Miss James. We worked in harmony on these cases. The Visa Office is very well—harmonize with SOV policy on these cases. There is no bickering or unpleasantness or somebody pulling one way or the other. We seem to go along with them. Every time one comes up they go along in the regular way based upon established policy.
Mr. Coleman. There was no instance where you said, "I think that this ought to be done" and somebody said, "I don't care what you think, this is the way it should be done."
Miss James. No.
Mr. Coleman. In all these cases you discussed the problem with the Visa Office and you reached a mutual agreement. You never had a dispute?
Miss James. I recall no such feeling or reactions.
Mr. Coleman. You had indicated earlier, Miss James, that there was a general policy in your office to see that husbands and wives were not separated. Would you want to describe for the record just what that policy was?
Miss James. May I go back historically?
Mr. Coleman. Yes.
Miss James. Since the time we first recognized the Soviet Union, we have had these cases of separated families, spouses, husbands and wives and children and other relatives who by some reason or another, mostly because of the operation of Communist policy, have become separated from their American citizen families. And from the time we first recognized the Soviets, this has been a problem there. Files are filled with notes to the Soviet Government asking them to please issue exit visas to permit certain relatives to join families in the United States. This has gone on, and I remember hearing an officer say that if the result of recognizing the Soviet Union was for no other reason than to assist these people this was a very powerful reason. During World War II no visas were issued and nobody traveled and this died. Right after the war we again had the problem of people trying to get their relatives out, and the number was greatly increased by Russia taking over those various countries, Lithuania, Estonia, parts of Poland, parts of Czechoslovakia, Rumania went into the Soviet Union, and we had the number greatly enlarged.
Then, in addition to that, because of war operations, American citizens were stationed in the Soviet Union and they had married Soviet women, and so we had pressing cases of correspondents. American correspondents, a few people assigned to the Embassy in Moscow who married Soviet wives, probably about 15 or 16 who were very, what we would call, worthy cases of good marriages and good people who had made a good marriage with women we thought were good people, and they have since made good American citizens.