How to Hide an Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr

  The films took the idea and ran with it. The private island looms large in the film of Dr. No, a film for which Chris Blackwell worked as a location scout. Similar locales can be found in other Bond films: Thunderball (filmed on Wenner-Gren’s island), You Only Live Twice (rocket base under a Japanese volcanic island), Diamonds Are Forever (offshore oil rig), Live and Let Die (small Caribbean island dictatorship), The Man with the Golden Gun (private Thai island), The Spy Who Loved Me (giant sea base), and Skyfall (abandoned island). There is also a sequence in the 2006 Casino Royale shot, as was Thunderball, on Wenner-Gren’s island.

  The world of James Bond contains much that is absurd. The exploding pens, shark tanks, and endless procession of round-heeled female help-meets seem more the fruits of Fleming’s seasoned imagination than insights into actual espionage. Yet with the island thing, Fleming was onto something.

  Just as he saw, islands are instruments of world domination.

  *

  They hadn’t always been that way. Though the United States had begun its overseas expansion by collecting guano islands, its interest waned after they were scraped clean. In 1904 a State Department official announced that the United States claimed “no sovereign or territorial rights over guano islands”—a bizarre statement,17 even more so because it was apparently unprovoked.

  Civil servants cannot single-handedly de-annex parts of the United States. Still, the statement captured the prevailing mood of the time. The United States was actively interested in colonies and was fighting a bloody war to hold on to its largest one, the Philippines. But remote atolls and sandbars meant much less. Washington made no objection and perhaps didn’t even notice when other powers set up shop on some of its guano islands.

  This blithe attitude may have served in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but new technologies endowed islands with new significance. Aviation meant they could serve as landing strips; radio meant they could host transmitters. In 1935 the State Department announced that it was annexing Baker, Howland, and Jarvis Islands in the central Pacific. Two days later, it hastily rescinded the announcement. The United States didn’t need to annex those islands, officials clarified with embarrassment. A consultation of the records had revealed that it already owned them.18

  It was a telling oversight, one that captured well the shambolic character of U.S. imperial administration. But it changed nothing from a strategic perspective. Franklin Delano Roosevelt called in Ernest Gruening, then the head of the Division of Territories and Island Possessions, for a chat about those islands. “Are we in an acquisitive mood today?”19 Roosevelt asked.

  Gruening assured the president he was.

  Roosevelt sent Gruening on a Pacific tour. As Gruening saw it, legal claims dating from the nineteenth century weren’t enough. To “maintain the sovereignty of the United States,”20 he believed, the guano islands must be actively colonized. And so, playing the part of one of history’s last conquistadors, Gruening set off to plant the flag in the soil and claim the islands in the name of his country.

  The plan, undertaken in secret starting in 1935, was to visit the Pacific guano islands, raise a flag, install a plaque, and drop off “colonies” of four or more Hawaiians on each. Why Hawaiians? “Because of their adaptability to prevailing conditions,”21 Gruening explained. Thus the finest products of the Kamehameha Schools in Hawai‘i were deposited in small groups on remote islands,22 with drums of water, crates of canned goods, and instructions to ward off invaders.

  It didn’t go perfectly. Arriving on Canton Island, Gruening’s men found a British radio operator there. “I am instructed to inform you that this is British territory and to protest against your raising the American flag,”23 he said. But they hoisted the flag and dropped off the Hawaiians anyway.

  Howland Island was of special interest,24 as it was to be a stop in the aviator Amelia Earhart’s round-the-world journey (she died en route to it). But to tame it, the Hawaiians would have to deal with an out-of-control rat population—the same rats that had tormented the island’s guano miners some eighty years earlier. The settlers used red quill powder as a poison. The powder killed the rats but acted slowly enough that the island’s few other animals were able to regurgitate it.

  Ernest Gruening (back row, right) and four Hawaiian colonists on Howland Island

  The resulting scenario was surreal, half Heart of Darkness, half Salvador Dalí. At the very least, it would make a striking diorama: four Hawaiians eating out of crates, waiting for a famous aviator who would never arrive on a tiny, poisoned island that was littered with guano, crab vomit, and dead rats. And the Stars and Stripes flapping crisply in the breeze.

  *

  There was a comic air to the reconquest of the guano islands. Yet, zooming out, we can see the event as an important inflection point in U.S. history. Tiny islands such as Howland proved to be, just as Roosevelt and Gruening foresaw, extremely useful. They and other small pockets of land became the mainstays of the United States’ territorial empire.

  Small specks of land acquired special importance in the twilight of formal empire. The global tide of decolonization washed most imperial arrangements from the map, but it left a few nooks and crannies, nearly all small islands. Large colonies could hope for self-sufficiency and launch nationalist movements to seize it. Small ones could not. For them, as Luis Muñoz Marín had observed, independence might mean economic suicide. And for places as small as Guam on the U.S. Virgin Islands, to stage armed revolutions would be actual suicide.

  Similar calculations ran on the other side of the equation. Synthetics, international standardization, and the technologies of movement had alleviated the pressure on rich countries to colonize, since colonial products became both less necessary and easier to get through international (rather than imperial) trade. But geopolitics did not entirely vanish. Great powers still played games on the maps. It’s just that with the advent of planes and wireless, they no longer needed to bother with difficult-to-hold populated colonies, as they had in Captain Mahan’s day. They could focus instead on small pockets of control.

  The United States, in other words, did not abandon empire after the Second World War. Rather, it reshuffled its imperial portfolio, divesting itself of large colonies and investing in military bases, tiny specks of semi-sovereignty strewn around the globe. Today there are roughly eight hundred such bases,25 some of the most important of them on islands.

  The pointillist empire today: Known U.S. bases beyond the mainland

  It’s telling that the guano islands were recolonized at the same time as the Philippine commonwealth was being established—i.e., just as the largest colony was put on track for independence. It’s as if the United States, standing before the world map, put down the imperialist’s paint roller and picked up the pointillist’s brush.26

  *

  Gruening’s Gilbert and Sullivan–style adventures in the Pacific in the 1930s marked the turn toward pointillism. The Second World War locked the trajectory in. That war gave the United States more than two thousand overseas base sites. And it was hard to imagine giving them all back.

  Right at the war’s end, Harry Truman announced that his country coveted no territory. It was an anodyne statement, nearly identical to those his predecessors had often made. Yet this time it triggered what the State Department called a “storm of comment” from the press,27 Congress, and military leaders. What about the bases? they asked. Surely Truman wasn’t going to let them go, was he?

  Truman hastily clarified. The United States would take no colonies, he explained, but it would “maintain the military bases necessary for the complete protection of our interests and of world peace.”28 (It was straight out of Tom Sawyer, one critic cackled: “We seek no territorial expansion or selfish advantage except maybe a few battered old bases that nobody else wants and that aren’t much good anyhow.”29)

  This was the new way. As the United States loosened its grip on large colonies, it grabbed bases and small islands more ti
ghtly. In the Philippines, it refused to leave entirely after independence. Instead, it insisted, as the price of reconstruction aid to the Philippines, on receiving ninety-nine-year leases on select base sites.

  It was the same in Puerto Rico. Washington allowed gubernatorial elections and commonwealth status, but it clamped down on the eastern island of Vieques, which the navy turned into a sort of Caribbean Pearl Harbor. Around ten thousand of the poorest Puerto Ricans lived there, and many had their homes taken. Pedro Albizu Campos regarded the surrender of Vieques as the “vivisection”30 of Puerto Rico. As a community leader described Vieques, “We are the lamb that has been sacrificed so that the big island lives comfortably.”31

  On Guam,32 increased rights and citizenship came at the cost of a massive military buildup—today, more than a quarter of the island is military bases. Hawaiian statehood was accompanied by the military takeover of the smallest of Hawai‘i’s major islands, Kaho‘olawe, for use as a firing range and bombing site. Dwight Eisenhower, as president, had sought something similar in Alaska.33 His idea was to grant statehood but cleave off the strategically valuable portion of the territory, which would remain in military hands.

  The same dynamic prevailed in Japan. The United States occupied the main islands until 1952 but continued to hold strategically useful outer islands for far longer. It kept Iwo Jima until 1968, Okinawa until 1972. Even today, with Okinawa back in Japanese hands, the U.S. military still dominates its landscape. “The military doesn’t have bases on Okinawa,”34 a naval officer has explained. “The island itself is the base.”

  Then there were Japan’s mandated islands in Micronesia, which the United States had seized during the war. In the postwar settlement, they were taken from Japan and collectively placed under the authority of the United Nations as a strategic trust territory. Yet because those lightly inhabited islands (with some thirty thousand people living on them) were of great strategic value, Truman insisted that the United States have supervisory power. It got that power, and with little UN oversight.

  In 1958, the same year Fleming published Doctor No, a naval officer named Stuart Barber rolled all this into a strategic plan. Decolonization, Barber argued, was sweeping the globe, making it harder for Western powers to secure access to foreign lands. So, rather than claim colonies or negotiate with decolonizing nations, Barber suggested that the United States seek out “relatively small,35 lightly populated islands, separated from major population masses” for its bases.

  This was Barber’s “strategic island concept,” and it gave a name to what the United States was already doing. It underscored the point that in this new pointillist empire, colonialism was a liability, not an asset. The best bases were those that didn’t enmesh large populations. They were places where, in the words of Doctor No, the United States would have to “account to no one.”

  Or, as Albizu put it, “The Yankees are interested in the cage but not the birds.”36

  *

  What, specifically, could the United States do with an island base? A good example is the Swan Islands, a small cluster of three islands in an isolated patch of the Caribbean, not far from the fictional location of Doctor No’s island. The Swans were in the first batch of guano islands the United States had claimed.

  The guano ran dry, but after the Second World War, Washington found other uses for the Swans. The USDA used them to quarantine imported livestock suspected of carrying foot-and-mouth disease. In the 1950s the CIA secretly took over Great Swan and built a landing strip and a fifty-thousand-watt radio transmitter. That extremely powerful transmitter could reach South America, allowing the United States to cover with its radio beams territory inaccessible by ground.

  Soon after the CIA built its radio station, a mission of armed Honduran students traveled to Great Swan to liberate the islands and claim them for Honduras. They had no idea of the CIA’s presence, and the agency was determined to keep them in the dark. give them plenty of beer and protect the family jewels was the frantic cable from Washington (i.e., don’t let them discover the broadcasting equipment). Marines sped to the island to repel the invasion.

  The episode that followed is best appreciated by reading the cable traffic from Swan to Washington:37

  Swan to HQ: HONDURAN SHIP ON HORIZON. BEER ON ICE. TALKED TO STUDENTS. THEY CONFABING. HAVE ACCEPTED BEER.

  Swan to HQ: STUDENTS MIXING CEMENT IN WHICH THEY INTEND TO WRITE “THIS ISLAND BELONGS TO HONDURAS.” ONE GROUP MALINGERING, LISTENING TO EARTHA KITT RECORDS AND DRINKING FIFTH BEER.

  Swan to HQ: STUDENTS HAVE JUST RAISED HONDURAN FLAG. I SALUTED.

  Swan to HQ: BEER SUPPLIES RUNNING LOW. NOW BREAKING OUT THE RUM. THESE KIDS ARE GREAT.

  Swan to HQ: STUDENTS HAVE EMBARKED FOR HONDURAS. LIQUOR SUPPLY EXHAUSTED. FAMILY JEWELS INTACT.

  In the end, the students were permitted to sing the Honduran national anthem, take a census, and raise their flag (on a CIA-supplied pole). The students left, never realizing who their drinking buddies were. Or that a contingent of marines had been waiting, ready to start shooting if the beer didn’t work.

  The family jewels were worth protecting. In 1954 the CIA had successfully used radio to spread fake news during a coup it helped stage to overthrow Guatemala’s democratically elected but left-leaning government. With its transmitter on Swan Island, it could run an even more secure and sophisticated operation, this time directed at Fidel Castro’s socialist regime in Cuba. Through “Radio Swan,” which posed as a privately run station, the United States promulgated false news reports and trolled the Cuban government. Castro and his lieutenants were “pigs with beards,”38 Raul Castro was “a queer with effeminate friends.” Radio Havana Cuba shot back that Radio Swan was “a cage of hysterical parrots.” Hysterical or not, Radio Swan boasted fifty million regular listeners throughout the Caribbean and Central and South America.39

  In 1961 the United States sent seven ships of paramilitaries to invade Cuba—the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. The day before the invasion, Radio Swan sowed confusion with cryptic messages designed to confound Castro: “Look well at the rainbow.”40 “The fish will rise very soon.” “Chico is in the house. Visit him.” During the invasion, Radio Swan issued orders to nonexistent battalions to give courage to the rebels and spread fear among the authorities.

  When this became public, journalists snickered over the resemblance between the operation and the plot of Doctor No.41 But the similarities may have been more than coincidence. The director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, gushed about the Bond novels and owned a complete set—a gift from the author. Moreover, Dulles had solicited Ian Fleming’s advice on how to dislodge Castro.42 To his colleagues’ surprise, Dulles had given every sign of taking that advice seriously.

  The Bay of Pigs debacle forced Dulles into retirement and blew Radio Swan’s cover, but the CIA still found uses for the islands.43 In the 1980s the agency outfitted Great Swan with a port to off-load cargo intended for its favored political allies. Munitions, uniforms, parachutes, and other matériel flowed from the island to the rebels in Nicaragua who sought to bring down the leftist government. Great Swan was where right-wing paramilitaries trained, where Rhodesian mercenary pilots took off for their airdrops over Nicaragua.

  The CIA island was in fact a central node in the vast and distinctly not-legal plot to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. That plot in its fullness incorporated arms dealers, drug traffickers, Middle Eastern governments, religious organizations, Cuban exiles, retired generals, and Rambo-style soldiers of fortune. Had such a multifarious scheme appeared in one of Fleming’s novels, it might have strained his readers’ patience. It is a victory for the forces of concision that today we know it simply by two words, albeit incongruous ones: the Iran-Contra affair.

  *

  In the 1958 novel Doctor No, guano is ubiquitous. Bond observes the thickly flocking birds, watches the miners, and smells the stink of the stuff. His love interest, Honeychile Rider, gets covered in it (she is “powdered white … except where th
e tears had marked her cheeks”).44 At the end of the novel, Bond defeats Doctor No by burying him in a guano pit, the villain’s “screaming lungs stuffing with the filthy dust” until he dies.

  In the 1962 film version, however, there is no trace of guano. Instead, Honeychile gets covered in “radioactive contamination.” Doctor No’s base is powered by a nuclear reactor, and Bond triumphs in the end by triggering a meltdown, drowning Doctor No in the pool containing the overheating reactor and wrecking the island. (That Bond’s action would quite likely have turned Jamaica and its environs into a Chernobyl-style fallout zone goes narratively unexplored.)

  The film’s introduction of the nuclear theme was not a random choice. There is a special connection between nuclear weapons and islands, one that has placed the world’s greatest instruments of destruction on some of its most remote locales. The very distance of small islands from large populations has made them ideal sites to test and store nuclear devices.

  When the United States tested its first atomic bomb, scientists used the New Mexican desert. But for subsequent tests the Atomic Energy Commission sought places far from the mainland. “We just took out dozens of maps and started looking for remote sites,”45 recalled one of the naval officers tasked with the hunt for islands. He lit on the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Conveniently, it belonged to the Micronesian islands that the United States had seized at the end of the war (which would soon become the U.S.-supervised strategic trust territory).

  Less conveniently, the atoll was populated; it had 167 inhabitants. What would become of them? The navy made a great show of asking them to leave. It filmed a meeting between the military governor of the Marshalls and King Juda of the Bikini Marshallese. In the film, which was shown widely, the Marshallese solemnly consider the request. “We will gladly go,”46 Juda answers. “Everything in God’s hands.”