My telegram No. 664 of 16th September. [1]

On re-reading your telegram No. 201 of 4th August [2], we think
that we may have misread your wishes. We had understood you to
mean that you had no objection to preliminary discussion with
United States and Russia of proposals as to Austria as set out in
D. No. 439 [3] but wished to emphasize that Austria was part of
the problem of the future of Germany, and that you would naturally
wish to be fully consulted on this larger question before we
formulated proposals for discussion with the major Allies.

We hope that you will read our telegram D. No. 664 in the light of
this explanation and we are very sorry if, in fact, there has been
any misunderstanding.

Position now is that as you will see from my telegram D. No. 709
[4] we expect that question of Austria will come up for discussion
at the forthcoming meeting of Foreign Ministers at Moscow. You
will since have received my despatch of 8th August D. No. 67,
containing a memorandum which sets out in full our reasons for our
proposed line in regard to Austria [5] and we hope that we may now
feel the Commonwealth Government are in general agreement with our
taking this line in preliminary discussions at Moscow. [6]