The phone rang late in Washington, and Margaret Thatcher picked up to hear Ronald Reagan’s voice, already apologetic. “Listen, we regret very much the embarrassment that’s been caused you,” he said. “When your word came of your concerns, by the time I got it, the zero hour had passed and our forces were on their way. ”
The British prime minister had not been told that the United States was about to invade Grenada, a member of the British Commonwealth.
By the time she learned of it, the troops were already landing. It was October 1983, and the Cold War had just found a tiny new battlefield. Grenada was a small island off the coast of South America, known for nutmeg and cocoa. It had been a sovereign state since 1974, though it remained part of the British Commonwealth.
For two years, it had been under the rule of Maurice Bishop, a Marxist prime minister who modeled his government on Cuba. Bishop had brought real change. Cuban aid built homes, doubled the number of doctors, and funded health and education programs. He introduced equal rights, equal pay, and maternity leave for women.
Many Grenadians were living better than they ever had. But he had also outlawed all other political parties and refused to hold elections. The island’s neighbor to the north grew uneasy. The United States, already alarmed by communist Cuba, watched a second Marxist country rise in its own hemisphere.
Grenada was only a three-and-a-half-hour flight from Miami. The Americans worried about the new airport being built with Cuban money and labor. Officials claimed Cuba might use it as a staging post to airlift troops around the world. They released satellite photos and warned travel agents away from the island’s beaches.
When reporters visited, all they saw were bamboo huts and bikinis. Then Bishop’s deputy prime minister, Bernard Coard, staged a violent takeover. Within twenty-four hours, Bishop was dead, executed by the new regime. Coard was more extreme than his predecessor.
He ordered a state of curfew where anyone taking to the streets could be shot. The United States decided it would not tolerate another militant Marxist government in its backyard. American forces invaded. The first landings met resistance.
Radio messages crackled with confusion. “There is gunfire directly outside of our campus. Maybe not more than 100 or 200 feet away. Over six wounded.
Who are they? Over. ”
“Wounded are US Marines. They are US Marines.
”
Reinforcements poured in, wave after wave, arriving at the new airport the Cubans had built. Helicopter gunships joined the fight. An American officer said they used whatever it took to free the island. Cuban advisers and troops were on the ground in large numbers.
Fidel Castro claimed they were fighting, but the confrontation was brief. It was the first and only time U. S. and Cuban forces met directly, and the Cubans retreated quickly.
The battle for the capital, St. George, was over. The United States declared its main objectives achieved, and the purge of Marxist supporters began. The remaining elements of the Grenadian army were disbanded.
The international community was not impressed. The United Nations General Assembly called the invasion a flagrant violation of international law, voting 108 to 9 to condemn it. Reagan defended the action. His government had claimed it needed to protect American citizens and stop a planned Cuban occupation.
They said they had discovered a complete military base with weapons and communications equipment, proof, they insisted, that a Cuban occupation of the island had been planned. Grenada needed healing, and the Americans stayed for weeks. The governor general pushed for shops and offices to reopen, trying to restore faith in the island’s future. Grenada’s economy was reshaped according to privatization, free trade, and market-driven development.
Six years later, the results were grim. Grenada was deeper in debt than at any time in its past. Unemployment ran around 30 percent. Inflation was similar.
Hard drug use, burglary, and violent street crime, all rare a few years earlier, had become widespread. The Americans had brought window dressing, critics said, and little real development. A tiny island that could have been a tropical paradise had fallen into a coma. But the U.
S. troubles in Central America were far from over. In 1979, socialist rebels known as the Sandinistas rose up in Nicaragua against President Anastasio Somoza. His family had ruled the country for forty-three years, owned huge monopolies, and siphoned off international aid.
Norma, a young girl at the time, remembered the fear. Her father had worked for the government in the 1960s and 1970s. If you were a Somoza supporter under the new regime, you were in trouble. One evening, her father went into the backyard and saw two armed men hiding behind the fence.
He thought they had come for him. Men were being taken from their houses and executed in front of their families. The family fled through the neighbors’ yard and escaped to Costa Rica. The Somoza regime had been so corrupt that even the middle classes opposed it.
After eighteen months of open revolution, the rebel army entered the capital, Managua, in July 1979. Fifty thousand people had died in the war. The departing regime took with them all the cash and gold reserves they could carry. The Sandinistas brought land reform and literacy programs.
They welcomed Cuban teachers and doctors in their hundreds. They launched a drive to provide health and education for all, things that had never existed under Somoza. They received support from the Soviet Union and Cuba, just as the Marxist government in Grenada had. But the war was not over.
The United States began funding and training the Contras, counterrevolutionary guerrillas made up largely of former members of Somoza’s National Guard. Training camps were set up in Florida’s Everglades. Families and friends who had lost property and power in Cuba and Nicaragua wanted it back. The Contras were the U.
S. key to fighting communism in Central America. Since 1984, most of their money, eighty-seven million dollars, came from American taxpayers. Another twenty to thirty million came from private donors.
It became a classic Cold War proxy conflict. The Soviet Union used Cuba to wage war against the Americans, and the Americans used the Contras to wage war against the Sandinistas. The war was brutal. The Contras ran a campaign of terror against the government, accused of rape, torture, and murder.
Mass graves were found in the mountains. Figures varied, but Western diplomats estimated ten killings a day in Nicaragua, most by the army or the right wing. The U. S.
Congress, defying the president, blocked further funding to the Contras. But the money kept flowing, authorized or not. President Reagan appealed to the American people. “My fellow Americans,” he said, “I must speak to you tonight about a mounting danger in Central America that threatens the security of the United States.
This danger will not go away. It will grow worse, much worse, if we fail to take action now. ”
He described Nicaragua as a communist threat sitting on America’s doorstep, only two hours from U. S.
borders. He compared the Sandinistas to Gaddafi and pleaded for support. When a reporter asked Reagan directly whether he advocated the overthrow of the Nicaraguan government, the president dodged the question with rambling, evasive answers. He could not get enough support in the Senate.
Then his next move threatened to bring down his own government. News broke that the administration had been selling arms to Iran and diverting the profits to the Contras, circumventing Congress. The scandal became known as the Iran-Contra affair. Investigations began into Reagan’s knowledge and involvement.
Reagan insisted, “But let me put this in capital letters. I did not know about the diversion of funds. ”
His national security advisor, Admiral John Poindexter, resigned. Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North was fired from the National Security Council staff.
North refused to testify, citing his constitutional rights. Documents that might have shed light on the illegal funding were secretly shredded. North admitted, “I was aware the resistance was receiving funds directly from third countries and from private efforts, and I endorsed those endeavors wholeheartedly. ”
Many found it hard to believe that field-grade officers had made foreign policy for the United States on their own.
But the hearings found no evidence against Reagan. The verdict stood: Oliver North acted alone. By then, the fighting and dying had spread across Central America. The five Central American presidents joined together and asked the superpowers to stop sending destructive weapons into their region.
The president of Costa Rica, Oscar Arias, became the voice of reason, calling for an end to external aid to rebel forces. “The Contras are not the solution in Central America,” he said. “The Contras are the problem. ”
In July 1987, all U.
S. aid to the Contras finally stopped. Nicaraguans took to the streets in celebration. With the economic situation deteriorating and the war dragging on, the Contras could not win without funding.
Arias was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize that year. Nicaragua was emotionally and financially exhausted. Everyone struggled to put back together a country torn apart by ten years of war. The proudest achievements of the revolution, literacy and healthcare, were in ruins.
Seventy percent of children under six were malnourished. Gastroenteritis was a ruthless killer. Despite the setbacks in Central America, Reagan was already pursuing another Cold War initiative beyond the skies. In March 1983, he launched the Strategic Defense Initiative, a futuristic program of nuclear satellites, rail guns, and X-ray lasers based in space.
It was meant to shoot down Soviet missiles before they reached their targets. Reagan rejected the long-standing policy of mutually assured destruction, the belief that the two superpowers avoided direct conflict because both would be destroyed in a nuclear war. He called it a suicide pact. He believed a defense system could protect human life instead of threatening it.
The problem was that none of the technology existed. The American Physical Society said it would take ten more years of research to establish whether SDI was even feasible. But the American government leaked enough about the program’s capabilities to make the Soviets nervous. “We leaked enough of the capabilities that we were starting to develop to the Soviets,” one official recalled, “that they said, ‘Holy mackerel, they might actually be able to pull this off.
’”
It was a bluff, but the Soviets believed it. The USSR was the biggest country in the world but could not afford to develop its own SDI. A new Soviet leader was about to change course. Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union in March 1985.
He was the first Soviet leader who had not lived through the Russian Revolution. He brought new ideas: glasnost, or openness, and perestroika, or reconstruction. He wanted to reduce tension in the world. His first meeting with Reagan, in Geneva, was meant to begin a fresh chapter.
But the talks at Reykjavik, Iceland, came to an abrupt halt. The issue was SDI. Gorbachev wanted a complete ban on space weapons, and Reagan refused to give up his Star Wars program. “We had one moment of opportunity that the Soviets dashed because they sought to kill our Strategic Defense Initiative,” Reagan said.
“I wouldn’t let them do it then. I won’t let them do it now or in the future. ”
Gorbachev believed that if the Soviet Union tried to compete with SDI, its economy would be crippled. He mocked the program as a dangerous illusion.
Despite the hostility, a treaty was drawn up in 1987. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, or INF, eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons. In December of that year, Gorbachev came to Washington, the first Soviet leader to step on U. S.
soil in twelve years. “Common sense has won,” Gorbachev said. “Reason has won. ”
On December 8th, the treaty was signed.
It was the first agreement ever to eliminate nuclear weapons, a milestone in global history. But the Cold War was not over yet. Gorbachev had unfinished business in Afghanistan. The Soviet Union had been fighting there for nearly a decade, trying to hold on to a country that refused to be conquered.
American support for the rebel Mujahedin kept the Soviets bogged down. Afghanistan drained the Soviet economy and destroyed too many lives. It became Russia’s Vietnam. Gorbachev called the war a bleeding wound.
In Geneva in April 1988, an agreement was reached for peace. The Soviets agreed to withdraw half their troops in the first three months and all of them by February 15th, 1989. Even during the withdrawal, Soviet convoys fell under attack. And after they left, Afghanistan descended into a vicious civil war between the communist government and the Mujahedin.
Those who had lived in Kabul remembered the desperation. “We all had to leave Kabul because it became too dangerous, much more dangerous than when the Russians were there,” one woman said. “You could be killed anytime. ”
The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan seemed to signal the end of the last proxy conflict of the Cold War.
With Gorbachev pushing through reforms at home, the stage looked set for a radical shift. The winds of change were toppling outdated institutions in Eastern Europe. But a peaceful transition was far from guaranteed.
