LONDON, Jan 1: Britain's last Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, proposed a dramatic joint peace mission with Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin to end the Vietnam war, according to documents declassified today.British government papers released into the public domain after 30 years show that Wilson suggested the two men should go together to the North Vietnamese capital Hanoi. At the same time he proposed foreign secretary George Brown and his Soviet counterpart Andrei Gromyko should fly to the United States in an attempt to bring the warring sides together round the negotiating table. The suggestion, made at an embassy reception in London during a visit by Kosygin in February 1967, seemed to have been treated with no more than mild amusement by the Russian premier. Picking up a fork he told Wilson, ``if one took a piece of metal and attempted to make a fork without knowhow to do so, one would spoil the metal without producing a fork''. Wilson believed that a temporary truce between Americans and North Vietnamese offered the prospect of a more lasting cessation, possibly leading to a permanent settlement.But in the end, his attempts to broker a ceasefire with Moscow's intercession were undermined by the United States, precipitating a bitter row with his erstwhile friend, US president Lyndon Johnson.
