Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (13 page)

On the neighboring island of Culebra, in 1948, the Navy seized 1,700 acres of land for a bombing range. By 1950, the population had shrunk to 580, from 4,000 at the turn of the century. The Navy controlled one-third of the island and its entire coastline, encircling civilians with the bombing range and a mined harbor. Beginning in the 1950s, the Navy started drafting plans to remove the rest of Culebra’s inhabitants. In 1970, the Navy would attempt to remove the islanders again. When the issue became a “
cause célèbre
of the Puerto Rican independence movement,” the Navy started looking for another island and ceased use of the bombing range. Ultimately this came at the expense of those in Vieques, where bombing increased until protesters won its cessation in 2003.
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In Okinawa, the military seized large tracts of land and bulldozed houses for bases during the 1945 Battle of Okinawa. Within a year, the United States had taken 40,000 acres, equal to 20 percent of the island’s arable land. Displacement continued into the 1950s, affecting 250,000 people or nearly half of Okinawa’s population. Initially the military forced Okinawans to relocate to refugee camps and prevented them from returning to their homes. With the island growing increasingly overcrowded, between 1954 and 1964, the United States found at least 3,218 “volunteers” to resettle off the island. They sent them about 11,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean to landlocked Bolivia. Promised new farmland and financial
assistance, most found jungle-covered lands, incomplete housing and roads, disease, and none of the promised aid. By the late 1960s, “there was a steady exodus” to Brazil, Argentina, and back to Okinawa and Japan.
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In 1953 in Danish Greenland, the United States made plans to expand its air base in Thule and signed a secret agreement with the Danish Government to remove 150 indigenous Inughuit people standing in the way. Families were reportedly given four days to move or face U.S. bulldozers. The Danish Government gave the Inughuits some blankets and tents and left them in exile in Qaanaaq, a forbidding village 125 miles from their native lands.
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The expulsion severed the people’s connection to a homeland to which they were “intimately linked,” causing them physical and psychological harm and the loss of ancient hunting, fishing, and gathering skills, and endangering their entire existence as a people. In recent years, Danish courts have ruled the Danish Government’s actions illegal and a violation of the Inughuits’ human rights. And yet the courts said they have no right to return.
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In the Marshall Islands’ Kwajalein Atoll, the U.S. military displaced hundreds between the end of World War II and the 1960s to create a missile-testing base. Most were deported to the small island of Ebeye, where the population increased from 20 prior to 1944 to several thousand by the 1960s in an area less than 27 square miles. In 1967, with overcrowding a major problem, U.S. authorities would remove 1,500 “unnecessary” people from Ebeye. Following protests from the Marshallese Government, they were later allowed to return.
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By 1969, Ebeye was called “the most congested, unhealthful, and socially demoralized community in Micronesia.” A population of more than 4,500 was living in what was widely known as the “ghetto of the Pacific.”
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By 1978, there were more than 8,000 people on the island, giving it the population density that one would find if the entire population of the United States moved to Connecticut. By 2001, the population reached more than 12,000.
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The displacement of local peoples for bases may best be characterized as a kind of “strategic population cleansing,” which empires across many centuries have carried out for military purposes: That is, the “planned, deliberate removal from a certain territory of an undesirable population distinguished by one or more characteristics such as ethnic, religious, race, class, or sexual preference.”
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In her study of Vieques, Katherine McCaffrey explains how “bases are frequently established on the political margins of national territory, on lands occupied by ethnic or cultural minorities or otherwise
disadvantaged populations.”
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While the military generally selects base sites at a regional level on strategic grounds, McCaffrey points to how the selection of specific locations is heavily influenced at a local level by the ease of land acquisition. The ease with which the military can acquire land is in turn strongly related to the relative powerlessness of a group, which is linked to a number of factors including a group’s socially defined “race,”
**
ethnicity, nationality, numerical strength, and economic and political power.
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THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE

“One of the important things that was done,” Rivero said of his time in the Long-Range Objectives Group, was that “Stu, with help from some of us, got involved in looking at all the little islands around the world that might have some potential value. This was Stu’s idea, that we should stockpile base rights . . . before a lot of these countries became independent.” Rivero continued, “So, looking around, we picked a number of islands, and one of them was Diego Garcia.”
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Still, the man who selected Bikini for nuclear testing made his own contribution. According to Stu, Rivero approved the plan but insisted “emphatically” that the base be “austere” and have “no dependents.”
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Rivero worked hard to win supporters for the Strategic Island Concept within the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, and then from the powerful and longest-serving CNO in Navy history, Admiral Arleigh A. Burke.
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In June 1960, Rivero suggested that Burke talk to the British Navy about Diego.

Burke thought it a “good idea”
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and broached the subject at an October meeting with his British counterpart, First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Caspar
John.
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(Burke later claimed to have “foreseen” soon after World War II the eventual withdrawal of the British from the Indian Ocean and “advocated a U.S. Indian Ocean presence as early as 1949”).
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Working from Stu’s idea for acquiring Diego Garcia, Burke proposed that the British Government detach the atoll and the rest of Chagos from colonial Mauritius, as well as several other island groups from colonial Seychelles, to create a new territory that would ensure basing rights for future U.S. and U.K. military use.
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The British Navy liked the idea, and Burke returned from the meeting to submit a proposal on the Strategic Island Concept and Diego Garcia to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).

Despite some initial Air Force opposition to a plan (perhaps any plan) coming from its rival service, the JCS took the Navy’s proposal under consideration and expanded its scope to a worldwide search for bases.
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The Navy started base development studies for some 50–60 strategic islands, including ones in the Pacific and Atlantic, and worked to build support for the proposal in the Department of Defense.
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Despite the broadened search, the Navy maintained its focus on Diego: As Stu later put it, “Burke’s prompt and strong advocacy” quickly made the acquisition of the atoll “an article of Navy faith.”
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The response within the DOD was immediately warm. “This is long overdue,” wrote one Deputy Secretary of Defense.
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Another Pentagon official forwarded the Op-93 plan to high-ranking Kennedy administration officials McGeorge Bundy, Walter Rostow, and NSC-68 author Paul Nitze, explaining, “The study has considerable appeal as a possible solution to the dilemma posed by our continuing problem of maintaining an overseas base structure.”
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Under the guidance of new Op-93 director Rear Admiral Thomas Moorer, Stu formally briefed Nitze, then Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, in April 1961. Nitze soon raised the topic with his counterpart in the State Department, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Politico-Military Affairs, Jeffery Kitchen.
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Lobbied directly by Stu as well, Kitchen warned against the “outright purchase” of islands proposed by DOD (military officials believed that only with complete U.S. sovereignty would they have unrestrained base access and freedom of military action). But, he reported, “The Department of State would have no objection to initiating confidential talks with the United Kingdom regarding the detachment of Diego Garcia from the Mauritius group before the granting of selfgovernment.” Kitchen predicted “no major difficulties” in the discussions.
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THE “SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP”

The British, for their part, were “trying desperately to figure ways to hang on in the Indian Ocean,” as Kennedy and Johnson administration national security official Robert Komer later explained.
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Diego Garcia offered a way to remain in the ocean while shifting the major economic and military costs to the United States. “Seeing Malaya going independent; having lost their position in India, Pakistan, and Burma and Ceylon . . . sensing that it would be desirable from the standpoint of their strategic interests to get the Americans involved in yet another area where they could no longer carry the can,” Komer said, “the British were, I would say, quite interested in having us come in.”
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U.S. officials knew that the British were considering the withdrawal of some military forces in East Asia and the Middle East. They saw the Strategic Island Concept as an opportunity to encourage the British to maintain this “commitment” through collaborating on island base rights. (Providing base rights was, and is, widely considered to be an affirmation of both a military commitment and a
de facto
alliance or, in the Anglo-American case, a “special relationship” between nations.)

In July 1961, U.K. Minister of Defence Peter Thorneycroft informally notified Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara that because of financial difficulties, Great Britain might withdraw all its forces east of Aden (in what is now Yemen). The Navy promptly narrowed the focus of the Strategic Island Concept to efforts to secure base rights in the Indian Ocean alone.
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Early in 1962, the Joint Chiefs formally signed on to the Navy’s plan, recommending to McNamara that “steps be taken to assure long-term access rights for the US for use of strategically located islands in the Indian Ocean.”
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In September 1962, over three days of major U.S.-U.K. talks in Washington, Secretary McNamara and Minister Thorneycroft began formal diplomatic negotiations on a “possible joint Indian Ocean base.”
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A “Top Secret” JCS discussion of the Strategic Island Concept in the Indian Ocean shows how the Joint Chiefs and eventually the Pentagon accepted Stu’s plan in its entirety. The sparse, bulleted language of the JCS illustrates their adoption of the concept point by point:

• With the withdrawal of British forces from the area east of Aden, a military power vacuum will exist in the Indian Ocean area. . . .

• The United States requires bases to provide for the projection of its military strength around the world. There are important
gaps developing in the Free World base structure which are opening up as the Western powers withdraw. . . . This need is most acute at present in the Indian Ocean area. . . .

• Encroachment of the Sino-Soviet Bloc into the areas which are loosely termed colonial could be made vastly more difficult by conclusion of treaties and agreements now for permanent union with the United States. . . .

• US bases on foreign continents are inherently under pressure from a wide variety of sources [including]. . . . nationalism [and]. . . . Communist influences. . . .

• Acquisition of suitable islands by the United States would appear to be the most advantageous procedure [to counteract these forces]. . . .

• Islands having a limited population which are removed from continental mainlands and do not appear economically attractive seem to offer the most feasible avenues for United States development.
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As studies and planning continued within the Navy, and the departments of Defense and State, the State Department sent the following classified note to the British Embassy:

Washington, April 25, 1963. The Government of the United States proposes to the British Government the initiation of discussions by appropriate military and civil representatives of the two Governments looking toward the possible strategic use of certain small islands in the Indian Ocean area. The two Governments share a common concern for an adequate long-term allied presence in the area, and it is thus considered important that there be effective coordination of strategic planning on the matter.
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The British Embassy responded by presenting “its compliments” to the State Department and its “honour” of offering the following reply:

Washington, July 29, 1963. Her Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom agree that the two Governments share a common concern for the effective defence of the whole area against Communist encroachment. In principle, therefore, they welcome the American initiative for exploratory discussions.
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