Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [107]
However, as I rather expected, none of these diplomatic arguments in favour of lease-back had much appeal to the islanders themselves. They would have nothing to do with such proposals. They distrusted the Argentine dictatorship and were sceptical of its promises. But more than that, they wanted to remain British. They made this abundantly clear to Nick Ridley when he twice visited them to learn their views. The House of Commons too was noisily determined that the islanders’ wishes should be respected. Lease-back was killed. I was not prepared to force the islanders into an arrangement which was intolerable to them — and which I in their position would not have tolerated either.
However, what all this meant for the future of the Falklands in the longer term was less clear. The Government found itself with very little room for manoeuvre. We were keen, if we could, to keep talking to the Argentinians, but diplomacy was becoming increasingly difficult. The Argentinians had already shown that they were not above taking direct action. In 1976 they had established and had maintained since a military presence on Southern Thule in the South Sandwich Islands, which the Labour Government did nothing to remove and which ministers did not even reveal to the House of Commons until 1978.
Then, in December 1981, there was a change of government in Buenos Aires. A new three-man military Junta replaced the previous military government, with General Leopoldo Galtieri as President. Galtieri relied on the support of the Argentine Navy, whose Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Anaya, held particularly hardline views on the Argentine claim to the ‘Malvinas’.
Cynically, the new Junta continued negotiations for a few months. There were talks in New York at the end of February 1982 which seemed to go well. But then the Argentinian line hardened abruptly. With hindsight this was a turning point. But in judging our response to the new Junta it is important to remember how much aggressive rhetoric there had already been in the past, none of it coming to anything. Moreover, based on past experience our view was that Argentina was likely to follow a policy of progessively escalating the dispute, starting with diplomatic and economic pressures. Contrary to what was said at the time, we had no intelligence until almost the last moment that Argentina was about to launch a full-scale invasion. Nor did the Americans: in fact Al Haig later told me that they had known even less than we had.
A factor in all this was the American Administration’s policy of strengthening ties with Argentina as part of its strategy of resisting Cuban-based communist influence in Central and South America. It later became clear that the Argentinians had gained a wildly exaggerated idea of their importance to the United States. They convinced themselves on the eve of the invasion that they need not take seriously American warnings against military action, and became more intransigent when diplomatic pressure was applied on them afterwards to withdraw.
Could they have been deterred? It must be remembered that in order to take action to deter Argentina militarily, given the vast distance between Britain and the Falklands, we would have had to have some three weeks’ notice. Further, to send down a force of insufficient size would have been to subject it to intolerable risk. Certainly, the presence of HMS Endurance — the lightly armed patrol vessel which was due to be withdrawn under the 1981 Defence Review proposals — was a military irrelevance. It would neither deter nor repel any planned invasion. (Indeed, when the invasion occurred I was very glad that the ship was at sea and not in Port Stanley: if she had been, she would have been captured or blown out of the water.) Most important perhaps is that nothing would have more reliably precipitated a full-scale invasion, if something less had been planned, than if we had started military preparations on the scale required to send an effective deterrent. Of course with the benefit of hindsight, we would always like