Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (14 page)

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The term is one I prefer not to use because of the racial and other hierarchies it implies. I repeat it because it is the term that U.S. officials often used and thus conveys the way most thought about a broad area of colonized and formerly colonized lands inhabited primarily by non-Western peoples and featuring lower levels of industrialization than the United States and its Western allies.

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In line with anthropological and other scientific understanding dating to the middle of the last century, I consider “race” to have no biological or scientific validity as a way to categorize human populations or understand human diversity. At the same time, even if race has no biological reality, the idea that race exists has over the past 500 years developed into a profound social reality shaping the treatment of human beings according to essentially arbitrary criteria and influencing how most human beings understand themselves and others. That is, even if race is not real in a biological sense, people experience it as real, making racism a pervasive and insidious part of our world. Throughout, then, I try to call attention to the socially constructed nature of race and the existence of alleged “races,” while analyzing the significance of race and racism in shaping the lives of the people in this story.

“EXCLUSIVE CONTROL”

The members of the Kennedy administration saw themselves as living in “an Olympian age,” and the people crafting foreign policy were its gods. They were men who were full of “virility” and power, combining traditional notions of American masculinity based on physical force with the supposed heights of intellectual prowess.
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And of those in fabled Camelot, the men surrounding McGeorge Bundy epitomized “the best and the brightest” generation that descended on Washington. This was the elite group of White House staffers working for the Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. They came to be known as the “Bundy State Department.” When President Kennedy grew dissatisfied with the size and cautiousness of Dean Rusk’s State Department, Bundy’s men filled the void, eventually surpassing the Rusk State Department in influence.
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As unofficial biographer of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations David Halberstam described the Bundy team, they were a group of “bright young men summoned from all areas of government and academe,” generally from privileged upper-class backgrounds. Almost all were part of the generation that fought in World War II and “were fond of pointing out that they were the generation which had fought the war,” Halberstam observes. Full of confidence from having conquered the Axis, “there was a sense that these were brilliant men, men of force, not cruel, not harsh, but men who acted rather than waited.”
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“BLOWTORCH BOB”

One of the best, brightest, and most ambitious of the bunch was Robert W. Komer. “With his owlish eyeglasses and a briar pipe and his 15 years in the Central Intelligence Agency,” a
New York Times
obituary later wrote, Komer was the “model of what novelist John le Carre calls an intellocrat.”
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Komer had graduated from Harvard College before going off to World War II to work as an intelligence officer and a historian. After he got his Harvard business degree at 25, friends from the war convinced him to join a new government branch called the Central Intelligence Group. “[I] went to the CIA before it was the CIA and found that it was a perfectly fascinating career,” Komer explained. “These fellows said to me . . . ‘You know the war with the Germans and the Japs may be over, but the war with the Communists seems to be beginning and public service is just critically important. So with your wartime background. . . .’”
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Komer served in the CIA for almost a decade, helping to create the first National Intelligence Estimates and focusing on Middle East policy. After a year at the National War College and working as a liaison with the National Security Council in the Eisenhower administration, Komer was asked by Bundy and Walt Rostow to join the national security team in the Kennedy White House.
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Before long, Komer became the White House expert on India and Pakistan, the Middle East, and Africa, earning one of the palest members of the administration the title of “White House African.”
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He earned his other nickname, “Blowtorch Bob,” after President Johnson sent Komer to Vietnam in 1967: U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge explained that arguing with Komer was “like having a flamethrower aimed at the seat of one’s pants.” In Vietnam, Komer would earn a “reputation as a man with a take-no-prisoners attitude, a deathless optimism that the war would be won, and a near religious faith in the power of facts and statistics to help win it.”
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Chief among Komer’s tools for winning the war was his “pacification” program, CORDS, and its Operation Phoenix. Designed to win the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese, Phoenix ultimately assassinated more than 20,000 suspected Viet Cong.

Years before entering that war, Komer was focused in the Kennedy White House on a large swath of the decolonizing world centered around the Indian Ocean. By 1963, Komer had seized on two ideas gaining momentum in the national security bureaucracy: Increasing the U.S. naval presence in the ocean and creating a chain of Indian Ocean bases with Diego Garcia as the centerpiece. “Look, this whole area from Suez to Singapore is heating up,” Komer later recalled.

We’ve had the Chinese making trouble in ’62. We have the Paks starting to play footsie with the Chicoms
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and then with the Russians. We have Bandaranaike in Ceylon. We have Sukarno over on
the eastern end. We have . . . Nyerere in Tanzania sort of playing games with our friends the Chinese as well as the Russians. We have the Zanzibar business. I was saying, “Look this is an area of the world that is becoming more volatile at the very time when the former strategic balance-holders, the British essentially, are pulling back and that projecting the trend, it’s a more important area.”
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With the approval of his boss Bundy, Komer sent a memo to the President in June 1963 proposing the deployment of an aircraft carrier task force in the Indian Ocean supported by island bases.
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“Despite my parochial viewpoint,” Komer started the memorandum, “I see an increasingly strong case for maintaining a small task force in the Indian Ocean.” He continued, “It is a simple fact that our greatest lack of conventional deterrent power lies along the broad arc from Suez to Singapore. . . . We have traditionally left the defense of this region to the British, yet their strength is waning at a time when we face a potential show of force or actual combat needs ranging from Saudi Arabia to the Persian Gulf and Iran through India and Burma to Malaysia.”
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Although he did not mention Diego Garcia
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or the Strategic Island Concept by name, Komer clearly envisioned island bases supporting the task force in the face of what he saw as increased anti-Western sentiment and chaos in the region. “Mobile, sea-based, air power could be a real asset to us here,” Komer wrote. “It would also minimize the need for expensive on-shore base rights, which would be politically difficult to obtain,” and “especially if the Navy could settle for a protected anchorage or use of UK bases.”
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(Years later Komer would claim to have been “the one who proposed seeking from Britain a joint base in the Indian Ocean, which led to Diego Garcia.”
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)

President Kennedy “jumped on it with enthusiasm,” and told Komer, “Let’s try it out for size. Take it up with McNamara.”
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Komer cranked out a one-page memorandum in Kennedy’s name asking McNamara to investigate the task force idea. The Indian Ocean area, he stressed, is one where “our military presence . . . is exceedingly light, and yet the pot is always boiling.” Closing with an allusion to island bases, Komer emphasized that a naval task force should only be pursued on the grounds that it “would not require expensive base arrangements or involve significant flow of gold.”
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McNamara was initially, as Komer put it, “very lukewarm” to the task force.
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But “Blowtorch Bob” was not to be denied, keeping it on the agendas
of the departments of Defense and State. McNamara asked for the view of the JCS, which, as with the Strategic Island Concept, readily approved the plan. Secretary of State Rusk wrote to McNamara supporting the idea of a task force as “a significant stabilizing influence throughout th[e] area,” adding that “we would view the establishment of the Indian Ocean base facilities at Diego Garcia which we are planning to negotiate with the British as an ideal protected anchorage to support an Indian Ocean Task Force. Indeed,” he said, “it is our view that this negotiation should be pursued as a matter of some urgency.”
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“CONSIDERATION NOW RPT NOW . . . LIMITED . . .”

As part of a separate project, McNamara had just approved a JCS recommendation to create a communications station in the Indian Ocean and passed the proposal on to the President. The station, codenamed “Project KATHY,” was designed to fill a gap in military communications capabilities in the area south and east of the Suez Canal. Filling the gap would allow increased naval operations in the area, in part, JCS held, to “contain” any Chinese movements southward.

In the summer of 1963, Kennedy approved the proposal for a communications base and ordered McNamara to carry out the plan.
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The State Department concluded that on political grounds Diego Garcia was the best available site. On August 23, State instructed its embassy in London to quietly approach the British about conducting an urgent and secret survey of the island.
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The response from the British Foreign Office was positive but mentioned in clipped official language, “HMG might feel it necessary to consider impact of large military installation on few inhabitants of this small island.”
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An official at the U.S. Embassy in London replied “perhaps this aspect might better be considered during broader discussions,” and asked that “consideration now rpt now be limited to survey question,” using bureaucratic shorthand for the word
repeat
. The Foreign Office agreed, saying the “request would be given urgent attention.”
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A TASK FORCE AND A TRANSFER OF POWER

Komer meanwhile continued to push McNamara on the “Indian Ocean Task Force.” Komer went to see Navy officials to generate more support for
his projects and reported back to Bundy that the “Navy of course is strong for it.” Admiral Claude Ricketts, the Vice Chief of Naval Operations, told Komer that for a base, the “Navy could make do with no more than a communications facility ($15 million) which is needed anyway, plus an airstrip ($5 million). Of course,” Komer added, “Navy would like more.”
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By November, McNamara finally relented under Blowtorch Bob’s pressure and directed the JCS to begin planning for deployment of the Indian Ocean Task Force. The flotilla steamed into the ocean four months after Kennedy’s assassination, in April 1964. Officials renamed it the “Concord Squadron” to arouse fewer suspicions (among the Soviets, Chinese, and Indians especially) that the deployment signaled the major shift that it in fact represented: that is, the beginning of the first transfer of power in the Indian Ocean since Britain defeated France in 1814, and a major step toward the creation of a base on Diego Garcia and the expulsion of its people.

HIDDEN IN PARENTHESES

Jeffrey Coleman Kitchen started off closing bases. In 1944, at the age of 23, Kitchen began his State Department career in the Office of Foreign Liquidation, helping to close overseas military facilities acquired from Britain through lend-lease. After working for Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, serving as Deputy Director in the Office of Greek, Turkish, and Iranian Affairs, and spending five years at the RAND Corporation, Kitchen was back twenty years later leading discussions to open new bases on British territory.

For three days beginning February 25, 1964, now Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Politico-Military Affairs Kitchen led a U.S. delegation in London for secret talks with their British counterparts on strategic island bases in the Indian Ocean. The meeting, which included officials from the DOD, Navy, Air Force, Army, and the U.K. Foreign and Colonial Offices and the Ministry of Defence, represented the major realization of the work of Stu Barber and the Navy, Nitze, and Komer to identify, promote, and push through the Diego Garcia idea within the national security apparatus

Entering the talks, two members of Kitchen’s staff sketched out the joint State-Defense delegation’s concerns and intentions: “On the one hand,” they wrote, there are “threats to the stability and security of the area” from “massive communist military power” to the north and local disturbances
that might offer the Soviets and Chinese opportunities to intervene in the region. “This, coupled with the fact that the Persian Gulf area is the largest source of petroleum available to the West on financially acceptable terms,” they continued, “makes the [Arabian] Peninsula a key area.”
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