Nikola Tesla FBI Files - Page 143

ļ DEATH AND TRANSFIGURATION - 262 The King added that he was deeply touched and that both he and Dr. Tesla had wept. He then visited Columbia University, to be warmly welcomed by President Nicholas Murray Butler and to find another link with his own country in the Pupin Physics Laboratory Returning to Washington, he was assured by FDR that food, clothing, arms, and ammunition would be dropped over Yugoslavia. But he was shocked when, In 1943, the British Mission In Yugoslavia made official contact with Tito. Peter asked to be parachuted into his country, but Churchill demurred Tito openly accused Mihailović of being a traitor.* At the Teheran Conference in November there occurred, largely at Churchill's Instance, what the King described as a "fatal change" of Allied policy It was decided that "the basic force fighting the Germans in Yugoslavia recognized by the Alles was the National Liberation Army, under the command of Tito, and the Partisan force received full recognition as an Allied Army Mihailović was thus denied and abandoned."* Winston Churchill overnight became a hero of modern Yugoslavia. And when the young monarch frantically wrote to FDR for support, the alling President replied urging him to accept Churchill's advice “as if it was my own." Within months Roosevelt died. Tesia's nephew Kosanović, along with certain other diplomatic representatives of King Peter, had been dismissed by the monarch at the height of the 1942 crisis He often told Bogdan Raditsa in those days that he lett Tesla had been terribly shocked by his nephew's exclusion from the royal government. In fact, Kosanović believed that the Inventor's death was actually precipitated by his own "setback." "He thought," Kosanović repeatedly told Raditsa, "that I was punished, and that eventually I would be arrested or something of the kind, but I succeeded to convince him that it was inevitable in politics." During this period Kosanović was frank in saying that he tried to keep Tesla from seeing members of the royal government. Ambassador Fotić had become "the enemy" since he still favored a Great Serbian policy as opposed to the changes ahead. Tesla's relationship with this old friend became "lukewarm." "There is no doubt," says Professor Raditsa, "that the whole internecine tragedy of Yugoslavia from 1941 to 1943 must have had a rather depressing impact upon Tesla. Very often he would ask me, could I explain to him what was going on among us, and why we cannot agree.... DEATH AND TRANSFIGURATION →→→ 263 After the war, Mihailović would be executed by a "People's Court" for alleged collaboration with the enemy, and the Republic of Yugoslavia declared to exist, with Tito as President for life and the Communists firmly in charge. A count of Yugoslavian casualties at the end of World War II disclosed that 2 million persons had died; tragically, many thousands had been killed by fellow Yugoslavs. "After the war." recalls Professor Raditsa, "Kosanović, bacama a minister in the Tito-Šubašić. Government, and I was tais nesistant in the Ministry of Information from 1944 to 1945, when I left the country, for I couldn't become a Communist. Later on in 1946, Sava Kosanović became Tito's ambassador in Washington but I never saw him again after I left Belgrade in October of 1945. Kosanović had accepted totally the Communist system in Yugoslavia and remained loyal until his death." There had not been a time in ten centuries when the Yugoslavs had not been ruled and ransacked by invaders by Venetians, Romans, Turks, Bulgars, Austrians, Hungarians, Germans, Italians, when they were not living under threat of tortum, prison, or violent death. Now a marvelous truth began to dawn upon them: that they were free, in a manner of speaking. Tesla would not live to see this. Whether he could ever have accepted the new government, with its Soviet-type Constitution and a Soviet alliance, whether he could ever have accepted the permanent exdle of his beloved monarch, are unanswerable questions. Unfortunately, however, all this was to have a bearing on how he would be remembered in the West. The fading of his scientific reputation, the forgetfulness of Americans in the postwar period, resulted in large degree from the disappearance of most of his scientific papers behind that new Cold War phenomenon, the Iron Curtain. In 1948 Yugoslavia ceased to be an Iron Curtain country, declaring its independence from the Soviet doctrine of "limited sovereignty" America and her allies then were generous in sending economic and military aid to the Slavs; but the damage had been done. America had not raced to Tito's wartime support with the alacrity that Churchill had shown. In the future it would not be made easy for American scholars to draw on Yugoslav sources to document the achievements of Nikola Tesla. The inventor became very feeble in the winter of 1942. His lear of germs was so obsessive that even his closest friends were 143