TURKEY—The Turkish Ambassador, Feridun Cemal Erkin, insists on decorum in his Embassy at 1606 23rd Street. Turks there put on gloves and are fully clothed when they go to bed with their wives, an Orthodox Mohammedan custom.
UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS—The Russians used to be the big spenders. Parties in the great white Embassy at 1125 16th Street were Washington’s most brilliant affairs. Invitations were eagerly sought after. The Russian government paid all expenses of the Ambassador and his staff, even bridge losses. The Russkies were terrific gamblers and few locals could go along in games with them. Once when a Washington businessman was asked to play bridge at 25 cents a point he pleaded, “I’m only a capitalist, not a proletarian.”
There was always plenty of food and liquor in the Red retreat. All members of the local press corps were remembered with presents, especially beluga caviar. But now the Russians don’t go out except to official functions, and that goes for their satellites, too. And they travel only in pairs, one to spy on the other.
The Russians and their slave states bring their own females from abroad, because they’re afraid to trust American women, Communist ones included, any more. In the good old days, the consecrated American left-wingers used to go to the Soviet Embassy, where they proved their party loyalty by getting in the hay with the men from Moscow. After many frightened American Reds got religion and betrayed the cause, Soviet diplomats were forbidden to Ostermoor with American women. This did not cause too much hardship, because most American Communist women are no dream-girls; even the Russians shrank from them.
Almost every member of the embassy set has a wife or a concubine posing as a wife with him. In Russian Naval Headquarters, a few handsome young orderlies are being used. There are said to be few homosexuals in Russia, where perversion is strictly punished, except for “Kremlin and world revolution.”
As one humorist remarked, “There are no fags in Russia, because they like goats; but where can they find goats in Washington?”
As a further check on their own people, members of the Soviet Embassy staff are not permitted to live alone. Even couples must share apartments with others.
The Russians have been getting special kid-gloving in Washington since 1933, when the Embassy became the fashionable place to go. At Teheran, Stalin asked President Roosevelt for permission to set up a shortwave radio transmitter in the U. S. to enable his boys to contact Moscow directly. Roosevelt sent a memo to General Marshall, instructing him to cooperate. Marshall wrote back that the law absolutely forbade any foreign government to maintain a transmitter in this country. F. D. R. penciled across it, “Do it anyway.”
Consequently, an entire wing of the Pentagon was turned over to the Commies, where they sent over a million words a week. The President ordered Military Intelligence not to try to break the Russian code, but some officers took their oath to defend the Constitution literally, and overrode the President without his knowledge. As these words are being written, thugs of the NKVD are sitting 24 hours a day with ear-phones and transmitters in Russian Naval and Military headquarters at Massachusetts Avenue and Kalorama Road.
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