The Downing Street Years (36 page)

Later that afternoon I learnt of our success in South Georgia. An audience was arranged with the Queen that evening at Windsor. I was glad to be able personally to give her the news that one of her islands had been recovered. I returned to Downing Street to await confirmation of the earlier signal and the release of the news. I wanted John Nott to have the opportunity of making the announcement and so I had him come to No. 10. Together, he, the MoD press officer, and I drafted the press release and then went out to announce the good news.

A remark of mine was misinterpreted, sometimes wilfully. After John Nott had made his statement journalists tried to ask questions. ‘What happens next Mr Nott? Are we going to declare war on Argentina Mrs Thatcher?’ It seemed as if they preferred to press us on these issues rather than to report news that would raise the nation’s spirits and give the Falklanders new heart. I was irritated and intervened to stop them: Just rejoice at that news and congratulate our forces and
the marines … Rejoice’. I meant that they should rejoice in the bloodless recapture of South Georgia, not in the war itself. To me war is not a matter for rejoicing. But some pretended otherwise.

A worry for us at this point was that the press and probably some of the public began to assume that it would only be a matter of days before we retook the Falklands and that this would be as quick as the recapture of South Georgia. We knew that this was far from true. Indeed, it was only on that day that the last ships of the amphibious group necessary for the landing left Britain. Led by the assault ship HMS
Intrepid
, there were the ferries
Norland
and
Europic
carrying the 2nd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, and — loaded with vital stores — the container ship
Atlantic Conveyor.

On Monday 26 April, the War Cabinet agreed the announcement of a Total Exclusion Zone (TEZ) of a 200-nautical-mile radius and the rules of engagement which were to apply to it. The military pressure on Argentina was steadily mounting. The TEZ went beyond the earlier MEZ by excluding aircraft as well as sea-going craft: the task force would shortly be close enough to the Falklands to be able to enforce it and to be at risk from air attack itself. One priority was to close down the airfield at Port Stanley.

At home the apparent imminence of full-scale military conflict began to shake the determination of those whose commitment to retaking the Falklands had always been weaker than it appeared. Some MPs seemed to want negotiations to continue indefinitely. I had to put the realities to the nation. At Prime Minister’s Questions I said:

I made the same point in a live interview that evening on
Panorama:

I also took the opportunity to say directly just what we were fighting for:

Unfortunately, the cracks now appearing in the Labour Party were likely to be widened by what was happening at the United Nations. The Secretary-General of the UN started to become more involved as the Haig mediation manifestly stalled. A low-key appeal from Sr. Perez de Cuellar to both sides — which appeared to imply that we, like Argentina, had failed to comply with UNSCR 502 — was seized upon by Denis Healey and Michael Foot. I had a serious clash with Mr Foot during Prime Minister’s Questions on Tuesday 27 April on the question of our returning to the United Nations. In fact, the Secretary-General very quickly took the point, but the damage was done. We ourselves had been exploring whether an offer from President López-Portillo of Mexico to provide a venue for negotiations might be productive. But Al Haig did not wish us to pursue this and I doubt whether the Mexicans would in fact have proposed the simpler and more satisfactory formula which we wanted.

Al Haig had had his own share of diplomatic problems. His speech to a meeting of the Organization of American States justifying the United States line on the Falklands and Argentina had been greeted with stony silence. The Argentine Foreign minister, furious at the retaking of South Georgia, had publicly refused to see him, though they had been in contact privately.

Al Haig could not under these circumstances go back to Buenos Aires, which from our point of view was probably all to the good. He had again modified the proposals discussed with Francis Pym in Washington and now transmitted these to the Argentine Government. Mr Haig told the Junta that no amendments were permissible and imposed a strict time limit for their reply, though he was subsequently unwilling to stick to this. For its part, the Junta was now determined to play for time. Al Haig telephoned Francis Pym in the afternoon of
Wednesday 28 April to say that there was still no word from Buenos Aires. Both Francis and Nico Henderson continued to press him to say publicly that the Argentinians were to blame for the failure of his mediation and that the United States was openly supporting us.

At Cabinet on Thursday 29 April we discussed the continuing uncertainty. The deadline given to the Argentinians for their answer had passed, but now Mr Haig was talking of the possibility of the Argentinians amending his proposals. Where would all this end?

After Cabinet I sent a message to President Reagan saying that in our view the Argentinians must now be regarded as having rejected the American proposals. In fact, later that day the Argentinians did formally reject the American text. President Reagan now replied to my message in these terms:

This was very satisfactory. We wanted a clear statement that the Argentinians were to blame for the failure of negotiations. But we did not want to muddy the waters by revealing every detail of proposals which were in truth fundamentally unacceptable to us, nor did we want to imply that we had accepted the Haig proposals.

There was, though, one drawback. This was that once the Haig mediation had formally ended the pressure would sharply increase for us to go back to the UN where we would be faced by any number of difficulties. Indeed Tony Parsons advised us that once we were back in the Security Council there would be no way of avoiding an unacceptable call on us to halt military preparations and accept the good offices of the Secretary-General. This would mean that we would have to use our veto, which we wanted to avoid. In fact, although this assessment was correct it was not until the following month that all this came to a head. We were fortunate that it did not occur earlier.

Friday 30 April effectively marked the end of the beginning of our diplomatic and military campaign to regain the Falklands. The United States now came down clearly on our side. President Reagan told television correspondents that the Argentinians had resorted to armed aggression and that such aggression must not be allowed to succeed. Most important, the President also directed that the United States would respond positively to requests for military materiel. Unfortunately, they were not prepared to agree to place an embargo on imports from Argentina. However, the President’s announcements constituted a substantial moral boost to our position.

It was on this day that the TEZ came into force. And although diplomatic and military affairs remained inextricably intertwined, it is fair to say that from now on it was the military rather than the diplomatic which increasingly commanded our attention. At that morning’s War Cabinet it was the Argentine aircraft carrier, the 25
de Mayo
, which concerned us. She could cover 500 miles a day and her aircraft a further 500. Her escorts carried Exocet missiles, supplied by France in the 1970s. We were well aware that the Exocet threat should be taken seriously. It increased the danger which the Argentine carrier group posed to our ships and their supply lines. We therefore authorized an attack on the carrier, wherever she was, provided it was south of latitude 35 degrees and east of longitude 48, and outside the 12-mile limit of Argentine territorial waters. Such an attack would be based upon the right of self-defence and be within Article 51 of the UN Charter; in accordance with the notification which had been given on 23 April no further warning was required.
^*

That evening I had to speak at a large rally in Stephen Hastings’s constituency at Milton Hall in Bedfordshire. Stephen and his predecessor Alan Lennox-Boyd spoke magnificently. I was given a wonderful reception. No one present had any doubt of the justice of our cause, nor that we would eventually win through. I felt proud and exhilarated: but I felt too an almost crushing burden of responsibility. I knew that the task force would enter the waters around the Falkland Islands the following day.

CHAPTER VIII

From the beginning of May through to the recapture of the Falklands in mid-June military considerations loomed ever larger in my mind. But this did not mean that the pressure for negotiations eased — far from it. I was under an almost intolerable pressure to negotiate for the sake of negotiation and because so many politicians were desperately anxious to avoid the use of force — as if the Argentinians had not already used force by invading in the first place. At such a time almost everything and everyone seems to combine to deflect you from what you know has to be done.

Yet I could never afford to ignore the diplomatic effort because on its successful conduct rested our hard-won position of UN Security Council support for Resolution 502 and, still more important, the degree of support we might receive from our allies, above all the United States. And all this time there was constant, nagging fear of the unknown. Would we have sufficient air cover? Where were the Argentine submarines? Would we be able to reach the military and diplomatic position required for a successful landing within that narrow time-frame set by the onset of intolerable winter weather in the South Atlantic?

Over breakfast at Milton Hall I received a telephone call to say that our Vulcans had bombed the runway of Port Stanley airport. Our naval task force was also bombarding Argentine positions elsewhere on the Falklands. I was told that there had so far been no British casualties but it would still be many hours before the Vulcans — after their marathon flight involving five mid-air refuellings — would be back at Ascension Island. In fact they all returned safely. The refuelling seemed a stupendous feat at the time, although such is the way of things that later performances of this kind came almost to be taken for granted.

That day the Argentine Air Force mounted a major attack on
our ships. The Argentinians were in a position to send photographs to the outside world, which we were not. They claimed that many of our aeroplanes had been shot down but in that famous broadcast Brian Hanrahan, the excellent BBC correspondent, put the record straight when he reported: ‘I counted them all out and I counted them all back.’ It was a great relief. But we had no illusions about the significance of the heavy attack and the vital question it raised about the sufficiency of our air cover.