Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (19 page)

In June 1967, with Diego Garcia detached from Mauritius as part of the BIOT and an agreement for a base signed but still facing stiff opposition on financial grounds from Robert McNamara, Nitze left his job as Secretary of the Navy to become Deputy Secretary of Defense, the second highest-ranking official in the Defense Department. Half a year later, with Britain having devalued the pound and still facing deep military spending cuts and scientific opposition to a base on Aldabra, Prime Minister Wilson announced the cancellation of the Aldabra base. McNamara, Nitze, and other U.S. officials were little interested in going it alone on Aldabra (which they had always viewed primarily as another way to keep a British
military presence “East of Suez”). Nitze and other Pentagon leaders returned their focus to Diego Garcia.
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Before long, however, changes came closer to home. By March 1968, McNamara had left the Defense Department for the World Bank, and Clark Clifford became Johnson’s new Secretary of Defense. With Clifford focused almost entirely on Vietnam, Nitze was left to run most of the rest of the Pentagon. Having worked on Diego Garcia since 1961 during his tenure at ISA, Nitze soon began meeting with Navy officials to discuss plans for the base.

Barely a month after McNamara’s departure, the Joint Chiefs offered a “reappraisal” of the Diego Garcia proposal in light of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and the January 1968 British decision to withdraw their forces east of Suez by the end of 1971. Once again predicting the development of a “power vacuum” in the region and ensuing Soviet and Chinese “domination,” the JCS recommended “the immediate establishment” of a base on Diego. They proposed a $46 million joint service facility capable of supporting limited forces in “contingency situations” (the euphemism for combat), Army and Air Force infrastructure, and a 12,000-foot runway capable of landing B-52 nuclear bombers and C-5A transport aircraft.
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So much for “austere.”

Internally the JCS crafted a strategy to dissuade new Secretary of Defense Clifford from being “unduly influenced” by Systems Analysis: “The project is analogous to an insurance policy,” their rationale explained. “Low premiums now could lead to large returns later if military requirement does develop.” The Chiefs continued, “We are trying to buy preparedness which is never cost-effective.”
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Systems Analysis was again unconvinced. It urged the Secretary to “reject the JCS proposal” because it was not cost-effective and risked starting an arms race in the Indian Ocean.
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Surprisingly, Deputy Secretary of Defense Nitze agreed. He found there was “no justification” for a major base. However, he decided that “adequate justification exists” for what he called a “modest facility” on Diego Garcia, at a cost of $26 million, which, it just so happened, was exactly the price he had previously suggested as Secretary of the Navy.
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In this case, Nitze let the JCS provide the “bludgeon” with its warnings of Soviet “domination” and Chinese “expansion.” In the face of these articulated threats and with the major JCS proposal on the table, Nitze’s plan looked like a cheap, rational option, challenging the heart of Systems Analysis’s opposition.

The Navy submitted a plan for the base along Nitze’s suggested lines. It sent Nitze’s former staffer Elmo Zumwalt back to Ravenal at Systems Analysis to make the case. “What is so striking about the succession of proposals,” Ravenal later said, was “the kaleidoscopic change of rationales to support the same proposals.”
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But this time, “they knew they were going to win,” Ravenal recalled of Zumwalt’s visit. “They were going to do it right this time. . . . They weren’t going to make some sort of a [weak] case.”

Still Systems Analysis continued its opposition, questioning the urgency of the Diego project and asking for it to be deferred until fiscal year 1971. But this time, Ravenal explained, “We lost.”

ISA approved the plan as expected and in November 1968, Nitze signed off on the Navy’s request to include $9,556,000 in the fiscal year 1970 military construction budget.
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Within days, the Navy had notified the armed services committees of both houses of Congress. Under Nitze’s leadership, an interdepartmental group of top officials from the Pentagon, State Department, CIA, and Treasury Department began arguing for the base on Capitol Hill.
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In January 1969, a classified line item for Diego Garcia appeared in the fiscal year 1970 Military Construction budget. The funding process for the base was finally underway.

“It is the persistence of the military services,” Ravenal would tell Congress years later, “that eventually wears down opposition within the Pentagon, within the executive branch, and ultimately within Congress and succeeds in attaining what they were after in the first place.”
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In the case of Nitze, Ravenal told me, one has to see, “He threw the football as Secretary of the Navy, and he caught it as Deputy Secretary of Defense.”

PLANNING THE “EVACUATION”

While DOD was quarreling over funding, the State Department’s Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs and the embassy in London were coordinating the removals with the British.

“U.S. would desire removal of migrant laborers from Diego Garcia after due notice in accord with Minutes to BIOT Agreement,” read an August 1968 telegram to the embassy in the name of Secretary of State Rusk. The joint State-Defense message instructed the embassy to inform British officials of the State and Defense departments’ concern that the removals
might arouse the attention of the United Nations’ Committee of Twenty-Four. The message asked that the removals be carried out in a manner minimizing such negative publicity, preferably with resettlement taking place outside the BIOT (and thus technically removing it from the purview of the Committee of Twenty-Four).
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The telegram further noted that some British officials had still been using the term “inhabitants” to describe the people of Diego Garcia. Following the Foreign Office’s plan to deny there was a settled population, the message asserted that the islanders were in fact “migrant laborers.”

“We suggest, therefore, that the term ‘migrant laborers’ be used in any conversations with HMG as withdrawal of ‘inhabitants’ obviously would be more difficult to justify to littoral countries and Committee of Twenty-four.”
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The embassy spoke with the Foreign Office the next day. Ambassador David Bruce telegrammed back to the State Department that the Foreign Office’s representative “took the point on ‘migrant laborers’” but noted that although “it was a good term for cosmetic purposes . . . it might be difficult to make completely credible as some of the ‘migrants’ are second generation Diego residents.”
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MORE “FICTIONS”

“Negligible. . . . For all practical purposes . . . uninhabited.” Or so the U.S. Navy said when characterizing Chagos’s population in briefing papers delivered to members of Congress to secure Diego’s funding in the 1970 military construction budget. When pushed by Senate Appropriations Committee member Senator Henry Jackson about the local population, one Navy official “told him that it consisted entirely of rotating contract copra workers, and that the British intended to relocate them as soon as possible after Congressional action was complete.” Recounting Jackson’s reaction, the official explained, “He came back to this question twice more. He was obviously concerned about local political problems. I assured him that there should be none.”
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On Capitol Hill however, the political problems mounted for the Navy. First the Senate Armed Services Committee rejected the project, only to have it restored in a House-Senate conference. Then, after the House Appropriations Committee authorized funding, Jackson’s Senate committee disapproved it, despite an intensive Navy lobbying campaign led by new Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Thomas Moorer.

In appropriations committee conference, senators led by Democrat Mike Mansfield refused to yield to Diego backers in the House through four meetings on the military appropriations. Democrats argued the project was a new military commitment overseas at a time when the Nixon administration had already indicated its desire to withdraw from Vietnam. Others wanted to “hold the Brits feet to the fire,” and keep the U.S. from assuming their role in the Indian Ocean. The conferees ultimately left the project unfunded but offered the Navy an oral agreement: It should return in the following year’s budget cycle with a pared-down request for a communications station without the other proposed facilities.
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Following the congressional defeat, newly elected President Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird gave the Navy equally simple instructions: “Make it a communications facility.” Within two weeks, John H. Chafee, the new Secretary of the Navy, submitted to Laird a proposal for a $17.78 million “communications facility,” with an initial funding increment of $5.4 million for fiscal year 1971.
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This of course was the same proposal that in 1965 had been “overtaken by events.” Navy documents indicate that while the station was supposed to address gaps in the naval communications network in the Indian Ocean, the only such gaps were in the ocean’s southernmost waters, closest to Antarctica and far from any potential conflict zones. A closer examination of the Navy’s budget shows too that half the cost of the revised “communications station” project was for dredging Diego Garcia’s lagoon and building an 8,000-foot airstrip; both were said to allow the resupply of a facility that featured a mere $800,000 worth of communications equipment. The “austere” project featured the construction of a 17-mile road network, a small nightclub, a movie theater, and a gym.
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Under the guise of a communications station, the Navy was asking for the nucleus of a base whose design allowed for ready expansion and the restoration of previously envisioned elements of the base.
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As the CNO’s Office of Communications and Cryptology put it, “The communications requirements cited as justification are fiction.”
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FUNDING SECURED

By the spring of 1970, with congressional funding looking likely for the following year, British officials wanted to begin making arrangements for the deportations. The British were eager to begin negotiations to convince the Mauritian Government to receive the Chagossians and arrange
for their resettlement. State and Defense officials on the other hand were concerned that Mauritian officials would leak news of the negotiations and endanger congressional funding by drawing international attention to the removals. State and Defense moved quickly and secured agreement from British officials not to begin negotiations until funding had been secured.
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With members of Congress concerned at the time about increasing problems between U.S. overseas bases and local populations, presentations to Congress were careful to maintain that there would “be no indigenous population and no native labor utilized in the construction.”
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At the same time, Defense and State emphasized in internal discussions that they needed “to retain enough distance” from the details of the deportations to ensure that British officials would not look to the United States for assistance and to avoid anyone making the connection between the impending base construction and the removals. Accordingly, the departments rejected a suggestion from the embassy in London to send an engineer to assist simultaneously with the base planning and the resettlement program.
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As expected under the previous year’s oral agreement, in November 1970, Congress appropriated funds for an “austere communications facility.” The funds were again listed as a classified item in the military construction budget. In a closed-to-the-public “executive” session of the House Appropriations Committee, Navy representatives told members of Congress for the first time that the BIOT agreement included the “resettlement of local inhabitants” and $14 million in Polaris missile payments.
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Neither issue ever found its way out of the closed-door session.

With the money secured, Navy officials worked “to pursue the early removal” of those they were now simply calling “copra workers.”
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On December 7, 1970, a joint State-Defense message, telegrammed in the name of Secretary of State William P. Rogers, delivered instructions to the U.S. Embassy in London. Rogers asked the embassy to inform British officials that it was time “for the UK to accomplish relocation of the present residents of Diego Garcia to some other location”:

All local personnel should be moved from the western half of the island before the arrival of the construction force in March 1971. We hope that complete relocation can be accomplished by the end of July 1971 when aircraft begin using the air strip and the tempo of construction activities reaches its full scale.
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In turn, the embassy reported that the British were facing serious difficulties in arranging the deportations, given the bar on discussing resettlement with the Mauritians until after base funding was secured.
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“We recognize the British problem,” State and Defense replied, but deporting the population “was clearly envisioned as United Kingdom’s responsibility in 1966 agreements,” and one for which the United States had paid “up to $14,000,000 in Polaris Research and Development charges.”
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