Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (122 page)

The very next day, 14 April, provided an example of just how annoying, from the British point of view, Haig could be. The
Washington Post
, under the front-page headline ‘US Aiding British Fleet in Atlantic’, reported US satellite and intelligence assistance for Britain and the offer of fuel tanks in Ascension Island. Argentina immediately used this as an excuse for refusing further negotiations, and Haig rang Mrs Thatcher. He said he proposed to put out a statement denying the story and saying that there would be no help to Britain ‘beyond the customary patterns of co-operation … British use of facilities on the UK island of Ascension has been restricted accordingly.’ ‘Oh, now that’s a bit devastating,’ said Mrs Thatcher. ‘The House of Commons’, she went on, would be disappointed that ‘the full difference between democracy and dictatorship is not appreciated and that we are both treated the same.’
¹⁸²
In a later conversation with him the same day, she pointed out that his proposed statement was self-contradictory –
if there was no special co-operation, why was he withdrawing it? She summed up brusquely: ‘What I’m saying, Al, is for Pete’s sake, get that use of Ascension Island out of your statement, because it’s our island and we can’t exactly invade our island.’ ‘Of course not,’ said Haig meekly, ‘I will take that out.’
¹⁸³

Mrs Thatcher herself was only partially aware of how true the story in the
Washington Post
was. Almost from the first day, through the good offices of the Pentagon, the United States had been providing secret assistance to Britain.
*
Weinberger, confident in the support of his boss, acted at first without telling the President directly. When, days into the crisis, British requests became far more significant he met Reagan privately. The President’s response was clear and simple: ‘Give Maggie everything she needs to get on with it.’
¹⁸⁴
The Americans had cracked Argentine military codes: ‘The NSA [National Security Agency] had broken the code for Argentina’s military communication. They were able to pass the data to the British in real time, so they got it even before those in the Falklands. It then leaked out that this was happening so the Argentines changed the code. But the NSA broke it again in just twenty-four hours.’
^185
†
The same co-operation extended to kit. According to Dov Zakheim, the point man on the subject in the Pentagon: ‘Weinberger wanted to ensure that Britain had whatever it needed … He wanted to know what had happened to each request. Had we met it? If not, why not?’
¹⁸⁶
In acting thus, without formal authority, Weinberger probably broke the law, but no one was disposed to arraign him for it. Even before Haig’s diplomacy had come to an end, US military help for Britain began to move on to a more formal footing. By 19 April, for example, presidential authority had been obtained to provide Britain with six surface-to-air missile launchers and twelve missiles.
¹⁸⁷
As a result of his behaviour in the Falklands War, Weinberger was to become one of Mrs Thatcher’s lifelong heroes.

On 14 April, Mrs Thatcher exposed the Haig proposals to the full Cabinet. She explained that Haig himself did not know whether his proposals would ‘stick’ in Buenos Aires. Argentina was holding out for an Argentine governor flying the Argentine flag and negotiations which must end in Argentine sovereignty (this was Mrs Thatcher’s interpretation of
Costa Méndez’s five demands). These things were ‘totally unacceptable’, she said, according to Robert Armstrong’s notes, but ‘if we secure withdrawal and restoration of Ex and Leg Co [the Executive and Legislative Councils], a great prize’. ‘Absolute sticking-point is paramountcy of wishes of islanders,’ she added. In the discussion which followed, Pym and Geoffrey Howe argued that concessions had to be made and that there would be no return to the status quo ante. Nigel Lawson and Lord Hailsham took the opposite view, arguing that the sort of settlement Haig wanted would show that aggression had paid. Mrs Thatcher, for all her bellicosity with Haig, found herself sitting in the middle. ‘All they are getting for withdrawal’, she said in reply to Hailsham, ‘is one-third of a Commission.’
¹⁸⁸
At this time, her mind moved constantly back and forth between natural outrage at conceding anything and a reluctant sense of what might be politic. The fact was that the War Cabinet, with her approval,
had
made some concessions which Haig was authorized to use. In Parliament that day, she explained, as frankly as she could, the progress of the Haig mission, and said that Britain was negotiating. She emphasized the importance of the wishes of the islanders, using the word ‘paramount’.
¹⁸⁹

On 15 April, Al Haig left Washington and again set off for Buenos Aires. Pessimistic about Argentine attitudes, he cabled the President, warning him that ‘we should begin to prepare ourselves for the worst’ and inviting him to consider whether Reagan himself should ‘push Mrs Thatcher to come forth with a significant concession’ or whether the whole mission should be broken off: ‘Whether you should, or could, push Mrs Thatcher to this bitter conclusion – that they cannot in any event resist the course of history and that they are now paying the price for previous UK vacillation on the sovereignty question – with all that would mean for her, for our relationship, and our own principles, will require very careful thought.’
¹⁹⁰
On that same day, Reagan had a civil but not very substantive telephone conversation with General Galtieri. ‘I agree that a war in this hemisphere between two Western nations, both friendly to the United States, is unthinkable,’ Reagan told Galtieri, who stressed repeatedly his anxiety at the approach of the British fleet.
¹⁹¹
He then sent Mrs Thatcher a message reporting the Galtieri conversation, neither approving nor disapproving of what the general had said. She replied fiercely the next day that the suggestion (from Galtieri) that the aggressor can be left in possession of his spoils was ‘gravely misplaced … The fundamental principles for which the free world stands would be shattered.’
¹⁹²
Reagan rang her the following day, offering some reassurance. As he put it in his diary: ‘Al Haig is there [in Buenos
Aires] and as of noon the situation looked hopeless. I called Margaret Thatcher to tell her I’d cabled him to return home if there was no break in the Argentine position.’
¹⁹³
Mrs Thatcher’s version was: ‘I said we could go
no further
and President Reagan
agreed
that it would not be reasonable to ask us to move further.’
¹⁹⁴
*

Haig did, in fact, manage to extract some sort of text from Argentina before he left, but when he was at Buenos Aires airport the same thing happened as on his previous trip. Costa Méndez handed him an envelope going back on the modest concessions made and insisting that recognition of Argentine sovereignty over the islands by 31 December 1982 was a
sine qua non
of all negotiation. In the circumstances, it did not seem worth returning to London. Haig cabled Pym. He did not tell him about the Costa Méndez ambush, but he gave him the Argentine text, and did not try very hard to sell it: ‘My own disappoint [sic] with this text prevents me from attempting to influence you in any way … Francis, I do not know whether more can be wrung out of the Argentines. It is not clear who is in charge here, as many as 50 people, including corps commanders, may be exercising vetos [sic]. Certianly [sic], I can do no better at this point.’
¹⁹⁵
The War Cabinet, realizing Britain could not be blamed, happily and swiftly rejected the text, believing that this long game was now at an end.

There was less agreement, though, about the best way to handle the collapse of the Haig mission. Francis Pym suggested an idea for a new UN Security Council resolution that Britain might put forward itself. Mrs Thatcher was intensely suspicious, fearing that another country would introduce an amendment which would prevent the use of force. She rang Anthony Parsons in New York about it. It was ‘utterly appalling’, she said, and would show Britain ‘washing our hands’ of the islanders. ‘I took one look at it and said well I suppose this is Foreign Office,’ but the Foreign Office had assured her it was Parsons’s idea, hence the call. Parsons managed to reassure her that he was very much against a new resolution, but that Britain should be ready with one if necessary to prevent a worse draft coming from the United States and Jeane Kirkpatrick. As they wound up the call on friendly terms, Mrs Thatcher added with a touch of pathos, ‘I have no department here and I’m jolly well realising that I need a
department. I have no department and therefore I have to rely on third-hand hearsay and I don’t like it.’
¹⁹⁶

These words are reminders of the astonishing extent of her isolation during the Falklands War. In all her long-running economic battles with the spending departments and the Wets, she was able to work closely with the Treasury team, but for the Falklands crisis she was not close to any other minister or department. With Carrington gone and Pym replacing him, she had little faith in her Foreign Secretary. She had been shaken by John Nott’s performance in the first debate in the Commons and had noticed that he was ‘often in a pretty febrile state’.
¹⁹⁷
Although she did not regard him as politically hostile, Nott became, according to Clive Whitmore, ‘rather suspect in the PM’s eyes’.
¹⁹⁸
When it came to the progress of the conflict, ‘The PM wanted to hear from Terry Lewin, not from him,’ admitted Nott’s own private secretary, David Omand.
¹⁹⁹
Willie Whitelaw, though useful for his political feel and his own experience of war, was not deeply engaged in the running of the crisis. Nor was the other member of the War Cabinet, Cecil Parkinson. He was politically loyal to Mrs Thatcher and performed well on television, but he was the most junior of the five ministers, and his experience of the armed forces was limited to a brief spell of national service in the RAF. Michael Havers, the Attorney-General, with his combination of wartime naval experience, political attitude and important legal advice on matters like Rules of Engagement, was a congenial spirit to the Prime Minister, but he was not a man with his own political standing. Perhaps her closest political companion was Ian Gow. He was passionately loyal, and seized of the romance of the situation.
²⁰⁰
Shortly after the Task Force had sailed, he sent Mrs Thatcher a handwritten letter about the ‘loneliness of your task’. There were ‘many of us’, he said, ‘who, whatever the future holds in store, will be forever thankful for having had the privilege of trying to help the finest chief, the most resolute and far sighted leader and the kindest and most considerate friend that any man could hope to serve’.
²⁰¹
Gow worked tirelessly to secure her position in the House of Commons, and gave her great comfort; but he was not, of course, in any position of command, or of policy-making.

Mrs Thatcher was also served by able private secretaries in Clive Whitmore and John Coles, and turned to Whitmore, who had a Ministry of Defence background, for advice, but she certainly did not run policy through them as she was later to do with Coles’s successor, Charles Powell. So, in a crisis that had seemed to come out of nowhere, on a subject about which, she admitted to Whitmore, she knew very little,
²⁰²
she was more or less on her own. It was not surprising that she turned not only for expertise but also for moral support to the naval and military commanders. She
particularly admired John Fieldhouse, the Commander-in-Chief Fleet, and, above all, Lewin himself. According to John Coles, Lewin ‘exuded calm, confidence, experience and a charm to which she was not immune’.
²⁰³
‘She had the wisdom to realize that she had a great deal to learn,’ said Whitmore,
²⁰⁴
and Lewin was her ideal teacher, both because he was a sailor,
*
whose service was, until the actual landing on the Falklands, in the lead, and because of his own character. Seeing him every day at the War Cabinet, she came to rely on his judgment more than on anyone else’s. The result was that, although Mrs Thatcher had to spend more of her time with diplomatic decisions than with military ones, in her eyes the needs of the armed services came first. The key to success, as Denis advised her, was ‘Get the Chiefs, give them clear objectives and then get out of the way.’
²⁰⁵

Exhausted though he was, Haig did not allow the collapse of his discussions with Argentina to bring the whole business to an end. Indeed, he did not sit back and analyse the situation very clearly. Robin Renwick assessed him thus: ‘Haig, whose intentions were honourable, but who had none of Kissinger’s intellectual power, had difficulty understanding that he was trying to bridge an unbridgeable gap. Temperamentally hyperactive, he also seemed to be operating under serious personal strain … it was disconcerting to find ourselves dealing with a US Secretary of State who, under the strain, had developed facial tics reminiscent of Dr Strangelove.’
²⁰⁶
When he saw Reagan on 20 April, Haig had a new suggestion. Instead of using his good offices any further, he would throw away earlier drafts and come up with his own proposal for presentation to both sides. ‘I don’t think Margaret Thatcher should be asked to concede any more,’ Reagan had written in his diary the day before, but he now assented to Haig’s request to revisit the issue.
²⁰⁷
Haig invited Pym to visit him in Washington on 22–23 April for a final round of discussion. Mrs Thatcher had her doubts about Haig even before this suggestion. Speaking on the telephone to Pym from Chequers on 18 April, she said: ‘I have an awful suspicion that compromise is going to be everything to him [Haig],’
²⁰⁸
but she did not feel that she could refuse the request. The War Cabinet agreed that Pym should go, bearing counter-proposals to those last offered by Argentina, which Britain had already rejected.