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satisfied with the ‘1940 border’ – that is to say, the agreement the Soviets forced on the Finns after the Winter War – with perhaps some minor adjustments.
    There was then a brief break in the talks, during which Roosevelt had a private conversation with Stalin and Molotov 31 Aware that the contentious issue of Poland was about to be raised, the American President confided to Stalin that since he ‘might’ stand for re-election the following year, he had a problem – the several million Americans of Polish ancestry. As ‘a practical man’, he had to be conscious of their feelings – they could decide to vote against him if they disliked any deal he did over the future of their land of origin. But Roosevelt said he could tell Stalin secretly now that he agreed with moving the whole of Poland west and allowing the Soviets to keep the territory gained as a result of their invasion in September 1939. It was a significant exchange. Stalin now knew he had, at last, gained the land he had been demanding from the first moment of the forced alliance with the West. In 1942 the Americans had reacted with outrage at any suggestion that the Soviets could retain this territory; but now here was Roosevelt giving it away without a murmur. The President must have felt he had to balance the question of the future boundaries of Poland against the other key issues over which he had already reached agreement with Stalin. In addition, as Churchill had admitted, what could the Western Allies do in practice to get this territory back for the Poles?
    This secret conversation with Stalin was yet another example of Roosevelt's hard-headedness. It was Stalin who had taken the nom de guerre ‘Steel’, but it was also an epithet that could on occasion apply to Roosevelt – at his core, and despite the patina of jokes and charm, he had an ice-cold, almost ruthless sense of political realities.
    Two of Roosevelt's most important colleagues – Averell Harriman and Charles ‘Chip’ Bohlen – heard him give Stalin this secret assurance over Poland. Both recorded afterwards that they believed he had made a mistake. Harriman felt that Roosevelt had at this moment just given the Soviets the right to impose whatever system they wished on Poland, and Bohlen confessed he was ‘dismayed’ for much the same reason.
    Harriman was subsequently called to task for the American decision to let Stalin keep eastern Poland when he appeared beforethe US Congress committee on the Katyn forest massacre just a few years after the war. When asked how it was possible to reconcile the decision to let Stalin have this territory with the principles of the Atlantic Charter, he replied: ‘The Russians had contended – and I am not justifying the contention, but I am merely stating the fact – they had contended for a considerable period of time that the eastern borders of Poland had been unfairly made and that ethnologically there was a larger percentage of white Russians and Ukrainians in that area and that the agreement at the end of World War I was unfair to the Soviet interests. I assume that was the reason why this discussion took place and was not to be considered to be perhaps a violation of the Atlantic Charter’. 32 Given that the position of the American administration in 1942 had been that the Soviet claim on eastern Poland was in clear breach of the Atlantic Charter, Harriman's argument was specious. (As Churchill wrote to Eden in January 1942: ‘We have never recognized the 1941 frontiers of Russia, except de facto’.)
    Sumner Welles, who had served as American Under-Secretary of State until just before the conference, was someone else who thought the President had made a mistake about Poland at Tehran. When giving evidence at the Katyn massacre hearings he was asked: ‘Don't you think that if we had adopted a more firm policy toward Soviet Russia and particularly toward its demands with regard to Poland and other similar situations that we