Did our man in Argentina commit treason over Falklands?
Envoy ‘was more interested in feathering his nest’, claims new book
LORD CARRINGTON was told the Falklands War – a conflict that cost him his job as Foreign Secretary – started because Britain’s envoy in Argentina wanted to retire there, it has been revealed.
The claim is made in a new book about the Tory grandee, who died in July, and which is serialised in today’s Mail on Sunday.
Carrington resigned ‘on a point of honour’ when Argentina invaded the Falklands in 1982 while he was abroad on a diplomatic trip.
According to Carrington: An Honourable Man by historian Christopher Lee, he believed that Anthony Williams, Britain’s ambassador in Buenos Aires, ‘failed to represent the UK to the Argentine government, and properly report Argentinian intentions’.
‘On one occasion, the embassy objected to Carrington’s suggestion that a senior official should be sent from London to assess the situation on the grounds that it would undermine the ambassador’s authority.’
Lee says that years later, when Carrington was Nato Secretary-General, Swiss ambassador Gaspard Bodmer, who was in Buenos Aires at the time of the war, told him: ‘[Williams] was withholding information as he wanted to make his career in Argentina after he retired.’
Lee questions whether Williams was more interested in feathering his own nest than reporting faithfully on the crisis. He says Carrington observed: ‘I can’t think what Williams would get out of it unless he was trying to ingratiate himself in a treasonable way, which I find difficult to believe.’ Lee tracked down Bodmer, who endorsed Carrington’s version of events.
The author adds that Carrington maintained that when Williams was forced to quit his Buenos Aires post days after war started, he used a ‘ bitter’ valedictory despatch to ‘justify his position by stating Car- rington had ignored his advice’. Will i ams died i n 1990. The note reportedly said: ‘[Argentina] is not just another banana republic, a tinpot country led by a tinpot dictator. It has its share of vandals, hooligans and roughs. But this is not the whole story, nor was the seizure of the islands a simple act of brigandage.’
Professor Lawrence Freedman, the official Falklands War historian, has said Williams believed Britain ‘followed the worst of all diplomatic paths’ by promising to stand by the islanders without giving them the military means to defend themselves.
‘ He was so cross about t he Falklands being British that he completely failed to notice that the country in which he worked was about to invade them ,’ wrote Freedman.
Two weeks before the invasion, Williams described Argentine dictator General Galtieri’s junta as ‘too intelligent to do anything so silly’, said Freedman.
Days later, he said the fact that Argentine submarines had left their naval base was ‘not necessarily sinister’.
A total of 255 British servicemen, 649 Argentinians and three Falklanders died in the conflict.