Ronald Reagan left Washington for a long-scheduled golfing break in Augusta, Georgia, on Friday 21 October 1983. By then US planning for the invasion of Grenada was well advanced. In the early hours of the following morning, 22 October, the President was awoken by news of a request from the OECS for ‘assistance’, in other words, to invade. Although the Pentagon approached the possibility of military action with great caution, Shultz and the NSC staff were strong advocates. Reagan readily agreed to the OECS request. His agreement was hardly surprising, since the formal OECS request had been engineered by his own Secretary of State.* The OECS nations were deeply concerned by the instability on Grenada with Eugenia Charles, the Prime Minister of Dominica, particularly vocal in asking Washington for support. As early as 18 October, Shultz (encouraged by Reagan) had asked her to generate a formal OECS request for military assistance. Miss Charles agreed. Meeting in Washington at 9 a.m. local time on the Saturday, the Special Situations Group (SSG), chaired by the Deputy National Security Advisor, John Poindexter, met to plan the invasion. According to Poindexter, consultation with the British ‘wasn’t a big deal to us’,82 but informing Mrs Thatcher was discussed and it was agreed to ‘notify her at the last minute’.83 The SSG produced a time chart for ‘D-Day’, the day of invasion, which provided that Mrs Thatcher be informed only on ‘D-DAY MINUS ONE’:
1500
Eagleburger calls in UK Ambassador and provides him signed letter from President to PM Thatcher stating our concern for safety of foreigners, concerns of Caribbean leaders from threat from military regime on Grenada, formation of government, US interest to cooperate with provisional government and Caribbean leaders to restore democracy in Grenada. President will inform Mrs Thatcher when there is final decision.84
In short, by the Saturday morning, the Reagan administration had decided to keep Mrs Thatcher in the dark over Grenada until it was too late for her to do anything about it.
Some subsequent explanations by American participants suggested that it was simply the rush of events which made them forget their closest ally, or the need for complete secrecy, or the assumption that she would be all for the invasion. In fact, the expectation was not that Mrs Thatcher would agree, but that she would not. According to Duane Clarridge* of the CIA, who attended the SSG meeting, ‘we anticipated that Mrs Thatcher would be unhappy. We … didn’t want to give her any room for manoeuvre, either publicly or privately. We didn’t want to lose control of the operation.’85 This was the real reason that Mrs Thatcher was not consulted.
There is no record of an explicit order by Reagan or Shultz to keep Mrs Thatcher unsighted, but both were complicit. Ken Adelman† recalls hosting a dinner for Sir Anthony Kershaw, the chairman of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, who visited Washington shortly after the invasion. As Adelman told the story, Kershaw, when he met Reagan, had asked the President why he had not consulted Mrs Thatcher earlier. At first, Reagan ‘says nothing. So he says, “And she considers you a close personal friend.” Reagan is silent.’ Kershaw asked again: ‘Reagan then took off his glasses, which showed he was a little angry, and said, “Because I didn’t want her to say no.” ’86 This story has never been corroborated – it may be apocryphal – but, according to Jack Matlock‡ of the NSC, its point was correct: ‘It might seem cowardly, but I had the feeling that Reagan knew he would have trouble psychologically authorizing the invasion if Thatcher objected … he decided it would be best to confront the PM with a fait accompli.’87 In Geoffrey Howe’s view, the deception was necessary because the friendship and ‘sexual chemistry’ between Mrs Thatcher and Reagan was such that ‘if Mrs Thatcher had talked to Reagan [before the attack was under way] she’d have dissuaded him.’88 In the view of Howard Baker, later the President’s Chief of Staff, ‘Maggie Thatcher was the only person who could intimidate Ronald Reagan.’89
This assessment may exaggerate the power Mrs Thatcher had over her most powerful ally, but the accurate belief on both sides that Mrs Thatcher and Reagan enjoyed a relationship of trust does help to explain the actions of those involved. For the Americans, it was a reason to deny her information. For the British, it was a reason to take things slightly for granted. Certainly, British diplomats in Washington that weekend gained their main information from sources which were not close to the action. In particular, much store was set by a conversation between Robin Renwick and Admiral Jonathan Howe, the Director of the Bureau for Politico-Military Affairs at the State Department, which was reported to London on the evening (London time) of Saturday 22 October. Howe had informed Renwick that the NSC had decided that ‘the US should proceed very cautiously’; ‘Howe also assured us that there would be consultation if the Americans decided to take any further steps.’90 Explaining this to the present author, Howe insisted that he ‘wouldn’t have tried to mislead Robin’ and that his view may have been ‘reflecting the Department of Defense’s reluctance to act’. His comments were not intended as an official statement of administration policy. Had he realized that the British government would base its entire policy on these fateful words, Howe confirmed that he would have been horrified.91 It was indeed odd that so much weight was put on the words of a single, middle-ranking administration official. British fears were too easily allayed.
This was not so true of Mrs Thatcher herself, always more likely to suffer from agitation than complacency. At Chequers that weekend, she followed the situation closely. Informed that Geoffrey Howe, from Athens, had authorized HMS Antrim to depart in the direction of Grenada, Mrs Thatcher rang Richard Luce that Saturday afternoon. Luce had returned to office after his resignation over the Falklands invasion, and now found himself in the same role as then, deputizing in the absence of the Foreign Secretary abroad. He was at home watching a Western on television when the Prime Minister rang: ‘ “What are you doing sending ships?” she demanded. “We don’t want a war!” ’92 She calmed down only when Luce explained to her that the ship was approaching the island (keeping below the horizon) in order to be ready to rescue British citizens and with no belligerent intent. Luce soon discovered that Mrs Thatcher was worried by the threat of US action: ‘She said that evening that she was “fearful of being dragged into an unwarranted conflict”,’ and of embarrassment that might be caused to the Queen.93 He urged her to ‘put her oar in in Washington. She said she would call a meeting the next day.’94
On the same day, Mrs Thatcher had learnt, as Tom Adams of Barbados had foreshadowed, that the OECS had resolved unanimously to use force to restore order on Grenada and to seek help from Britain and others in doing so. On the other hand, she was informed that CARICOM, the wider and more powerful organization of Caribbean states, had taken a cautious line, urging a diplomatic solution. She was also armed with information from Buckingham Palace which, despite the constitutional separation between the Queen’s role as head of state of a Commonwealth country and the government of the United Kingdom, naturally kept in touch. At 9 a.m. (UK time) that morning, the Queen’s assistant private secretary, Robert Fellowes,* had spoken on the telephone to the Governor-General. Scoon had ‘assured Fellowes that there was no threat to himself or to Lady Scoon, and that they were both in good form’.95 In the circumstances, it did not seem necessary or wise to agree to the OECS request, which had only been conveyed orally.† The British government chose inaction, masterly or otherwise.
The next day, Mrs Thatcher did not follow up Luce’s advice to get in touch with Washington directly. She always disliked transacting business on the telephone, and took some comfort in the assurances relayed from Admiral Howe. She decided instead to discuss the whole matter in Cabinet committee (OD) the following day. She would have acted more swiftly – and angrily – if she had known that the OECS request had been encouraged by the Americans in the first place.
On that Sunday morning, 23 October, events in Lebanon provided a sudden and tragic distraction. The US Marine barracks in Beirut, part of a multinational peacekeeping force, were destroyed by a truck bomb (see Chapt
er 9). The eventual death toll was 241. This terrible event obviously made it harder for Mrs Thatcher, if she was still so minded, to get in touch with Washington about Grenada. For an America which had not seen full-scale military action since Vietnam, the combination of this attack with the perceived threat in Grenada was a powerful spur to action of some sort. Mrs Thatcher wrote in her memoirs, ‘What precisely happened in Washington I still do not know, but I find it hard to believe that outrage at the Beirut bombing had nothing to do with it. I am sure that this was not a matter of calculation, but of frustrated anger.’96 In fact, the evidence shows that the Grenada decision predated the Beirut atrocity. The only political effect of Lebanon was to brush aside any remaining American doubt about acting over Grenada. The practical effect was to allow the NSC to go into continuous session, making it impossible for the British, anxious for information about Grenada, to speak to their best contacts. When the NSC meeting ended, Robin Renwick reached a State Department contact, who told him that ‘Grenada was now a subject on which there was “no cable traffic”.’97 As Renwick explained later, ‘That could mean only one thing.’98
Nevertheless, that ‘one thing’ was not clearly or quickly conveyed by the British Embassy in Washington. At the OD meeting chaired by Mrs Thatcher the next morning, Geoffrey Howe reported that the US was not planning military action: ‘The Prime Minister and colleagues endorsed our reasoning.’99 It is remarkable, given her anxiety over the weekend, that Mrs Thatcher accepted the Foreign Office’s reassurances so readily. She probably did so because of her trust in her closeness to Reagan. As Howe himself put it afterwards: ‘The closer co-operation was the more one relied on it.’100 That afternoon, Howe made a statement to the House of Commons in which he said that ‘we are keeping in the closest possible touch with the United States Government … I have no reason to think that American military intervention is likely.’101* Mrs Thatcher kept her own copy of Howe’s statement and noted down what was said in questions that followed as she sat beside him. She recorded Howe’s answer when his shadow, Denis Healey, asked if the United States intended to invade: ‘I know of no such intention.’102
It is strange that the government found itself saying such things. As the report of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee into the fiasco emphasized, it had known by 22 October at the latest that the OECS were preparing for an invasion, so its reliance on (mistaken) evidence from Washington alone was curious. Another important clue came from a conversation with the Governor-General on the afternoon of 23 October. Visited by a British diplomat,* Scoon was asked if he would be prepared to support a US military intervention, backed by CARICOM forces. ‘He replied, without any hesitation, that he would probably be eliminated if he made any move that directly challenged the authority of the RMC [the revolutionary government]. He doubted therefore that he could ask for outside help.’103 It was on this telegram that Mrs Thatcher based her view of the Governor-General’s position (the underlinings on it are hers). The interpretation she and her government seem to have put on Scoon’s reported words was that he was not asking for help. But they probably suggested the opposite: by telling his visitors that his life was in danger, Scoon was explaining why he could not speak freely and hinting that he did, indeed, need assistance. Scoon’s message was shared with Tom Adams, who saw it as the green light for action. The Americans, in close touch with the Caribbean leaders, took the same view. They made Scoon’s ‘request’ central to the legality of their involvement and now concocted a rigmarole with the OECS – drafting a written request for help from Scoon, which would be presented to him for his signature only after he had been rescued.
On Monday 24 October 1983, the day of Howe’s unhappy statement, the Americans followed the secret timetable drawn up by the Special Situations Group two days earlier. The first of the two Reagan messages for Mrs Thatcher was cabled at 14.47 hours, almost exactly as planned. Following his allotted task, Lawrence Eagleburger got in touch with the British Ambassador, Oliver Wright, that afternoon. ‘What he was saying in effect’, Wright reported, ‘was that the US Administration would not understand if we actively lobbied against the course of action which they had almost but not quite decided upon.’104 The first Reagan message to Mrs Thatcher suggested consultation. The second, which arrived before she had returned from the dinner with Princess Alexandra, was that the invasion was going ahead. There had been no consultation at all.
Mrs Thatcher was seriously perturbed and affronted: ‘She didn’t see how the invasion of sovereign territory could be right.’105 Only the previous year she had fought a war to carry that point. She was also mortified that a country of which the Queen was head of state was to be invaded. And above all, she was shocked by what she suspected was the duplicity of the Americans. At half past midnight, she sent a reply to Reagan’s second cable, noting the shortage of time between one message and the other and stating, ‘I must tell you at once that the decision which you describe causes us the gravest concern.’106 She said she feared for the safety of US and British citizens on the island, and complained that the invasion put the Governor-General – ‘the Queen’s representative on the island’ – ‘in a very delicate position’. She also pointed out that Britain had never received a formal request from the OECS. She widened the argument. Invasion without agreement or consultation, she said, would undermine her case that America could be trusted to behave with restraint:
This action will be seen as intervention by a Western democratic country in the internal affairs of a small independent nation, however unattractive its regime. I ask you to consider this in the context of our wider East/West relations and of the fact that we will be having in the next few days to present to our parliament and people the siting of cruise missiles in this country … I cannot conceal that I am deeply disturbed by your latest communication. You asked for my advice. I have set it out and hope that even at this late stage you will take it into account before events are irrevocable.107
This message was written and sent after consultation with Howe, Heseltine, Antony Acland, the head of the Foreign Office, and her private secretaries Robin Butler and John Coles. Those present took the view that Mrs Thatcher should immediately follow it up with a telephone call to the President. According to Butler she was extraordinarily reluctant to do so, partly because she was ‘not wanting to have a great row with Reagan about it’. ‘I think the penny eventually dropped,’ continued Butler. ‘Indeed, I remember us saying to her, “You’re going to have to say something about this in the House of Commons tomorrow. And you really must have made some effort to speak to Reagan about it.” ’108
So she did.
While Mrs Thatcher felt indignant, she was still working out how best to handle the situation. Her words to Reagan were not angry ones and the call lasted only three minutes.* Butler, who also listened in to the call, confirmed that it had ‘barely any substance at all’, and, in his eyes, became unintentionally comic:
First of all, Reagan was very reluctant to come to the telephone. When he did eventually … I can only describe his tone of voice as one of a naughty schoolboy who had been caught out doing something he shouldn’t have been … And then she said, and this was the funny thing, ‘Well, er, Ron. I don’t want to say too much on the telephone.’ And he then said, ‘But Margaret, we’re speaking on our most highly encrypted line.’ And she said, ‘But never mind. You can never be sure about telephone calls.’109
At first Butler thought this showed extraordinary naivety on Mrs Thatcher’s part about the technology, but ‘In fact I think it was an excuse. She didn’t really want to go into it very much. The call took place for the sake of the call taking place.’110 Recording its main points, John Coles noted simply that Mrs Thatcher urged Reagan ‘to consider her [cabled] reply very carefully indeed. The President undertook to do so but said, “We are already at zero.” ’111
Mike Deaver was with Reagan when he finished the call:
Reagan hung up and said, ‘She’s not with us. She’s n
ot going to be with us.’ I could tell, knowing him, the pain for him of the conversation … He said, ‘But we have to go forward. We’ve got to go forward anyway.’ … It was clear from when he hung up and his shoulders kind of sagged that he was disappointed not to have his friends with him.112
Much later that evening, Reagan sent a third message to Mrs Thatcher, conciliatory in tone, but firm in content, sticking to his view that invasion was ‘the lesser of two risks’. He sought the ‘active cooperation of Her Majesty’s Government’ and, playing the legitimacy card, hoped that ‘the Governor General will exercise his constitutional powers to form an interim government which would restore democracy and facilitate the rapid departure of all foreign forces’.113 Two hours later, US forces began their assault on Grenada.
Although the Americans had not intended to humiliate Mrs Thatcher, they deliberately misled her. The Special Situations Group plan was followed throughout. Reagan’s line in his first cable to Mrs Thatcher that he wanted her ‘thoughts’ was never true: they were deliberately sought only when it was too late for them to matter.* The system of messages was a charade, carefully worked out. In his memoirs, Reagan overlooks the messages altogether, suggesting – erroneously – that Mrs Thatcher got wind of the invasion from ‘British officials in Grenada’.114 The American deception may well have been justified from the administration’s point of view, but a deception it was.*
It took a bit of time for the full import to sink into Mrs Thatcher’s mind. From the start she was deeply worried, but the real anger came later. Her immediate reaction was simply to try to deal as fast as possible with the problems which arose. As she had predicted, critics used the invasion, and Britain’s exclusion from the decision-making, to question US reliability over cruise missiles. Her claims to a close relationship with the President were widely ridiculed. The papers carried a flurry of bad headlines. ‘Reagan’s midnight snub for Maggie’, said the Sun, ‘– stunning humiliation’. While the final outcome of the invasion could not be in much doubt, US forces met stiffer resistance than had been expected, and fighting on the island was continuing.† This circumscribed Mrs Thatcher’s ability to make any final judgment or comment.
Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume 2 Page 17
