Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (11 page)

In the nineteenth century, Britain and other European powers tied their expansionist success to the direct control of foreign lands. World War II made this no longer an option for the United States. The European powers had already divided most of the world among themselves, and the ideological mood of the time was clearly against colonialism and territorial expansion.
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The allied powers had made World War II a war against the expansionist desires of Germany, Japan, and Italy, and the United States had framed the war as an anticolonial struggle, criticizing the colonial powers, and pledging to assist with the decolonization of colonial territories upon war’s end. After the war, the creation of the United Nations enshrined the decolonization process and the right of nations and peoples to self-determination and selfgovernment.

“In the 1950s era of decolonization,” writes anthropologist Carole McGranahan, “empires did not go away, but went underground, surfacing in guises ranging from socialist empire in the Soviet Union to various forms of neo-imperialist aggressive democracy as in the case of the United States. Yet each of these polities,” she explains, “fiercely guarded themselves against any accusations of empire or imperialism.”
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Which meant the United States came to exert its power through increasingly subtle and discreet means: most importantly through economic markets, international agreements, and foreign bases. Without a collection of colonies, the United States used what is likely the greatest collection of bases ever as well as periodic displays of military might to keep wayward nations within the rules of an economic and political system favorable to the United States.
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Indeed, it was the nation’s unchallenged military superiority at the end of World War II that left it in a position to dictate
much of the postwar international economic system upon which U.S. geoeconomic power is based.
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U.S. forces abroad came to be “used to influence and limit the political, diplomatic, and economic initiatives of host nations,” explains base expert Joseph Gerson.
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In the Philippines, for example, the United States used military and economic aid and defense promises to extract not only decades’ worth of base access but favorable terms of trade and political influence as well.
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“Global economic access without colonies” was the postwar strategy, explains geographer Neil Smith, “matched by a strategic vision of necessary bases around the globe both to protect global economic interests and to restrain any future military belligerence.”
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During the Korean War, shortly before Stu Barber began his work on Diego Garcia, the U.S. military increased its number of overseas bases by 40 percent, bringing the total to near the heights of World War II.
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By the end of the 1950s, around one million U.S. troops and their families lived on or near bases abroad. By 1960, the United States had entered into eight mutual defense pacts with 42 nations and executive security agreements with more than 30 others, most of which provided various kinds of basing access. After some post-Korea reductions, there would be another 20 percent increase in base sites during the war in Vietnam.
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One was Diego Garcia.

THE STRATEGIC ISLAND CONCEPT AND A CHANGING OF THE IMPERIAL GUARD

Within three months of the United States’ entrance into World War II, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers “Capetown Clipper” seaplane was skidding to a halt across Diego Garcia’s lagoon. Two officials stepped out of the plane and went to meet Diego’s administrator. After signing his autograph book, they began surveying the northwest tip of the island for construction of a 4,000-foot runway.
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The Army never built the runway; instead the ruling power in the ocean, Great Britain, developed a corner of the atoll into a small base for ships, reconnaissance seaplanes, and communications traffic.

Between the fall of Napoleon in 1814 and the end of World War II, Britain dominated the Indian Ocean without peer. During the war, the ocean was a relatively minor theater but saw periodic German attacks on allied shipping and Japan’s seizure of the Andaman Islands and threats against India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Fearing the fall of Ceylon and its naval base there, Britain established an alternate base in the Addu Atoll, at the southern tip of the Maldives, 400 miles from Diego Garcia. The smaller base on Diego became a precautionary move against having to retreat even further south. British troops remained on the island through the end of the war, though the island saw no military action.
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After the war, Britain’s power globally and in the Indian Ocean was clearly on the wane. Observing this and the growing importance of petroleum reserves in the Middle East, the United States established a small Middle East naval force, MIDEASTFOR, in 1949, in the Persian Gulf state of Bahrain. Composed of a handful of aging vessels, the force was mostly a symbolic gesture aimed at maintaining a political and military
presence in the area. A larger presence and a base on Diego Garcia were, for the moment, deferred.

“FORWARD STRATEGY” AND MILITARIZATION’S CREEP

Following the end of World War II, the “containment” policy of George Kennan came to guide “national security” strategy (using the same kind of obscuring language that transformed the War Department into the Department of Defense). In the eyes of Kennan and other government officials, the aim of containment was to establish a worldwide balance of power favorable to the United States. For Kennan, this meant the use of not just military force but political, economic, and psychological power as well. Economic aid came to be a primary tool of Truman administration foreign policy in an attempt to rebuild Japan and the nations of Western Europe as strong allies opposed to the Soviet Union. NATO and other treaty organizations played an equally important political-military role as part of Kennan’s vision for a selective approach of defending key strategic strongpoints with military force.
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After the Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic weapon in 1949, a new iteration of the containment policy emerged with the drafting of National Security Council Report 68 of 1950 (NSC-68). The report was written in large part by Paul H. Nitze, a leading foreign policy official who would play a key role in the creation of the base on Diego Garcia and whose influence would extend into the Reagan administration. Unlike earlier Kennan-derived strategy, NSC-68 emphasized the military aspects of containment. Instead of defending key strategic strongpoints, NSC-68 saw danger everywhere and emphasized defending the United States and the West at every point on its “perimeter.”
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Also known as the “forward strategy,” this policy held that the United States should maintain its military forces as close as possible to the Soviet Union (and later China). These forces would create a line of defense against Soviet and Chinese expansion and allow rapid military deployment (nuclear and nonnuclear) to meet any perceived threat to the United States. A paper from a decade later outlined the “essential” role of the base network to the forward strategy: The base network

provides a basis of support and dispersal necessary for the retaliatory forces of the Air Force and the Navy and for other forces in
forward areas. It permits the forward deployment of ground, sea and air forces in or close to potential spots in areas throughout the world where the security interests of the United States require military strength to deter or deal swiftly with any military action against areas of the Free World.
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Both NSC-68 and Kennan’s containment strategy shared a newly global vision of U.S. foreign policy and an aim of encircling the Soviet Union and, increasingly, China, with offensive nuclear and nonnuclear military power as close to enemy borders as possible. Although there are precedents for such a policy dating to the nineteenth-century acquisition of naval and coaling stations in the Pacific, the postwar military policies of Kennan and Nitze represented a shift in U.S. foreign policy. “The security of the United States, in the minds of policymakers,” one scholar explains, “lost much of its former inseparability from the concept of the territory of the United States.”
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For the Navy in particular, the forward strategy meant employing an “offensive defense” to, in the tradition of Mahan, “project” U.S. naval forces as close to the shores of the Soviet Union, keeping it hemmed in and unable to project its own power outside Soviet territory.
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At a broader level, this “dominant mode of thought” crowded out all alternative visions and to this day, as Catherine Lutz says, “necessitates an exhaustive sorting of the world into friendly and unfriendly nations and the globe to be sliced comprehensively into military zones patrolled twenty-four hours of each day by American troops.”
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A new vision had emerged of an “intrinsically threatening world,” where instability, no matter how far removed from the United States, was seen as a threat to the nation. And in this world, the role of the military had become that of a “permanently mobilized force” ready to confront threats wherever they might appear.
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In a process that started before World War II and accelerated during the war, military interests were entering into almost every corner of civilian life.
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Perhaps the most “pernicious feature” of this creeping militarization is “not only the expansion of military influence into civilian areas from which it should have been excluded, but the injection of the military élan throughout our society—a constant pressure driving American life toward the reactionary.”
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Thus when President Eisenhower left office, he warned the nation that the military’s influence was not just a problem of politics and public policy but “an insidious penetration of our own minds.”
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The United States and its people, writes Lutz, had become a “society made”—socially,
culturally, economically, politically, and psychologically—“by war and preparations for war.”
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LOSING BASES AND THE “THIRD WORLD”
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As the Cold War proceeded into the 1950s, the relative supremacy of the United States gradually declined. The Soviet Union, as its nuclear weapons tests suggested, was emerging as another empire able to at least challenge the United States, and China soon emerged as a regional competitor.

With Britain, France, and other western European nations giving up their colonial possessions, their power and thus the power and influence of the United States and the West was eroding. Decolonization left the alignment of new nations up for grabs. With the United States allied with most of the former colonial rulers, a perception grew that many of the new nations and the balance of the Cold War were tilting toward the East. Amid the independence movements, opposition to foreign military facilities was growing throughout the decolonizing world. As nations gained their independence, countries like Trinidad and Tobago evicted the United States from bases in their territories.

In this context, Stu Barber and others grew concerned that the United States would be evicted from more bases. With these losses, officials worried that U.S. influence over the future of non-Western nations would decline as well. Many officials particularly feared losing control of the regions bounding the Indian Ocean, from southern Africa through the Middle East, south Asia, and southeast Asia.

The disastrous outcome, from Britain’s standpoint, of the 1956 Suez Canal crisis called into question Britain’s ability to assert long-term control over the Indian Ocean and the Middle East. U.S. military strategists began to foresee the development of a “power vacuum” in the region as British power declined. For the first time, some in the Navy and the wider national security establishment began to look seriously at establishing a larger presence in the ocean.
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Stu grew interested in the region, as he later explained, “not because of a visualized specific requirement but because of a realization that Western
power and influence in that part of the world had been dependent mainly on British forces and bases, and these were clearly on the way down.” France’s colonial presence was likewise on the wane.
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Part of this concern stemmed from a growing interest in ensuring the flow of Persian Gulf oil to the U.S. economy and, as much, to the increasingly Gulf-dependent economies of Europe and Japan. “More significant” in Stu’s mind and the minds of other officials was the broader concern that “Western nations cannot afford to be without means of exerting power and influence in so large a sector of the world (which the USSR could potentially threaten at shorter range from the north). And looking ahead, the U.S. Navy seemed to be the service most likely to retain the potential of doing so.”
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“We just can’t bug out,” Stu told Senator Ted Stevens in a letter.
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To this point, however, other than the token MIDEASTFOR ships, the Indian Ocean was largely unknown to the Navy, distant from the United States, and rarely visited by Navy vessels. (The CIA had started to work in the region, helping to overthrow the government of Iran in 1953 and installing the Shah.) For the Navy to operate in the ocean, it needed to be able to supply and repair its ships. In the Atlantic and Pacific, the United States had coastal ports and island bases like those at Pearl Harbor, Guam, and Puerto Rico. Other than the small outpost in Bahrain, the Navy had little capacity to operate in this new ocean.