Department aide: "An airplane is not like a textile machine or wheat. It could be used against us directly."

*Field Marshal the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein returned from Red China last year rapturously describing Red Boss Mao Tse-tung as "the sort of man I'd go in the jungle with."

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