wrote that two of the "captive nations" mentioned in the resolution, Idel-Ural and Cossackia, were "fictitious entities created as a propaganda ploy by Hitler's racial theoretician Alfred Rosenberg during World War Two". The American Vice President, Richard Nixon, was visiting Moscow at the time the resolution was passed, and the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, was extremely angry about the resolution. Khrushchev asked Nixon how it was possible for him to negotiate with a nation that just proclaimed the break-up of his country as its foreign policy goal. Nixon, in effect, was forced to apologize for the resolution, saying that neither he nor President Eisenhower had any control over the resolutions passed by Congress, and stated: "Neither the President nor I would have deliberately chosen to pass a resolution of this type passed just before we visited the USSR". At the time, there was much tension in American-Soviet relations owing to the latest Berlin crisis, and Nixon had been sent to Moscow to find a way to ease tensions in order to end the Berlin crisis peacefully. The general feeling in Eisenhower administration was that the resolution was ill-timed. The American diplomat George F. Kennan came to deplore the ABN, complaining the group had an over-sized influence over Congress as most congressmen and senators were afraid of being labeled "soft on Communism", and charged that the ABN had a vested interest in inflaming Cold War tensions. Kennan wrote that the ABN in the United States was a classic example of a domestic lobby taking over foreign policy to achieve its own ends, even if those goals were not necessarily in the broader interest of the United States. During his time as the American ambassador to Yugoslavia, Kennan complained that his efforts to influence Marshal Josip Broz Tito to undertake a more pro-American foreign policy were being constantly undercut by the ABN, which successfully lobbied Congress to pass resolutions calling for the overthrow of Tito and for the break-up of Yugoslavia. From 1962 onward, the ABN worked closely with Lady Birdwood, described as the "largest individual distributor of racist and antisemitic material" in Britain. The leader of the British branch of the European Freedom Council, founded in 1967, was Lady Birdwood. The ABN activists in Britain who worked with Lady Birdwood expressed anti-Semitic and far-right views. Representatives from the ABN and related organizations participated in the congresses of the WACL and EFC.