New Documents Reveal Britain's Secret Plan to Invade a Tiny Caribbean Island
Source: VICE
New Documents Reveal Britain's Secret Plan to Invade a Tiny Caribbean Island
By Phil Miller Oct 24 2014
As mad and ruthless as Gairy was, his presence on the island represented stability for British interests. So British spies in the Caribbean were busy trying to stop opposition elements from assassinating him on Independence day, when his public presence amongst crowds, noise and fireworks might present a favorable opportunity, according to declassified UK government files that I found at the National Archives in London.
One intelligence report, marked secret, was written by an MI5 officer. Describing his work as intelligence might be a stretch, however, as the British spook also reported, On the other hand, the West Indian temperament does not seem to lend itself to determined and fanatical action except sporadically. That sounds like a weird mix of guesswork and racial stereotyping rather than legitimate insider information.
Nevertheless, the files reveal that information from this officer prompted the British military to prepare a full-scale invasion plan on the eve of Grenada's independence, to restore law and order and constitutional government. This would involve a reversion to colonial rule, the foreign secretary warned Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath in January 1974.
MI5 was worried about the New Jewel Movement ("Jewel" was an acronym for Joint Endeavor for Welfare, Education and Liberation" . It was viewed as an extremist organization whose main aim is the overthrow of Gairy and his government (by force if other means fail) and the setting up in its place of a people's revolutionary regime. The files show that Britain's economic interests in the Caribbean were comparable with investments in India and oil reserves in the Middle East. They reveal that MI5 spied on Grenada's trade unions and ran informants inside the New Jewel Movement (NJM) in the months before independence, looking for plots against Gairy.
MI5 did this knowing that Gairy was no angel. Their intelligence reports refer to his Mongoose Gang as ruthless and described it as an un-uniformed and undisciplined body... many of them have criminal records.
Read more: http://www.vice.com/read/revealed-britains-top-secret-plan-to-invade-a-tiny-caribbean-island
valerief
(53,235 posts)George II
(67,782 posts)....in fact they're decades old. They headline should have been "Newly Discovered Documents" (as it's worded in the article itself)
I hate sloppy journalism or writing.
Igel
(35,191 posts)How could they be "discovered" if they were already known to exist?
(This, not because I think it's a serious objection--it's not, in fact it's puerile and simple-minded--but because precisely that kind of objection is taken seriously by some.)
PeoViejo
(2,178 posts)He just fucking went ahead and did it. There was no heads-up. The Marines landed before anyone in DC knew what was going on. I just happened to be Duty Officer that day and took the Flash Traffic down to management. It was all a seat of the pants cluster-fuck. Luckily it was one of my co-workers that got the pleasure of going there on Day2. His luxury accommodations was to sit on a pallet of Mortar shells in a C-130, with the entertainment being to watch the spots of light appear, as ground fire punched holes in the Fuselage.