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.1 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.2
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.”3
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.”4 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. . . .’”5
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.6 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.”7
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.”8 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* 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.”9
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.10
“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.”11
Although he did not mention Diego Garcia** 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.”12 (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.”13)
President Kennedy “jumped on it with enthusiasm,” and told Komer, “Let’s try it out for size. Take it up with McNamara.”14
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.”15
McNamara was initially, as Komer put it, “very lukewarm” to the task force.16 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.”17
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.18 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.19
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.”20
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.”21
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.”22
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.
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.”23
With rising costs in the war in Vietnam, they rejected continuous troop deployments or the construction of extensive military facilities, and proposed to the British the use of strategically located islands under U.K. control. Along with Diego Garcia and other islands in Chagos, the team identified some of the outlying islands of the Seychelles archipelago as prime possibilities. “They do not appear to us,” they wrote, “to be capable of supporting serious independence movements and are probably too remote and culturally isolated to figure plausibly in the plans of any mainland government.”24
On the first day of talks there was quick consensus on the basic plan to augment the U.S-U.K. military presence in the region and to gain permanent control over strategic islands to support new military activity.
“May be possible to transfer Diego Garcia from Mauritius to Seychelles which will be easier to deal with,” the Navy’s representative telegrammed back to the JCS about an initial idea for retaining control over Diego by separating it from Mauritius and making it part of the Seychelles, which unlike Mauritius was not expected to gain independence soon. “Only 200 people involved.”25
U.S. officials and their British counterparts agreed on ensuring total control over Diego Garcia and Chagos without the possibility of outside interference. “It would be unacceptable to both the British and the American defence authorities,” a UK Colonial Office document explained, “if facilities of the kind proposed were in any way to be subject to the political control of Ministers of a newly emergent independent state,” referring to soon-to-be-independent Mauritius or the Seychelles.26
On the last day of the talks, Kitchen returned to the U.S. Embassy to report back on his progress. “Re Diego Garcia—UK willing to move rapidly as possible to separate Diego Garcia from Mauritius,” Kitchen telegrammed the State Department. “Thereafter, joint US/UK survey will be conducted under UK auspices. If survey satisfactory, UK will move to acquire entire island for US communications site and later development other austere facilities.”27
The U.K. representatives were surprised, however, with what Kitchen and the DOD’s Frank Sloan had to say about the local populations on the islands. Some archived versions of the initial agreement produced at the talks remain censored on this point; but elsewhere uncensored documents show that the British (concerned about the future of their before-long ex-colonies) were “clearly disappointed” to hear that the United States was not interested in offering aid or base employment opportunities that might benefit the economies of Mauritius and the Seychelles. Instead, Kitchen and Sloan explained that the U.S. Government had something entirely different in mind. Tellingly, in the official record, they conveyed the demand in a parenthetical phrase: The United States wanted the islands under its “exclusive control (without local inhabitants).”28
The United States wanted the Chagossians gone. Or as other documents would later, more directly put it, they wanted the islands “swept” and “sanitized.”29 Despite their surprise, British representatives quickly agreed to the parenthetically presented expulsion order: “H.M.G. should be responsible for acquiring land, resettlement of population and compensation at H.M.G.’s expense,” the representatives agreed. The United States would assume responsibility for all construction and maintenance costs.30
For U.S. officials, the aim was to avoid not just having to answer to a non-Western government like Mauritius or the Seychelles, but equally, having to deal with a (potentially antagonistic) local population. Worst of all was the possibility that a local population could press claims for self-determination at the United Nations and threaten the life of the base.
“The Americans made it clear during the initial [1963] talks,” detailed a secret U.K. document, “that they regarded freedom from local pressures as essential.”31 Another Foreign Office brief, marked “secret and guard,” was even more explicit:
The primary objective in acquiring these islands from Mauritius and the Seychelles . . . was to ensure that Her Majesty’s Government had full title to, and control over, these islands so that they could be used for the construction of defence facilities without hindrance or political agitation and so that when a particular island would be needed for the construction of British or United States defence facilities Britain or the United States should be able to clear it of its current population. The Americans in particular attached great importance to this freedom of manoeuvre, divorced from the normal considerations applying to a populated dependent territory.32
The document continued, “It was implied in this objective, and recognized at the time, that we could not accept the principles governing our otherwise universal behaviour in our dependent territories, e.g. we could not accept that the interests of the inhabitants were paramount and that we should develop self-government there.” If the needs of the local population were treated as “paramount,” the brief explained, the United States would likely cancel its participation.33
British officials felt that any apparent contradiction between their “principles” and the expulsion plan was “not an insurmountable problem”: They would simply remove the people and tell the world “there were no permanent inhabitants in the archipelago.” This step was crucial because, in classic Orwellian logic, “to recognise that there are permanent inhabitants will imply that there is a population whose democratic rights have to be safeguarded.”34
For U.S. officials, the plan for Diego Garcia thus had all the advantages and almost none of the disadvantages of an overseas military base. It had all the advantages as a relatively surreptitious way to exercise U.S. power, and was controlled by “a longstanding ally (the United Kingdom) unlikely to toss [the United States] out for governmental changes or U.S. foreign policy initiatives.”35 In the British Government, the United States had a partner willing to ignore British law and international human rights guarantees. The British would do the dirty work of the expulsion. They would dispose of the population. All the while the United States would have the legal and political alibi that Great Britain was the sovereign, retaining ultimate responsibility for the islanders.
With the people scheduled for removal, the U.S. Government would have almost the perfect base: strategically located, free of any potentially troublesome population, under de facto U.S. control yet with its closest ally as sovereign to take any political heat, and almost no restrictions on use of the island, save the need to consult periodically with the British. Free reign over an idyllic and strategically located atoll in the Indian Ocean. No wonder the Navy would come to call it “Fantasy Island.”
Before the U.S. delegation left London, the two sides agreed to a series of recommendations and future steps involving the development of what officials were calling a “strategic triangle” of bases on the islands of Diego Garcia, Aldabra in the Seychelles on the western edge of the Indian Ocean, and Australia’s Cocos/Keeling Islands to the east.36 Notably, while U.S. officials demanded that the “local” (read: non-white) governments of Mauritius and the Seychelles cede their sovereignty claims, U.S. officials were willing to have the local Australian Government retain sovereignty in the Cocos/Keeling Islands (the ongoing Anglo-American-Australian coalition of the pale has of course been visible in Iraq).
The British Cabinet approved the recommendations in principle on the day the talks concluded. Six days later, Secretary Rusk approved the agreements; DOD and the JCS approved them the following month.37
When both the U.S. and U.K. delegations to the United Nations heard news of the plans, however, they expressed concern. Officials jointly suggested a slow implementation of the strategy “to minimize adverse reaction at the UN and throughout the world.” Each step should have “some logical cover,” they recommended. “Discreet timing and spacing” of the steps should be employed. “Any step which clearly reveals the true intentions should be taken after other preliminary steps” so as to reduce the amount of time opposition would have to build against the base. In particular, the delegations warned, “The transfer of population no matter how few . . . is a very sensitive issue at the UN. It should be undertaken on the basis that the populations must be induced to leave voluntarily rather than forcibly transferred.”38
Despite attempts to maintain the total secrecy of the discussions and planning, the Washington Post was ready to run a story about the London agreements by June 15, 1964. Fearing that the story might derail their plans, Kitchen and Assistant Secretary of State Jeff Greenfield went to meet with the managing editor of the Post, Alfred Friendly, to ask him to hold the story.
In an off-the-record conversation, Kitchen explained to Friendly the background of U.S. involvement in the Indian Ocean and the plans for island bases. Kitchen stressed how publication of the story would endanger British negotiations to remove the islands from Mauritius and the Seychelles, as well as a secret U.S-U.K. survey of the islands. Friendly promised not to publish his story until after a U.S. or U.K. announcement. Rusk later called it “a considerable service to the USG.”39
A month later, White House and State officials feared that both the Post and the Economist might break the story within a matter of days. In a heavily underlined memorandum hurriedly delivered by Komer to President Lyndon Johnson, Rusk alerted the President and provided him with background in case of press inquiries. Rusk described the islands as “virtually uninhabited,” citing numbers of one to two hundred people.40
Under continued pressure from the State Department, the Post did not publish the story, and the secret island survey went off without interruption (the Economist also held the story). A team of Navy and Air Force engineers and construction experts left for the Indian Ocean at the end of July and completed its work within a month.
Upon the survey team’s return, the Air Force expressed interest in Diego Garcia for the first time, as a base for B-52 bomber operations.41 The Navy’s evaluation was even more enthusiastic. A telegram back to Navy headquarters reported: “Anchorage excellent with minimum blasting coral heads. . . . Logistic airstrip feasible [at two sites]. . . . Island excellent for COMMSTA [communications station] regards interference and ground conductivity. . . . Sufficient land available other support as required.”42
Briefed by the survey team at the Pentagon, Admiral Horacio Rivero, now Vice Chief of Naval Operations, exclaimed, “I want this island!”
Rivero “turned to one of his staff and told them to write a letter to the British using whatever words or justification that were necessary” to get it.43 There is no record of any discussions about another of the survey team’s findings: that a distinct native population was living on Diego. The team reported, “The problem of the Ileois*** and the extent to which they form a distinct community is one of some subtlety and is not within the grasp of the present manager of Diego Garcia.”44
The Washington Post finally ran its story on August 29, more than two months after it had been written, buried in the media void of end-of-August vacations. The last column of the article described the population of Diego Garcia as consisting “largely of transient laborers” most of whom were “understood to have left.”45
A day prior to publication, the article’s author, Robert Estabrook, met with U.S. Embassy officials in London. They convinced him to remove references to the detachment of islands from Mauritius and the Seychelles and to make the story less definitive about which islands were the focus of attention. An embassy cable reported that Estabrook initially refused to delete a paragraph explaining that the Post had held the story at the request of the State Department; the published article included no such reference.46 The story gained little attention and was soon forgotten.
On the British side, the U.K. Government began pressuring Mauritian representatives during its independence negotiations in 1965 to give up Chagos in exchange for Mauritian independence. During meetings with Secretary Rusk in Washington in April, new Labour Party Prime Minister Harold Wilson brought up the detachment and said that Britain would “pay a price” at the UN for its actions.47 In 1960, the UN General Assembly had passed Declaration 1514 (XV) “on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.” The declaration called for the complete independence of non-self-governing territories, like Mauritius and the Seychelles, without alteration of their borders, thrice demanding that states respect their “territorial integrity” during decolonization, and condemning “any attempt aimed at the partial or total disruption of the national unity and the territorial integrity of a country.”48
The British understood that they would thus have to pay Mauritius and the Seychelles to silence any protests over the detachment and trump any Soviet voices likely to encourage protest: “If we do not settle quickly (which must mean generously) agitation in the colonies against ‘dismemberment’ and ‘foreign bases’ (fomented from outside) would have time to build up to serious proportions, particularly in Mauritius.”49
A British official was even blunter during face-to-face meetings. He told U.S. representatives that British officials could not proceed in detaching the islands (by this point agreed to be Chagos, and the Aldabra, Desroches, and Farquhar groups) from Mauritius and the Seychelles until they knew what “bribe” they could offer the local governments.50
A few days later, Foreign Office official E. H. Peck told Kitchen he was “red-faced” over the matter but stressed the need to give Mauritius a “platinum handshake.”51 British Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart officially inquired in an aide-mémoire if the United States was willing to make a financial contribution. Stewart estimated the total cost at £10 million, or $28 million, and explained that the money would “include compensation for the inhabitants and commercial interests displaced.”52
The Joint Chiefs took the matter under consideration and decided “perpetual access” to the islands was worth $15 million. Although McNamara initially disagreed (he believed payment would be a signal to the British that the United States was ready to assume Britain’s position in the Indian Ocean), the Secretary of Defense changed his mind. On June 14, 1965, McNamara authorized a contribution of up to half—or $14 million—of Britain’s BIOT expenses.53
With the financial arrangement secured, Kitchen led another State-Defense team to London to finalize the foundations of the deal. The meetings were held on September 23–24, at the same time British ministers were concluding independence negotiations with Mauritian representatives. The leading Mauritian official, Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, who would become the first prime minister of Mauritius, was given little choice: Accept the detachment of Chagos from Mauritius and £3 million, or no independence. Ramgoolam chose independence and the money.54
The Seychelles, which was further from independence, had even less choice in the matter but won construction of an international airport, now essential to its tourism-based economy. The Seychelles eventually negotiated the return of its three groups when it gained independence in 1976.
As the Mauritian independence negotiations concluded, the British Cabinet informed Kitchen’s delegation that it would detach the Mauritian islands and the three Seychellois groups and maintain them under British sovereignty. “After two years of, at times, intensive negotiation,” reported a memorandum for Paul Nitze in his new job as Secretary of the Navy, “the use of the islands on acceptable terms for US defense requirements has been secured. The principal task remaining is to work out the details on making the islands available, particularly the status of the local population.”55
The decision to retain the islands was not announced publicly. On November 8, 1965, the British Government invoked an archaic royal prerogative of the monarch to pass laws without parliamentary approval. (Prime ministers did the same to take the nation into wars in Egypt in 1956 and Iraq in 2003.)56 The government, in the name of the Queen, used what is called an Order in Council to quietly declare that Chagos and the three groups of islands from the Seychelles “shall together form a separate colony which shall be known as the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT).”57
Investigative journalist John Pilger describes how they did it: “The British Indian Ocean Territory was brought into being by an order-in-council, a decision approved not by Parliament but by the monarch, acting on the advice—in effect, the instructions—of a secretive, unaccountable group known as the Privy Council. The members of this body, the Privy Councillors, include present and former government ministers. They appear before the Queen in Buckingham Palace, standing in a semi-circle around her, heads slightly bowed, like Druids; they never sit down.” The Orders in Council are read out by title, and the Queen simply says, “Agreed.” Pilger explains, “This is government by fiat: the use of a royal decree by politicians who want to get away with something undemocratically. Most British people have never heard of it.”58 (As we shall see, this would not be the last time the British Government would employ the Order in Council in this story.)
More than a month later, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 2066 noting its “deep concern” over actions taken by Great Britain “to detach certain islands from the Territory of Mauritius for the purpose of establishing a military base.” Citing the UN prohibition on disturbing the territorial integrity of non-self-governing territories, the General Assembly asked Britain “to take no action which would dismember the Territory of Mauritius and violate its territorial integrity,” and instead to implement fully 1960’s Declaration 1514 on decolonization.59
Blowtorch Bob moved more quickly than the UN. Two days after the BIOT was created, Komer sent the following nine-word memo to “Jeff” Kitchen: “Congratulations on the islands. Now how about some forces.”60
In the at times exotic bureaucratic language of Washington, “OBE” stands for “overtaken by events,” meaning that an issue is no longer relevant because of changed circumstances. Not long after the creation of the BIOT, the Joint Chiefs of Staff reviewed the communications station proposal for Diego Garcia and found that it had been “overtaken by events” and “that the high cost of construction did not warrant” the project.61 The relevant “events” were the development of satellite technology that made the need for a communications station on Diego Garcia essentially obsolete. The U.S. Embassy in London informed the Foreign Office of the change. The embassy said that for the time being, no population removal would be necessary.
Undeterred, Navy planners began drafting a new base proposal. One rear admiral suggested to Secretary of the Navy Nitze that creating a fuel station for ships transiting the Indian Ocean might offer a “suitable justification” for a facility.62 Under the name of Vice CNO Rivero, a four-page draft proposal emerged for a $45 million “fleet support activity,” comprising an anchorage, a runway, austere communications equipment, berthing and recreation facilities for 250 men, and 655,000 barrels of petroleum, oil, and lubricants (POL) storage. Nitze received the Rivero proposal and revised it personally before sending it to Secretary McNamara.63
One of Nitze’s staff members, Robert Murray, explained that the staff considered the base a “contingency facility” for the future. From his office as President and CEO of the consulting firm the Center for Naval Analyses, Murray recalled in 2004 that he and his colleagues said at the time, “None of this makes a lot of sense in today’s world. It’s only if you believe that you don’t know what the world’s going to look like, or what our interests are going to be in it, that you would want to do this. And if the cost is low . . . then, why not?” Murray clarified, “I mean, it was speculation against the future. Or a hedge against the future.”64
Because hedges and speculations do not frequently earn funding from Congress and thus priority within DOD, Nitze offered McNamara three justifications for the base: the loss of naval ports in littoral nations as a result of anti-Western sentiment; “tenuous” naval communications capacity in the Indian Ocean; and the need for the United States to augment its military presence in the ocean as Britain appeared on the verge of reducing its forces “East of Suez.”65
Nitze closed his memo to McNamara by saying the facility was the “minimum” necessary to meet the Navy’s existing requirements but could serve as a “nucleus around which to build an altogether adequate defense base.” Known for his aggressively persuasive writing style, Nitze argued, “We should plan now for the orderly development of a fleet support facility before the need for it reaches emergency proportions with attendant higher costs.”66
The reply from the Pentagon came from Nitze’s former deputy at ISA, John McNaughton. McNaughton politely informed Nitze that it was “prudent and necessary” for the Navy to continue in-house studies of the project.67
The Navy dutifully complied and later the same year offered a little-changed but repackaged facility at the same cost as Nitze’s proposal. Just before the end of 1966, however, the Pentagon rejected a proposed congressional notification package that would have asked for funding for the base. McNamara’s people were concerned about expected opposition on Capitol Hill, a pending military budget review in the midst of the Vietnam buildup, and the lack of British financial commitment to the project.68 The base and the Chagossians’ fate were again deferred.
With Nitze and the Navy temporarily stymied, the Air Force and JCS were simultaneously moving ahead with a proposal to build a joint U.S.-U.K. air base on Aldabra, one of the Seychelles island groups now part of the BIOT. In July, McNamara discussed the issue in a mid-morning telephone call with President Johnson, who was preparing for a visit by Prime Minister Wilson later that day.69
“What about this—his wanting to help you, uh, uh,” Johnson began. “Wanting you, to build, uh, uh—wanting us to participate in building an airport, when he moves out of Aden?”
“Uh—that, that. Alebra, in the Indian Ocean,” McNamara replied, misremembering the island’s name. “We can go in on a 50/50 basis, and I think it will cost us on the order of, of, uh, uh [pause] 10 million, I think.**** The island’s name is A – L – D –A – B – R – A. Aldabra.”
“Alright. And have you agreed to that?” Johnson queried.
“Uh, not in detail. No. And if you want to, it’s, it’s fine with us. [Pause] 50/50.”
“Alright. Anything else?” Johnson asked, moving the conversation to other issues.70
Six days later McNamara approved a proposal to accept cost sharing for the Aldabra base and to alert the British to new planning for Diego Garcia.71
While the Navy continued its studies and planning to win funding for Diego Garcia, Jeffrey Kitchen continued hammering out an official government-to-government agreement for use of the BIOT islands.72 In mid-November, Kitchen returned to London for more secret talks, accompanied by a team of six, including officials from the Pentagon, the Navy, and the Air Force. Over two days, Kitchen initialed the agreements with his counterparts in the Foreign Office. Kitchen noted that although financing was not yet secured for Diego Garcia, the Secretary of Defense had approved the Navy’s plan for a facility that could be expanded quickly in the future.73
A little more than a month later, the U.S. Ambassador to Britain, Honorable David K. E. Bruce, and a representative for the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, George Brown, M.P., met to sign the final agreements. As others were preparing for year’s end parties, they gathered, as one of Kitchen’s negotiators who witnessed the signing later said, “under the cover of darkness,” the day before New Year’s Eve, 1966.
The agreement signed that night was to be completed by an “exchange of notes.” It was innocuously titled, “Availability of Certain Indian Ocean Islands for Defense Purposes.” A treaty would have had to survive time-consuming legislative approval before Congress and Parliament; an exchange of notes accomplished the same thing without the legislative approval and public notification.
Published without notice months later in the United States by the Government Printing Office, the agreement made all the islands of the British Indian Ocean Territory “available to meet the needs of both Governments for defense.” As agreed, the United Kingdom would remain sovereign in the territory. The United States would have access to the islands for fifty years with an option to extend the agreement for an additional twenty years. Each government would pay for constructing its own facilities, though in general access would be shared. According to the published notes, the islands would be available to the United States “without charge.”74
In a set of confidential accords accompanying the notes, however, the U.S. Government agreed to make secret payments to the British of up to $14 million, or half the cost of creating the BIOT, as McNamara had agreed months earlier. These payments helped reimburse the British for “all costs pertaining to the administrative detachment of the Indian Ocean islands in question and to the acquisition of the lands thereon”—diplomatic legalese for the costs of deporting the Chagossians, buying out the plantation owners, and paying off Mauritius and the Seychelles.
A secret British document explained the arrangement:
Besides the published Agreement there is also a secret agreement under which . . . the US effectively, but indirectly, contributed half the estimated cost of establishing the territory (£10m). This was done by means of a reduction of £5m in the research and development surcharge due from Britain for the Polaris missile. Special measures were taken by both the US and UK Governments to maintain the secrecy of this arrangement.75
Seeking to avoid congressional oversight and required congressional approval for a budget appropriation, the DOD credited the British for payments owed on research and development costs on the purchase of Polaris missiles. Another British document described the evasion of Congress:
The second point, and of even more importance to us, is the American insistence that the Financial Arrangements must remain secret. . . . The Americans attach great importance to secrecy because the Unites States Government has, for cogent political reasons of its own, chosen to conceal from Congress the substantial financial assistance which we are to get in the form of a remission of Polaris Research and Development dues.76
No money was exchanged directly, but in effect, a $14 million debt was wiped off the books for Great Britain.
Yet this was not the only secret agreement. Another confidential “agreed minute” referred to a paragraph in the public notes where the United States agreed to notify the United Kingdom in advance of using any island so that Britain might take those “administrative measures” necessary to make the islands available for use. Those administrative measures, the secret notes show, were any actions necessary for closing down the plantations and “resettling the inhabitants.”77
* Pakistanis and Chinese Communists from the Peoples Republic of China, respectively, in the bigoted bureaucratic lingo of the day.
** In a handwritten note on the same memorandum, Komer in fact seems to confuse the name Diego Garcia with Diego Suarez, the French port in Madagascar.
*** They appear not to have bothered asking how to spell the name.
**** The correct estimated cost for half of the project was $25 million.