On 2 April 1982, only three months after the Nicoll report on surprise attack had been completed, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. British intelligence manifestly failed to spot this coming, and within months Nicoll had been recalled to mount a second inquiry that focused on the Falklands intelligence failure. Although he had been tough on Britain’s intelligence analysts about their performance over the past decade, he was kinder to them about the Falklands. He concluded that the invasion had been very hard to detect in advance. The Argentineans had caught the British by surprise because they launched their operation earlier than they had themselves intended, and with almost no preparation. The Argentinean military planners had expected six months of build-up, but Buenos Aires had suddenly ordered a snap invasion in the space of just six days. There were simply no preparations to see. As Lord Carrington, Britain’s forlorn Foreign Secretary, later put it: ‘It’s all very well when you can see soldiers moving about on the ground, but you can’t see someone’s intentions.’8 Nevertheless, senior intelligence officers conceded that despite increased diplomatic rumblings over the Falklands, the islands had remained a ‘low intelligence priority’.9
The Argentinean junta that took power in a coup in 1976 was, in the words of Lord Carrington, a ‘brutal’ one.10 Its more unpleasant activities included a loathsome ‘Dirty War’ in which leftists, intellectuals, trade unionists and human rights campaigners ‘disappeared’. The notorious Naval Mechanics School in Buenos Aires became the main torture centre, and many junior officers were forced to participate in the liquidation of forty thousand of their fellow citizens. Argentinean naval intelligence played a leading role in the secret execution of intellectuals and union leaders, and this in turn underlined the strength of the naval faction in the new junta. Invading the Falklands would be a predominantly naval operation, and almost immediately after the coup there were worrying signs. In November 1976 the aggressive Commander in Chief of the Argentine Navy, Admiral Jorge Anaya, arranged for the symbolic occupation of the tiny uninhabited British island of Southern Thule. More remarkably, on 22 September 1977 Anaya ordered the capture of four Soviet trawlers that were fishing in Falklands waters as an assertion of Argentina’s sovereignty. The incident was messy, with an exchange of fire and the death of one Russian sailor. This should have signalled that Buenos Aires was now run by violent men. Argentinean death squads operated not only at home but abroad. Elena Holmberg, the Argentine Cultural Attaché in Paris, compiled a dossier on the way in which Argentine naval intelligence officers were extending their terror operations to Europe to kill dissident Argentines there. Sadly, she was recalled to Buenos Aires and herself secretly killed in January 1979.11
The main impediment to the junta’s Falklands ambitions had been the arrival of the highly principled Jimmy Carter in the White House in 1977. The junta had been thinking about repeating the Southern Thule episode by capturing South Georgia, a dependency of the Falklands and a larger island than Thule, which London would not be able to ignore. This, the Argentineans believed, would allow them to negotiate from a position of strength on the issue of the Falklands, which they had long regarded as Argentinean territory. However, Carter placed a moratorium on American arms exports to Argentina because of its horrific human rights violations. By contrast, the Europeans behaved like unprincipled bagmen. The British rushed to sell the Argentineans some of their latest frigates, but were outpaced by the Germans. The French sold them Super Etendard jets and the latest Exocet sea-skimming missiles. The Italians, Spanish and Belgians followed in their wake. All these countries overlooked the disappearance of their own nationals in Argentina as part of the ‘Dirty War’: in the case of Germany, no fewer than forty-eight of their citizens had vanished without trace. Britain secured a contract for the training of Argentinean special forces, and even supplied a hundred specially silenced Sterling sub-machine guns. In April 1982 these elite Argentinean troops were in the first wave of invaders, and infamously displayed captured British Royal Marines in front of Government House at Port Stanley, the islands’ capital.12
Incredibly, when the Argentinean junta seized the tiny uninhabited island of Southern Thule in 1976, the Foreign Office covered this up, and it was only admitted to Parliament a year later. Ted Rowlands, a junior Foreign Office Minister, was sent to Argentina to undertake another round of appeasement. Rowlands made pathetic pleas to Buenos Aires not to mention the embarrassing Southern Thule incident publicly, resulting in open mockery from the Argentineans. By 1977 the JIC had looked at the occupation of Southern Thule and concluded, rightly, that the Falklands were now a cause célèbre for the junta, and that a further escapade might be on the cards. The Foreign Secretary, David Owen, decided that frigates and a nuclear submarine should be sent to the South Atlantic as a show of resolve, and the Prime Minister, James Callaghan, backed him. It is widely thought that SIS was asked by Callaghan to gently leak the presence of this secret task force to the Argentineans to increase its deterrent value.13
Given that warning of an attack on the islands would always be difficult to secure, visible deterrence was critical. The most important element of the British military presence in the South Atlantic was a curious-looking ship called HMS Endurance, variously described as an ice-patrol ship or a survey vessel. Painted an indeterminate shade of reddish-orange, she was known affectionately by her crew as ‘The Plum’. Armed with only a 20mm cannon and a helicopter, she moved around between South Georgia, the Falklands and Argentina, transporting small contingents of Royal Marines and conducting scientific survey work. However, her most important role was a covert one, as her Captain, Nick Barker, later explained:
It could be argued that the main armament of the ship was the listening suite. This was a small box parked on top of the hangar which contained a comprehensive set of monitoring equipment. It could also receive frequencies in most bands at sea or on station. Our communications technicians were Spanish linguists which meant they were well informed whenever we went alongside in South America…The Endurance was, in effect, a listening station. The two senior ratings most concerned were known as ‘The Spies’ by the ship’s company.14
As Barker recounts, it did not take the Argentineans long to realise that the curious boxes on the roof of the hangar contained something slightly more exciting than brooms for sweeping down the decks. Sir Anthony Williams, Britain’s Ambassador to Buenos Aires later explained that Endurance was not only listening to Argentina, but was gathering signals intelligence from throughout South America.15 Much of Cheltenham’s best material on Argentina came from the Endurance. However, the Thule incident had also prompted GCHQ to revive its small station on Ascension Island off the west coast of Africa, which had only been closed down the year before. The cover for this activity was the small settlement called Two Boats, which nominally belonged to Cable & Wireless Ltd.16
In 1980 an unsuspecting Foreign Office Minister, Nicholas Ridley, was lured by pro-Argentinean British diplomats into trying to transfer the islands’ sovereignty by stealth. The idea was that the Falklands would quietly be given to the Argentineans, but then leased back from them by Britain for a number of years. Ridley tried valiantly to sell the idea of ‘leaseback’ to the islanders, but they were not impressed, and wished to remain British subjects. In December 1980 he expounded the plan to the House of Commons, and walked into a well-prepared ambush by the Falklands lobby. He was subjected to a wilting attack from all sides, denouncing what they called the Foreign Office’s ‘shameful schemes’.17 Nonetheless, curious conspiracies were still going on in Whitehall a year later. When Admiral Fieldhouse, the new Commander in Chief of the Fleet, took over in 1981, he recalls repeatedly asking about contingency plans for the defence of the Falklands. The Foreign Office told him there was no need, as ‘they were negotiating and could handle it’.18 More alarmingly, HMS Endurance was scheduled to be withdrawn in late 1981 because of defence cuts. Argentina had detected that the civil servants of Whitehall were not anxious to defend the Falklands, but
it was equally clear that a negotiated solution would never get past the House of Commons. For the Argentineans, the only logical answer was now invasion. The person who was most aware of the developing crisis was the man on the spot, Sir Anthony Williams, Britain’s Ambassador in Buenos Aires. He had been anxious about the Falklands for some time, and in the autumn of 1981 had sent ‘a very much more acute warning’ to the Foreign Office. However, London was not persuaded: ‘They were by no means convinced that my information was necessarily better than what they were getting through…the interception of Argentina’s diplomatic cypher traffic by Government Communications Headquarters.’19
In fact, Argentinean orders to prepare for the invasion of the Falklands were given secretly by word of mouth. On the sunny morning of Tuesday, 15 December 1981, Admiral Anaya flew into Puerto Belgrano, which served as the main centre of operations for the Argentine Navy. His presence there was seemingly ceremonial: he had arrived to oversee the installation of the new Chief of Naval Operations, Vice Admiral Juan Lombardo. Bands played, sailors paraded and were inspected, everything passed off faultlessly. However, a surprise awaited Lombardo. A few hours after the parade, Anaya asked to speak to him alone. To his amazement he was ordered to prepare for the invasion of the Falklands. Absolute secrecy, Anaya emphasised, was paramount.20 In mid-January 1982 the Army and the Air Force were told, and by early March the outline planning for invasion was ready. The target date was mid-September, following the abatement of the foul South Atlantic winter weather, between April and August. The 2nd Marine Infantry Battalion, which was to lead the invasion, began quietly exercising on the coast of Patagonia, using a beach that resembled that of Port Stanley. Only a handful of their officers knew the real purpose of the exercises, and radio silence ensured that it was not picked up by GCHQ.21
Bizarrely, the British now triggered an earlier than scheduled invasion of the Falklands, and so, in a way, inflicted surprise upon themselves. During March 1982 a minor incident occurred on South Georgia, which was also claimed by Argentina. A group of Argentine scrap-metal workers had been contracted to remove some old machinery from an abandoned whale factory on the island. During their visit they raised an Argentinean flag, and refused to seek a landing permit. The British Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, repeatedly insisted on their removal, and despatched HMS Endurance, with a party of twenty Royal Marines, from the Falklands. This was reported to Buenos Aires, which sent a similar-sized ship, the Bahia Paraios, with a small party of troops. By the end of March two armed parties, Lilliputian in size, were on South Georgia, twenty miles apart. Crucially, this minor confrontation accelerated the invasion of the Falklands. The junta now ordered immediate action. Argentinean military officers had almost no time to prepare the invasion, and British intelligence had few preparations to observe.22
The Argentinean junta saw South Georgia as a crisis. The removal of the scrap men by force would be an unbearable slight to their prestige, yet they would not be ready for military action against the British for months. All crises consist of both danger and opportunity. In the end, Buenos Aires decided to seize the opportunity, and used the confrontation over South Georgia as a pretext to launch a snap invasion of the Falklands. On 23 March the planning group was asked how quickly they could produce a detailed scheme for invasion. Their answer was early April, but they were told to be ready to sail on 28 March. Air Vice Commodore Carlos Bloomer-Reeve, who was to become Secretary General of the new Argentinean administration on what they called the ‘Islas Malvinas’, was only told of his role on 27 March.23 The extreme short notice helped to defeat sigint. One of GCHQ’s key indicators of a possible invasion was that intelligence analysts had identified a number of Argentine military units as likely participants, and their signals were tracked as warning features. Among these indicator units were elite army formations along the border with Chile.24 While they remained there, so orthodoxy maintained, an invasion could not be under way. Rather like the Israelis in 1973, who had a model of what forces the Egyptians would need to assemble if they planned an invasion, GCHQ also had a fixed concept. Instead, the initial operations were carried out almost entirely by the Argentinean Navy and Marines. Meanwhile the crack army units remained on the Chilean border.25
At sea, both the Argentineans and the Chileans were engaged in large-scale exercises, resulting in a cacophony of signals from dozens of ships, all seemingly ‘on operations’.26 In fact sigint contributed to British confusion. Reports received around 24 March indicated that two Argentine warships had been sent to intercept HMS Endurance, then making its way to South Georgia with Marines. It was this sigint material that triggered a discussion of the situation on South Georgia in Whitehall on Thursday, 25 March. The Defence Secretary, John Nott, who had been away in Washington, saw the same material over the weekend, and went to see the First Sea Lord, Henry Leach, about it early on the following Monday morning. GCHQ had picked up a signal from Admiral Anaya in Buenos Aires ordering two Argentinean frigates, Drummond and Granville, to sail south to reinforce the Bahia Paraios and its small party of Marines on South Georgia. In fact Admiral Lombardo objected to this move, insisting that he needed the frigates for the main operation against the Falklands, so they were recalled. However, such is the power of sigint in painting the picture for commanders that most British accounts, including Nott’s own precise memoir, still insist that these ships went to South Georgia. Oddly, a deployment that never actually occurred now began the slide towards war.27
Over the weekend of 27-28 March, the British Ambassador in Buenos Aires was told by the Argentines that South Georgia was now a ‘closed issue’, and would not be discussed further. This ominous sign was accompanied by general instructions to Argentinean embassies around the world to cancel all leave. All this was collected by GCHQ. The JIC still believed in a model of gradually escalating tension, and did not think the crisis over South Georgia would have immediate implications for the Falklands. However, GCHQ maintained its long-established practice of selecting choice items of raw intelligence for Downing Street, known as the Blue Book. This was a favourite with Margaret Thatcher, who loved intelligence, despite the fact that her staff referred to these reports rather sneeringly as ‘Comic Cuts’.28 When she and Carrington saw the raw sigint on South Georgia, their gut instincts were much better than those of the intelligence analysts. Conversing over the phone on the evening of 28 March, and again on an aircraft that took them to a summit in Brussels on Monday, 29 March, they decided to send three nuclear submarines south immediately. At this point the focus of British anxiety still seems to have been South Georgia. However, to Carrington’s credit, these submarines were sailing south within perhaps three days of the moment at which the junta had decided to invade.29
In the two weeks between the arrival of the scrap-metal workers and the invasion of the Falklands, much of the intelligence material pouring in was low-grade naval sigint collected by Endurance. Because of John Nott’s attempts to trim the British fleet in 1981, Endurance had been earmarked for retirement. Therefore her warnings of increasing Argentine bellicosity, based on the interception of low-level operational traffic, were dismissed by some as an effort to save the ship from being withdrawn from service.30 Working under the JIC were several Current Intelligence Groups covering different regions. The Group covering Latin America, headed by Brigadier Adam Gurdon, thought the material was not very definitive. Something was going on, but the vast volume of low-grade naval traffic was confusing. Key elements of the Argentine Army were still on the border with Chile. Moreover, the momentum seemed less than in 1977, when the JIC had sounded the alarm but no attack had taken place. So for the time being they watched and waited.31 What Douglas Nicoll had called ‘perseveration’ was also in evidence. The intelligence analysts rehearsed the familiar line on the Falklands that invasion would not occur suddenly, but would follow a gradual increase in diplomatic pressure by Buenos Aires. Moreover, the gathering tempo of the Cold War, with fighting in Afghanistan and then trouble i
n Poland, took their attention elsewhere. Over a two-year period between November 1977 and November 1979, the JIC had reviewed the situation in the Falklands eight times. However, over the next two and a half years, between November 1979 and March 1982, it revisited the threat to the islands only three times.32
On Wednesday, 31 March 1982, sigint finally picked up unambiguous signs of a Falklands invasion at two days’ notice. GCHQ intercepted a message to the Argentine submarine Santa Fe, which was landing a special forces reconnaissance team on the beach at Mullett Creek on the Falklands. There was only one possible interpretation that could be placed on this – invasion was very close. This unpleasant news was flashed to the Cabinet Office.33 During that morning there had also been a very rapid rise in the volume of signals traffic. Suddenly, it was hard to escape the conclusion that an invasion fleet was mustering off the Falklands. By the same afternoon a crash assessment had reached John Nott’s desk, but he was busy in the House of Commons.34 At 6 o’clock in the evening, Nott still had ‘no conception’ that a major crisis was about to unfold. However, aware that there were problems, he had asked a team from the Defence Intelligence Staff to come to his room in the House of Commons to give him a briefing:
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