RUMANIA EXPELS U.S. DIPLOMAT: ALLEGED PLOTTING

Greymouth Evening Star, 23 June 1950, Page 8

RUMANIA EXPELS U.S. DIPLOMAT: ALLEGED PLOTTING

WASHINGTON, June 21.—The United States State Department disclosed today that Rumania had expelled Captain Herschel Hutsinpiller, Assistant United States Military Attache in Bucharest, on charges of plotting to arm revolutionary forces. The State Department, in a Note to the Rumanian Foreign Office., said the expulsion was part of a deliberate centrally-directed campaign of the Communist countries to drive American diplomatic representatives from Eastern Europe. Diplomatic circles in Washington said the phrasing of the Note was the closest the State Department had yet come to charging formally that Russia was instigating a campaign by her satellite countries to harass United States diplomats.

The department said the charges against Captain Hutsinpiller were “a distorted outgrowth of a perfectly legitimate incident in which he ordered two subordinates to destroy a small amount of ammunition left behind by the Allied Control Commission for Rumania.” The ammunition was dumped into a lake near Bucharest. The department said the dumping was carried out in. an open manner which belied assertions that the action had a clandestine or secretive character.