Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (11 page)

By October 1983, the time of the invasion, Reagan had been beating the presidential tom-toms about the Central America peril for more than two years, and he was growing ever more frustrated that he had been unable to get Congress to fall in step. When the House Intelligence Committee chairman learned from press reports in November 1982 that Reagan’s ambassador in Honduras was secretly training rebels to overthrow the popular but Marxist-leaning government in Nicaragua, he pointedly introduced legislation (which passed) that specifically prohibited the Department of Defense or the CIA from allocating any of their approved budgets to assist and foment a coup in Nicaragua. The usually unflappable Reagan was visibly angered by what he thought was congressional interference. “The Sandinistas have openly proclaimed Communism in their country and their support of Marxist revolutions throughout Central America,” he blurted in evident exasperation in a meeting with Democratic Speaker of the House Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill. “They’re killing and torturing people! Now, what the hell does Congress expect me to do about that?”

Reagan went on one of his signature public relations offensives. In a speech to the nation from the Oval Office in March 1983, wherein the president warned that his record-breaking defense budget had been “trimmed to the limits of safety” by
the soft-on-Communism Congress, Reagan revealed some hazy satellite photos of an airfield under construction. “On the small island of Grenada, at the southern end of the Caribbean chain,” he’d said, “the Cubans, with Soviet financing and backing, are in the process of building an airfield with a ten-thousand-foot runway. Grenada doesn’t even have an air force. Who is it intended for?”

Reagan meant this as an ominous rhetorical question, but it did have rather less ominous empirical answers. To wit: there were airfields of similar size and capacity already dotting the Caribbean; the Grenadian government wanted to build a new modern airport to increase tourism, which was their only source of income outside nutmeg, bananas, and servicing those medical students at St. George’s University. The Grenadian government had asked the United States for money to help build it so they could bring in big jetfuls of tourists directly from Miami and New York and Dallas; the tourists wouldn’t have to wait around Bridgetown, Barbados, to catch a puddle-jumper connection. The United States had said no to the aid request, but Great Britain and Canada had been happy to help. The main contractor for construction of the Point Salines airfield was a British company underwritten by a grant from the British government. None of this was secret. But according to Reagan there was a much more nefarious plot afoot. The president said he wanted to reveal more to the American people on TV that night, but, alas, he claimed, the stakes were too high. “These pictures only tell a small part of the story. I wish I could show you more without compromising our most sensitive intelligence sources and methods.”

Here’s what he could say: “The Soviet-Cuban militarization of Grenada, in short, can only be seen as power projection into the region. And it is in this important economic and strategic
area that we’re trying to help the governments of El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras, and others in their struggles for democracy against guerrillas supported through Cuba and Nicaragua.

“This is why I’m speaking to you tonight—to urge you to tell your senators and congressmen that you know we must continue to restore our military strength. If we stop in midstream, we will send a signal of decline, of lessened will, to friends and adversaries alike.”

Reagan’s national plea did not shake loose the cash he’d desired from the legislature, so a month later he called a rare and dramatic joint session of Congress to ask members to stop resisting his budget requests for fighting the Commies in Central America. “The national security of all the Americas is at stake in Central America. If we cannot defend ourselves there, we cannot expect to prevail elsewhere. Our credibility would collapse, our alliances would crumble, and the safety of the homeland would be put in jeopardy.”

But Congress kept whittling away at funding for El Salvador, and for the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. The Senate blocked a specific request to have the CIA actively undermine the Communist-friendly runway-happy Grenadian government—effectively a slow-motion coup. But when Congress said no on Grenada, Reagan simply prepared an end run. On October 4, 1983, the president signed National Security Decision Directive 105, which ordered his own national security team to draw up plans for destabilizing the economy and the institutions of Grenada (among other Central American countries), to overthrow its Socialist government, and to rid the island once and for all of Cuban and Soviet influence. Senate be damned.

When the news hit that something was afoot in Grenada (just nine days after the secret presidential directive was issued), Reagan’s national security adviser for Latin American Affairs
immediately brought up the possible perils to the Americans living on the island. “In crises there is opportunity,” he said later, “and I believed that this emergency just might present an excellent chance to restore democracy to Grenada while assuring the safety of our citizens.” What better way to do all that—and to prove that America was back—than military action. Military action in Grenada was a first resort for the Reagan team, not a last resort. It’s not like they tried much else. They didn’t even bother to get good information about what was actually happening on the island, or to verify what little they did get. They were under the spell of their old Team B Soviet-military hype. The Russians were running a takeover in Grenada.

And frankly, this was an administration eager to use the military in a way that would let the president say things like “America is back.” He had been using the idea of military strength to political effect for years; now he could use
actual
military strength. The purported justification sold to the American people about Grenada—the rescue of these American medical students—was so far from the operational point of Urgent Fury that the White House would send the president out to make his victory speech even before all the students were secure.

As the Grenadian government tore itself apart over the next week, Reagan’s administration made plans for the “rescue” of the British queen’s representative in Grenada, Governor-General Paul Scoon, a ceremonial figurehead who governed nothing and didn’t know we were coming. The military rescue team for Scoon would also include a US State Department representative who made sure that the governor-general went up on the island’s radio network and said all the right things about how the Americans had been officially invited in to restore order and good government. There was considerably less diplomatic push to ensure the actual safety of the American students living on
the island. Little or no effort was made to contact anybody in student housing or to talk to the faculty and staff of St. George’s University, whose bursar had been receiving personal assurances from Grenadian government officials that the students were safe and would be assured a safe departure if they wished to leave. (The retired chief actuary of the US Social Security system flew out of the small airport on the northeast part of the island the day that SEAL Team Six made its second attempt to infiltrate the island.)

No, the real energy inside the Reagan administration was expended on preparing a full-out combat operation, and preparing to justify it after the fact. Every branch of the military was anxious to get a piece of the action: the SEAL teams, an Army Ranger battalion, a second Army Ranger battalion, the Air Force for transport, the Navy for air and gun support. Everybody had a piece of the little spice island. The Marines didn’t get much, but they did get a little real estate to take up north.

But then, less than thirty hours before the invasion was to commence, events on the other side of the world changed the plans in a big way. On the morning of October 23, 1983, a suicide bomber drove a truck containing six tons of explosives and a variety of highly flammable gases into the US Marine barracks at the airport in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 241 soldiers there on a don’t-shoot peacekeeping mission. Fourteen months into the deployment, and after an earlier suicide bombing at the US embassy in Beirut, Reagan was still unable to make clear to the American people exactly why US Marines were there. Were we keeping the peace in the civil war there, or were we taking sides with the Christians against the Muslims? The Reagan administration was still mixed on that message in the wake of the bombing, but the president was damned sure not going to let anybody question American resolve. Reagan dispatched Vice President
Bush to Beirut to make sure the world knew we were going to be staying the course in Lebanon, that we weren’t going to be frightened off by terrorists.

That afternoon the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff suggested that perhaps the Grenada operation was a dangerous exercise, at least where the president’s political standing was involved. Reagan was headed into reelection season, the chairman reminded him, and he didn’t need a double whammy of military complications. It might be less fraught to let the diplomats work out a deal to extricate the American students from Grenada. But Reagan was not about to back down. Not now. This was not the time to show weakness.

Word of a change in plans for Operation Urgent Fury started to filter through the chain of command within eight hours of the Lebanon bombing. “Now that the Marines had been bloodied in Beirut, they wanted an active role,” SEALs commander Robert Gormly wrote later. “Politics took over and the island was divided down the middle, with the Joint Headquarters retaining the southwest part and the Marines given the go-ahead to make an amphibious landing at the smaller airfield in the northeast.” The next day, as Gormly mourned his four dead SEAL colleagues and continued planning for the rescue of the governor-general, he found himself in a meeting with the State Department official who was going to go along on the operation. “[He] offered me some interesting information: that the Cuban ‘engineers’ on the island wouldn’t be a problem, because their government had informally agreed to keep its people in their barracks during our incursion. In other words, the Cubans knew we were coming.”

Funny thing, that secrecy business. Our putative enemy, Fidel Castro, knew about the invasion well before the Speaker of the
United States House of Representatives. In fact, when President Reagan finally had a group of congressional leaders to the White House residence on the night of October 24, 1983, secretly, to explain the plans for Grenada, the Army Rangers were already collecting their ammo and loading into their transport planes. The secretary of state briefed the three Democratic leaders and two Republicans on the situation on the ground in Grenada, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs laid out plans for a military operation involving two thousand American soldiers, sailors, and Marines. Only House Republican leader Bob Michel offered unquestioning support. The majority leader in the Senate, Tennessee Republican Howard Baker, wondered if Reagan was making a serious political mistake, and perhaps a military one. House Democratic majority leader Jim Wright thought the situation called for a stronger diplomatic effort, not military force. Senate Minority Leader Robert Byrd said point-blank he was against the invasion, and he’d say so in public.

Tip O’Neill, the venerable old big-city liberal and the Democratic Speaker of the House, was torn. He was sympathetic to Reagan’s worry that American hostages would be taken in Grenada; the 444-day hostage crisis in Iran just a few years earlier had been a grim national nightmare, and Jimmy Carter’s inability to free them had torpedoed his presidency. But O’Neill, like the other Democrats at the meeting, thought diplomacy was the wiser course to take in Grenada. There were no reports of Americans being menaced on the island, let alone being taken hostage. He saw no compelling reason for the United States military to execute a full-scale regime change; and he knew of no compelling constitutional argument that permitted Reagan to launch the operation simply on presidential say-so. Even if Operation Urgent Fury wrapped up within the sixty-day window that compelled Reagan, under the War Powers Resolution,
to consult Congress and secure specific statutory authority for the war, it was hard to make the case that Grenada represented a “national emergency created by an attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.” At the very least, the president should have
begun
the process of seeking approval from Congress before hitting the Go button. “You are informing us,” O’Neill pointedly told the president at the end of the administration’s presentation, “not asking us.”

Reagan reminded the congressional leaders that the rush of events had simply overtaken constitutional prerogatives. The safety of the American students was paramount; there was no time to lose. And then, prompted by something his national security adviser said, Reagan told the congressional leaders a story about how the Filipino people had cheered American soldiers after their liberation in World War II. “I can see the day, not too many weeks from now,” Reagan told the group, “when the Lebanese people will be standing at the shore, waving and cheering our Marines when they depart.”

O’Neill grew increasingly uncomfortable as Reagan kept going on about Lebanon in the middle of a meeting about Grenada. The Speaker began to suspect that part of the rationale for the invasion of Grenada was to use a quick-and-easy triumph as a distraction from the hideousness of the Beirut bombing.

Tip O’Neill was old-school. He worked hard to find common ground with the president, no matter how divergent their political philosophies. He’d always given the president the benefit of the doubt when White House factotums grabbed for a little extra on every deal the two men made—give a little, get a little was how O’Neill’s politics worked. Just three weeks earlier the Speaker had gone to bat for the president on the mission in Beirut, convincing skeptical House Democrats to vote for an eighteen-month extension of the 1,200-Marine US presence in
the multinational peacekeeping force there. Reagan’s team had assured the Speaker that things were improving; that they could get Israeli and Syrian military units out of Lebanon, stand up a viable coalition government in Beirut, and train and equip a Lebanese Army capable of defending the country without an American presence. They just needed a little time.