The Iron Lady

by John Campbell

  Mrs Thatcher received this message before she went out to dinner but, in view of the promise of further consultation, did not think it required an immediate reply. Only three hours later, however, at ten o’clock, there came a second, much shorter cable, in which the President informed her curtly: ‘I have decided to respond positively to this request.’

  Our forces will establish themselves in Grenada. The collective Caribbean security force will disembark on Grenada shortly thereafter… We will inform you of further developments as they occur. Other allies will be apprised of our actions after they are begun.

  I expect that a new provisional government will be formed in Grenada shortly after the collective security force arrives. We hope that Her Majesty’s government will join us by extending support to Grenada’s new leaders.54

  What these two cables clearly show is that the Americans were perfectly well aware of Britain’s primary responsibility in Grenada, but had decided that Mrs Thatcher’s support for unilateral US action could be taken for granted. As a robust Cold Warrior, they assumed, the Iron Lady would applaud the suppression of a Communist coup anywhere in the world. But if they thought she would be gratified to be informed a few hours before the other allies, they were badly mistaken. She was outraged, first that the Americans should think of invading the Queen’s territory, which touched in her the same patriotic trigger as the Argentine invasion of the Falklands; worse still that they should do it without telling her. There is no doubt that she felt personally let down. But she did not get on the telephone immediately. First she held a midnight meeting with Howe and Michael Heseltine. They agreed a reply setting out Britain’s objections to military action and urging the Americans to hold their hand. In addition, Mrs Thatcher worried that America intervening militarily in the Caribbean would be used by the Russians to legitimise their invasion of Afghanistan. She told her staff that she remembered seeing newspaper placards in 1956 reading ‘Britain Invades Egypt’ and knew instantly that it was wrong.55

  Only after sending Britain’s reasoned objection did she telephone Reagan, at about two o’clock in the morning, London time. Unfortunately no transcript of her call was made. But both Howe, in his memoirs, and Mrs Thatcher at the time, contradict the story that she gave the President an earful. All she did was to ask him to consider carefully the advice in her cabled message. So much for her giving Reagan ‘a prime ticking off’.

  A few hours later – just before 7.00 a.m. in London, just before 2.00 a.m. in Washington and only three hours before the troops landed – came Reagan’s reply, diplomatic but uncompromising. He thanked Mrs Thatcher for her ‘thoughtful message’, claimed to have ‘weighed very carefully’ the issues she had raised, but insisted that while he appreciated the dangers inherent in a military operation, ‘on balance, I see this as the lesser of two risks’. He stressed the danger of Soviet influence in Grenada, felt that he had no choice but to intervene, and repeated his hope that ‘as we proceed, in cooperation with the OECS countries, we would have the active cooperation of Her Majesty’s Government’ and the support of the Governor-General in establishing an interim government.56

  That afternoon Howe had to explain to the Commons why he had inadvertently misled the House the day before. He still claimed to have kept ‘closely in touch’ with the American Government over the weekend, and confirmed that he and Mrs Thatcher had opposed military intervention; but he could not deny that their advice had not been asked until it was too late and had been ignored when given. He could not endorse the American action, but neither could he condemn it, leaving himself open to the mockery of Denis Healey, who savaged the Government’s ‘impression of pitiable impotence’. Not for the first time, he charged, Mrs Thatcher had allowed ‘President Reagan to walk all over her’.57

  Next day – during an uncomfortable Commons debate – Reagan rang to apologise for the embarrassment he had caused her. This time the transcript shows Mrs Thatcher to have been uncharacteristically monosyllabic. But the action was under way now and she hoped it would be successful.

  When her turn came to face questions in the Commons, Mrs Thatcher was obliged to put the best face possible on her humiliation. Needled by Labour glee at the breach of her special relationship, she made the best case she could for the American action, recalling that they had intervened to restore democracy in Dominica in exactly the same way in 1965.58 Nevertheless, she was still seething. ‘That man!’, she railed. ‘After all I’ve done for him, he didn’t even consult me.’59 On a late-night BBC World Service phone-in, she vented her fury on an American caller who accused her of failing to stand alongside the Americans in fighting Communism:

  We in the Western countries, the Western democracies, use our force to defend our way of life. We do not use it to walk into other people’s countries, independent sovereign territories… If you are pronouncing a new law that wherever Communism reigns against the will of the people… there the United States shall enter, we are going to have really terrible wars in the world.60

  The Americans were bewildered by Mrs Thatcher’s attitude. They did not understand her sensitivity about the Commonwealth and could not see that their action was any different from what she herself had done in the Falklands. Senior members of the administration were angry that Britain did not give them the same support they had given Britain in the South Atlantic. Reagan regretted the dispute, but was unrepentant because he thought she was ‘just plain wrong’.61 And in due course, as it became clear that the invasion – unlike some other American military interventions – had been wholly successful in its limited objectives, Mrs Thatcher herself came to feel that she had been wrong to oppose it. At any rate she quickly put the episode behind her and set herself to making sure that there was no lasting damage to her most important international relationship.

  The tension passed. Nevertheless Mrs Thatcher’s initial reaction to Grenada was a telling glimpse of her ultimate priority. Disposed as she was to defer to American leadership, her instinct was to repel any infringement of what she saw as British – or in this case Commonwealth – sovereignty. Had she been consulted she might well have agreed to a joint operation to restore democracy. She wanted to be America’s partner, not its poodle. She was deeply hurt by Reagan’s failure to consult her, but the lesson she learned was that next time the Americans needed her she must not let them down.

  The test came in April 1986, when Washington was provoked by a spate of terrorist attacks on American tourists and servicemen in Europe, presumed to be the work of Libyan agents. Libya’s eccentric President, Colonel Gaddafi, had been a particular bête noire of Reagan’s from the moment he entered the White House, and by 1986 Reagan was itching to punish him. When a TWA plane was sabotaged over Greece on 2 April, and five servicemen were killed by a bomb in a Berlin nightclub three days later, the President determined to bomb Tripoli in retaliation. The US plan involved using F-111s based in Britain, partly for accuracy, but also deliberately to involve the European allies in the action. But Reagan’s request put Mrs Thatcher on the spot at a time when her authority was weakened by the Westland crisis. France and Spain refused the Americans permission to overfly their territory; and Mrs Thatcher knew she would invite a political storm if she agreed to let the American mission fly from British bases.

  Britain too had suffered from Libyan terrorism – notably the shooting of a London policewoman in 1984. MI5 had no doubt of Libya’s responsibility for the latest attacks. But again Mrs Thatcher worried about the legality of the proposed action. Just three months earlier, speaking to American journalists in London, she had explicitly condemned retaliatory action against terrorism. ‘I must warn you that I do not believe in retaliatory strikes that are against international law,’ she declared. ‘Once you start going across borders then I do not see an end to it… I uphold international law very firmly.’62 Some time earlier she had refused to endorse an Israeli attack on the headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in Tunis, asking Garret FitzGerald to imagi
ne what the Americans would say if Britain ‘bombed the Provos in Dundalk’.63 She had also refused to follow a unilateral American embargo on Libyan oil.

  But when Reagan asked her permission, late in the evening of 8 April, she felt that she had no choice but to agree. Particularly after Grenada, she could not afford to deny the Americans the payback to which they felt they were entitled after the Falklands. In her view – and theirs – this was what the Alliance was all about. ‘The cost to Britain of not backing American action,’ she wrote in her memoirs, ‘was unthinkable.’64 Her only escape was to try to convince the Americans that retaliation would be counterproductive. After hasty consultation she sent back a holding reply asking for more detail about intended targets, warning of the risk of civilian casualties and spelling out the danger that the United States would be seen to be in breach of international law unless the action could plausibly be justified under Article 51 of the UN Charter as ‘self-defence’.

  The next day she held more ad hoc meetings with relevant ministers, including the Attorney-General, Michael Havers. All were unhappy, but their doubts only hardened Mrs Thatcher’s resolve, as Charles Powell recalled:

  The Foreign Office were whole-heartedly against it, believing it would lead to all our embassies in the Middle East being burned, all our interests there ruined. But she knew it was the right thing to do and she just said, ‘This is what allies are for… If one wants help, they get help.’ It just seemed so simple to her.65

  After the event, when the television news showed pictures of the dead and injured in the streets of Tripoli, the opposition parties once again condemned her slavish subservience to American wishes, asserting that British complicity in the bombing would expose British travellers to retaliation. Opinion polls showed 70 per cent opposition to the American action – ‘even worse than I had feared’, Mrs Thatcher wrote in her memoirs.66 But in public she was defiant. ‘It was inconceivable to me,’ she told the House of Commons, ‘that we should refuse United States aircraft and personnel the opportunity to defend their people.’67

  One opponent who backed her was the SDP leader David Owen. In his view Mrs Thatcher not only displayed courage and loyalty, but demonstrated ‘one of the distinguishing features of great leadership – the ability to turn a blind eye to… legal niceties’. In the event, he believed, ‘the bombing did deter Libya… even though it was, by any legal standard, retaliation not self-defence and therefore outside the terms of the UN Charter’.68 In her memoirs Lady Thatcher too defended the bombing as having been justified by results. ‘It turned out to be a more decisive blow against Libyan-sponsored terrorism than I could ever have imagined… The much-vaunted Libyan counter-attack did not… take place… There was a marked decline in Libyan-sponsored terrorism in succeeding years.’69 There is a problem, here, however. The Thatcher – Owen defence is contradicted by the verdict of the Scottish court in the Netherlands which convicted a Libyan agent of the bombing of the US airliner over Lockerbie in 1989 which killed 289 people, the most serious terrorist outrage of the whole decade. Oddly, Mrs Thatcher fails to mention Lockerbie in her memoirs. This might be because it dents her justification of the American action in 1986. Alternatively it could be because she knew that the attribution of guilt to Libya – rather than Syria or the PLO – was false.[j]

  But her principal reason at the time for backing the American raid was to show herself – by contrast with the feeble Europeans – a reliable ally; and in this she was triumphantly successful. Doubts raised in Washington by her reaction to Grenada were drowned in an outpouring of praise and gratitude. ‘The fact that so few had stuck by America in her time of trial,’ she wrote, ‘strengthened the “special relationship”.’71 She got her payback later that summer when Congress – after years of Irish-American obstruction – approved a new extradition treaty, closing the loophole which had allowed IRA terrorists to evade extradition by claiming that their murders were ‘political’. The Senate only ratified the new treaty after pressure from Reagan explicitly linking it to Britain’s support for the US action in April. Here was one clear benefit from the special relationship.

  Defusing the Cold War

  But these were side shows. The central purpose of the Atlantic alliance was to combat the Soviet Union; and it was here that the eight years of the Reagan – Thatcher partnership saw the most dramatic movement. The sudden breach of the Berlin Wall in 1989, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union itself a couple of years later, were totally unpredicted and, even as the events unfolded, unexpected.Yet both Reagan and Mrs Thatcher had been working for exactly that result; and with hindsight it can be seen that their dual-track strategy in the mid-1980s was staggeringly successful in bringing it about.

  Though Mrs Thatcher had always been unrestrained in condemning the Soviet Union as a tyrannical force for evil in the world, she also believed – just because it was so repressive – that it must eventually collapse from lack of popular support and economic failure. She wanted to win the Cold War by helping it to do so: to encourage the Russian people and their subject populations in Eastern Europe to throw off the shackles by their own efforts and find freedom for themselves. She was very excited by the Solidarity movement in Poland, and disappointed when it seemed to peter out under the initial impact of General Jaruzelski’s martial law. Beneath her hatred of Communism she even retained traces of a wartime schoolgirl’s admiration for the heroic sacrifices of the Russian people in the struggle against Hitler. She never lost sight of the ordinary people behind the Iron Curtain.

  At this time the Cold War appeared to be at its bleakest. NATO was in the process of stationing cruise missiles in Europe in response to Soviet deployment of SS-20s. Reagan – widely portrayed in Europe as a trigger-happy cowboy – had embarked on an expensive programme of modernising America’s nuclear arsenal, and in March 1983 made his famous speech in Orlando, Florida, labelling the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire… the focus of evil in the modern world’.72 The Russians had a propaganda field day denouncing his warmongering provocation; but just six months later they furnished graphic evidence of what he meant by shooting down a South Korean airliner which strayed accidentally into Soviet air space, with the loss of 269 lives.

  Yet it was at this very moment that Mrs Thatcher started making overtures to the Soviet Union. Leonid Brezhnev had died in November 1982 and she was keen to establish early contact with the new General-Secretary, the younger but still stone-faced Yuri Andropov. She began to look seriously for openings after June 1983.

  On 8 September she held an all-day seminar at Chequers with academic experts on the Soviet Union to look at the possibilities. An urgent consideration was the recognition that defence spending could not go on rising indefinitely.73 Britain (5.2 per cent) already spent a substantially higher proportion of GDP on defence than either France (4.2 per cent) or West Germany (3.4 per cent).74 Reagan might reckon that the US could always outspend the Soviets, but Mrs Thatcher did not have the same resources. She needed a fresh approach. In Washington three weeks later, therefore, and in her party conference speech a fortnight after that, she surprised her hearers by sounding a new note of peaceful coexistence based on realism: ‘We have to deal with the Soviet Union,’ she asserted. ‘We live on the same planet and we have to go on sharing it.’75

  Her next step was to make her first trip as Prime Minister behind the Iron Curtain. In February 1984 she visited Hungary, selected as one part of the Soviet empire that was marginally freer than the rest, and had a long talk with the veteran leader, János Kádár, who welcomed her new concern for East – West cooperation and filled her in on the personalities to watch in the Kremlin. As usual, she passed on her impressions to the White House. ‘I am becoming convinced,’ she wrote to Reagan, ‘that we are more likely to make progress on the detailed arms control negotiations if we can establish a broader basis of understanding between East and West… It will be a slow and gradual process, during which we must never lower our guard. However, I believe that the e
ffort has to be made.’76

  A few days after she returned from Hungary, Andropov died. Mrs Thatcher immediately decided to attend his funeral. There she met not only his successor, the elderly and ailing Konstantin Chernenko; but also Mikhail Gorbachev, who was clearly the coming man. ‘I spotted him’, she claims in her memoirs, ‘because I was looking for someone like him.’77 In fact the Canadians had already spotted him – Trudeau had told her about Gorbachev the previous September; and nearer home Peter Walker had also met him and drawn attention to him before she went to Moscow.78 Even so, she did well to seize the initiative by inviting Gorbachev – at that time the youngest member of the Soviet politburo – to visit Britain. ‘Our record at picking winners had not been good,’ Percy Cradock reflected. But in Gorbachev’s case ‘we drew the right card’.79

  Gorbachev came to Britain the following December. He was not yet Soviet leader, and Mrs Thatcher was accompanied by several of her colleagues; but over lunch at Chequers the two champions quickly dropped their agendas and simply argued, so freely that their interpreters struggled to keep up. Gorbachev was ‘an unusual Russian’, Mrs Thatcher told Reagan at Camp David the following week, ‘in that he was much less constrained, more charming, open to discussion and debate, and did not stick to prepared notes’.80

  ‘I found myself liking him’, she wrote in her memoirs.81 Even Denis – equally pleasantly surprised by Gorbachev’s wife Raisa – was aware that ‘something pretty special’ was happening.82 The fact was that Mrs Thatcher relished having an opponent who was prepared to argue with her. ‘He was self-confident and though he larded his remarks with respectful references to Mr Chernenko… he did not seem in the least uneasy about entering into controversial areas of high politics.’83 Gorbachev evidently enjoyed their exchange as much as she did, even though – on her home ground – he was necessarily on the defensive much of the time. Despite their fundamental differences, Gorbachev and Mrs Thatcher were temperamentally alike: each recognised the other as a domestic radical, battling the forces of inertia in their respective countries. Famously, therefore, when she spoke to the BBC next day, Mrs Thatcher declared that this was a man she could ‘do business with’.84