Haig's shuttle diplomacy over Falklands

These are the times when a broadcaster wishes he were back in the days before taping, before even recording on discs, when you sat in a studio watching the second hand of the big clock crawl up to the hour and a light went on and you began and you knew that, whether the audience was three miles or three thousand miles away, it was hearing you at the moment you were speaking.

You spoke over the old radio circuits and though you might sound like the captain on the bridge of a ship sinking in a hurricane, at least you knew that the audience didn't know anything you didn't know.

Nowadays the magic of tape recording and the jet plane make it possible to record a talk well ahead of its transmission, so by the time it's played, the audience can say, 'Who is this bonehead of a Rip Van Winkle who's just woken up to tell us that there's a prospect of war between Transylvania and Costa Manga – when in fact Costa Manga has already surrendered and the armistice talks are under way?'.

Well, I'm talking at the point where the Argentines have boasted of having two patrol boats successfully run the blockade where Mrs Thatcher has warned them not to challenge it and where Secretary of State Haig has gone off again to Buenos Aires on the fifth, sixth leg is it of his exhausting shuttle diplomacy. We used to fear for the stamina of Dr Kissinger when he was practically commuting between Tel Aviv, Cairo and Washington. We have obvious cause to pray for the health of Secretary Haig and for the maintenance of his judgement.

Years ago, after similar studies were done in London and at the American air force's Institute of Aeronautical Medicine in Maryland, it was established that jetting across time zones not only jolted the human system out of its sleep and digestive habits, but also impaired one's mental ability to judge a problem. After those studies were published, many business corporations forbade their flying executives to make serious decisions until they'd been on the ground for at least 24 hours.

It is a custom by now honoured in the breach. After all, the main point of a jet flight, if any, is to come zooming into a problem before its elements change against you and, so far as I know, neither presidents, nor prime ministers, nor foreign secretaries, nor defence secretaries ever land at their summit or mini-summit conference and say, 'Don't disturb me for another day. I'm going to rest and read and think and recover my judgement.'

The only useful thing that can be contributed from this end is a thought or two taking up from where we left off last time about the painfully tricky position of the United States in trying to be a go-between. Even on the television networks here, there have been some very tart responses from the regular commentators to the president's seemingly simple statement that the United States is equally friendly to both the disputing countries and that the role of America is to be even-handed.

In a couple of minutes the other evening, the National Broadcasting Company's news commentator put on a blistering little documentary feature contrasting Argentina's war record as a friend of Nazi Germany almost to the end of the Second War and its present government record as a near-fascist dictatorship that tortures and liquidates its political opponents, contrasting this unsavoury picture with Britain's steady support of the United States on the questions of Afghanistan, Poland, the Olympic boycott, the American hostages held in Iran, the EEC trade embargo and so on. The conclusion was a sharp question. 'Even-handed? Come off it, Mr President!'

Well, all things being equal, this reaction is right and natural but all things are not equal. We are not considering an equal threat to Britain and the United States by some Third World nation, say, in which the two countries can stand boldly together and the attitude of a South American dictatorship does not matter. We have to remember, as a starter, that we all – West Germany, France, Britain, the United States – we all sell arms and weapons to dictatorships until they overtly insult or threaten us, as Argentina has now done to Britain.

Let me just repeat what I said at the very end of last week's talk, a thought spoken just one week after the Argentine invasion: 'There are two possibilities that the White House and the State Department must reluctantly keep in mind, especially if it comes to a battle and Britain is winning it. One is a hard-pressed Argentina asking for help from its best food customer, the Soviet Union. The other is the possible intervention of Cuba. To put it mildly, neither consequences is one the United States would simply sit back and brood upon. One or both of them could confront the United States with a military challenge hardly less menacing than the Russians' installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962.' Unquote.

Well, nothing that's happened so far has moderated these threats but one or two things have happened to distort them or widen them. First, in midweek came the report, or rumour, that the Russians had ships moving into the South Atlantic and that they were providing Argentina with intelligence reports about the advancing British task force. Back from Barbados, President Reagan was asked about this and the men and women on the South American desk of the State Department, if they'd been present, would have held their breath and crossed their fingers against the chance of the president's tossing off one of those candid passing thoughts which sound so direct and manly at the time, but which within the hour cause earth tremors to pass through the State Department, the defence department and the Washington press corps.

And just about the same time there was another report, and this one was passed on to the press by unidentified administration officials, that the United States in its turn was providing Britain with political and military information on Argentina from a full range of intelligence resources. Now if this was untrue, its circulation was an embarrassment to the Reagan administration. If it was true, it was even more of an embarrassment to a government which, if it is to negotiate the whole business successfully, must try to maintain the stance of an impartial broker, no matter what its private allegiances may be.

Well, it was true and, once again, the administration groaned and looked around to identify the leak or leaker. Secretary Haig, back yet again from London, after a few hours of sleep, was inevitably confronted with this report. He couldn't deny it. He must have staggered into his press conference in the knowledge that, again, unidentified but absolutely credible officials of the administration had said that the United States was helping Britain through satellites to communicate with the British task force. What could he say?

What he did say, walking round the implied accusation of partisanship with careful tiptoes and a firm jaw, was that the United States has long-standing relationships with Britain and Argentina, that we have been careful to maintain these relationships in order to preserve our influence. Failure to live up to existing obligations or going beyond them would jeopardise our ability to play the role both countries wish us to perform.

The implication here was, of course, that for a long time the United States has shared with Britain, through satellites and other means, aerial surveillance, electronic intercepts, diplomatic intelligence and the like. As one administration man said, 'This is a routine that goes back to the Second World War'.

However, Mr Haig made this admirably vague and resounding diplomatic statement only hours after Mr Reagan, asked the same question but buttoning his mouth for once, said, 'This situation is too critical so that any comment, I think, can be taken one way or the other and endanger the peace-keeping or the peace-making process.'

Between his saying this in the morning and Mr Haig's implicit admission that the report was true, we have, I have, not been able to discover what hassles or arguments went on to change the official mind. All we can be sure of is that the administration was extremely sore at the official, if they ever found him, who leaked the news in the first place.

So, I'm talking at a time when the prospect of a settlement, a truce, a compromise, seems remote. Secretary Haig has given most of a week, night and day, most of it in the air, to thrashing through the arguments and counter-arguments, the proposals gingerly accepted and the proposals rejected outright. He has to be, by now, the only living expert on the conflicting attitudes of London and Buenos Aires and Washington and any offhand criticism of him must be put down, I think, to spleen.

He knows, as well as anybody, that at the heart of the conflict is national pride, that Britain is not going to yield the principle that the Falkland Islanders have an absolute right to say which country they want to belong to and that Argentina is not going to risk the fall of any government that, at this stage, is going to run down the flag it has raised over the islands.

And pulsing through this conflict like a contracting and relaxing heart beat, is the knowledge that Britain is America's firmest ally in Europe and Argentina is, for better or worse, the United States' bulwark against ommunist subversion in Latin, especially in Central, America.

In the meantime, Americans are beginning to wonder at the administration's almost total preoccupation with the Falklands. How about nuclear arms control? The Israeli threat to Lebanon? The complexion of the new government in El Salvador? Not to mention the domestic anxieties over unemployment, high interest rates, bankrupt farmers and insolvent airlines.

If not a shot is fired and the Argentines just rode anchor off their own shores, few Americans believe that the British fleet could stay on the alert off the Falklands for any length of time and if there is no compromise and negotiations go on and on, it looks from here like the main hazard to the British cause.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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