Better Speed Urged For Official Communications

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30445, 20 May 1964, Page 11

Better Speed Urged For Official Communications

(From

FRANK OLIVER,

N.Z.P.A. Special Correspondent)

WASHINGTON, May 15. The American Ambassador to Moscow when home re* cently told a Senate committee that diplomatic communications were overwhelmed during the 1962 Cuban crisis over Soviet missiles.

Some important messages, he said, were hours behind.

Political crises in various parts of the world arise and are reported these days with jet-speed and this speed cannot be matched by the communications system of the State Department which has to try and keep in up-to-date touch with 108 embassies and about 200 other posts, legations and consular establishments.

It seems to be more than the system can do adequately, and one correspondent recently described the system as “wheezing towards senility.” What is wanted, say some authorities, is the introduction of the computer to keep the department in constant and rapid touch with its many establishments overseas.

Mr Foy Kohler, Ambassador to Moscow, told the Senate committee in testimony just released that there ought to be computers to catalogue and make information promptly available before it gets buried in the department’s bulging archives.

DIPLOMATIC COURIERS The Cuban crisis of 1962, he said, showed up the inadequacy of the communications system. During this period even critical messages ran several hours late.

It is also suggested by some that there is still too much reliance on the diplomatic courier. The State Department says it has 83 of these couriers and that between them they travel nearly 11m miles a year carrying more than a million pounds of classified documents to 108 diplomatic posts. Mr Kohler told the Senate committee he saw no reason, in this age of the computer end automation, for research workers to spend “days look!ng through the archives” and (ther officials “trying to remember what someone said 'it some time.”

An important facet <rf this problem concerns Moscbw. About a quarter of overseas posts have access to American Government communications systems, but some key posts, Moscow included, have to rely on either commercial or foreign Governments controlled lines of communications.

Communications with American diplomatic posts in the many new African States leave a lot to be desired and

delay is altogether too frequent. LEASED LANDLINE Efforts are being made to speed up communication with Moscow. Negotiations are afoot between Washington and Moscow for a leased landline connexion with Western Europe. The “New York Herald-Tri-bune” said recently that it is a relatively rare morning, afternoon or night that does not produce some important development or crisis abroad and equally rare if the State Department. learns of it or can do anything about it immediately through its own communications system. That is why the department wants Congress to appropriate a sum of 10m dollars for more communications officers and newer and safer equipment for its world-wide communications system which in large measure still relies on devices and machines that were up-to-date 20 years ago but which have now been left far behind by the jet-engine and high-speed radio . SLOW CODING There are still in use coding machines which “plug along” at a mere 60 words a minute. What the department is after, to enable it to cope with the high-speed developments of the modern world, are electronic devices which code, transmit and decode telegrams simultaneously. In the matter of communications the State Department is well behind the Strategic Air Command, whose commander can reach any of his subordinates round the world by radio in approximately 15 seconds. The American Ambassador in Moscow can of course lift a telephone receiver and fairly quickly be in touch with the Secretary of State but the call must go through the Soviet Union’s State-con-trolled telephone exchange. The average time to ‘’get through” is about an hour. THE “HOT LINE”

There is of course a “hot line” between Washington

and Moscow but this is for use between the President and Mr Khrushchev or Mr Dean Rusk and the Soviet Foreign Minister, not for use between the State Department and the Ambassador in Moscow. There are some spots bn the globe with which communications are remarkably • fast but they are all too few and on some telephone circuits and telegraph lines there is far from a maximum of security. ‘ Many diplomatic missions 1 must rely on commercial tele--1 graph systems and it is even hinted that some native tele--1 graphists have a higher priority rating to an afternoon ' siesta than to a coded tele- ' gram that to him is just a ; jumbled mass of letters and 1 figures. In some countries there is communication only in hours ! of daylight which often means a black-out in - com- ■ munications during ten out 1 of the 24 hours. QUILL PEN This is still better than the ' days when an Ambassador i wrote a dispatch with a quill ■ pen, consigned it to an out- ■ going steamer and hoped for i a reply within a month or i two but, officials here say, it : is not good enough for the i jet-age and the space-age in : which diplomatic crises and i other developments of importance arise at least once a day and sometimes more often.

The department is always battling to keep up and wants to call on that American invention, the computer, to give it an even break.