But Harrigan didn't confine himself to watchdogging Webster and the Island Council. Very early in 1968 he saw what a foot-dragging operation the Interim Agreement really was and began complaining about it. On February 24 he published an "open letter to Lord Shepherd," which said in part:
Two months have passed since Anguilla accepted the interim agreement, and with the presence of Mr. Tony Lee on the island we realize that there is no longer a danger of overt hostile action being taken against us ... In other respects there has been no alleviation of our difficulties. The savings of many hundreds of Anguillans are still frozen in the Treasury of St. Kitts . . . the share of the U. K. grant which should have come to Anguilla last year never reached us . . . Mr. Tony Lee is here in Anguilla (in the words of your letter of January 16th, 1968) "to assist with the administration of Anguilla, with the object of working towards an agreed long-term solution for the island." Both these objectives are being hindered by the delay in settling these eight-month-old grievances*.
The bank had also been a problem, but that was in the process of being resolved—not through any activity on the part of the British, however, whose Inactivity was at that time at its most Masterly.
There had originally been two banks on Anguilla, one a local branch of Great Britain's Barclays Bank and the other the Mid-Atlantic Bank with its home office in Basseterre. Barclays had shut its doors very early in the proceedings, while the Mid-Atlantic was still open and trying to do business without any money.
But the Mid-Atlantic Bank was a strange little outfit, straight out of an Eric Ambler novel. It was started in the sixties by a man named Sidney Alleyne, who has the kind of past history that makes frequent use of the word "alleged." He is from Barbados and was involved with a racist-cwm-Communist political party on Jamaica in 1962, none of whose candidates got enough votes to save their deposits; you put up a deposit and if you don't get an eighth of the vote you lose the money. They lost the money.
It is alleged that in Trinidad he passed counterfeit money. It is also alleged that he did some gunrunning to various African nations in the sixties; for this or some other reason, he was named an Honorary Colonel in the Algerian Army. He also got involved in politics in his home island of Barbados in 1964, but it is alleged he passed some queer money on a high official and had to go somewhere else.
From somewhere in this forest of allegations, Alleyne picked up nearly half a million dollars. With this money and some personal contacts in the St. Kitts Government, he set up the Mid-Atlantic Bank and became its major shareholder. The original idea was that it would be an investment bank with numbered accounts (shades of Jerry Gumbs!), but since there wasn't at that time any other bank on Anguilla the Mid-Atlantic became a general-purpose bank.
Enter, in dramatic lighting, a Swiss citizen named Walter Germann, who lived in New York and had started the Bank of Panama. (If only Sydney Greenstreet were alive to play the role.) The Bank of Panama had been put together with Nazi money from Argentina, Teamsters Union money, Nevada and Puerto Rico gambling money and (here comes an "alleged") alleged Mafia money.
But the finest asset of the Bank of Panama was a piece of paper. It was letterhead stationery from a reputable American geological survey and assaying company, and it said that rich gold-ore deposits had been found in Ecuador on a piece of land owned by the Bank of Panama. This letter was signed by a well-known member of the firm who had recently died, so nobody could ask him if that was really his signature.
I'm not suggesting that anybody was out to sell gold-mine stock, not in this sophisticated day and age. You don't need a gold mine, and no gold has been mined on that bit of land in Ecuador; all you need is the piece of letterhead stationery. You borrow all the money you want and put up the land as security.
These two bankers, Alleyne and Germann, allegedly met when both were wearing their gunrunning hats. Germann had a Swiss corporation called Interhandle, and it is alleged that Interhandle handled the gun sales to Boumedienne in Algeria, Tshombe in the (Belgian) Congo and Colonel Ojukwu in Biafra.
Back in the Caribbean, Germann saw what a nice little bank Alleyne had on St. Kitts, and one way or another he hustled Alleyne out and took over the operation himself. It is alleged Alleyne lost a lot of money and was very bitter about it. Germann sent down two assistants, improbably named Labe and Schwarm, to run the Mid-Atlantic Bank for him.
Unfortunately, a little difficulty had come into Walter Ger-mann's life. A Federal Grand Jury in New York decided that much of what he was doing, particularly with the Bank of Panama, required their attention. This was in March of 1965. Germann said he really couldn't give comprehensive answers to their questions unless he looked in his account books, which were in Switzerland; could he go get them? The Grand Jury said Yes. Walter Germann went to Switzerland and refused to come back, putting him in contempt of court in New York. He didn't seem to mind.
The end of the Walter Germann story—or maybe it isn't the end—is also imitation Eric Ambler. Germann committed suicide by shooting himself in the face so that he was no longer recognizable. The final allegation is that the body in Walter Germann's grave over there in Switzerland is somebody other than Walter Germann.
So that's the bank. The miracle is that the Kittitians didn't wake up one morning and find the whole building gone.
Early in 1968, the Bank of America stepped in and bought the Mid-Atlantic Bank, from whoever was left to sell it. The Bank of America agreed with the Anguillans that their branch would not be administered from St. Kitts, but from St. Croix, one of the U.S. Virgin Islands, a shift in responsibility that made banking possible once again on Anguilla.
It also made it possible at last for Anguillans to withdraw their savings, which just about all of them did. The result was a run on the bank, ending with the only instance in the history of the Bank of America that one of its branches had to shut its doors. The closing was only temporary. More money was brought in from another branch, and when the Anguillans saw that this bank was businesslike in its behavior most of them deposited their cash right back in again.
A murder, a bank opening; the story of Anguilla had shifted from international politics to small-town commonplaces. At the end of August, with more than half the year of grace already gone, Tony Lee went back to London and met with officials there. Sluggishly the bureaucratic machinery began to respond to reality. In October, Mr. Willian Whitlock, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs—and a Labour M.P.—invited Ronald Webster and Robert Bradshaw to London to talk things over.
The talks started on October 14. But nobody was sure what would happen if Webster and Bradshaw met face to face so the first week was spent with everybody simply talking to Whitlock. The Kittitians chatted with him in the morning, and the Anguillans chatted with him in the afternoon. Finally Whitlock offered both sides three possible plans for ending the stalemate; Webster liked only plan one, Bradshaw liked only plan three.
The Trinidad Guardian summed up the meetings: "Interim report on the current interim Conference on the Interim Agreement' on Anguilla:—No progress, no confrontation, no compromise, no cash, no comment."
These meetings marked the low point in Jerry Gumbs's relationship with his home island. While in London, Ronald Webster said in public that Jerry Gumbs was "an evil man who would not be allowed to have any part in Anguilla's affairs." But when the London meetings were over, and the British— who had been talking so strongly against Gumbs—had managed once more to accomplish nothing, Webster's opinion of Gumbs very quickly rose again, until eventually it was higher than before.
By the time Webster got back to Anguilla the Interim Agreement was a shambles and the future was a mess. Webster was talking about really going independent on January 9, the day after the Interim Agreement would drop dead. Anguillans were choosing up sides as to whether he was right or wrong.
Among those who opposed the idea was Atlin Harrigan, who flailed away with his Beacon at everything that moved: "For so
me time an element existed in Anguilla that attempts to destroy anything that does not coincide with their own cabalistic views. These persons are only looking for personal financial gain and don't give two hoots about the individuals and will use dirty methods to achieve their aims, if and when Anguilla declares her independence from Britain."
But Jerry Gumbs, who'd been back talking about the Bank of Anguilla again—still with numbered accounts as the main feature—was all in favor of independence. So was Wallace Rey, a member of the Island Council. Wallace Rey, an excitable man at a public meeting, owner of a prosperous hardware store, had run the island's Department of Public Works until there was some question as to whether or not he was hiring out bulldozers and other equipment belonging to the Government and forgetting to give the rentals to the Treasury. (Of all the people I talked to in preparing this book, Wallace Rey was the only one who offered to sell me information.)
And three Americans who had become friendly with Webster also counseled independence. They were an odd assortment, unrelated except by their citizenship. One was a Baptist minister from Kentucky named Freeman Goodge, a fire-breathing believer in dramatic solutions to all problems. One was a man named Lewis Haskins, who, with his two teen-age sons, owned and operated a small mica-sorting and plastic-jewelry-making factory on the island; back in January of 1968, the Anguilla Alphabet in the Beacon had included, "H is for Haskins, the Father and Sons; Dad runs the business, the Boys hold the guns." The father had been a moderate for some time before coming to the conclusion that Anguilla would never get anywhere with Britain, but the sons had been hanging around with the rougher young people from the beginning, and of course that group inevitably favored whatever decision was likeliest to start a fight.
Goodge and Haskins had both been living on the island since long before the trouble had started, but the third man was a recent arrival. His name was Jack Holcomb, and his life was somewhat less alleged than, say, Sidney Alleyne's. He was forty-one, he said he was a businessman, and his intention on the island was to start a "basic-materials industry," meaning stone and brick and concrete and other elements used in construction. But his background wasn't in construction. Most recently he had run something called Solar Research Enterprises in Florida, an outfit that made surveillance devices for private detectives—"bugs," they're called in the trade. He had gone out of business when his plant had mysteriously burned down.
He had been involved in "surveillance" work before in his life; in Los Angeles in 1955, while running a predecessor of Solar Research Enterprises, he was tried for illegal wire-tapping but was not found guilty. Much more recently, in 1967, he had become police commissioner in a small suburb of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, called Sea Ranch Lakes, but was fired when it was discovered there had been a narcotics charge in his youth; he'd been arrested in Long Beach, California, for possession of barbiturates and a hypodermic needle (and a blackjack), but the charges had been dropped.
More prosaically, Holcomb was involved in real estate in Florida. Less prosaically, he made business trips to the Caribbean, though the business matters were vague. (When I wrote to him in December of 1969, he wrote back, "Purposefully I have omitted writing on a letterhead until such time as I determine you are not one of the British agents still trying to acquire certain information about Anguilla ... I could give the story with documentation far greater than anyone since I was privy to the most guarded secrets both of government as well as individuals involved. However ... I would doubt that my inclination would be to release the information at this time." In my response, I said, "You say British agents are still trying to acquire certain information about Anguilla; of course, I won't try to get you to tell me the answers they're looking for, but would you feel it possible to tell me the questions they're asking?" He never replied.)
In the fall of 1968, Holcomb presented the Island Council with a spiral binder containing "A Proposal to the Government of Anguilla for Basic Building Materials by Jack N. Holcomb, P.O. Box 23130, Oakland Park, Florida." Complete with maps and illustrations, the binder started with a suggestion about the manufacture of concrete blocks, but soon began to spiral upward.
First, Holcomb wanted a guarantee that he would be the sole supplier of all building materials on the island for twenty-five years. Second, he wanted it tax-free. Third, he had some other ideas in addition to building materials. "Fantastic growth and development possibilities exist," the proposal said. "In the investment capital market of the world, nothing appears as attractive as complete and total tax exemptions." Anguilla could set herself up as a flag of convenience for shippers (the pseudo-Onassis offer again); she could offer incorporation for international holding companies and give them "exemption from special taxes, corporation taxes, personal income tax, customs duties and tariffs." Land deals could be worked, money deals (numbered accounts?), all sorts of deals.
There could be Anguillan "participation" in all this, but the "stockholders in all companies would principally consist of United States citizens interested in this type of operation." And Holcomb himself would be in charge and exert "direct control."
For all of which the Anguillan Government would be paid a total of five hundred dollars a year.
The Island Council decided not to accept Holcomb's proposal, but he did have several supporters on the island. Jerry Gumbs was unhappy at the turndown: "He was gonna invest plenty. He wasn't gonna make money for four years. Then you'll let someone else in? These people don't understand economics. If Webster could worry he'd be worried. He was gonna build that road, open up that whole area. Put value on people's property. Houses going up alongside the road. But these people don't understand."
Jerry Gumbs understood. So did Wallace Rey, and so did a few others.
So the Interim Agreement Year wound down, with nothing accomplished. Things must grow or rot; that's a fact of life, in everything from flowers to love affairs, from brains to nations. In 1968, in the political life of Anguilla, nothing grew.
17
On January 8, the Interim Agreement on Anguilla came to an end. With it, British aid—technical and economic—also ended. On January 16, Tony Lee left the island.
The next two months got a little rough on Anguilla. Anguillans have always fought among themselves as boisterously as any people on earth—it took someone like Colonel Bradshaw to make them all stand together, even briefly—and now that they were alone, with neither a goal nor a way to get to it, the factions began to split like the ground over an awakening volcano.
There was no longer any question about whether or not to separate from St. Kitts; they'd done that, they'd made it stick for almost two years, and they'd amply demonstrated that neither Bradshaw nor anybody else could get them back with St. Kitts again. Now the question was what to do next, and it boiled down to two choices. Either really declare independence and try to survive alone, or go on struggling to make the connection with Mother Britain.
The Island Council was split down the middle on the
issue. Wallace Rey and two others favored independence, while Atlin Harrigan and another two wanted to stay in the Commonwealth and go on trying to attract Great Britain's attention.
The tie-splitting vote was held by the Chairman, Ronald Webster, and Webster was spending most of his time with four men: three Americans and an Americanized Anguillan. They were Lewis Haskins, the Reverend Freeman Goodge, Jack Holcomb and Jerry Gumbs. All four preached independence, and that was the way Ronald Webster went.
So there was another independence referendum. This one was tied in with a new Constitution that had been written to replace the one Roger Fisher had tapped out on his portable typewriter in July of 1967. Most of the new document was a rehash of the American Constitution, but a couple of parts rang echoes from Jack Holcomb's "Proposal" of the preceding fall.
The anti-independence faction on the island was also anti this Constitution and was by this time very anti Jack Holcomb. However, the phrasing of the referendum stacked the deck in such a way that
the pro-British group had no way to announce itself. The voter was given a choice between an A statement and a B statement as follows:
A: Affirm declaration and approve Constitution Government of the people of Anguilla;
B: Reject declaration Constitution return to St. Kitts.
The vote was 1,739 A's and 4 B's; I don't know which member of the Lloyd family didn't vote that time. The referendum was held on February 6, and the next day Ronald Webster went into Ronald Webster's Park and read out a new Declaration of Independence.
But this one didn't fool around; when this one said independence, it meant independence. "When the political ties of one people have deteriorated with another," it started, "and the common bonds of their future no longer exist, it becomes necessary to separate and assume their own destiny among the nations of the world."
Meanwhile, there was another Conference going on, only peripherally involved with Anguilla. This was the Fifth Conference of Heads of Government of Commonwealth Caribbean Countries, and it was held in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, from February 3 to 6, 1969. While Ronald Webster was publishing his Declaration of Independence, this Conference was publishing a statement that included the following: "The Conference called upon the Government of the United Kingdom to take all necessary steps in collaboration with the Government of the State to confirm the territorial integrity of St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla."
Which was a lot tougher than they'd been a year and a half earlier, when Lord Shepherd had asked for just this kind of statement to support a landing of British troops on the island. What made the big change?
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