“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, non-nuclear 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, world-wide U.S. military machine.”3
In June 1967, with Diego Garcia detached from Mauritius as part of the BIOT and an agreement for a base signed but still facing stiff opposition on financial grounds from Robert McNamara, Nitze left his job as Secretary of the Navy to become Deputy Secretary of Defense, the second highest-ranking official in the Defense Department. Half a year later, with Britain having devalued the pound and still facing deep military spending cuts and scientific opposition to a base on Aldabra, Prime Minister Wilson announced the cancellation of the Aldabra base. McNamara, Nitze, and other U.S. officials were little interested in going it alone on Aldabra (which they had always viewed primarily as another way to keep a British military presence “East of Suez”). Nitze and other Pentagon leaders returned their focus to Diego Garcia.4
Before long, however, changes came closer to home. By March 1968, McNamara had left the Defense Department for the World Bank, and Clark Clifford became Johnson’s new Secretary of Defense. With Clifford focused almost entirely on Vietnam, Nitze was left to run most of the rest of the Pentagon. Having worked on Diego Garcia since 1961 during his tenure at ISA, Nitze soon began meeting with Navy officials to discuss plans for the base.
Barely a month after McNamara’s departure, the Joint Chiefs offered a “reappraisal” of the Diego Garcia proposal in light of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and the January 1968 British decision to withdraw their forces east of Suez by the end of 1971. Once again predicting the development of a “power vacuum” in the region and ensuing Soviet and Chinese “domination,” the JCS recommended “the immediate establishment” of a base on Diego. They proposed a $46 million joint service facility capable of supporting limited forces in “contingency situations” (the euphemism for combat), Army and Air Force infrastructure, and a 12,000-foot runway capable of landing B-52 nuclear bombers and C-5A transport aircraft.5 So much for “austere.”
Internally the JCS crafted a strategy to dissuade new Secretary of Defense Clifford from being “unduly influenced” by Systems Analysis: “The project is analogous to an insurance policy,” their rationale explained. “Low premiums now could lead to large returns later if military requirement does develop.” The Chiefs continued, “We are trying to buy preparedness which is never cost-effective.”6
Systems Analysis was again unconvinced. It urged the Secretary to “reject the JCS proposal” because it was not cost-effective and risked starting an arms race in the Indian Ocean.7
Surprisingly, Deputy Secretary of Defense Nitze agreed. He found there was “no justification” for a major base. However, he decided that “adequate justification exists” for what he called a “modest facility” on Diego Garcia, at a cost of $26 million, which, it just so happened, was exactly the price he had previously suggested as Secretary of the Navy.8
In this case, Nitze let the JCS provide the “bludgeon” with its warnings of Soviet “domination” and Chinese “expansion.” In the face of these articulated threats and with the major JCS proposal on the table, Nitze’s plan looked like a cheap, rational option, challenging the heart of Systems Analysis’s opposition.
The Navy submitted a plan for the base along Nitze’s suggested lines. It sent Nitze’s former staffer Elmo Zumwalt back to Ravenal at Systems Analysis to make the case. “What is so striking about the succession of proposals,” Ravenal later said, was “the kaleidoscopic change of rationales to support the same proposals.”9
But this time, “they knew they were going to win,” Ravenal recalled of Zumwalt’s visit. “They were going to do it right this time. . . . They weren’t going to make some sort of a [weak] case.”
Still Systems Analysis continued its opposition, questioning the urgency of the Diego project and asking for it to be deferred until fiscal year 1971. But this time, Ravenal explained, “We lost.”
ISA approved the plan as expected and in November 1968, Nitze signed off on the Navy’s request to include $9,556,000 in the fiscal year 1970 military construction budget.10 Within days, the Navy had notified the armed services committees of both houses of Congress. Under Nitze’s leadership, an interdepartmental group of top officials from the Pentagon, State Department, CIA, and Treasury Department began arguing for the base on Capitol Hill.11 In January 1969, a classified line item for Diego Garcia appeared in the fiscal year 1970 Military Construction budget. The funding process for the base was finally underway.
“It is the persistence of the military services,” Ravenal would tell Congress years later, “that eventually wears down opposition within the Pentagon, within the executive branch, and ultimately within Congress and succeeds in attaining what they were after in the first place.”12
In the case of Nitze, Ravenal told me, one has to see, “He threw the football as Secretary of the Navy, and he caught it as Deputy Secretary of Defense.”
While DOD was quarreling over funding, the State Department’s Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs and the embassy in London were coordinating the removals with the British.
“U.S. would desire removal of migrant laborers from Diego Garcia after due notice in accord with Minutes to BIOT Agreement,” read an August 1968 telegram to the embassy in the name of Secretary of State Rusk. The joint State-Defense message instructed the embassy to inform British officials of the State and Defense departments’ concern that the removals might arouse the attention of the United Nations’ Committee of Twenty-Four. The message asked that the removals be carried out in a manner minimizing such negative publicity, preferably with resettlement taking place outside the BIOT (and thus technically removing it from the purview of the Committee of Twenty-Four).13
The telegram further noted that some British officials had still been using the term “inhabitants” to describe the people of Diego Garcia. Following the Foreign Office’s plan to deny there was a settled population, the message asserted that the islanders were in fact “migrant laborers.”
“We suggest, therefore, that the term ‘migrant laborers’ be used in any conversations with HMG as withdrawal of ‘inhabitants’ obviously would be more difficult to justify to littoral countries and Committee of Twenty-four.”14
The embassy spoke with the Foreign Office the next day. Ambassador David Bruce telegrammed back to the State Department that the Foreign Office’s representative “took the point on ‘migrant laborers’” but noted that although “it was a good term for cosmetic purposes . . . it might be difficult to make completely credible as some of the ‘migrants’ are second generation Diego residents.”15
“Negligible. . . . For all practical purposes . . . uninhabited.” Or so the U.S. Navy said when characterizing Chagos’s population in briefing papers delivered to members of Congress to secure Diego’s funding in the 1970 military construction budget. When pushed by Senate Appropriations Committee member Senator Henry Jackson about the local population, one Navy official “told him that it consisted entirely of rotating contract copra workers, and that the British intended to relocate them as soon as possible after Congressional action was complete.” Recounting Jackson’s reaction, the official explained, “He came back to this question twice more. He was obviously concerned about local political problems. I assured him that there should be none.”16
On Capitol Hill however, the political problems mounted for the Navy. First the Senate Armed Services Committee rejected the project, only to have it restored in a House-Senate conference. Then, after the House Appropriations Committee authorized funding, Jackson’s Senate committee disapproved it, despite an intensive Navy lobbying campaign led by new Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Thomas Moorer.
In appropriations committee conference, senators led by Democrat Mike Mansfield refused to yield to Diego backers in the House through four meetings on the military appropriations. Democrats argued the project was a new military commitment overseas at a time when the Nixon administration had already indicated its desire to withdraw from Vietnam. Others wanted to “hold the Brits feet to the fire,” and keep the U.S. from assuming their role in the Indian Ocean. The conferees ultimately left the project unfunded but offered the Navy an oral agreement: It should return in the following year’s budget cycle with a pared-down request for a communications station without the other proposed facilities.17
Following the congressional defeat, newly elected President Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird gave the Navy equally simple instructions: “Make it a communications facility.” Within two weeks, John H. Chafee, the new Secretary of the Navy, submitted to Laird a proposal for a $17.78 million “communications facility,” with an initial funding increment of $5.4 million for fiscal year 1971.18
This of course was the same proposal that in 1965 had been “overtaken by events.” Navy documents indicate that while the station was supposed to address gaps in the naval communications network in the Indian Ocean, the only such gaps were in the ocean’s southernmost waters, closest to Antarctica and far from any potential conflict zones. A closer examination of the Navy’s budget shows too that half the cost of the revised “communications station” project was for dredging Diego Garcia’s lagoon and building an 8,000-foot airstrip; both were said to allow the resupply of a facility that featured a mere $800,000 worth of communications equipment. The “austere” project featured the construction of a 17-mile road network, a small nightclub, a movie theater, and a gym.19
Under the guise of a communications station, the Navy was asking for the nucleus of a base whose design allowed for ready expansion and the restoration of previously envisioned elements of the base.20 As the CNO’s Office of Communications and Cryptology put it, “The communications requirements cited as justification are fiction.”21
By the spring of 1970, with congressional funding looking likely for the following year, British officials wanted to begin making arrangements for the deportations. The British were eager to begin negotiations to convince the Mauritian Government to receive the Chagossians and arrange for their resettlement. State and Defense officials on the other hand were concerned that Mauritian officials would leak news of the negotiations and endanger congressional funding by drawing international attention to the removals. State and Defense moved quickly and secured agreement from British officials not to begin negotiations until funding had been secured.22 With members of Congress concerned at the time about increasing problems between U.S. overseas bases and local populations, presentations to Congress were careful to maintain that there would “be no indigenous population and no native labor utilized in the construction.”23
At the same time, Defense and State emphasized in internal discussions that they needed “to retain enough distance” from the details of the deportations to ensure that British officials would not look to the United States for assistance and to avoid anyone making the connection between the impending base construction and the removals. Accordingly, the departments rejected a suggestion from the embassy in London to send an engineer to assist simultaneously with the base planning and the resettlement program.24
As expected under the previous year’s oral agreement, in November 1970, Congress appropriated funds for an “austere communications facility.” The funds were again listed as a classified item in the military construction budget. In a closed-to-the-public “executive” session of the House Appropriations Committee, Navy representatives told members of Congress for the first time that the BIOT agreement included the “resettlement of local inhabitants” and $14 million in Polaris missile payments.25 Neither issue ever found its way out of the closed-door session.
With the money secured, Navy officials worked “to pursue the early removal” of those they were now simply calling “copra workers.”26 On December 7, 1970, a joint State-Defense message, telegrammed in the name of Secretary of State William P. Rogers, delivered instructions to the U.S. Embassy in London. Rogers asked the embassy to inform British officials that it was time “for the UK to accomplish relocation of the present residents of Diego Garcia to some other location”:
All local personnel should be moved from the western half of the island before the arrival of the construction force in March 1971. We hope that complete relocation can be accomplished by the end of July 1971 when aircraft begin using the air strip and the tempo of construction activities reaches its full scale.27
In turn, the embassy reported that the British were facing serious difficulties in arranging the deportations, given the bar on discussing resettlement with the Mauritians until after base funding was secured.28
“We recognize the British problem,” State and Defense replied, but deporting the population “was clearly envisioned as United Kingdom’s responsibility in 1966 agreements,” and one for which the United States had paid “up to $14,000,000 in Polaris Research and Development charges.”29
At 10:00 a.m. Washington time, on Tuesday, December 15, the Nixon White House for the first time publicly announced the United States’ intention to build a joint U.S.-U.K. military facility on Diego Garcia. The State and Defense departments provided embassies with a list of anticipated questions and suggested answers to handle press inquiries, including the following:
Q: What is the purpose of the facility?
A: To close a gap in our worldwide communications system and to provide communications support to U.S. and U.K. ships and aircraft in the Indian Ocean.
Q: Is this part of a U.S. build-up in the Indian Ocean?
A: No.
Q: Will other facilities be built in this area?
A: No others are contemplated.
Q: What will happen to the population of Diego Garcia?
A: The population consists of a small number of contract laborers from the Seychelles and Mauritius engaged to work on the copra plantations. Arrangements will be made for the contracts to be terminated at the appropriate time and for their return to Mauritius and Seychelles.30
If, as Earl Ravenal indicated with one of today’s ubiquitous sports metaphors, Paul Nitze helped get the plan for Diego Garcia moving as Secretary of the Navy (in fact he started even earlier at ISA) and got the base funded as Deputy Secretary of Defense, the man who saw the project to its completion was Admiral Elmo Zumwalt.
Born in San Francisco in 1920 to two doctors, Elmo Russell Zumwalt, Jr., a prep school valedictorian and Naval Academy graduate, enjoyed an unprecedented rise to the top of the Navy hierarchy. At 44, Zumwalt was the youngest naval officer to be promoted to Rear Admiral. At 49, Zumwalt became the Navy’s youngest-ever four-star Admiral and the youngestever CNO. His record of awards, decorations, and honorary degrees runs a single-spaced page, including medals from France, West Germany, Holland, Argentina, Brazil, Greece, Italy, Japan, Venezuela, Bolivia, Indonesia, Sweden, Colombia, Chile, South Korea, and South Vietnam.31
As CNO from 1970 to 1974, Zumwalt gained attention for integrating the Navy, for upgrading women’s roles, and for relaxing naval standards of dress in keeping with the times. In an order to the Navy entitled “Equal Opportunity in the Navy,” Zumwalt acknowledged the service’s discriminatory practices against African Americans and ordered corrective actions. “Ours must be a Navy family that recognizes no artificial barriers of race, color or religion, “Zumwalt wrote in what was a pathbreaking statement for the U.S. armed forces. “There is no black Navy, no white Navy—just one Navy—the United State Navy.”32
Nitze originally recruited Zumwalt in 1962 to work under him when Nitze was Assistant Secretary of Defense at ISA. In his memoirs, Zumwalt describes working closely with his “mentor and close friend.” Zumwalt eventually following Nitze to his position as Secretary of the Navy, as Nitze’s Executive Assistant and Senior Aide. Zumwalt was “at Paul’s side” during the Cuban Missile Crisis and negotiations leading to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Under Nitze’s “tutelage,” Zumwalt writes, he earned a “Ph.D. in political-military affairs.”33
Nitze, for his part, rewarded Zumwalt by recommending him to receive the rear admiral’s second star two years before others in his Naval Academy class were eligible and without having commanded a destroyer squadron or cruiser, as was the Navy’s tradition.34 Upon becoming the Navy’s youngest-ever rear admiral, Zumwalt commanded a cruiser-destroyer flotilla and later became Commander of U.S. Naval Forces in Vietnam before his promotion by President Nixon to CNO.
Zumwalt worked on Diego Garcia from his time with Nitze at ISA and maintained the same interest in the base once he left Nitze’s staff.35 One of Zumwalt’s staffers, Admiral Worth H. Bagley, remembered in 1989 how Zumwalt wanted to boost the U.S. naval presence in the Indian Ocean, in part out of concern for the “growing reliance on high oil imports at a time when things were looking unstable.” Helped by the 1971 war between India and Pakistan, Zumwalt increased the pace of deployments in the ocean.
“He went out himself and visited the . . . African countries,” Bagley explained. “Looking into the question of bases and things of that sort. . . . To see if he could find some economical way to increase base and crisis support possibilities there.”36
“In dealing with Diego Garcia also?” Bagley’s interviewer suggested.
“Moorer did that. Zumwalt finished it up for him,” Bagley replied.37
And so Zumwalt did. Once Nitze and Admiral Moorer had secured funding from Congress, Zumwalt focused on removing Diego Garcia’s population to prevent any construction delays. At a December 10, 1970 meeting, CNO Zumwalt told his deputies that he wanted to “push the British to get the copra workers off Diego Garcia prior to the commencement of construction,” scheduled to begin in March 1971.38
A secret letter confirmed British receipt of the order to remove the Chagossians: “The United States Government have recently confirmed that their security arrangements at Diego Garcia will require the removal of the entire population of the atoll. . . . This is no surprise. We have known since 1965 that if a defence facility were established we should have to resettle elsewhere the contract copra workers who live there.”39
As both governments prepared for the deportations and the start of construction, the U.S. embassies in London and Port Louis began recommending that the Navy use some Chagossians as manual laborers for the construction. Zumwalt refused. Two days after his December 17 order redressing racial discrimination in the Navy, Zumwalt stressed that by the end of construction all inhabitants should be moved to their “permanent other home.”
In a small note handwritten on the face of Zumwalt’s memo, a deputy commented, “Probably have no permanent other home.”40
As planning proceeded into January 1971, Zumwalt received a memorandum from the State Department’s Legal Adviser, John R. Stevenson, bearing on the deportations and the speed with which they would be accomplished. In the memo, Stevenson discussed “several legal considerations affecting US-UK responsibilities toward the 400 inhabitants of Diego Garcia.” He pointed out that the 1966 U.S.-U.K. agreement “provides certain safeguards for the inhabitants,” noting as well the commitment of both nations under the UN Charter to make the interests of inhabitants living in non–self-governing territories “paramount”:
Although the responsibility for carrying out measures to ensure the welfare of the inhabitants lies with the UK, the US is charged under the [1966] Agreement with facilitating these arrangements. London 10391 [embassy memo] states that the US constrained the UK from discussing the matter with the GOM pending the outcome of our Congressional appropriations legislation. In light of this, we are under a particular responsibility not to pressure the UK into meeting a time schedule which may not provide sufficient time in which to satisfactorily arrange for the welfare of the inhabitants. Beyond this, their removal is to accommodate US needs, and the USG will, of course, be considered to share the responsibility with the UK by the inhabitants and other nations if satisfactory arrangements are not made.41
A day after Zumwalt received Stevenson’s warning, two Navy officials were in the Seychelles to meet with the commissioner and administrator of the BIOT, Sir Bruce Greatbatch and John Todd. Together, they made plans for emptying the western half of Diego Garcia before the arrival of Navy “Seabee” construction teams, the “segregation” of Chagossians from the Seabees, and the “complete evacuation” of Diego Garcia by July.42 Greatbatch and Todd explained that this was the fastest they could get rid of the population other than to “drop Ilois on pier at Mauritius and sail away quickly.”43
Two weeks later a nine-member Navy reconnaissance party arrived on Diego Garcia with Todd and Moulinie & Co. director Paul Moulinie. On January 24, Todd and Moulinie ordered everyone on the island to the manager’s office at East Point. Dressed in white and perched on the veranda of the office overlooking the assembled crowd, Todd announced that the BIOT was closing Diego Garcia and the plantations. The BIOT, he added, would move as many people as possible to Peros Banhos and Salomon.
A black-and-white photograph of the scene shows the islanders staring in disbelief (see figure 6.1). Some “of the Ilois asked whether they could return to Mauritius instead and receive some compensation for leaving their ‘own country.’”44 Not unlike the Bikinians before them, most were simply stunned.45
When given the “choice” between deportation to Mauritius or to Peros Banhos or Salomon, most elected to remain in Chagos. Many Seychellois workers and their Chagos-born children were deported to the Seychelles. Some Chagossians resigned themselves to deportation directly to Mauritius.
Many Chagossians say that they were promised land, housing, and money upon reaching Mauritius.46 Moulinie’s nephew and company employee Marcel Moulinie swore in a 1977 court statement that he “told the labourers that it was quite probable that they would be compensated.” He continued, “I do not recall saying anything more than that. I was instructed to tell them that they had to leave and that is what I did.”47
Figure 6.1 Closing Diego Garcia, January 24, 1971. The BIOT announces the deportations, John Todd at center, hand on forehead; Paul Moulinie at right, in white hat. Courtesy Chagos Refugees Group, Willis Prosper.
Within days, a Navy status report detailed the progress of the deportations:
Relocation of the copra workers is proceeding in a satisfactory manner. The Administrator of the BIOT has given his assurance that the three small settlements on the western half of the atoll will be moved immediately to the eastern half. All copra producing activities on the western half will also cease immediately. The BIOT ship NORDVAER is relocating people from Diego Garcia to Peros Banhos, Salomon Islands, and the Seychelles on a regular basis.48
On February 4, a State-Defense message directed all government personnel to “Avoid all direct participation in resettlement of Ilois on Mauritius.” The cable explained that “basic responsibility [is] clearly British,” and that the United States was under “no obligation [to] assist with” the resettlement. On the other hand, the departments conceded, the government had some obligation to give the British “sufficient time” to adequately ensure the welfare of the islanders. “USG also realizes,” the telegram stated, “it will share in any criticism levied at the British for failing to meet their responsibilities re inhabitants’ welfare.”49
Figure 6.2 CNO Comment Sheet, Admiral Elmo Russell Zumwalt, Jr., Navy Yard, Washington, DC, 1971. Naval Historical Center.
The pace of deportations continued unabated, and within a few months, Marcel Moulinie and other company agents had forced all Chagossians on the western side of Diego Garcia, including the villages of Norwa and Pointe Marianne, to leave their homes and land to resettle on the eastern side of the atoll.50
On March 9, a landing party arrived on Diego to prepare for the arrival of a Seabee construction battalion later that month. Within days, unexpected reports came back to Navy headquarters from the advance team.
The commander “warns of possible bad publicity re the so-called ‘copra workers,’” a Deputy CNO wrote. “He cites . . . fine old man who’s been there 50 years. There’s a feeling the UK haven’t been completely above board on this. We don’t want another Culebra,” he said, referring to the opposition and negative publicity faced by the Navy during major protests in Puerto Rico against 1970 plans to deport Culebra’s people and use their island as a bombing range.51
“Relocation of persons,” Captain E. L. Cochrane, Jr. admitted to the Deputy CNO four days after the Seabees began construction, “is indeed a potential trouble area and could be exploited by opponents to our activities in the Indian Ocean.” He added, “A newsman so disposed could pose questions that would result in a very damaging report that long time inhabitants of Diego Garcia are being torn away from their family homes because of the construction of a sinister U.S. ‘base.’”52
The Navy, Pentagon, and State concluded, however, “that the advantages of having a station on an island which has no other inhabitants makes it worth the risk to ask the British to carry out the relocation.” In fact, Cochrane wrote, the advantages of having the British relocate the inhabitants were “so great that the United States should adopt a strict ‘let the British do it’ policy while at the same time keeping as well informed as possible on the actual relocation activities.”53
Weighing the concerns of the advance party and Cochrane’s recommendation, Zumwalt had the final say. On a comment sheet with the subject line “Copra workers on Diego Garcia,” Zumwalt had three words:
“Absolutely must go.”54