Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (15 page)

With rising costs in the war in Vietnam, they rejected continuous troop deployments or the construction of extensive military facilities, and proposed to the British the use of strategically located islands under U.K. control. Along with Diego Garcia and other islands in Chagos, the team identified some of the outlying islands of the Seychelles archipelago as prime possibilities. “They do not appear to us,” they wrote, “to be capable of supporting serious independence movements and are probably too remote and culturally isolated to figure plausibly in the plans of any mainland government.”
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On the first day of talks there was quick consensus on the basic plan to augment the U.S-U.K. military presence in the region and to gain permanent control over strategic islands to support new military activity.

“May be possible to transfer Diego Garcia from Mauritius to Seychelles which will be easier to deal with,” the Navy’s representative telegrammed back to the JCS about an initial idea for retaining control over Diego by separating it from Mauritius and making it part of the Seychelles, which unlike Mauritius was not expected to gain independence soon. “Only 200 people involved.”
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U.S. officials and their British counterparts agreed on ensuring total control over Diego Garcia and Chagos without the possibility of outside interference. “It would be unacceptable to both the British and the American defence authorities,” a UK Colonial Office document explained, “if facilities of the kind proposed were in any way to be subject to the political control of Ministers of a newly emergent independent state,” referring to soon-to-be-independent Mauritius or the Seychelles.
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On the last day of the talks, Kitchen returned to the U.S. Embassy to report back on his progress. “Re Diego Garcia—UK willing to move rapidly as possible to separate Diego Garcia from Mauritius,” Kitchen telegrammed the State Department. “Thereafter, joint US/UK survey will be conducted under UK auspices. If survey satisfactory, UK will move to acquire entire island for US communications site and later development other austere facilities.”
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The U.K. representatives were surprised, however, with what Kitchen and the DOD’s Frank Sloan had to say about the local populations on the islands. Some archived versions of the initial agreement produced at the talks remain censored on this point; but elsewhere uncensored documents
show that the British (concerned about the future of their before-long ex-colonies) were “clearly disappointed” to hear that the United States was not interested in offering aid or base employment opportunities that might benefit the economies of Mauritius and the Seychelles. Instead, Kitchen and Sloan explained that the U.S. Government had something entirely different in mind. Tellingly, in the official record, they conveyed the demand in a parenthetical phrase: The United States wanted the islands under its “exclusive control (without local inhabitants).”
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“FREEDOM OF MANOEUVRE, DIVORCED FROM THE NORMAL CONSIDERATIONS”

The United States wanted the Chagossians gone. Or as other documents would later, more directly put it, they wanted the islands “swept” and “sanitized.”
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Despite their surprise, British representatives quickly agreed to the parenthetically presented expulsion order: “H.M.G. should be responsible for acquiring land, resettlement of population and compensation at H.M.G.’s expense,” the representatives agreed. The United States would assume responsibility for all construction and maintenance costs.
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For U.S. officials, the aim was to avoid not just having to answer to a non-Western government like Mauritius or the Seychelles, but equally, having to deal with a (potentially antagonistic) local population. Worst of all was the possibility that a local population could press claims for self-determination at the United Nations and threaten the life of the base.

“The Americans made it clear during the initial [1963] talks,” detailed a secret U.K. document, “that they regarded freedom from local pressures as essential.”
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Another Foreign Office brief, marked “secret and guard,” was even more explicit:

The primary objective in acquiring these islands from Mauritius and the Seychelles . . . was to ensure that Her Majesty’s Government had full title to, and control over, these islands so that they could be used for the construction of defence facilities without hindrance or political agitation and so that when a particular island would be needed for the construction of British or United States defence facilities Britain or the United States should be able to clear it of its current population. The Americans in particular attached great importance to this freedom of manoeuvre, divorced from the normal considerations applying to a populated dependent territory.
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The document continued, “It was implied in this objective, and recognized at the time, that we could not accept the principles governing our otherwise universal behaviour in our dependent territories,
e.g.
we could not accept that the interests of the inhabitants were paramount and that we should develop selfgovernment there.” If the needs of the local population were treated as “paramount,” the brief explained, the United States would likely cancel its participation.
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British officials felt that any apparent contradiction between their “principles” and the expulsion plan was “not an insurmountable problem”: They would simply remove the people and tell the world “there were no permanent inhabitants in the archipelago.” This step was crucial because, in classic Orwellian logic, “to recognise that there are permanent inhabitants will imply that there is a population whose democratic rights have to be safeguarded.”
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For U.S. officials, the plan for Diego Garcia thus had all the advantages and almost none of the disadvantages of an overseas military base. It had all the advantages as a relatively surreptitious way to exercise U.S. power, and was controlled by “a longstanding ally (the United Kingdom) unlikely to toss [the United States] out for governmental changes or U.S. foreign policy initiatives.”
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In the British Government, the United States had a partner willing to ignore British law and international human rights guarantees. The British would do the dirty work of the expulsion. They would dispose of the population. All the while the United States would have the legal and political alibi that Great Britain was the sovereign, retaining ultimate responsibility for the islanders.

With the people scheduled for removal, the U.S. Government would have almost the perfect base: strategically located, free of any potentially troublesome population, under
de facto
U.S. control yet with its closest ally as sovereign to take any political heat, and almost no restrictions on use of the island, save the need to consult periodically with the British. Free reign over an idyllic and strategically located atoll in the Indian Ocean. No wonder the Navy would come to call it “Fantasy Island.”

“SOME LOGICAL COVER”

Before the U.S. delegation left London, the two sides agreed to a series of recommendations and future steps involving the development of what officials were calling a “strategic triangle” of bases on the islands of Diego Garcia, Aldabra in the Seychelles on the western edge of the Indian Ocean,
and Australia’s Cocos/Keeling Islands to the east.
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Notably, while U.S. officials demanded that the “local” (read: non-white) governments of Mauritius and the Seychelles cede their sovereignty claims, U.S. officials were willing to have the local Australian Government retain sovereignty in the Cocos/Keeling Islands (the ongoing Anglo-American-Australian coalition of the pale has of course been visible in Iraq).

The British Cabinet approved the recommendations in principle on the day the talks concluded. Six days later, Secretary Rusk approved the agreements; DOD and the JCS approved them the following month.
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When both the U.S. and U.K. delegations to the United Nations heard news of the plans, however, they expressed concern. Officials jointly suggested a slow implementation of the strategy “to minimize adverse reaction at the UN and throughout the world.” Each step should have “some logical cover,” they recommended. “Discreet timing and spacing” of the steps should be employed. “Any step which clearly reveals the true intentions should be taken after other preliminary steps” so as to reduce the amount of time opposition would have to build against the base. In particular, the delegations warned, “The transfer of population no matter how few . . . is a very sensitive issue at the UN. It should be undertaken on the basis that the populations must be induced to leave voluntarily rather than forcibly transferred.”
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SURVEYS, SECRECY, AND A “CONSIDERABLE SERVICE” TO THE U.S. GOVERNMENT

Despite attempts to maintain the total secrecy of the discussions and planning, the
Washington Post
was ready to run a story about the London agreements by June 15, 1964. Fearing that the story might derail their plans, Kitchen and Assistant Secretary of State Jeff Greenfield went to meet with the managing editor of the
Post
, Alfred Friendly, to ask him to hold the story.

In an off-the-record conversation, Kitchen explained to Friendly the background of U.S. involvement in the Indian Ocean and the plans for island bases. Kitchen stressed how publication of the story would endanger British negotiations to remove the islands from Mauritius and the Seychelles, as well as a secret U.S-U.K. survey of the islands. Friendly promised not to publish his story until after a U.S. or U.K. announcement. Rusk later called it “a considerable service to the USG.”
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A month later, White House and State officials feared that both the
Post
and the
Economist
might break the story within a matter of days.
In a heavily underlined memorandum hurriedly delivered by Komer to President Lyndon Johnson, Rusk alerted the President and provided him with background in case of press inquiries. Rusk described the islands as “
virtually uninhabited
,” citing numbers of one to two hundred people.
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Under continued pressure from the State Department, the
Post
did not publish the story, and the secret island survey went off without interruption (the
Economist
also held the story). A team of Navy and Air Force engineers and construction experts left for the Indian Ocean at the end of July and completed its work within a month.

Upon the survey team’s return, the Air Force expressed interest in Diego Garcia for the first time, as a base for B-52 bomber operations.
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The Navy’s evaluation was even more enthusiastic. A telegram back to Navy headquarters reported: “Anchorage excellent with minimum blasting coral heads. . . . Logistic airstrip feasible [at two sites]. . . . Island excellent for COMMSTA [communications station] regards interference and ground conductivity. . . . Sufficient land available other support as required.”
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Briefed by the survey team at the Pentagon, Admiral Horacio Rivero, now Vice Chief of Naval Operations, exclaimed, “I want this island!”

Rivero “turned to one of his staff and told them to write a letter to the British using whatever words or justification that were necessary” to get it.
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There is no record of any discussions about another of the survey team’s findings: that a distinct native population was living on Diego. The team reported, “The problem of the Ileois
***
and the extent to which they form a distinct community is one of some subtlety and is not within the grasp of the present manager of Diego Garcia.”
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The
Washington Post
finally ran its story on August 29, more than two months after it had been written, buried in the media void of end-of-August vacations. The last column of the article described the population of Diego Garcia as consisting “largely of transient laborers” most of whom were “understood to have left.”
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A day prior to publication, the article’s author, Robert Estabrook, met with U.S. Embassy officials in London. They convinced him to remove references to the detachment of islands from Mauritius and the Seychelles and to make the story less definitive about which islands were the focus of attention. An embassy cable reported that Estabrook initially refused to delete a paragraph explaining that the
Post
had held the story at the
request of the State Department; the published article included no such reference.
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The story gained little attention and was soon forgotten.

PLATINUM HANDSHAKES

On the British side, the U.K. Government began pressuring Mauritian representatives during its independence negotiations in 1965 to give up Chagos in exchange for Mauritian independence. During meetings with Secretary Rusk in Washington in April, new Labour Party Prime Minister Harold Wilson brought up the detachment and said that Britain would “pay a price” at the UN for its actions.
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In 1960, the UN General Assembly had passed Declaration 1514 (XV) “on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.” The declaration called for the complete independence of non-self-governing territories, like Mauritius and the Seychelles, without alteration of their borders, thrice demanding that states respect their “territorial integrity” during decolonization, and condemning “any attempt aimed at the partial or total disruption of the national unity and the territorial integrity of a country.”
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