The Silent Deep by James Jinks

Author:James Jinks
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141973708
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

In his memoirs, Lord Owen did ‘not believe that Maurice Oldfield … would have disclosed the naval deployment as a result of a discussion with the Prime Minister, at least not without talking to me first’. He did admit that ‘in some delicate areas’ Oldfield would have been ‘entitled to respond only to the Prime Minister’ but did ‘not believe this was one of them’.15

According to the official historian of the Falklands conflict, Sir Lawrence Freedman, ‘there were no indications at the time to suggest that “C” did anything as a result of this conversation or that Argentina was aware of this deployment or allowed it to affect its behaviour’.16 However, there is some evidence to suggest that Oldfield did, in fact, take matters further. Had MI6 wanted to inform the Argentinians that a naval Task Force – in particular an SSN – was operating close to the Falklands, one of the most appropriate and credible means of doing so would have been through Navy-to-Navy channels. The British Naval Attaché in Argentina at the time was a Royal Navy officer named Daniel Leggat. Leggat allegedly discreetly informed his Argentinian counterpart about the presence of the Task Force. Interviews conducted in 1992 for a television programme told of a 1977 conversation between Admiral Juan José Lombardo, Commander at the time of the Argentinian Navy’s submarine force, and Admiral Jorge Anaya, the then Fleet Commander of the Argentinian Navy, in which Anaya asked Lombardo if Argentina’s new German-built diesel submarines could find and attack a British SSN, to which Lombardo replied ‘No.’17

Whatever the truth, Owen was ‘very grateful to the Royal Navy for mounting this operation so quickly’.18 The negotiations with the Argentinians continued and the Callaghan Government successfully ‘avoided any immediate risk of dangerous confrontation with the Argentines’.19 Dreadnought returned to Faslane in March 1978 with a vast amount of information about the communication and oceanographic conditions in the waters surrounding the Falkland Islands, which in almost every respect were different to those in the North Atlantic. Her crew were ordered not to reveal where they had been. When the officers walked into the Wardroom at Faslane they were met by a jubilant group of wives wearing T-shirts emblazoned with ‘HMS Dreadnought Magical Mystery Tours’.20 Negotiations between Argentina and the United Kingdom continued over the next two years as the two governments attempted to find a solution that met the concerns of both the Argentinians and the islanders, the most promising of which involved a proposal to transfer sovereignty to Argentina, which would then lease the Falkland Islands back to the United Kingdom. However, support for lease-back faltered. In June 1981, as part of its Defence Review, the Thatcher Government announced that the Royal Navy’s Antarctic patrol ship, HMS Endurance, the most important symbol of the UK’s commitment to the Falkland Islands, was to be withdrawn from service. In December 1981, a new junta took power in Argentina led by the commander of the army, General Leopoldo Galtieri. On 18 March

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