Within three months of the United States’ entrance into World War II, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers “Capetown Clipper” seaplane was skidding to a halt across Diego Garcia’s lagoon. Two officials stepped out of the plane and went to meet Diego’s administrator. After signing his autograph book, they began surveying the northwest tip of the island for construction of a 4,000-foot runway.1 The Army never built the runway; instead the ruling power in the ocean, Great Britain, developed a corner of the atoll into a small base for ships, reconnaissance seaplanes, and communications traffic.
Between the fall of Napoleon in 1814 and the end of World War II, Britain dominated the Indian Ocean without peer. During the war, the ocean was a relatively minor theater but saw periodic German attacks on allied shipping and Japan’s seizure of the Andaman Islands and threats against India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Fearing the fall of Ceylon and its naval base there, Britain established an alternate base in the Addu Atoll, at the southern tip of the Maldives, 400 miles from Diego Garcia. The smaller base on Diego became a precautionary move against having to retreat even further south. British troops remained on the island through the end of the war, though the island saw no military action.2
After the war, Britain’s power globally and in the Indian Ocean was clearly on the wane. Observing this and the growing importance of petroleum reserves in the Middle East, the United States established a small Middle East naval force, MIDEASTFOR, in 1949, in the Persian Gulf state of Bahrain. Composed of a handful of aging vessels, the force was mostly a symbolic gesture aimed at maintaining a political and military presence in the area. A larger presence and a base on Diego Garcia were, for the moment, deferred.
Following the end of World War II, the “containment” policy of George Kennan came to guide “national security” strategy (using the same kind of obscuring language that transformed the War Department into the Department of Defense). In the eyes of Kennan and other government officials, the aim of containment was to establish a worldwide balance of power favorable to the United States. For Kennan, this meant the use of not just military force but political, economic, and psychological power as well. Economic aid came to be a primary tool of Truman administration foreign policy in an attempt to rebuild Japan and the nations of Western Europe as strong allies opposed to the Soviet Union. NATO and other treaty organizations played an equally important political-military role as part of Kennan’s vision for a selective approach of defending key strategic strongpoints with military force.3
After the Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic weapon in 1949, a new iteration of the containment policy emerged with the drafting of National Security Council Report 68 of 1950 (NSC-68). The report was written in large part by Paul H. Nitze, a leading foreign policy official who would play a key role in the creation of the base on Diego Garcia and whose influence would extend into the Reagan administration. Unlike earlier Kennan-derived strategy, NSC-68 emphasized the military aspects of containment. Instead of defending key strategic strongpoints, NSC-68 saw danger everywhere and emphasized defending the United States and the West at every point on its “perimeter.”4
Also known as the “forward strategy,” this policy held that the United States should maintain its military forces as close as possible to the Soviet Union (and later China). These forces would create a line of defense against Soviet and Chinese expansion and allow rapid military deployment (nuclear and nonnuclear) to meet any perceived threat to the United States. A paper from a decade later outlined the “essential” role of the base network to the forward strategy: The base network
provides a basis of support and dispersal necessary for the retaliatory forces of the Air Force and the Navy and for other forces in forward areas. It permits the forward deployment of ground, sea and air forces in or close to potential spots in areas throughout the world where the security interests of the United States require military strength to deter or deal swiftly with any military action against areas of the Free World.5
Both NSC-68 and Kennan’s containment strategy shared a newly global vision of U.S. foreign policy and an aim of encircling the Soviet Union and, increasingly, China, with offensive nuclear and non-nuclear military power as close to enemy borders as possible. Although there are precedents for such a policy dating to the nineteenth-century acquisition of naval and coaling stations in the Pacific, the postwar military policies of Kennan and Nitze represented a shift in U.S. foreign policy. “The security of the United States, in the minds of policymakers,” one scholar explains, “lost much of its former inseparability from the concept of the territory of the United States.”6 For the Navy in particular, the forward strategy meant employing an “offensive defense” to, in the tradition of Mahan, “project” U.S. naval forces as close to the shores of the Soviet Union, keeping it hemmed in and unable to project its own power outside Soviet territory.7 At a broader level, this “dominant mode of thought” crowded out all alternative visions and to this day, as Catherine Lutz says, “necessitates an exhaustive sorting of the world into friendly and unfriendly nations and the globe to be sliced comprehensively into military zones patrolled twenty-four hours of each day by American troops.”8
A new vision had emerged of an “intrinsically threatening world,” where instability, no matter how far removed from the United States, was seen as a threat to the nation. And in this world, the role of the military had become that of a “permanently mobilized force” ready to confront threats wherever they might appear.9
In a process that started before World War II and accelerated during the war, military interests were entering into almost every corner of civilian life.10 Perhaps the most “pernicious feature” of this creeping militarization is “not only the expansion of military influence into civilian areas from which it should have been excluded, but the injection of the military élan throughout our society—a constant pressure driving American life toward the reactionary.”11 Thus when President Eisenhower left office, he warned the nation that the military’s influence was not just a problem of politics and public policy but “an insidious penetration of our own minds.”12 The United States and its people, writes Lutz, had become a “society made”—socially, culturally, economically, politically, and psychologically—“by war and preparations for war.”13
As the Cold War proceeded into the 1950s, the relative supremacy of the United States gradually declined. The Soviet Union, as its nuclear weapons tests suggested, was emerging as another empire able to at least challenge the United States, and China soon emerged as a regional competitor.
With Britain, France, and other western European nations giving up their colonial possessions, their power and thus the power and influence of the United States and the West was eroding. Decolonization left the alignment of new nations up for grabs. With the United States allied with most of the former colonial rulers, a perception grew that many of the new nations and the balance of the Cold War were tilting toward the East. Amid the independence movements, opposition to foreign military facilities was growing throughout the decolonizing world. As nations gained their independence, countries like Trinidad and Tobago evicted the United States from bases in their territories.
In this context, Stu Barber and others grew concerned that the United States would be evicted from more bases. With these losses, officials worried that U.S. influence over the future of non-Western nations would decline as well. Many officials particularly feared losing control of the regions bounding the Indian Ocean, from southern Africa through the Middle East, south Asia, and southeast Asia.
The disastrous outcome, from Britain’s standpoint, of the 1956 Suez Canal crisis called into question Britain’s ability to assert long-term control over the Indian Ocean and the Middle East. U.S. military strategists began to foresee the development of a “power vacuum” in the region as British power declined. For the first time, some in the Navy and the wider national security establishment began to look seriously at establishing a larger presence in the ocean.14
Stu grew interested in the region, as he later explained, “not because of a visualized specific requirement but because of a realization that Western power and influence in that part of the world had been dependent mainly on British forces and bases, and these were clearly on the way down.” France’s colonial presence was likewise on the wane.15
Part of this concern stemmed from a growing interest in ensuring the flow of Persian Gulf oil to the U.S. economy and, as much, to the increasingly Gulf-dependent economies of Europe and Japan. “More significant” in Stu’s mind and the minds of other officials was the broader concern that “Western nations cannot afford to be without means of exerting power and influence in so large a sector of the world (which the USSR could potentially threaten at shorter range from the north). And looking ahead, the U.S. Navy seemed to be the service most likely to retain the potential of doing so.”16
“We just can’t bug out,” Stu told Senator Ted Stevens in a letter.17
To this point, however, other than the token MIDEASTFOR ships, the Indian Ocean was largely unknown to the Navy, distant from the United States, and rarely visited by Navy vessels. (The CIA had started to work in the region, helping to overthrow the government of Iran in 1953 and installing the Shah.) For the Navy to operate in the ocean, it needed to be able to supply and repair its ships. In the Atlantic and Pacific, the United States had coastal ports and island bases like those at Pearl Harbor, Guam, and Puerto Rico. Other than the small outpost in Bahrain, the Navy had little capacity to operate in this new ocean.
Stu’s Strategic Island Concept offered an answer, The Navy, for its part, was “buoyed by the fact that there were so many such islands in the Indian Ocean.” Most of the islands were controlled by the British, and the Navy “did not see any real difficulty in persuading Great Britain to enter into . . . an agreement” to create island bases.18 As with the Pacific Lake strategy after World War II, government officials ultimately hoped to ensure U.S. dominance in another ocean by controlling every available piece of territory, or at least by denying their use to the Soviet Union and China.
Stu’s work on the Strategic Island Concept reflects the recognition by the late 1950s that the power of the United States had diminished relative to that of its Cold War opponents. The shift was probably less significant in real terms than it was in its perception, but this made little difference at the time to U.S. officials and others in the world. At the same time, domestic political concerns about appearing “weak” on “defense” or giving ground to the communists were probably as significant as perceptions of growing U.S. weakness in shaping foreign and military policy.
Indeed, most U.S. officials understood that the United States remained the most powerful nation on Earth. By the time President Kennedy took office, both the President and Secretary of Defense McNamara knew that fears about a “missile gap” with the Soviet Union were unfounded, that the Soviet Union and China no longer represented a unified threat, and that the United States enjoyed “overwhelming strategic dominance.” In quantitative terms, Gareth Porter shows that although U.S. military strength narrowed from forty times greater than the Soviet Union in 1954 to nine times greater in 1965, the difference still represented the greatest disparity between a major power and its nearest rival since the seventeenth century.19
Aware of this power imbalance, that the United States possessed a dominance so great that in effect no other nation could constrain most of its contemplated activities, officials across successive presidential administrations exploited a “new freedom of action” to pursue “more aggressive and interventionist policies.”20
Although Stu and the Long Range Objectives Group researched scores of islands (see table 3.1), they increasingly focused their attention on Diego Garcia. While looking for islands, the Navy considered not just an island’s strategic location but certain political, economic, cultural, and social factors. As Stu explained, island selection was based on a weighing of “military and political factors”: “Our military criteria were location, airfield potential, anchorage potential,” he wrote. “Our political criteria were minimal population, isolation, present [administrative] status, historical and ethnic factors.”21
After a survey of Diego Garcia, Stu and Op-93 determined that Diego Garcia was ideal: On “military” grounds, Diego Garcia was close to perfect, as Stu had recognized. Among the “political” criteria, the Navy found that Chagos had a small population and was “among the most neglected minor backwaters of the world.”22
Importantly, Navy officials understood that the archipelago was not only of marginal interest globally but also of marginal interest to Mauritius: Given Chagos’s limited economic output, Britain would have an easy time convincing Mauritian leaders to give up the islands. People of Indian descent dominated Mauritius, and officials understood that the Indo-Mauritian leadership would probably care little about uprooting an isolated, mostly African population whose ties to Mauritius were historically tenuous. Given the general isolation and obscurity of Chagos and its people, the Navy realized that few elsewhere would notice, let alone object.
TABLE 3.1
“Strategic Island Concept”: Information on Potential Sites
The Navy’s search for strategically located islands with small easy-to-remove non-Western populations was not without precedent. After World War II, the U.S. Navy was given the responsibility for orchestrating postwar nuclear weapons tests and first needed to find an isolated island test site. “We just took out dozens of maps and started looking for remote sites,” explained Horacio Rivero, one of two officers responsible for finding a location. “After checking the Atlantic, we moved to the West Coast and just kept looking.”23
Rivero knew a lot about islands. He was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico in 1910. During World War II he served on the USS San Juan in battles for islands across the Pacific, including those at Kwajalein, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Guadalcanal, the Gilbert Islands, the Santa Cruz Islands, the Solomon Islands, and Rabaul. After the war, Commander Rivero worked at the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab under William S. Parsons; “Deak,” as he was known, was a crew member on the Enola Gay, helping to arm the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.24
In his next posting, Rivero and colleague Frederick L. Ashworth considered more than a dozen nuclear test sites around the world’s oceans. Officials ruled out most because the waters surrounding the islands were too shallow, the populations too large, or the weather undependable. Rivero and Ashworth considered the Caroline Islands in Micronesia, Bikar and Taongi in the Marshall Islands, and even the Galapagos (the Interior Department had the foresight to strike Darwin’s famed islands from the list because of their rare species).25 Initially the Navy was most interested in one of the Carolines, as one memorandum explained, “partly because evacuation of natives would not be a major problem.” Eventually Rivero and Ashworth selected the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The Navy was particularly pleased that Bikini had an indigenous population of only about 170.26
The Navy sent a commodore—“Battling Ben” Wyatt—to “ask” the Bikinians for use of their islands. However, the outcome was a foregone conclusion: President Harry Truman had already approved the removal, and preparations for the test had begun on the islands.27
For their part, the Bikinians were “awed” by the U.S. defeat of Japan and grateful for the help the United States had provided since the war. They “believe[d] that they were powerless to resist the wishes of the United States.”28
On March 7, 1946, less than one month after posing its “question,” the Navy completed the removal of the Bikinians to the Rongerik Atoll, elsewhere in the Marshall Islands. Within months it became clear that the move to Rongerik had been “ill-conceived and poorly planned,” leaving the Bikinians in dire conditions. The New York Times wrote in classically ethnocentric language that the Bikinians “will probably be repatriated if they insist on it, though the United States military authorities say they can’t see why they should want to: Bikini and Rongerik look as alike as two Idaho potatoes.”29
By 1948, the Bikinians were running out of food and suffering from malnutrition. After planning to move them to Ujelang, the Navy sent them to a temporary camp on Kwajalein Island, near a major U.S. base. Later that year, the Navy moved the islanders to a new permanent home on Kili Island. By 1952, the government was forced to make an emergency food drop on Kili as conditions again deteriorated for the people. In 1956, the United States paid the Bikinians $25,000 (in $1 bills) and created a $3 million trust fund making annual payments of about $15 per person. “The Bikinians were completely self-sufficient before 1946,” explains attorney Jonathan Weisgall, “but after years of exile they virtually lost the will to provide for themselves.”30
Between 1946 and 1958, the Navy conducted 68 atomic and hydrogen bomb tests in Bikini,31 removing an additional 147 people from Enewetak Atoll and all the people of Lib Island. On March 1, 1954, the first U.S. hydrogen bomb test spread a cloud of radiation over 7,500 square miles of ocean, leaving Bikini Island “hopelessly contaminated” and covering the inhabitants of the Rongelap and Utirik atolls.32 In addition to deaths and disease from this and other radiation, the removals and the disruption to Marshallese societies led to declining social, cultural, physical, and economic conditions, high rates of suicide, infant health deficits, and slum housing conditions, to name just a few of their debilitating effects.33
One of the two officers responsible for selecting Bikini, Horacio Rivero, was rewarded for his work by being made an admiral. Appropriately sharing a first name with both the figure from bootstraps mythology (Alger) and the naval hero from the Battle of Trafalgar (Nelson), Rivero became the first Latino admiral in U.S. Navy history. (That Rivero married Hazel Hooper, of Horacio, Kansas, seems beyond coincidence, underlining the significance of Rivero’s name.) Rivero’s next promotion was to become the third director of the Long Range Objectives Group, where he discovered another search for islands and Stu Barber’s “brilliant idea” for Diego Garcia.34
That Horacio Rivero would come to play a role in the displacement of both the Bikinians and the Chagossians is hardly a coincidence. Around the world, often in isolated locations, often on islands, and often affecting indigenous populations, the U.S. military has displaced local peoples as part of the creation of military facilities. Almost always, these removals have led to the impoverishment of those affected. And among the services, Rivero’s Navy has frequently been involved. In total there are at least sixteen documented cases of base displacement outside the continental United States. Some of these took place prior to World War II. Other displacements initially began during World War II combat under the pretext of wartime necessity; most of the people removed in wartime, however, were prevented from returning at war’s end, with the early displacements only paving the way for the displacement of even greater numbers in peacetime. The sixteen cases followed more than a century during which the United States engaged in the systematic displacement of native peoples in North America.35
In Hawai‘i, the United States first took possession of Pearl Harbor in 1887 when officials coerced the indigenous monarchy into granting exclusive access to the protected bay.36 Half a century later, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Navy seized Koho‘olawe, the smallest of the eight major islands, and ordered its inhabitants to leave. The service turned the island, which is “home to some of the most sacred historical places in Hawai‘ian culture,” including 544 archaeological sites, into a weapons testing range.37 In 2000, the Navy finally returned the environmentally devastated island to the state of Hawai‘i.
In 1899, a year after the United States seized Guam from Spain, the U.S. Navy designated the entire island a U.S. naval station. The Navy administered the island until Japan captured it three days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. After the United States retook Guam in 1944, the military acquired more than 45 percent of its available land. Today, the military controls around one-third of the island and has plans for a major expansion of the base’s capacity to host more than 20,000 troops shifted from bases in Japan, South Korea, and Europe.38
In Panama, the United States carried out nineteen distinct land expropriations around the Panama Canal Zone between 1908 and 1931. Some were for fourteen bases established in the country and some were for the canal.39
In the Philippines, Clark Air Base and other U.S. bases were built on land previously reserved for the indigenous Aetas people. According to McCaffrey, “they ended up combing military trash to survive.”40
In Alaska, in 1942, the Navy displaced Aleutian islanders from their homelands to live in abandoned canneries and mines in southern Alaska for three years. The military also seized Attu Island for a Coast Guard station; it was eventually designated a wilderness area in 1980. In 1988, an act of Congress delivered some compensation to the surviving islanders.41
In the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, the Navy carried out repeated removals on the small island of Vieques. Between 1941 and 1943, and again in 1947, the U.S. Navy displaced thousands of people from their lands, seizing three-quarters of Vieques for military use. In 1961, the Navy announced plans to seize the entire island and evict all 8,000 inhabitants before Governor Luis Muñoz Martin convinced President Kennedy to halt the expropriations in light of UN and Eastern bloc scrutiny of the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States. Few benefits followed military occupation. Stagnation, poverty, unemployment, prostitution, violence, and the disruption of subsistence and other productive activities became the rule.42
On the neighboring island of Culebra, in 1948, the Navy seized 1,700 acres of land for a bombing range. By 1950, the population had shrunk to 580, from 4,000 at the turn of the century. The Navy controlled one-third of the island and its entire coastline, encircling civilians with the bombing range and a mined harbor. Beginning in the 1950s, the Navy started drafting plans to remove the rest of Culebra’s inhabitants. In 1970, the Navy would attempt to remove the islanders again. When the issue became a “cause célèbre of the Puerto Rican independence movement,” the Navy started looking for another island and ceased use of the bombing range. Ultimately this came at the expense of those in Vieques, where bombing increased until protesters won its cessation in 2003.43
In Okinawa, the military seized large tracts of land and bulldozed houses for bases during the 1945 Battle of Okinawa. Within a year, the United States had taken 40,000 acres, equal to 20 percent of the island’s arable land. Displacement continued into the 1950s, affecting 250,000 people or nearly half of Okinawa’s population. Initially the military forced Okinawans to relocate to refugee camps and prevented them from returning to their homes. With the island growing increasingly overcrowded, between 1954 and 1964, the United States found at least 3,218 “volunteers” to resettle off the island. They sent them about 11,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean to landlocked Bolivia. Promised new farmland and financial assistance, most found jungle-covered lands, incomplete housing and roads, disease, and none of the promised aid. By the late 1960s, “there was a steady exodus” to Brazil, Argentina, and back to Okinawa and Japan.44
In 1953 in Danish Greenland, the United States made plans to expand its air base in Thule and signed a secret agreement with the Danish Government to remove 150 indigenous Inughuit people standing in the way. Families were reportedly given four days to move or face U.S. bulldozers. The Danish Government gave the Inughuits some blankets and tents and left them in exile in Qaanaaq, a forbidding village 125 miles from their native lands.45 The expulsion severed the people’s connection to a homeland to which they were “intimately linked,” causing them physical and psychological harm and the loss of ancient hunting, fishing, and gathering skills, and endangering their entire existence as a people. In recent years, Danish courts have ruled the Danish Government’s actions illegal and a violation of the Inughuits’ human rights. And yet the courts said they have no right to return.46
In the Marshall Islands’ Kwajalein Atoll, the U.S. military displaced hundreds between the end of World War II and the 1960s to create a missile-testing base. Most were deported to the small island of Ebeye, where the population increased from 20 prior to 1944 to several thousand by the 1960s in an area less than 27 square miles. In 1967, with overcrowding a major problem, U.S. authorities would remove 1,500 “unnecessary” people from Ebeye. Following protests from the Marshallese Government, they were later allowed to return.47 By 1969, Ebeye was called “the most congested, unhealthful, and socially demoralized community in Micronesia.” A population of more than 4,500 was living in what was widely known as the “ghetto of the Pacific.”48 By 1978, there were more than 8,000 people on the island, giving it the population density that one would find if the entire population of the United States moved to Connecticut. By 2001, the population reached more than 12,000.49
The displacement of local peoples for bases may best be characterized as a kind of “strategic population cleansing,” which empires across many centuries have carried out for military purposes: That is, the “planned, deliberate removal from a certain territory of an undesirable population distinguished by one or more characteristics such as ethnic, religious, race, class, or sexual preference.”50
In her study of Vieques, Katherine McCaffrey explains how “bases are frequently established on the political margins of national territory, on lands occupied by ethnic or cultural minorities or otherwise disadvantaged populations.”51 While the military generally selects base sites at a regional level on strategic grounds, McCaffrey points to how the selection of specific locations is heavily influenced at a local level by the ease of land acquisition. The ease with which the military can acquire land is in turn strongly related to the relative powerlessness of a group, which is linked to a number of factors including a group’s socially defined “race,”** ethnicity, nationality, numerical strength, and economic and political power.52
“One of the important things that was done,” Rivero said of his time in the Long-Range Objectives Group, was that “Stu, with help from some of us, got involved in looking at all the little islands around the world that might have some potential value. This was Stu’s idea, that we should stockpile base rights . . . before a lot of these countries became independent.” Rivero continued, “So, looking around, we picked a number of islands, and one of them was Diego Garcia.”53
Still, the man who selected Bikini for nuclear testing made his own contribution. According to Stu, Rivero approved the plan but insisted “emphatically” that the base be “austere” and have “no dependents.”54
Rivero worked hard to win supporters for the Strategic Island Concept within the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, and then from the powerful and longest-serving CNO in Navy history, Admiral Arleigh A. Burke.55 In June 1960, Rivero suggested that Burke talk to the British Navy about Diego.
Burke thought it a “good idea”56 and broached the subject at an October meeting with his British counterpart, First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Caspar John.57 (Burke later claimed to have “foreseen” soon after World War II the eventual withdrawal of the British from the Indian Ocean and “advocated a U.S. Indian Ocean presence as early as 1949”).58
Working from Stu’s idea for acquiring Diego Garcia, Burke proposed that the British Government detach the atoll and the rest of Chagos from colonial Mauritius, as well as several other island groups from colonial Seychelles, to create a new territory that would ensure basing rights for future U.S. and U.K. military use.59 The British Navy liked the idea, and Burke returned from the meeting to submit a proposal on the Strategic Island Concept and Diego Garcia to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).
Despite some initial Air Force opposition to a plan (perhaps any plan) coming from its rival service, the JCS took the Navy’s proposal under consideration and expanded its scope to a worldwide search for bases.60 The Navy started base development studies for some 50–60 strategic islands, including ones in the Pacific and Atlantic, and worked to build support for the proposal in the Department of Defense.61 Despite the broadened search, the Navy maintained its focus on Diego: As Stu later put it, “Burke’s prompt and strong advocacy” quickly made the acquisition of the atoll “an article of Navy faith.”62
The response within the DOD was immediately warm. “This is long overdue,” wrote one Deputy Secretary of Defense.63 Another Pentagon official forwarded the Op-93 plan to high-ranking Kennedy administration officials McGeorge Bundy, Walter Rostow, and NSC-68 author Paul Nitze, explaining, “The study has considerable appeal as a possible solution to the dilemma posed by our continuing problem of maintaining an overseas base structure.”64
Under the guidance of new Op-93 director Rear Admiral Thomas Moorer, Stu formally briefed Nitze, then Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, in April 1961. Nitze soon raised the topic with his counterpart in the State Department, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Politico-Military Affairs, Jeffery Kitchen.65
Lobbied directly by Stu as well, Kitchen warned against the “outright purchase” of islands proposed by DOD (military officials believed that only with complete U.S. sovereignty would they have unrestrained base access and freedom of military action). But, he reported, “The Department of State would have no objection to initiating confidential talks with the United Kingdom regarding the detachment of Diego Garcia from the Mauritius group before the granting of self-government.” Kitchen predicted “no major difficulties” in the discussions.66
The British, for their part, were “trying desperately to figure ways to hang on in the Indian Ocean,” as Kennedy and Johnson administration national security official Robert Komer later explained.67 Diego Garcia offered a way to remain in the ocean while shifting the major economic and military costs to the United States. “Seeing Malaya going independent; having lost their position in India, Pakistan, and Burma and Ceylon . . . sensing that it would be desirable from the standpoint of their strategic interests to get the Americans involved in yet another area where they could no longer carry the can,” Komer said, “the British were, I would say, quite interested in having us come in.”68
U.S. officials knew that the British were considering the withdrawal of some military forces in East Asia and the Middle East. They saw the Strategic Island Concept as an opportunity to encourage the British to maintain this “commitment” through collaborating on island base rights. (Providing base rights was, and is, widely considered to be an affirmation of both a military commitment and a de facto alliance or, in the Anglo-American case, a “special relationship” between nations.)
In July 1961, U.K. Minister of Defence Peter Thorneycroft informally notified Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara that because of financial difficulties, Great Britain might withdraw all its forces east of Aden (in what is now Yemen). The Navy promptly narrowed the focus of the Strategic Island Concept to efforts to secure base rights in the Indian Ocean alone.69
Early in 1962, the Joint Chiefs formally signed on to the Navy’s plan, recommending to McNamara that “steps be taken to assure long-term access rights for the US for use of strategically located islands in the Indian Ocean.”70 In September 1962, over three days of major U.S.-U.K. talks in Washington, Secretary McNamara and Minister Thorneycroft began formal diplomatic negotiations on a “possible joint Indian Ocean base.”71
A “Top Secret” JCS discussion of the Strategic Island Concept in the Indian Ocean shows how the Joint Chiefs and eventually the Pentagon accepted Stu’s plan in its entirety. The sparse, bulleted language of the JCS illustrates their adoption of the concept point by point:
• With the withdrawal of British forces from the area east of Aden, a military power vacuum will exist in the Indian Ocean area. . . .
• The United States requires bases to provide for the projection of its military strength around the world. There are important gaps developing in the Free World base structure which are opening up as the Western powers withdraw. . . . This need is most acute at present in the Indian Ocean area. . . .
• Encroachment of the Sino-Soviet Bloc into the areas which are loosely termed colonial could be made vastly more difficult by conclusion of treaties and agreements now for permanent union with the United States. . . .
• US bases on foreign continents are inherently under pressure from a wide variety of sources [including]. . . . nationalism [and]. . . . Communist influences. . . .
• Acquisition of suitable islands by the United States would appear to be the most advantageous procedure [to counteract these forces]. . . .
• Islands having a limited population which are removed from continental mainlands and do not appear economically attractive seem to offer the most feasible avenues for United States development.72
As studies and planning continued within the Navy, and the departments of Defense and State, the State Department sent the following classified note to the British Embassy:
Washington, April 25, 1963. The Government of the United States proposes to the British Government the initiation of discussions by appropriate military and civil representatives of the two Governments looking toward the possible strategic use of certain small islands in the Indian Ocean area. The two Governments share a common concern for an adequate long-term allied presence in the area, and it is thus considered important that there be effective coordination of strategic planning on the matter.73
The British Embassy responded by presenting “its compliments” to the State Department and its “honour” of offering the following reply:
Washington, July 29, 1963. Her Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom agree that the two Governments share a common concern for the effective defence of the whole area against Communist encroachment. In principle, therefore, they welcome the American initiative for exploratory discussions.74
* 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.
** 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.