The Postwar Period 205
tried to ruin him economically by severing Yugoslavian commercial and indus-
trial ties with the Soviet bloc.
Tito was well aware of the strategic significance of his split with Stalin.
“The Americans are not stupid,” he said to Djilas during the summer of 1948,
“they will not allow the Russians in these conditions to reach the Adriatic.”^286
In affirming this, he overlooked some hotheads in the American secret serv-
ices who thought the time had come to organize a Chetnik coup against his
regime. In spite of warnings by Ambassador Cavendish W. Cannon not to
play with fire, they sent a group of Serb parachutists to Yugoslavia in January
1949, whose task was to kindle a revolt and put King Petar II back on the
throne. However, the UDBA immediately managed to halt the attempt, cap-
turing and killing the Chetniks. The State Department was against such initia-
tives and suppressed them in order to prevent them from exerting a negative
influence on the nascent dialogue between Tito and the leaders of the capital-
ist world.^287
Obviously, it was not easy to accept Western help, especially as Tito feared
opposition by the most orthodox members of CPY. When the effects of the
economic boycott proclaimed by the Soviet Union and imposed by Stalin on
the satellites began to be felt seriously, Tito had no hesitation. The fact that
suddenly industrial machines and even gasoline stopped coming from the East
gave him no choice. In August 1948, he had already accepted secret supplies of
crude oil, which had until then come from Romania, from Zone A of the Free
Territory of Trieste, administered by the English and Americans, although in
mid-1949 he still had doubts as to whether it was opportune to accept the more
substantial economic aid offered by Washington.^288
Aleš Bebler, member of the Yugoslav delegation to the General Assembly
of the UN, also contributed to the conviction in Western circles that the split
between Moscow and Belgrade was definitive, and that Tito had abandoned
every hope in a “descent of Stalin from the sky.” On 5 October 1948, he had din-
ner with one of the most important Foreign Office diplomats, Secretary of State
Hector McNeill. They had met the previous spring, when Bebler was in London
for several weeks, a circumstance that favored their dialogue. McNeill prepared
himself thoroughly for the meeting, reading the most important dispatches sent
by Sir Charles Peake. He therefore knew the ambassador’s arguments about the
gradual evolution of the regime, and the need to support its detachment from
Moscow, but to do so cautiously.^289 He was surprised, however, by the political
realism and frankness of Bebler, who did not hide that he was extremely down
with regards both to his government’s internal difficulties and its interna tional
isolation, which had been particularly evident in Paris, where the Yugoslav del-
egation was treated with coldness both by the Eastern and the Western blocs.