The threads that link the Falklands to Iraq

A quarter-century after the war in the South Atlantic, Simon Jenkins says that we have still not learned its lessons for intelligence and ministerial decision-making Twenty-five years ago this weekend British territory was invaded by a foreign power. The Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands followed six months in which the British government, for extraneous reasons, claimed that no such threat existed, corrupting the conduit of intelligence to that end. It blinded itself to the possibility of conflict. In the subsequent war, 255 British troops died and £3 billion was spent recapturing the islands. An inquiry, under Lord Franks, was staged to exonerate ministers of guilt.

Four years ago a British government was in an eerily inverse predicament. It spent six months claiming, again for an extraneous reason, that a foreign power posed an imminent threat to Britain, corrupting the conduit of intelligence to that end. It blinded itself to the possibility of no conflict. In the subsequent war 134 British troops, so far, have died and well over £3 billion has been spent. Two inquiries, under Lord Hutton and Lord Butler, have been staged to exonerate ministers of guilt.

After the Falklands war, stern efforts were made to ‘learn the lessons’ of what appeared to be a failure of intelligence and deterrence. Yet a dense fog still surrounds the run-up to that war. There are few accounts of the war seen from the Argentine side, as defeat is always an orphan. Last year’s official British history by Sir Lawrence Freedman broadly accepted the Franks thesis that the invasion came as a bolt from the blue. It was a spur-of-the-moment response by the Argentine junta to a threatened general strike, capitalising on a visit to South Georgia by some scrap-metal merchants in March 1982. Such an invasion, said Franks in 1982, ‘could not have been foreseen’ and therefore, ‘We would not be justified in attaching any criticism or blame to the present government.’ The truth is that the Argentine invasion was a complex operation that had been long in the preparation. Although plans for an invasion were standard exercises in Argentine navy circles, 1981 was different. The British government was clearly signalling that it had lost interest in its South Atlantic possessions. At the United Nations in New York the Foreign Office had been negotiating to transfer sovereignty over the islands to Argentina and then ‘lease them back’ to enable the islanders to continue as self-governing. These negotiations deteriorated abruptly when Margaret Thatcher indicated to Foreign Office ministers that she was unwilling to pressure the islanders to agree terms. To the intelligence community the result was clear. It meant a seriously increased risk of Argentina staging an occupation, against which the islands had to be better defended, the so-called ‘fortress Falklands’ option.

Thatcher’s desire to appease islander opinion was equalled only by her desire to cut defence spending, best illustrated by the navy review boldly engineered by her defence secretary, John Nott. This embraced the end of ‘out of area’ seaborne operations, the withdrawal of HMS Endurance from its patrol duties in the South Atlantic and even an offer to sell the carrier, HMS Invincible, to Buenos Aires. To Argentina’s naval attaché in London, Gualtar Allara, Britain was pulling in its colonial horns. The Falklanders were not being offered full British citizenship, Rhodesia had gone and Hong Kong was going. The Diego Garcians had been sold down the river.

Earlier Argentine plans for seizing the Falklands had been codenamed Plan Goa, after the similar seizure by India of the Portuguese colony in 1961, a seizure that had been accepted by the United Nations (and by Britain). In December 1981, the navy commander, Admiral Jorge Anaya did exactly what a Joint Intelligence Committee assessment the previous July had warned. He hatched a plot with his old colleague, Admiral Juan Lombardo, to repeat their capture of (Britain’s) South Sandwich Islands in 1976 by seizing South Georgia. Desperate to restore the reputation of the navy, a leading exponent of the dirty war against the Left throughout the 1970s, they wanted to portray their service as the restorer of national pride. With Endurance returning to London for the last time in April 1982, a covert landing on South Georgia would take place during the (southern) winter of 1982 and be revealed to the world the following October. The world would yawn.

That same December Anaya’s close associate, Leopoldo Galtieri, seized power in a coup. He was a bombastic soldier much favoured by the Reagan team in Washington. Anaya agreed to support him on condition that the navy were allowed not just to occupy South Georgia but to realise its fondest dream — a full invasion to ‘recover’ the Falklands before the 150th anniversary of their occupation by the British in 1833. Galtieri agreed and the invasion plan was authorised by the new junta on 15 December.

This was a wholly different scale of operation from that on South Georgia. Since glory was to be shared, it required a full tri-service planning team under Lombardo, with associated legal, diplomatic and public relations support. The invasion would take place in the depths of the southern winter, between 15 May and Argentine independence day on 9 July, when any British response would be near impossible. This was approved by the junta on 12 January. It was to be a bloodless exercise in ‘coercive diplomacy’ as a preliminary to resumed UN negotiations.

The full extent of what became Operation Rosario was revealed only in the postwar debriefing of junta members by the enterprising Argentine journalist, Maria Laura Vignolo, and in The Secret Plot by Oscar Cardoso, Ricardo Kirschbaum and Eduardo van de Kooy. It was a good plan, relying heavily for its world acceptance on India’s Goa operation.

The plan was pre-empted. In January Anaya had promised Lombardo that he would abort the South Georgia landing to avoid any risk that it might alert Britain to a threat. He did not do so. As a result an incident in March which at first seemed a confusion over some scrap merchants was revealed as a belligerent gesture by a group of marines under the notorious torturer Captain Alfredo Astiz. The British, with Endurance still on station, ordered it to remove them. This ill-conceived act provoked the Argentinians into doing the one thing against which Britain had no defence — stage a full invasion of the Falklands before the British could send preventive reinforcements, notably the one weapon the Argentine navy most feared, nuclear submarines.

Lombardo, on holiday at the time, was ordered to bring forward invasion immediately. This was a desperate measure, requiring ships to be recalled to port and untrained units embarked. Landing sites had to be checked by overflights and sub marine patrols, all of which would be detected by the British. Signals traffic would be noted and passed on to Cheltenham. Legal work on land and fishing rights had to be curtailed. For all this the invasion proceeded with astonishing expedition, landing on the morning of 2 April. Operation Rosario slid from sight and has remained there ever since. It appears nowhere in the official British history of the war.

Every great intelligence failure yields cohorts of ‘I told you so’s. The Falklands was no different. The JIC in July 1981 was told by the Foreign Office that if Britain failed to negotiate sovereignty in good faith and agree some compromise, ‘Argentina might occupy one of the uninhabited dependencies ... and might establish a military presence on the Falkland Islands themselves.’ By the start of 1982 this same message was communicated to London by the British ambassador in Buenos Aires Anthony Williams, by his defence attaché Stephen Love, by the captain of HMS Endurance Nick Barker, and by South American desk staff in the Foreign Office. In the two weeks of naval activity while Lombardo was bringing his plan forward — when submarines might have been sent south and public ultimatums issued to Buenos Aires — the messages (now on record) became a flood.

They were blocked because they were messages the system did not want to hear, implying costly ship movements. Love told me he felt like murdering the defence ministry section which buried his warnings. The foreign secretary, Lord Carrington, did not want to risk infuriating Thatcher with talk of compromise on sovereignty. The JIC was brainwashed by the culture of defence cuts. Falklands alarmists were regarded as slightly bonkers — until it was too late.

All this was set to one side in the flush of subsequent victory. Such intelligence failures as Franks detected were regarded as procedural. Yet the Falklands was a close fought war, its fortune turned by the sinking of the Belgrano and Anaya’s resulting withdrawal to port of his carrier, Yeinticinco de Mayo, whose planes could have devastated a task force already pummelled by landbased bombers. The loss of any further ships would have been catastrophic and probably required Britain to seek overt military help from America. This would have been conditional on some negotiating compromise with Argentina, which Reagan was still pressing on Thatcher shortly before the end of the war in June.

The Falklands invasion was a classic of the intelligence phenomenon known as ‘cognitive dissonance’, where the recipient hears only what he wants to believe is the case. Not until Thatcher saw her career about to collapse about her ears did she and those around her wonder why they had not been warned. She was vastly relieved to be told by Franks that, in effect, there was nothing to warn — though for four months a foreign power had been planning to attack her in the belief that she would not resist. The preliminaries to the Iraq war were uncannily inverse. Once Tony Blair had decided to go to war in Iraq with America — at the Crawford summit in March 2002 — intelligence about Iraq ceased being a guide to policy and became its cheerleader. As in 1982, the Cabinet was impervious to shifts in intelligence assessment (assuming there were any). Intelligence that Saddam lacked weapons of mass destruction and posed no threat to the West was doctored, even though it was the only legal basis for attacking him.

Such raw material as was available was described in the Hutton and Butler reports as variously ‘not great’, ‘dodgy’, ‘pretty meagre’ and ‘a total horlicks’. It had constantly to be re-engineered by Downing Street to support the case for war. In this it was fiercely reinforced by cognitive dissonance in Washington.

Having studied both cases, I am inclined to the sanguine conclusion that far too much is expected of intelligence as an aid to policy. All the brains in the world will never overcome cognitive dissonance. An intelligence genius is always trumped by an idiot politician. In both the Falklands and Iraq, the Foreign Office and intelligence sources were feeding the machine with sensible material, but it was material that it suited nobody to hear. In both cases the ‘clear bell of warning’ was muffled.

The job of intelligence is not the same as that of statesman. There was at least a chance that Argentina might not invade until later in 1982, by which time something might have been done to avert it. In 2002, past history suggested that Saddam Hussein might yet be concealing something dreadful, whatever Hans Blix and the UN might claim. Spies, as George Smiley always said, must always defer to ‘our lords and masters’. But both these failures to hear intelligence aright led to the two bloodiest wars fought by Britain in my lifetime.

The lesson supposedly learned after the Falklands was that Whitehall’s intelligence apparatus should be made less dependent on departmental inputs and thus more robust in ‘speaking truth to power’. As part of this exercise, MI6 went public. Iraq shows that this restructuring failed. The head of the JIC was found cosying up to the Prime Minister on his sofa and editing press releases.

Intelligence must always remain on tap and not on top. States run by spies are never happy ones. But the message of both these affairs is that the tap must run pure. The framework by which threats to British security are assessed must be independent of executive policy and have some alternative conduit of accountability to parliament. If power does not like what truth speaks, so be it, but at least we might ensure it hears the speaking.

Simon Jenkins is co-author, with Max Hastings, of The Battle for the Falklands, published by Pan.