In October, 1942, the civil war which had been going on in Yugoslavia since November, 1941, began to seem an extremely serious matter with grave international implications. Britain, the United States and the Yugoslav government-in-exile were behind Drazha Mikhailovich and the Chetniks, who were fighting the Partisans and the Liberation Front who, backed by Russia, were fighting the Axis. That looked to me pretty close to war between Britain and us on the one side and Russia on the other. Could the United States do something about it? I gathered from an assistant secretary of state that the American government had no working policy for such problems. It left them to British hands — and at that time the British hands most active in reference to the Balkans were smeared with Rumanian oil and itching for Yugoslav metal deposits. Although the American government planned to invade the Balkans, it had no intelligence service of its own in Yugoslavia. And it seemed unable to take the initiative toward the formation of a commission of British, American and Russian army officers to go to Yugoslavia and assume command of the resistance to the Axis — a step which would make Yugoslavia into a symbol of Allied unity rather than a scene of conflict between the allies.