Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (16 page)

The British understood that they would thus have to pay Mauritius and the Seychelles to silence any protests over the detachment and trump any Soviet voices likely to encourage protest: “If we do not settle quickly (which must mean generously) agitation in the colonies against ‘dismemberment’ and ‘foreign bases’ (fomented from outside) would have time to build up to serious proportions, particularly in Mauritius.”
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A British official was even blunter during face-to-face meetings. He told U.S. representatives that British officials could not proceed in detaching the islands (by this point agreed to be Chagos, and the Aldabra, Desroches, and Farquhar groups) from Mauritius and the Seychelles until they knew what “bribe” they could offer the local governments.
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A few days later, Foreign Office official E. H. Peck told Kitchen he was “red-faced” over the matter but stressed the need to give Mauritius a “platinum handshake.”
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British Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart officially inquired in an aide-mémoire if the United States was willing to make a financial contribution. Stewart estimated the total cost at £10 million, or $28 million, and explained that the money would “include compensation for the inhabitants and commercial interests displaced.”
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The Joint Chiefs took the matter under consideration and decided “perpetual access” to the islands was worth $15 million. Although McNamara initially disagreed (he believed payment would be a signal to the British
that the United States was ready to assume Britain’s position in the Indian Ocean), the Secretary of Defense changed his mind. On June 14, 1965, McNamara authorized a contribution of up to half—or $14 million—of Britain’s BIOT expenses.
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With the financial arrangement secured, Kitchen led another State-Defense team to London to finalize the foundations of the deal. The meetings were held on September 23–24, at the same time British ministers were concluding independence negotiations with Mauritian representatives. The leading Mauritian official, Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, who would become the first prime minister of Mauritius, was given little choice: Accept the detachment of Chagos from Mauritius and £3 million, or no independence. Ramgoolam chose independence and the money.
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The Seychelles, which was further from independence, had even less choice in the matter but won construction of an international airport, now essential to its tourism-based economy. The Seychelles eventually negotiated the return of its three groups when it gained independence in 1976.

As the Mauritian independence negotiations concluded, the British Cabinet informed Kitchen’s delegation that it would detach the Mauritian islands and the three Seychellois groups and maintain them under British sovereignty. “After two years of, at times, intensive negotiation,” reported a memorandum for Paul Nitze in his new job as Secretary of the Navy, “the use of the islands on acceptable terms for US defense requirements has been secured. The principal task remaining is to work out the details on making the islands available, particularly the status of the local population.”
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The decision to retain the islands was not announced publicly. On November 8, 1965, the British Government invoked an archaic royal prerogative of the monarch to pass laws without parliamentary approval. (Prime ministers did the same to take the nation into wars in Egypt in 1956 and Iraq in 2003.)
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The government, in the name of the Queen, used what is called an Order in Council to quietly declare that Chagos and the three groups of islands from the Seychelles “shall together form a separate colony which shall be known as the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT).”
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Investigative journalist John Pilger describes how they did it: “The British Indian Ocean Territory was brought into being by an orderin-council, a decision approved not by Parliament but by the monarch, acting on the advice—in effect, the instructions—of a secretive, unaccountable group known as the Privy Council. The members of this body, the Privy Councillors, include present and former government ministers. They appear before the Queen in Buckingham Palace, standing in a semi-circle around her, heads slightly bowed, like Druids; they never sit down.” The Orders in Council are
read out by title, and the Queen simply says, “Agreed.” Pilger explains, “This is government by fiat: the use of a royal decree by politicians who want to get away with something undemocratically. Most British people have never heard of it.”
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(As we shall see, this would not be the last time the British Government would employ the Order in Council in this story.)

More than a month later, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 2066 noting its “deep concern” over actions taken by Great Britain “to detach certain islands from the Territory of Mauritius for the purpose of establishing a military base.” Citing the UN prohibition on disturbing the territorial integrity of non-self-governing territories, the General Assembly asked Britain “to take no action which would dismember the Territory of Mauritius and violate its territorial integrity,” and instead to implement fully 1960’s Declaration 1514 on decolonization.
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Blowtorch Bob moved more quickly than the UN. Two days after the BIOT was created, Komer sent the following nine-word memo to “Jeff” Kitchen: “Congratulations on the islands. Now how about some forces.”
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“OBE”

In the at times exotic bureaucratic language of Washington, “OBE” stands for “overtaken by events,” meaning that an issue is no longer relevant because of changed circumstances. Not long after the creation of the BIOT, the Joint Chiefs of Staff reviewed the communications station proposal for Diego Garcia and found that it had been “overtaken by events” and “that the high cost of construction did not warrant” the project.
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The relevant “events” were the development of satellite technology that made the need for a communications station on Diego Garcia essentially obsolete. The U.S. Embassy in London informed the Foreign Office of the change. The embassy said that for the time being, no population removal would be necessary.

Undeterred, Navy planners began drafting a new base proposal. One rear admiral suggested to Secretary of the Navy Nitze that creating a fuel station for ships transiting the Indian Ocean might offer a “suitable justification” for a facility.
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Under the name of Vice CNO Rivero, a four-page draft proposal emerged for a $45 million “fleet support activity,” comprising an anchorage, a runway, austere communications equipment, berthing and recreation facilities for 250 men, and 655,000 barrels of petroleum, oil, and lubricants (POL) storage. Nitze received the Rivero proposal and revised it personally before sending it to Secretary McNamara.
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One of Nitze’s staff members, Robert Murray, explained that the staff considered the base a “contingency facility” for the future. From his office
as President and CEO of the consulting firm the Center for Naval Analyses, Murray recalled in 2004 that he and his colleagues said at the time, “None of this makes a lot of sense in today’s world. It’s only if you believe that you don’t know what the world’s going to look like, or what our interests are going to be in it, that you would want to do this. And if the cost is low . . . then, why not?” Murray clarified, “I mean, it was speculation against the future. Or a hedge against the future.”
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Because hedges and speculations do not frequently earn funding from Congress and thus priority within DOD, Nitze offered McNamara three justifications for the base: the loss of naval ports in littoral nations as a result of anti-Western sentiment; “tenuous” naval communications capacity in the Indian Ocean; and the need for the United States to augment its military presence in the ocean as Britain appeared on the verge of reducing its forces “East of Suez.”
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Nitze closed his memo to McNamara by saying the facility was the “minimum” necessary to meet the Navy’s existing requirements but could serve as a “nucleus around which to build an altogether adequate defense base.” Known for his aggressively persuasive writing style, Nitze argued, “We should plan now for the orderly development of a fleet support facility before the need for it reaches emergency proportions with attendant higher costs.”
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The reply from the Pentagon came from Nitze’s former deputy at ISA, John McNaughton. McNaughton politely informed Nitze that it was “prudent and necessary” for the Navy to continue in-house studies of the project.
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The Navy dutifully complied and later the same year offered a little-changed but repackaged facility at the same cost as Nitze’s proposal. Just before the end of 1966, however, the Pentagon rejected a proposed congressional notification package that would have asked for funding for the base. McNamara’s people were concerned about expected opposition on Capitol Hill, a pending military budget review in the midst of the Vietnam buildup, and the lack of British financial commitment to the project.
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The base and the Chagossians’ fate were again deferred.

“A-L-D-A-B-R-A”

With Nitze and the Navy temporarily stymied, the Air Force and JCS were simultaneously moving ahead with a proposal to build a joint U.S.-U.K. air base on Aldabra, one of the Seychelles island groups now part of the BIOT. In July, McNamara discussed the issue in a mid-morning telephone
call with President Johnson, who was preparing for a visit by Prime Minister Wilson later that day.
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“What about this—his wanting to help you, uh, uh,” Johnson began. “Wanting you, to build, uh, uh—wanting us to participate in building an airport, when he moves out of Aden?”

“Uh—that, that. Alebra, in the Indian Ocean,” McNamara replied, misremembering the island’s name. “We can go in on a 50/50 basis, and I think it will cost us on the order of, of, uh, uh [pause] 10 million, I think.
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The island’s name is A – L – D –A – B – R – A. Aldabra.”

“Alright. And have you agreed to that?” Johnson queried.

“Uh, not in detail. No. And if you want to, it’s, it’s fine with us. [Pause] 50/50.”

“Alright. Anything else?” Johnson asked, moving the conversation to other issues.
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Six days later McNamara approved a proposal to accept cost sharing for the Aldabra base and to alert the British to new planning for Diego Garcia.
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“UNDER THE COVER OF DARKNESS”

While the Navy continued its studies and planning to win funding for Diego Garcia, Jeffrey Kitchen continued hammering out an official government-to-government agreement for use of the BIOT islands.
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In mid-November, Kitchen returned to London for more secret talks, accompanied by a team of six, including officials from the Pentagon, the Navy, and the Air Force. Over two days, Kitchen initialed the agreements with his counterparts in the Foreign Office. Kitchen noted that although financing was not yet secured for Diego Garcia, the Secretary of Defense had approved the Navy’s plan for a facility that could be expanded quickly in the future.
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A little more than a month later, the U.S. Ambassador to Britain, Honorable David K. E. Bruce, and a representative for the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, George Brown, M.P., met to sign the final agreements. As others were preparing for year’s end parties, they gathered, as one of Kitchen’s negotiators who witnessed the signing later said, “under the cover of darkness,” the day before New Year’s Eve, 1966.

The agreement signed that night was to be completed by an “exchange of notes.” It was innocuously titled, “Availability of Certain Indian Ocean
Islands for Defense Purposes.” A treaty would have had to survive time-consuming legislative approval before Congress and Parliament; an exchange of notes accomplished the same thing without the legislative approval and public notification.

Published without notice months later in the United States by the Government Printing Office, the agreement made all the islands of the British Indian Ocean Territory “available to meet the needs of both Governments for defense.” As agreed, the United Kingdom would remain sovereign in the territory. The United States would have access to the islands for fifty years with an option to extend the agreement for an additional twenty years. Each government would pay for constructing its own facilities, though in general access would be shared. According to the published notes, the islands would be available to the United States “without charge.”
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In a set of confidential accords accompanying the notes, however, the U.S. Government agreed to make secret payments to the British of up to $14 million, or half the cost of creating the BIOT, as McNamara had agreed months earlier. These payments helped reimburse the British for “all costs pertaining to the administrative detachment of the Indian Ocean islands in question and to the acquisition of the lands thereon”—diplomatic legalese for the costs of deporting the Chagossians, buying out the plantation owners, and paying off Mauritius and the Seychelles.

A secret British document explained the arrangement:

Besides the published Agreement there is also a
secret
agreement under which . . . the US effectively, but indirectly, contributed half the estimated cost of establishing the territory (£10m). This was done by means of a reduction of £5m in the research and development surcharge due from Britain for the Polaris missile. Special measures were taken by both the US and UK Governments to maintain the secrecy of this arrangement.
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