by James Philip
And now the Lady had dumped the whole dreadful mess squarely upon the Cabinet table, presumably so that her colleagues might confront the entrails of the carcass.
This time, there were nervous coughs.
“Forgive me, Margaret,” Peter Carrington, her deputy observed urbanely, always the perfect gentlemen, preux chevalier to the core. “I may not be alone in thinking the document prepared for us by the South Atlantic Planning Group, was simply for informational purposes?”
The SAPG had been one of Airey Neave’s ‘wheezes’; a thing initially veiled in all the secrecy his Ministry of National Security could muster before it was appropriated by the Royal Navy, and eventually came under the control of the Prime Minister’s favourite admiral, Simon Collingwood, VC, the former commanding officer of Britain’s first nuclear submarine, HMS Dreadnought.
Most insiders had thought that was an inauspicious sign and now many were worried that they had been right. The Navy might be keen to ‘do something’ about the Falklands but the other services were not, nor was there any widespread spontaneous clamour for action from the public. However, handing the SAPG to the most energetic, fortunately only middlingly charismatic, naval officer of his generation had set alarm bells ringing.
However, because not a lot had happened in the last couple of years on the South Atlantic Front, the unwary had begun to relax their guards. Hence the quiet alarm in the air today. If for no better reason than that the one person in the room whose stance on the question actually mattered, had now signalled that she had not forgotten about the events of April 1964.
Of those events and their aftermath, what was ‘known’ was hotly disputed both within, and outside the United Kingdom but in the way of such things; in government, there was an ‘accepted’ history. A working template, as it were, of what had ‘probably’ happened, and it was this version of reality which presently governed the work of the South Atlantic Planning Group and the competent department claiming a legitimate interest in the ongoing debate.
Thus, in Oxford it was now ‘known’ that of the one thousand-nine-hundred and thirty-nine persons, all bar twelve of them British citizens or dependents of the same, three-hundred-and-eight, including the Governor of the Falkland Islands, Sir Edwin ‘Arrow’ Arrowsmith and his wife, Clondagh, and every member of the civil administration and Falkland Islands Legislative Council, had – probably - lost their lives; including all ninety-nine servicemen (eighty-two Royal Marines and seventeen men of a Royal Navy Hydrographic team) present in the dependencies at the time of the invasion. This latter figure, included an eleven-man combined Royal Marine liaison team temporarily resident upon South Georgia, believed to have been killed in the fighting, around the abandoned whaling station at Leith. On East and West Falkland, it was believed that resistance had continued for about a fortnight after the invasion, right up until the invaders had started to shoot civilian hostages.
On the Falklands Archipelago it was now thought that Argentine infantrymen and marines had murdered as many as twenty-seven ‘hostages’, adding to the forty-seven civilian Kelpers known to have been killed by shelling, bombing and in the street fighting in the battle for Stanley, the capital of the dependency. Thereafter, at least thirty captive islanders had perished in Argentine hands, according to the CIA – not regarded as an unimpeachable source of intelligence given it operated hand-in-glove with the repressive Junta in Buenos Aires - perhaps another six from ‘natural causes’, and twenty-four from unsatisfactorily defined ‘other causes.’ An unknown number of Kelpers (perhaps up to twenty or thirty persons) had also ‘gone missing’ or were ‘unaccounted for’ in the Argentine in the period after the extant population of the archipelago was compulsorily exiled to the mainland in the latter part of 1964.
As to the fate of the thirty-two members of the British Antarctic Survey mission trapped at the Rothera Research Station on Adelaide Island, Signy Island and at the Atmospheric Survey Station (ASS) on the Brunt Ice Shelf, rescue missions mounted by the Royal Australian Navy in late 1964 had discovered both island stations occupied by Argentine military personnel, and been warned off attempting to communicate with the ASS.
Subsequently, in mid-1965, the Argentine Navy had informed the Secretariat of the Organización de los Estados Americanos, the Organization of American States, that it had discovered these British bases ‘derelict and uninhabited’ when it ‘mounted humanitarian missions to ‘re-supply them and to offer humanitarian assistance after the re-conquest of Las Malvinas.’
More likely, it was assumed in Oxford, that the Argentinians had attacked and destroyed those bases at the same time they invaded the other Crown Territories in the Southern Ocean. In this connection, it was taken as read, that the scientists and technicians preparing to winter in the Antarctic had been murdered and their bodies disposed of.
The testimony of the one-thousand-six-hundred-and-thirty-one survivors, the last of whom had not reached a ‘safe’ third country until well over a year after the invasion, many of whom – it was stated in some reports - were suffering from severe malnutrition, and their health wrecked by months in prison camps without proper medical or sanitary arrangements, or by having been force-marched across the Argentine to the Chilean border, had been damning.
When questioned by the American media, the Argentine Ambassador in Washington had characterised the deaths of the twenty-four Kelpers who had died of ‘other causes’ as being the victims of ‘‘miscellaneous illnesses and self-inflicted injuries.’ However, many of the survivors spoke of varying degrees of callous and barbaric treatment from their captors; both from the Argentine military on the Falklands, and from para-militaries and the mainland police, and of being forced to live on near starvation rations only occasionally supplemented by the ‘Christian kindness of ordinary Argentines’ who had had to bribe their guards, to pass food and medicines into their squalid, mostly tented encampments outside the city of La Plata.
Most survivors reported that they believed, or had heard others speak of badly beaten Royal Marines being marched through Stanley, with their hands chained behind their backs, tied together into ‘a gang’ by ropes around their necks. Sources in South America had confirmed that as many as thirty Royal Marines had been captured, interrogated, tortured, executed and their bodies ‘dumped’ in the sea.
The Marines and the twenty-man Kelper ‘platoon’ of part-time soldiers had, it seemed, put up a determined defence of Government House, and after the death of the Governor and his wife, made a fighting retreat into ‘the camp’ – the boggy, tussock-grassed interior of the islands, establishing positions in the mountains to the west of Stanley, and fighting on until, depending on which source one accepted, surrendering after they ran out of ammunition, or the Argentinians threatened to start shooting civilian hostages.
Throughout, the Argentine Junta had stuck to their official line that despite plaintive entreaties to surrender to save lives and property, the Royal Marines garrison had fought to the last man – which was why so many innocent civilians had been caught in the crossfire.
However, this version of events had swiftly been countered by US officials in Buenos Aires and in Washington, who were so disgusted by the conduct of their nominal Latin ally’s occupation by force of Las Malvinas, that they had leaked reports of Marines being shot dead after laying down their guns, and of POWs and civilian hostages being tortured and buried in unmarked graves outside Stanley.
More recently, a great deal more ‘fine detail’ had emerged from – clearly – conflicted, US State Department ‘sources’, once Margaret Thatcher had unconditionally revived the ‘special relationship’ in January 1966. Since then, other ‘back channels’ had magically opened and Airey Neave had created a South Atlantic Section of his Security Ministry to work alongside the South Atlantic Planning Group (SAPG) secretly established, in skeletal form at first, as long ago as the week after the invasion in April 1964.
Significantly, in its own reports the SAPG had cautioned recipients of
its regular updates that the post-1966 response of the US authorities had been to pass corroborated and uncorroborated intelligence alike to its allies; and that there was a danger of ‘our friends telling us what they perceive we want to hear, rather than always giving it to us straight.’ Consequently, the latest SAPG digests contained little or no new information about the more sensational aspects of the sort of stories which had, several times, dominated the front pages of British and American newspapers in 1964 and 1965.
Undoubtedly, the most explosive – and in some respects, most salacious and thinly documented - revelations supposedly concerned the ordeals of dozens of women at the hands of Junta militiamen and the ‘Special Political Squads’ of the Federal Police and members the of the Secretaría de Inteligencia (SIDE), the Argentine Intelligence Service. Some of the incidents had occurred on the Falklands, others had occurred in the camps where women and children were, allegedly, segregated from their menfolk before being allowed to leave Argentina, under the protection of the Swedish Legation in Buenos Aires to travel hundreds of miles – often by foot - to the air base in Chile from which US military aircraft had ferried them, first to a jungle air base in Venezuela, thence on to Baton Rouge in Louisiana, or Homestead Air Force Base in Florida, where subsequently arrangements had been made to ferry the survivors back to the United Kingdom, or wherever else they nominated.
What it boiled down to was: that women had been raped, assaulted, or routinely compelled to trade food and medicine for their sick and starving children for ‘sexual favours’ with their captors. Moreover, the belated ‘prisoner releases’ had only begun in earnest in the run up to the General Election of March 1965 – the exiled Kelpers having been held in Argentina as hostages - presumably because the Argentine Government had calculated this would cause their enemies in the United Kingdom the maximum possible embarrassment, in the days leading up to the vote. Ironically, little or no news of what had ‘really gone on in Argentina’ had actually leaked out until some days and weeks after the result in England was known.
In hindsight, the admirals and generals in Buenos Aires had calculated their seizure of the Falklands and the other South Atlantic territories with a precision which, at the time, had given the Prime Minister and her military advisors pause to wonder, implausibly, if the Argentine had somehow contrived to co-ordinate its actions with those of the Soviets in the Mediterranean and the mountains of Iran. The timing alone was suggestive of just such co-ordination: at the very moment Argentine Marines were going ashore on South Georgia and East Falkland, two Soviet tank armies were crashing into Iran, intent on driving a road to the warm waters of the Persian Gulf; and Admiral Sergey Gorshkov was hurling his powerful Red Navy-Turkish fleet at Malta at the very moment practically the entire Mediterranean Fleet was engaged wrenching Cyprus back from its Red Dawn occupiers.
Four years later, it seemed that there had been no conspiracy; but that was one of the few things everybody agreed about.
It seemed that the Junta had made its move in April 1964 because it knew the Antarctic Winter was coming, and that would make it if not impossible, then very unwise for the Royal Navy, even had the ships been available which they were not, to send a fleet to the South Atlantic to save the day. Understandably, given the distances involved from the British Isles to the Falklands – eight thousand miles, give or take – the Junta had assumed that once they held the ground, the Falklands Archipelago, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, there would be nothing that Oxford could actually do about it. Indeed, this was a thing that those around Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet Room table had reluctantly accepted within days of the disaster, over four years ago.
Everybody, that was, except the one person whose view on the subject was…law.
“Prime Minister.”
Everybody turned to look at Keith Joseph.
It was an electric moment because he was the man who was, doctrinally, emotionally, almost theocratically the most in tune with the Lady and had spoken with a note of uncharacteristic, didactically exasperated angst in his voice.
“Yes, Keith?”
“Margaret,” the Secretary of State for Health replied, clearly biting down strong emotions. “Forgive me, we spoke of this matter once, some time ago. But I feel duty-bound to repeat what I said to you then if, I hope I am mistaken, you propose to give succour to those who persist in the misnomer that the Union Jack will again one day fly over Government House in Stanley.”
Keith Joseph glanced to Ian Gilmour, the number two at the Ministry of Defence.
“Ian, you’ve previously reported to Cabinet upon the immense difficulties, to all intents, intractable difficulties, inherent in any attempt to retake the lost territories in the Southern Ocean?”
Next, he caught Tom Harding-Grayson’s eye.
“Tom, any such initiative on our part would surely diplomatically undermine us on the world stage?”
Neither of the men responded, other than with a noncommittal shrug.
“Keith,” the Prime Minister said patiently, and as was her wont, adopting her famous ‘Head Girl’ tone. “As I have said before, many times; while I am Prime Minister of Her Majesty’s Government, I will not let those tinpot dictators in Buenos Aires get away with this. Moreover, if and when our appeals to the broader world community fail to bear fruit – I sincerely hope I am being pessimistic in that respect – I will not meekly surrender our lawful title to those islands. Although my number one priority remains the peaceful settlement of the South Atlantic Question; I will not, I will never, rule out the use of military force.”
Her friend refused to back down.
“Margaret, there is nothing whatsoever wrong in keeping all our options open. My concern is that we risk tying up a huge parcel of our military and intellectual capital in planning and preparing for an outcome that may never, one prays, come. The Chiefs of Staff have already concluded that to recover the lost territories by force majeure might require a D-Day scale amphibious campaign, conducted not at a range of fifty or a hundred miles, but at a range of thousands of miles for which we are not, and cannot be ready for many years, if at all. And what would the Americans do while the whole Royal Navy, presumably including many ships that they gave us, steamed south to confront one of their key South American allies in the march against Latin communism? Even to speak of a military adventure is immensely risky…”
The Prime Minister was silent for five or six seconds.
When she replied there was steel in her tight-lipped hectoring soprano tone.
“My Government will stand squarely behind the rules-based system of international relations formalised at the Bretton Woods summit in 1944. Contingency planning for Operation Downwind will continue. It is not for this Cabinet, or indeed, this administration to determine if Operation Downwind is ever enacted; that will be a decision for the next Government, and the next Parliament, after the next election which, for planning purposes I propose should be scheduled for the Thursday following the fourth anniversary of our March 1965 triumph.”
There was a brief, startled murmur around the table.
“I would like to know if there are any dissenting voices?”
There were none.
“Good,” Margaret Thatcher decided, smiling. “That is what we shall do, then. Further, I propose that our manifesto unambiguously asserts that a future National Conservative administration will dedicate itself to the concept of the Commonwealth, peaceful co-existence with the Soviet Union and to strive, might and main, to wrest the occupied South Atlantic territories – by all available means, preferably but not exclusively diplomatically - from the cruel hands of tyranny.”
Keith Joseph made as if to speak, thought better of it.
“I know and I respect the reservations colleagues around this table entertain about this matter,” Margaret Thatcher declared, smiling grimly. “I will promise you now that I will not authorise aggressive military action in the pursuit of the recovery of the South Atlantic dependencies witho
ut the implicit, not to say explicit, support of Cabinet colleagues, the Party and the country. You have my solemn word on that. However, to strengthen our negotiating position, I reserve the right to ensure that if such action becomes necessary, that the military commanders charged with its undertaking will have had every opportunity and the time needed, to properly ready their men and the engines of war.”
Later, nobody could say with any degree of certitude, that the Prime Minister was actually aware of the quiet wall of disquiet which was gradually closing in around her.
Certainly, her brisk, sunny summation of the discussion gave no indication that she was cognisant of the less than enthusiastic body language of perhaps, half her colleagues.
“Excellent. That’s agreed then. We shall go to the country next spring; and we shall let the British people have their say!”
Privately, her spies in the Party had consistently warned Margaret Thatcher that a minority of her senior ministers, not to mention as many as forty or fifty of her MPs were privately, ‘a little queasy’ about her refusal to take the South Atlantic Question off the agenda.
Nonetheless, so far as she was concerned, her Cabinet had agreed in principle to include a general commitment to energetically pursue a resolution of ‘the question’ – after putting the issues before the people – if the Party was returned to power in 1969.
It was a satisfying moment and she was a little vexed that it was bookended by a quiet, urgent knock at the Cabinet Room door, and by the entry of one of the junior Cabinet Office staffers who scurried apologetically to hand Robin Butler a folded sheet of paper.
The Prime Minister scowled.
Butler glanced at the note.
“Forgive me, Prime Minister. I believe this might be a missive best addressed by the Foreign Secretary, or perhaps, the Ministry of Defence. Reuters is reporting that an American destroyer has been hit by at least one guided missile while transiting the Taiwan Strait. The suggestion is that a vessel has been sunk and that there has, sadly, been a very heavy loss of life…”