U.S. Crushes Caribbean Jewel
Ьу Ellen Ray and Bill Schaap
Covert Action Magazine No 32 – Summer 1989
Editors’ Note: This article appeared in CAIB Number 21, Winter 1984 and was one of the few analyses of the overthrow of the Bishop government to concentrate on the role of U.S. intelligence. The U.S. invasion of Grenada remains the most severe application of the “Reagan Doctrine,” intervention of whatever sort necessary to reverse progressive victories around the world.
A curious aspect of the coverage of the coup against Maurice Bishop and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Grenada is the near absence in the press of any mention of the CIA or speculation about a CIA hand in the events. One would think William Casey was not present at George Bush’s National Security Council meetings deciding to divert the fleet after the death of Bishop, advancing the incursion plans at a frenzied pace after the Beirut bombing—plotting each step of the invasion. One would think there were no CIA agents on Grenada after four and a half years of urgent and persistent endeavors to place them there, that there were no intelligence officers on the island, directing the Marines and Rangers, or aboard the U.S.S. Guam directing part of the invasion itself. And yet we know that from the moment of the March 13, 1979, revolution in Grenada the CIA has relentlessly tried to destroy that tiny island’s government and to eliminate that great threat to the U.S. — a charismatic black leader loved by his own people and respected by all who knew him.
It is now clear that for more than two years the U.S. government had been moving inexorably toward the military overthrow of the People’s Revolutionary Government of Grenada. Early on, President Reagan’s advisers recognized that a simple continuation of the Carter administration’s destabilization campaign would not suffice.
Reagan’s Changing Plans
In 1980, President Carter created the Caribbean Rapid Deployment Force, which staged exercises at Guantanamo Naval Base on Cuba—military posturing which Bishop denounced at the U.N. as a return to gunboat diplomacy and a revival of the Monroe Doctrine. Shortly thereafter, when Reagan took over, he embarked on a game plan which would lead to the actual use of those forces.
Promising to shore up the CIA and to stop the “Marxists” in Grenada from threatening their democratic neighbors, Reagan sent Jeane Kirkpatrick to Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay to urge them to develop a joint security treaty. This preoccupation with organizing unity among right-wing countries eventually culminated in the formation of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) and the revival of the Central American Defense Council (Condeca).
Some of the steps leading up to the invasion include:
- On April 27, 1981, a rather motley collection of ten Ku Klux Klansmen and Nazis were arrested in New Orleans about to depart with a plan to invade Dominica. They were quietly tried and convicted. Eugenia Charles’s Freedom Party had been elected in Dominica with considerable support from the U.S. Embassy in Barbados. After the arrest of the would-be invaders, she clamored for a regional security treaty to protect against mercenaries, and at her urging the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States was inaugurated on June 18, 1981. The only reason for this organization seems to have been to provide an entity to be told by the U.S. to ask for a U.S. invasion.
- In the summer of 1981, Casey proposed a covert action plan against both Grenada and Suriname which was, in the words of one Senator, so “off the wall” that it was dropped. According to the Washington Post (February 27, 1983), members of the Senate Intelligence Committee objected. However, it was clear that the plan for Grenada was never dropped, but just sent back to the drawing board.
- Over a six-week period in the fall of 1981, according to Grenadian security forces, there were seven incidents of sabotage, suspected to have been of CIA origin, which could have been connected to an invasion plan.
- In October 1981, a massive U.S. naval exercise, Ocean Venture ’81, was conducted in the Caribbean, including a mock invasion of “Amber and the Amberdines,” an open reference to Grenada and the Grenadines. It involved a rescue of Americans being held hostage by the Amber government, and its mission was “to install a regime favorable to the ‘way of life we espouse,’” according to Pentagon literature.
- Reagan visited Barbados Prime Minister Tom Adams in April 1982 to discuss the “spread of the virus of communism” from Grenada. According to Karen De Young of the Washington Post (October 26, 1983), Adams said at the time he did not feel that either Grenada or Cuba posed a military threat to his island, but another participant at the meeting, Jamaica Prime Minister Edward Seaga, who owed his own election victory over Michael Manley to considerable U.S. intelligence collaboration, was interested. Shortly thereafter, Seaga was awarded a medal by Reagan at the White House.
- By the spring of 1983 the invasion plan was in high gear. In March, Reagan fulminated over Cuban help for the international airport construction. Although no one knowledgeable on the subject ever bought the President’s argument that the airport was “too big” for mere tourism, or that it was a secret military installation, the media continued to play up the charge, and the American public was told that tiny Grenada was a threat to U.S. security. At the same time, authoritative military journals were decrying the threat to the chokepoints of U.S. oil tanker lanes, another myth, since Grenada had no navy.
- In April, Barbados Foreign Minister Louis Tull told Edward Cody of the Washington Post (April 24, 1983), “I don’t expect the government of Grenada to back off. They’ve gone too far. You have to live with them.” Tull spoke highly of the Regional Defense System agreement (from which Grenada was excluded) to share intelligence and promote military cooperation.
- Shortly thereafter the Barbados Defense Forces, according to Caribbean Contact, began to receive training in the United States under the direction of the CIA.
- Then, a few months before Bishop’s assassination and the invasion, U.S. diplomats traveled to Jamaica and Barbados to finalize military intervention plans. According to officials there, “unidentified U.S. officials had been seeking for several months to …isolate Grenada and had urged the regional governments to consider military action against Grenada.” (Washington Post, October 28, 1983.) And, two weeks before the house arrest of Bishop, U.S. Army Rangers in Seattle were practicing parachute landings and the takeover of an airfield. Tom Adams almost gave the plan away when he tried to convince Grenadian Foreign Minister Unison Whiteman not to return to Grenada while Bishop was under house arrest. Later Adams claimed that the U.S. had approached him with a vague plan to rescue Bishop.
It is clear that there were U.S. intelligence agents active on Grenada; a military invasion of that size would never have been undertaken otherwise. The New York Times confirmed that CIA agents were brought out in the airlift of the medical students, and Newsweek (November 7) described one of them, “an older student named Jim Pfister” who assured the students that “help was on the way.” Pfister “claimed to be a …former Foreign Service officer, a U.S. consul in Laos during the Vietnam War, who had quit the State Department to go to medical school. Once the invasion started, he was in constant shortwave radio contact with the advancing troops and seemed to know their moves in advance.”
The “Internal” Struggles
What happened in Grenada affected the entire socialist world. That there was a deep split within the leadership of the New Jewel Movement— and clearly there was —was not as well known to insiders, friends of Grenada, and even some of its ambassadors, as it was to the recipients of intelligence “leaks.” For example, a front-page story by Barbara Crossette in the August 7, 1983 Sunday New York Times sought to play on racist fears of conservatives as well as anticommunist liberals, while pointing out, for the first time, rumors of a split. Crossette said that “Public support for the Government of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop is diminishing rapidly as Cuban and Soviet influence here grows, according to many Grenadians.” And, she noted, “Mr. Coard, Deputy Prime Minister, and Mrs. Coard, head of the National Women’s Organization, are considered by many Grenadians to be among the most radical members of the Government, and there are rumors of a rift between the Coards and Mr. Bishop.”
She was totally wrong in her account of Bishop’s lack of popularity; indeed events have proved that Bishop was far more interested in their welfare than the Coards. The graffiti on a truck, shown in many U.S. newspapers after the invasion, told it all: “No Bishop, No Work, No Revo.”
The hypocrisy of the U.S. government and its official media after the coup against Bishop was beyond belief. The day after Bishop was placed under house arrest, the Voice of America broadcast to Latin America and the Caribbean profiles of Bishop and Coard, portraying Bishop as a world-renowned, moderate, civil rights hero—the same Bishop it had excoriated relentlessly for four years— and portraying Coard as a brutal Stalinist. And, the reports said, there was “mounting evidence” that Cuba was behind the downfall of Bishop. The networks followed suit; both NBC and ABC referred to a “leftist” regime being overthrown by a “Marxist” regime.
The Imminent Invasion
Pressures from the U.S. intensified to the point that Caribbean leaders who were opposed to the invasion, such as Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister George Chambers and Guyana Prime Minister Forbes Burnham, were excluded from meetings and kept misinformed. State Department spokesmen, such as Deputy Assistant Secretary James H. Michel at an October 28 briefing, insisted that the decision to invade was made by the OECS, who “came to us,” a fatuous suggestion.
The urgency was underscored when Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Charles Gillespie (now “Ambassador” to Grenada) surfaced in Barbados at meetings between OECS leaders and Prime Ministers Seaga of Jamaica and Adams of Barbados – meetings at which those countries allegedly decided to ask for U.S. aid. The Washington Post noted that Gillespie was in Barbados “on a previously scheduled visit” when the regional talks turned to the discussion of invasion. The visit, according to Newsday, was “a trip to the region with Vice President George Bush on the weekend of October 15,” just after Bishop was placed under house arrest, and the same time that Adams said “a U.S. official” approached him with the idea of a “rescue” mission.
Censorship and Lies
The almost unbelievably strict press censorship imposed by the U.S. for the first several days of the invasion was clever on two counts. As could be expected, it prevented anyone from confirming or refuting whatever official statements issued forth, many of which, it later transpired, were outright lies. But it also deflected media scrutiny by making the censorship as big a story for the media as the invasion. Half the precious minutes on the nightly TV news programs were devoted to the adventures of small bands of correspondents trying by air and water to break the blockade.
Of course the censorship was not imposed by the administration and the military merely to suppress information. It was also used to peddle lies and half-truths which no one on Grenada could reach the media to expose. Even before the invasion had begun and censorship been imposed, when the fleet bound for Lebanon was diverted after the murder of Bishop, it was described as a “precautionary move.” As late as the night before the invasion reporters were told by press secretary Larry Speakes that the fleet was to “monitor” the situation, that there were “no plans for U.S. military action in Grenada,” that rumors of an invasion were “preposterous.”
Official lies about the composition of the attacking force abounded. Both President Reagan and Eugenia Charles referred to a “multinational force.” But every single soldier involved in the invasion was American. After the island was occupied, the other members of the “multinational” force were flown in and comfortably ensconced in police jobs.
The Cubans on Grenada
Some of the most outrageous lies concerned the Cubans on Grenada. The first was the notion that the Rangers parachuted into heavy Cuban fire. In fact, the Cubans did not fire upon the descending Rangers. They had orders not to fire unless attacked. Even before the invasion, they had made it clear to the world in general and the U.S. Interests Section in particular that they were appalled by the actions of the Revolutionary Military Council, and that they did not intend to get involved in internal Grenadian affairs. They wished to cooperate in ensuring the safety of U.S. residents on Grenada and, later, in the return of their own people. The Cuban government had refused to supply arms or reinforcements to the RMC, but had determined that it would be dishonorable to evacuate its citizens just as an invasion was imminent.
The Cubans did not obstruct the Ranger landings, but remained in their barracks at the far end of the site. The Rangers did meet some hostile fire as 350 of them parachuted onto the field, but that was Grenadian anti-aircraft fire. Yet, shortly after landing and clearing the runway for additional troop landings, the Rangers attacked the Cubans, commencing a day’s fierce fighting.
That night the Cubans and the Americans exchanged diplomatic notes again and the Cubans were assured that they were “not a target” and that their ultimate evacuation would not be considered a “surrender.” The following morning, the reassured Cubans remaining in defensive positions were directly attacked by helicopter gunships.
The Intelligence Failure
A further lie was the so-called intelligence failure, discussed in the early aftermath of the invasion. Originally officials expressed chagrin that the military did not know there were nearly twice as many Cubans on Grenada as had been reported by intelligence sources, or that most of them were trained soldiers, not construction workers. However, since this information turned out to be false, and the original estimates correct, it is unclear how this was an intelligence “failure.” What actually irked the Pentagon most was how tenaciously the Grenadians and the Cubans fought.
An interesting reason for the “confusion” emerged in Canadian media, suggesting that an inflated Cuban presence was a CIA media disinformation operation planned well before the invasion, which may have misled some Pentagon analysts not in on the scam. An “authoritative” article on Cubans in Grenada was written for the November issue of Naval Institute Proceedings by Timothy Ashby, described in the Toronto Globe and Mail (October 29, 1983) as “a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institute [sic] at Stanford University who lived in Grenada on and off for 13 years.” An advance copy, described in Reuters dispatches, insisted that there were more than 1,000 Cubans on Grenada, with more than 300 of them trained, full-time military, and faulted anyone who did not know this for not keeping their eyes open.
The article was touted in the media to demonstrate that there should not have been the intelligence failure which at the time was thought to have occurred. The irony is that the invasion provided positive proof that the so-called facts of the authoritative article were themselves untrue, deliberate disinformation intended to be part of the ongoing propaganda war against Grenada. The unfortunate author had no idea that his lies were going to be exposed so quickly. The “failure” was nothing more than a smokescreen to hide the fact that a few hundred Cubans and several hundred Grenadians were fiercely resisting some 6,000 to 8,000 elite U.S. troops on the island and 10,000 more on ships off the coast.
The Implications
There has been a dangerous flexing of U.S. military muscle in the region. New Caribbean naval maneuvers were ordered within days of the invasion and reports of the military’s heightened role in U.S. foreign policy were rife.
Directly threatened by such saber-rattling are Nicaragua, Cuba, and El Salvador. Any talk of the “impossibility” of a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua has been mooted by the fate of Grenada. Nicaragua is creating a nation-wide militia to prevent a repeat of Grenada and Cuba has been bolstering its militia. One can only hope the U.S. will study the mathematics of the situation before acting. If it took 8,000 or more trained troops to vanquish several hundred Cubans and Grenadians, it would take many more combat soldiers than the U.S. has in the world to defeat the Cubans or the Nicaraguans.
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