Mission to mascow

THE material in this book is made up of the following: official reports made by author to the Department of State, sent from either the Embassy at Moscow or Brussels or from some place where he was on special mission; personal letters to officials or friends; entries from a single-page calendar diary; excerpts from a journal which, for purposes of my work, he kept to supplement diary entries, and footnotes or special memoranda interpreting or commenting upon certain facts in the text.
The official dispatches speak for themselves and are in all material aspects in the exact word." I am indebted to the Department of State for its consent, in the public interest, to their use. They are, of course, conclusive, and the "best evidence" of what his opinions and judgments were on the facts and the situations, as of the dates when written. In a few instances there have been omissions to avoid repetition. The original diary entries were terse and cryptic, and were designed to recall to my mind the events and the personalities and to afford as little information as would be possible to anyone else in case the diary might fall into unauthorized hands. Some of the diary entries, as is obvious from the text, have been expanded for purposes of clarity, others have not. Names of persons where necessary for the protection of either the source of information or the person himself have been omitted and indicated by a dash. The footnotes or memoranda are invariably identified by the date on which they were written, to make it perfectly clear to the reader that they were entries made after the occurrence of the fact. Other than these, there are no ex post facto statements in this book.