Transcribed from:
Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, vol. VI: Eastern Europe, The Soviet Union.  Department of State Publication 8470, (Washington, DC : Gov't Printing Office, 1969), pp. 683.

NOTE: As with most telegrams, superfluous words were omitted.  This creates grammatical errors which are not part of the transcribing, but rather an inherent part of the telegram itself.  At other times it appears words were mistakenly omitted from the original transmission.  The parts enclosed in brackets [ ] were inserted by the State Dept.  Text in red indicates a quote of Soviet government sources.

    "On January 22 the Acting Secretary of State of the USA Mr. Acheson stated at a press conference that a secret Yalta agreement of the three Allied Powers had envisaged the granting to the Soviet Union of rights of occupation of the Kuril Islands but taht as far as he understood that agreement had not envisaged the final handing over the Kuril Islands to the Soviet Union. Mr. Acheson further stated taht, 'this was his opinion although perhaps he was mistaken'.²⁷
    Tass is authorized to explain that in the question ofthe Kuril Islands Mr. Acheson was indeed 'mistaken'. In the Yalta Agreement of the three powers which was signed on February 11, 1945 by I.V. Stalin on behalf of the Soviet Union, by Mr. Churchill on behalf of Great Britain and by Mr. Roosevelt on behalf of the USA but [not] published at that time for understandable reasons it was clearly stipulated that after the victory over Japan the Kuril Islands would be turned over to the Soviet Union and also that the southern part of the island of Sakhalin and all the islands adjacent thereto should be returned to the Soviet Union."
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