Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  The biggest immediate problem, however, was America. As by far Britain’s most important ally, the United States was essential in securing international backing for the British response. The Americans were also vital logistically, partly because, under the 1956 Bahamas Agreement, they used the British colony of Ascension Island in the middle of the Atlantic as a military base, and Ascension was the only stopping point from which the Task Force could operate effectively. The Americans had the power to deny or supply Britain with the satellite information, intelligence, technology and military hardware which were needed. Active American support was all but a necessity, and active American opposition would certainly be fatal.

  Given her friendship with Ronald Reagan, her attitude to the United States in general, and her uncomplicated belief that the injustice of the invasion was obvious to all, Mrs Thatcher had assumed that American support would be wholehearted. ‘I think she just felt that this was such an act of naked aggression – unprovoked and unnecessary – that there could not be any question that the Americans would take our view,’ recalled Clive Whitmore.129 As John Coles put it, ‘She found it hard to understand how, given the issues, there could be any talk of “balance” from Washington.’130 In terms of American public opinion, her instinct was immediately proved right: US public support for Britain easily overwhelmed that for Argentina. But in terms of the reaction of the US administration, Mrs Thatcher was quickly disappointed. On the evening of the invasion, Jeane Kirkpatrick,* the US Ambassador at the United Nations, had kept an appointment for a dinner given in her honour by the Argentine Embassy. The author of the distinction between ‘totalitarian states’ (bad) and ‘authoritarian states’ (sometimes tolerable), Mrs Kirkpatrick was the most ardent and articulate believer in the Reagan administration’s strategy of getting close to Latin America in order to fight off the Communist threat there. She was furious at Anthony Parsons’s quick move to get Security Council Resolution 502 passed, and when she saw that it would be impossible for the United States to veto it or abstain, she pointedly absented herself from the vote, sending her deputy. With Enders, and other Latin American experts at the State Department who were preoccupied with the danger of the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua and related subversion in El Salvador, she was ahead of the pack on a subject of which most of the administration was ignorant. On the other hand, at the Pentagon, whose worldview was built around the importance of the NATO alliance and the confrontation with the Soviet Union in Europe, the main players were firmly pro-British. John Lehman, the Secretary of the Navy, and his boss, Caspar Weinberger, the Defense Secretary, did everything they could for Britain, from the first: ‘Weinberger believed very, very strongly in the Anglo-American alliance. It was clear that to him this was the bedrock of how to deal with the Soviets and ensure that the West eventually won the Cold War. He had a very strong sense of the importance of alliances generally, but the relationship really was special. It wasn’t just Weinberger who was an anglophile, but John Lehman was an anglophile. He had studied at Cambridge and was the most powerful Secretary of the Navy in decades. He had a direct line to the White House. He was totally, totally committed to helping Britain.’131 Weinberger also acted in the belief that, if there were a fight, Britain would probably win,* although at first he thought more in terms of a naval blockade than a successful landing. It was often said by British journalists that the Reagan administration, dominated by Californians, took a ‘West Coast’ view of things, keeping Britain at a greater distance than was traditional. Yet Jeane Kirkpatrick, the least sympathetic to the British of the main figures, was ‘East Coast’, and the anglophile Weinberger was a Californian, who was extremely close to the President.

  As for the State Department, it was divided between its Latin American and European departments. In terms of personal sympathy, Al Haig, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, was pro-British. To a colleague in the European department, he said: ‘How can we be neutral? This is our closest ally and territory under their control has just been invaded.’132 The pro-British faction further argued that, should Mrs Thatcher not prevail, her government would fall and US plans to deploy INF missiles on British soil would be in jeopardy. On the other hand, Haig was conscious of the danger to the United States’ position in Latin America, and he liked the idea that he could be an ‘honest broker’ between the two countries. A further complication was Haig’s mercurial and somewhat self-aggrandizing personality. Since his appointment as secretary of State he had been regarded with disfavour by many in the White House, particularly after his clumsy attempt to take charge after the shooting of President Reagan the year before. According to Bud McFarlane, ‘There were suspicions among the senior White House staff of Secretary Haig’s actions being motivated in part by his political ambitions or perceived ambitions that weren’t uniquely relevant to the Falklands.’133

  In the middle of all of this, President Reagan hesitated. Questioned by reporters on Monday 5 April, he said: ‘It’s a very difficult situation for the United States, because we’re friends with both of the countries engaged in this dispute, and we stand ready to do anything we can to help them. And what we hope for and would like to help in doing is have a peaceful resolution of this with no forceful action or no bloodshed.’134 At Cabinet the following day, Mrs Thatcher characterized Reagan’s remarks as ‘unhelpful’ and contrasted them with the support of President Mitterrand.135 Nicko Henderson cabled London two days later, speaking of the ‘habitual degree of incoherence which characterises the US administration’.136 On 7 April the President attended a meeting of the National Security Planning Group, chaired by his National Security Advisor, Judge William Clark. All the principals, including Haig, Weinberger and Jeane Kirkpatrick, were present. According to Jim Rentschler, who took minutes during the meeting, Haig declared that the US had a fortnight to work out a diplomatic solution, and felt he could do so. He proposed to go first to London to ‘find out what the British bottom line is’ and then do the same with Argentina: ‘I’ll take along [General] Dick Walters.* He’ll talk to some of those generals down there in their native Spanish and scare the hell out of them.’137 According to Roger Fontaine, of the NSC staff, Haig declared, ‘There will not be a war in the South Atlantic.’138 ‘Then [as Rentschler recalls it] the President came into the discussion. He said, “It seems to me that we have an opportunity to do some good here. The main thing we have to do is to get these two brawlers out of the bar room.” ’139 Supported by Weinberger, the President authorized Haig to try his mission. The President, dressed in blue blazer and polo shirt and about to take off for his Easter holiday in Barbados, felt he had made his decision, but then Jeane Kirkpatrick cut in: ‘I hope you are determined, Mr President, to really keep our neutrality in this and not be seen to be favouring the British.’140 This provoked an impassioned intervention from Bobby Ray Inman, the Deputy Director of the CIA. America had to stick with ‘the links of language, law, culture, mother country’, insisted Inman in his Southern drawl, not to mention ‘the extremely serious, unparalleled co-operation we have with them [the British] in every military and intelligence chapter that’s of interest to us’. If they let the Argentines get away with their aggression, he went on, they would believe they could get away with developing nuclear weapons themselves.141 At this point, Reagan was visibly eager to go on holiday, and people were getting up to leave: ‘Reagan then looked at Kirkpatrick and said, “Look, I would love to stay friends with Argentina, but I think our first loyalty, our first order of business if worst comes to worst, is to side with the Brits.” ’142 It was with this mandate to seek a deal, and this understanding that, if no deal could be reached, the United States would have to back Britain, that Haig set off for London.

  Before Haig reached London, Mrs Thatcher wrote, ‘we made it clear [in public] that he was coming as a friend and not as a mediator,’143 but this was not how Haig saw matters, and indeed it was not long before Foreign Office documents started to refer, unselfconsciously, to the Secre
tary of State’s ‘mediation’. The US Embassy in London had reported that ‘Tory moderates and the Foreign Office are concerned that Prime Minister Thatcher has been listening largely to the Ministry of Defense, especially senior naval officers, and may not adequately be considering non-military options.’144 Haig saw it as his job to ensure that such options were firmly on the table. He had already told Henderson, before leaving Washington, that there should be a ‘mixed administration’ to run the Falkland Islands. He suggested that an international commission to get Argentina out of the Falklands should be set up by the Organization of American States (OAS). Henderson objected immediately. The idea, he said, was ‘totally deplorable’.145 Haig protested that Galtieri could not survive if Argentina were to leave the Falklands with nothing. Henderson replied that ‘It was not our purpose to help Galtieri survive.’146 He emphasized the huge strength of British feeling on the subject, comparing it to American feeling about the fifty-two US hostages in Iran during the Carter presidency.

  Arriving in London on Thursday 8 April, Haig was met at the airport by Edward Streator, the Chargé d’Affaires at the US Embassy in London.* Haig told Streator that, while ultimately the US would back Britain over the Falklands, now was the time for a display of even-handedness in the interests of fruitful negotiations. Streator warned that the Prime Minister was in no mood for compromise. ‘If you think you can sway her you’re dead wrong,’ he told Haig.147 Undeterred, Haig and an entourage that included General Walters and Enders, met Mrs Thatcher at 10 Downing Street later that afternoon.

  Mrs Thatcher fielded Pym, Nott, Lewin and officials. Although Haig was friendly and polite, and Mrs Thatcher tried to be the same, the encounters were blunt. Jim Rentschler, who accompanied Haig, set the scene: ‘And here’s Maggie, appearing in a flower-decorated salon adjoining the small dining room … La Thatcher is really quite fetching in a dark velvet two-piece ensemble with gros-grain piping and a soft hairdo that heightens her blond English coloring. “Listen, I want to show you guys something very appropriate considering the subject on our minds!” – and she pointedly leads us to a pair of recently hung oil portraits, one of Nelson and the other of Wellington!’148 In conversation before dinner, Mrs Thatcher told Haig that she had been ‘rather disturbed’ by Reagan’s public proclamation of friendship with both countries. ‘Mr Haig said that the Prime Minister would well know where the President really stood’ but he ‘had to be cautious’ about ‘profile’.149 Haig tried to show Mrs Thatcher some of the problems which might lie ahead, including military difficulties and the possibility that US public opinion, at that moment very pro-British, might swing the other way. He wanted a means of getting the Argentines off the islands without total loss of face: it was ‘important to avoid a priori judgments about sovereignty’. Couldn’t there be some sort of interim administration, perhaps involving the Canadians? But Mrs Thatcher would not accept that Argentina could gain anything by force that it could not have got by proper negotiation. Conflict was inevitable, said Haig, if Britain insisted on this. ‘The implication of this’, said Mrs Thatcher, ‘was that the Russians could move into Berlin.’150 She was determined not to lose sight of what she saw as the large principles at stake. Rentschler recorded the scene at dinner later:

  High color is in her cheeks, a note of rising indignation in her voice, she leans across the polished table and flatly rejects what she calls the ‘wooliness’ of our second-stage formulation, conceived in our view as a traditional face-saving ploy for Galtieri: ‘I am pledged … to restore British administration. I did not dispatch a fleet to install some nebulous arrangement which would have no authority whatsoever. Interim authority! – to do what? I beg you, I beg you to remember that in 1938 Neville Chamberlain sat at this same table discussing an arrangement which sounds very much like the one you are asking me to accept; and were I to do so, I would be censured in the House of Commons – and properly so! We in Britain simply refuse to reward aggression – that is the lesson we have learned from 1938.’151

  Poor Haig was rather battered. His advocacy of ‘certain constructive ambiguities’ did not find favour, but he did maintain his position about the need for an interim administration. He also picked up an important impression: ‘When I got to London I learnt something that surprised me. She didn’t have a unified Cabinet. The two guys that were totally unquestionably behind her were Terry Lewin and John Nott. The rest were not behind her. Poor old Pym. Dick Walters was sitting next to me and I said: “He’s not long for this world.” ’152 At one point Pym urged Mrs Thatcher to hear Haig out: ‘The Good Lord did not put me on this planet so that I could allow British citizens to be placed under the heel of Argentine dictators,’ she said, glaring at Pym.153 But for all her bluster, Haig detected a deeper truth: ‘I then realized that Mrs Thatcher needed this. We – the US and Britain – needed it, to be perceived to be trying to get a peaceful solution.’154 Despite her irritation with Haig, Mrs Thatcher did not really dissent from this last point: ‘She knew in her heart of hearts that one had to be seen as trying to arrive at a diplomatic outcome. This was necessary for the management of our relations with other countries – including the Americans … It was necessary too for the management of the government’s position vis-à-vis the British public.’155 As was often her way, Mrs Thatcher secretly registered the need for certain concessions while arguing flat out against them in conversation. On 11 April she was presented with the draft ‘line to take’ for government spokesmen. It said, ‘There can be no negotiation about the future status of the Falkland Islands until the Argentine forces have withdrawn and British administration has been restored.’ Despite all her toughness with Haig, she took her pen to the draft and crossed out ‘and British administration has been restored’.156

  On leaving London for Buenos Aires, Haig cabled to Reagan: ‘The Prime Minister has the bit in her teeth, owing to the politics of a unified nation and an angry parliament, as well as her own convictions about the principles at stake. She is clearly prepared to use force, though she admits a preference for a diplomatic solution. She is rigid in her insistence on a return to the status quo ante, and indeed seemingly determined that any solution involve some retribution.’157 Although he stated in his memoirs that he was not trying to urge any ‘compromise of principle’ upon Mrs Thatcher,158 Haig thought somewhat differently at the time. The talking points for his meeting with Galtieri in Buenos Aires had Haig reviewing Mrs Thatcher’s insistence that Argentina withdraw its forces before any negotiations began. ‘I told her I was sure you could not accept this,’ Haig’s points continued, ‘and frankly, I don’t believe you should.’159 He told Reagan: ‘If the Argentines give me something to work with, I plan to return to London over the weekend. It may then be necessary for me to ask you to apply unusual pressure on Thatcher. If the Argentines offer very little, I would plan to return and confer with you. In this case, it may be necessary to apply even greater pressure on the British if we are to head off hostilities.’160 As was often the case with Haig, however, his line was not entirely clear.* In a second cable to the President on the same day, he first declared that Mrs Thatcher’s principle that aggression should not pay was vital for the US as well as for Britain: ‘it is virtually as important to us that she have that success, for the principle at stake is central to your vision of international order, in addition to being in our strategic interests.’ But he added that ‘The consequences of hostilities would be devastating. Our interests through Latin America would be damaged, and the Soviets might even establish a foothold in the southern cone.’ So Mrs Thatcher must get her way, and yet fighting must be avoided at all costs: it did not reflect reality: ‘Just as Mrs Thatcher must be able to show that Galtieri got nothing for his use of force, he must be able to show that she got nothing.’161

  Reagan himself was ambivalent. On the one hand, his instinctive sympathy with Mrs Thatcher was genuine. He was very anxious that her government should not fall, a concern that had been stoked by Rupert Murdoch, among others. Mur
doch had earlier asked Vice-President Bush to warn Reagan that ‘anything less than Argentina’s pulling out of the Falklands will cost Mrs Thatcher her job’, adding that he was ‘very worried as to what will follow should Margaret Thatcher fall’. Bush reassured Murdoch that ‘all concerned here would not want to see the fall of the Thatcher government.’162 According to Judge Clark, for Reagan ‘there was no question as to where the blade would have to lie,’ and, from early on, the President authorized the trusted Weinberger ‘to give smart weapons out the back door’ to Britain.163 But although he was consistent with his line of seeking a peaceful solution while in the end favouring Mrs Thatcher, Reagan was detached, almost cynical, in his approach. On 16 April the journalist Jack Anderson published the illicit tape of a call the President had made to Haig while the latter was flying to Buenos Aires. In it, Reagan asked about a possible British attack: ‘That submarine of theirs, do you think it’s apt to go ahead with retribution and sink anything within the 200 miles, and would that be enough to vindicate them?’164 This report, which Mrs Thatcher was informed by Nicko Henderson was authentic, distressed her. When she came to write her memoirs, she decided not to mention it because of the sour taste it left:165 she wanted to give a more positive account of her relations with Reagan.