This issue begins by denouncing British and French aggression against Egypt during the Suez Canal Crisis. It also includes a Chinese statement about the Soviet Declaration "to Strengthen Friendship and Cooperation [with] Other Socialist States," which acknowledges tensions between socialist countries and the need to address people's demands in Hungary and Poland. The next sections feature a message from Zhou Enlai to János Kádár, who would lead Hungary after the failed Revolution of 1956, and Sino-Nepali correspondence.

Frank Wisner, reflecting on the Hungarian Revolution, suggests that Soviet Communism is on the defensive and RFE broadcasts to Poland should discourage violence while supporting Party leader Gomulka’s efforts to gain more autonomy from the Soviet Union. IOD Chief Cord Meyer annotates the memorandum.

After lightly rebuking Hoxha's choices to use public trials for the executions of political criminals, Khrushchev reassures Hoxha of the Soviet Union's support for Albania, and concludes with a summary of the Soviet Union's current standing in the international sphere.

Mao Zedong briefs Aleksander Zawadzki on China's socialist transformation.

Liu Shaoqi discusses the potential withdrawal of Soviet advisors from China. Although the Chinese government was considering sending back some specialist, they did not want the abrupt removal of all specialists as happened in Yugoslavia. Liu Shaoqi also brings up the 1956 uprisings in Hungary and Poland, saying that such events were a “useful lesson for the entire communist movement.”

President of People’s Republic of Hungary, Rezso Nyers, and General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, Karoly Grosz, report on their talks with Gorbachev in Moscow, 24-25 July, 1989. The excerpts contains economic reformer Nyers’ assessment of the political situation in Hungary, and first among the factors that "can defeat the party," he lists "the past, if we let ourselves [be] smeared with it." The memory of the revolution of 1956 and its bloody repression by the Soviets was Banquo’s ghost, destroying the legitimacy of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, just as 1968 in Prague and 1981’s martial law in Poland and all the other Communist "blank spots" of history came back in 1989 to crumble Communist ideology. For their part, the Communist reformers (including Gorbachev) did not quite know how to respond as events accelerated in 1989, except not to repeat 1956.

Second draft of “Proposed Interim Guidance for FEC” prepared for Allen Dulles to forward [over his disclosed pseudonym] to the FEC.

The State Department approves with “comments and recommendations” a November 15, 1956, CIA/International Operations Division draft of revised guidelines for the Free Europe Committee (FEC) with handwritten revisions [presumably by a State official].

Cord Meyer forwards to Allen Dulles a State Department assessment dated November 13, 1956, of Radio Free Europe Hungarian and Polish broadcasts. The assessment was requested by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and was prepared by State Department official L. Randolph Higgs, responsible for coordinating RFE issues with CIA, and Meyer, who objected to an initial State Department draft.

CIA/International Operations Division routing slips raise questions about an attached Free Europe Committee (FEC) draft dated November 12 on the FEC’s role in the wake of the Hungarian Revolution and note that the FEC [in New York] did not forward to Radio Free Europe Munich certain CIA guidances on broadcast policy.