Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (18 page)

STRANDED IN MAURITIUS

With conditions worsening, some Chagossians left for Mauritius, with hopes that life in Chagos would improve and allow their return. Others left as usual for vacations or medical treatment. Some Chagossians report
being tricked or coerced into leaving Chagos with the award of an unscheduled vacation in Mauritius.
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When the new arrivees and other Chagossians in Mauritius attempted to book their return passage, they, like their predecessors, were again refused. Because there was no telephone service in Chagos and because mail service between Mauritius and Chagos had been suspended, news of Chagossians being stranded in Mauritius did not reach those in the archipelago. By 1969, there were at least 356 Chagossians already in exile.
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This growing number found themselves having lost their jobs, separated from their homes and their land, with almost all of their possessions and property still in Chagos. Most were separated from family members left behind. All were confused about their future, about whether they would be allowed to return to their homes, and about their legal status in Mauritius.

The islanders also found themselves in a country that was highly unstable after gaining its independence in March 1968. Just after independence, riots between AfroMauritians and Indo-Mauritian Muslims broke out in many of the poor neighborhoods where Chagossians were living and continued through most of 1968.

Meanwhile, unemployment in Mauritius was over 20 percent.
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British experts warned that the island was a Malthusian disaster in the making and would soon lack the resources to feed and support its rapidly growing population. A secret British telegram acknowledged “the near impossibility of [Chagossians] finding suitable employment. There is no Copra industry into which they could be absorbed.”
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The result was that most were left, as another British official put it, languishing “on the beach.”
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As one Chagossian explained to me in 2004, life was turned completely upside down. Suddenly, “Chagossien dan dife, nu de lipie briye”—Chagossians were in the fire, with both our feet burning.

“LIKE QUESTIONING APPLE PIE”

As Paul Nitze’s staff member Robert Murray recalled, the British “relieved us of a lot of problems. I mean, we didn’t have to think through” the question of the removals anymore. “We didn’t have to decide how we were going to manage our force relative to the local population, because there wasn’t a local population.”

I asked Murray if there were discussions about the fate of the Chagossians.

There were, he said, but “it was something the British thought they could manage. We didn’t, we didn’t try to get ourselves involved in it. Unless Kitchen and State did. We had the practical interest in having the base. And the British said that they could manage the transition. And they went about it and some of it was legal and some of it was otherwise. They were doing whatever they were doing. To the best of my knowledge they weren’t consulting with us on the—now maybe that’s not true, but I don’t remember it anyway.”

“And your sense was that you wanted to leave that to them and it was something you didn’t particularly look into, or—” I asked before Murray interrupted.

“Yeah, we wanted to leave it to the British, I think, to manage that transition of the people and the sovereignty. We saw that as their responsibility. It was their island. . . . We personally saw, in Defense, no need or opportunity for us to inject ourselves—at least that’s how I saw it at the time.”

Murray’s memory of the Chagossians reflects a striking consistency in former officials’ responses when I asked what they remembered thinking about the Chagossians. Almost all remembered spending little time thinking about the islanders. The people were, as State Department official James Noyes put it, a “nitty gritty” detail that they never examined. Or as another said, they were something to which officials turned a “blind eye.” The removal was a “
fait accompli
. . . a given” never requiring any thought.

I asked former State Department official George Vest if he disagreed in any ways with the Diego policy.

“I didn’t have that deep a sense, [that] deep a feeling about it,” he explained. “There was never any conflict. My attitude, which I expressed, was what I call an inner internal marginal attitude. I accepted the premises which led us to do what we were doing there without any real questioning.”

That he and the United States were doing good in the world, Vest and others took for granted. Noyes said, “It was taken as a given good.”

Indeed, Noyes explained that by the time he arrived at the State Department in 1970, there was no policy analysis about Diego Garcia because the base was treated as already being in place. There was no questioning of the British about “‘What are you guys doing with the natives?’” he said. “It was an accepted part of the scenery.”

“It was—the question, the ethical question of the workers and so on,” Noyes said hesitatingly, “simply wasn’t, wasn’t in the spectrum. It wasn’t discussed. No one realized, I don’t think . . . the human aspects of it. Nobody was there or had been there, or was close enough to it, so. It was like questioning apple pie or something.”

THE WHIZ KIDS

With the population already gone in the minds of most U.S. and U.K. officials, the Pentagon simultaneously pursued the Air Force’s interest in Aldabra and the Navy’s proposal for Diego Garcia. The Air Force budgeted $25 million in fiscal year 1968 for the 50/50 base on Aldabra. For the Diego Garcia proposal, Secretary of the Navy Nitze asked McNamara to “reconsider” McNamara’s 1966 decision to withhold the Navy’s request from Congress. This time Nitze had a new justification for the base, pitching it around the war in Vietnam as an “austere” refueling port for ships traveling to and from southeast Asia. The plan had a revised $26 million budget, divided into two funding increments beginning in fiscal year 1969. The austere facility, Nitze noted, would still offer a “nucleus” for expansion into a larger base, “if need arose.”
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For this new incarnation, Nitze and the Navy had allies at DOD in Nitze’s former office and its new Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, John McNaughton. Together, Nitze and McNaughton now pushed McNamara to approve the new Diego-as-fueling-depot plan.

Still hesitant, McNamara referred the proposal to the office in the Pentagon that, bureaucratically speaking, defined his tenure as Secretary of Defense: Systems Analysis. When McNamara joined the Kennedy administration, he brought with him, from his tenure at Ford Motor Company, a mode of statistically based economic analysis that had started to grow in popularity in the 1950s. McNamara saw it as a way to seize control of the Pentagon from the military services by imposing rationality on Defense decision-making and hired a group that became known as the “Whiz Kids” to implement the changes.

“Young, book-smart, Ivy League,” these “think-tank civilian assistants,” many coming from the RAND Corporation, championed rational calculation and statistical analysis as the basis for all policy decisions. “Everything was scrutinized with the cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis” of RAND, Fred Kaplan writes in
Wizards of Armageddon
(1991[1983]). The questions of the day were ones like, “‘What weapon system will destroy the most targets for a given cost?’ or ‘What weapon system will destroy a given set of targets for the lowest cost?’”
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McNamara charged Systems Analysis, and its head Alain Enthoven, with providing this analysis. In Systems Analysis, statistically based cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit calculations helped shape, justify, and evaluate military policymaking. Nearly every weapons purchase, every troop
deployment, and every base decision had to pass through Systems Analysis for approval.

“McNamara would not act on a proposal without letting Alain’s department have a chop at it,” explained Earl Ravenal, a Systems Analysis staffer who worked on the Diego Garcia proposal. “Systems analysis became accepted as the buzz word, the way that decisions were rationalized, the currency of overt transactions, the
lingua franca
inside the Pentagon,” Kaplan writes.
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Often, this language and the use of statistical data alone were enough to create the veneer of rationality and justify policy decisions. This is exactly the type of language one sees in the Strategic Island Concept, in the talk of “stockpiling” islands like “commodities” and “investing” in bases as “insurance” to obtain future “benefits.” As anthropologist Carole Cohn has shown among “defense intellectuals,” and as the recollections of officials suggest, this language played an important role in shaping a particular version of reality and in shielding officials from the emotional and human impacts of their decisions.
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But at this time Ravenal’s team in Systems Analysis received the proposal for Diego Garcia with instructions to “look into the quantitative rationale” for the base and “see if it makes sense.” They took the Navy at its word and evaluated its most recent justification for the project—to create a new fueling depot for ships traveling to and from Vietnam. Ravenal’s team found the base was not cost-effective: Given the distances involved and the costs of transporting fuel, it was simply cheaper to refuel ships at existing ports.

McNamara wrote to the new Secretary of the Navy, Paul R. Ignatius (by the end of June 1967, Nitze was back at the Pentagon as Deputy Secretary of Defense), to inform him that he would again defer “investment.”
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Ravenal explained that the Navy and ISA were “extremely annoyed.” They were “hopping up and down” mad, he said. Even people within Systems Analysis were concerned that Ravenal’s team had taken on and defied the Navy over what they saw as such a relatively small project (thinking only in dollar terms). Rear Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Senior Aide to the Secretary of the Navy, who had worked on Diego Garcia since serving under Nitze at ISA, immediately knew that the Navy had picked the wrong rationale to get the base.

“We knew it would be a billion before long,” Ravenal said of the base’s cost. “They said, ‘Why are you opposing an austere communications facility?’ I said, ‘That’s not what’s going on here. You’re going to have a tremendous base here. It’s gonna be a billion’—of course it’s over that now.”

I asked Ravenal if any discussion of the Chagossians had surfaced in the work of Systems Analysis. Ravenal said he “heard about birds” on
the island—some flightless rails, he thought—but “very little” about any people. “It was sort of out in the middle of, we thought, nowhere,” he explained. “We thought nowhere because even though someone may have mentioned that there were some coconut farmers there, it didn’t register. I never heard a single thing. Just birds. That’s all.”

“Why do you think it didn’t register?” I asked.

“Well,” Ravenal paused. “The mindset of almost anyone on the political-military side of government, they simply were not sensitized to those kinds of issues,” Ravenal replied. “And I think it would have been my assumption, if you had twelve hundred people there, if you’re going to have a military base there . . . everyone’s better off getting them off there. But I would have made the assumption in my mind—but probably not bothered to check it out, I have to admit—that we were going to give them a lot of money and relocate them somewhere. Now if we didn’t, I think that’s a terrible shame.”

“THE ALDABRA AFFAIR”

While the Navy was facing continued resistance at the Pentagon, the British Government was still pursuing a base on Aldabra. At the time, however, the United Kingdom was undergoing a severe financial crisis and looking for ways to cut its overseas expenditures. In April and May 1967, British officials informed their U.S. counterparts that they remained interested in a Diego facility but the U.K. financial participation would be no more than a nominal one.
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In July, a U.K. white paper announced the withdrawal of all British troops from Singapore and Malaysia by mid-1970.

As the British continued plans for construction on Aldabra, U.K. and U.S. scientists who had been sent by the governments to survey the islands of the BIOT began to rally public opposition against the base. In what soon became known as the Aldabra Affair, scientists from the Royal Geographic Society and the Smithsonian Institution argued against a base on Aldabra. They said the military would endanger local populations of giant tortoises and rare birds, like the red-footed booby, which made Aldabra the “Galapagos of the Indian Ocean.”
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By contrast, according to David Stoddart, one of the scientists who surveyed the islands, Diego Garcia “was simply a coconut plantation. The plants were common and the birds and land animals few.”
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*
U.K. and U.S. documents offer widely varying, and mostly inaccurate, estimates of the numbers of Chagossians. In fact, there were probably 1,000–1,500 in Chagos and at least 250–500 living in Mauritius at this time.

“ABSOLUTELY MUST GO”

“When it came to writing official, top-secret reports that combined sophisticated analysis with a flair for scaring the daylights out of anyone reading them,” writes Fred Kaplan, “Paul H. Nitze had no match.”
¹
For five decades, Nitze was at the center of U.S. national security policy, beginning and perhaps most centrally with his authorship of the 1950 NSC-68 memo, which became one of the guiding forces in U.S. Cold War policy.

In NSC-68, and throughout his career, Nitze became an ardent proponent of building up “conventional, nonnuclear forces to meet Soviet aggression on the peripheries” (i.e., in the so-called Third World). But NSC-68’s language was “deliberately hyped,” admitted another of its authors, Nitze’s boss, Secretary of State Dean Acheson. They used it as a “bludgeon,” for “pushing their own, more militaristic views into official parlance.”
²
In NSC-68 and again in 1957 when Nitze helped spawn unfounded fears about a “missile gap” with the Soviets, as well as in his later work, the Democrat and former Wall Street financier continually inflated the Soviet threat. He offered a “highly pessimistic vision of Soviet military might, and the idea that the only real answer to the Soviet challenge lay in the construction of a gigantic, worldwide U.S. military machine.”
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