Book Questions Rationale for Grenada Invasion

The American soldiers who invaded Grenada six years ago are rightly hailed as heroes, but the official U.S. rationale for the mission was bogus, says a British officer involved in the attack.

Retired Maj. Mark Adkin said the U.S. military action was not necessary to save the lives of American medical students on the Caribbean island, as claimed by the Ronald Reagan Administration, and in fact endangered them.

He also says U.S. soldiers succeeded despite weak advance planning and haphazard coordination by leaders of the different military services involved.

Adkin, who took part in the invasion as Caribbean operations staff officer for the Barbados Defense Force, recounts the mission in a new book, “Urgent Fury: The Battle for Grenada.”

He lauded the outcome of the invasion and said it prevented Grenada from becoming a “communist bastion” in the region. But he dismissed U.S. claims at the time that the 700 American medical students on the island were in danger of being taken hostage.

Then-President Ronald Reagan repeatedly said the 6,000 combat troops staged a “rescue mission” on Oct. 25, 1983, to prevent the students from being taken hostage by a radical Marxist government.

If anything, Adkin said, the invasion increased the chances that the students would be taken hostage.

“U.S. citizens were in no danger until the operation was launched,” he wrote. “The assault on the island could easily have precipitated the taking of hostages by desperate men driven to desperate means to save their own lives.”

The Administration decided to intervene in Grenada “on the basis of seizing a fleeting strategic-political advantage, which had the added merit that inevitable military success would raise U.S. flagging morale,” he said.

The predawn attack by combined elite units of all the U.S. armed forces came days after leftists on the island executed Marxist Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and imposed a 24-hour curfew. The invasion forces ousted the leftists and flew the students home.

A former Reagan Administration official, Langhorne Anthony Motley, disputed Adkin’s claims about the students, saying, “He’s totally incorrect.”

Motley, a former assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, said a CIA officer spoke with the students before the troops arrived and that “they were concerned” about being taken hostage.

Regardless of the reason for the mission, Adkin said, the U.S. troops deserved the heroes’ welcome they received from both the islanders and the American public upon their return.

“The people who had been invaded welcomed the invaders, regarded them as liberators, even going so far as to want U.S. troops to remain far longer than they did. The island was to be a communist bastion, an ever more menacing reminder to the rest of the region that their way of live was threatened,” he said.

“This is what it would have become. That it did not was because President Reagan acted, albeit primarily for reasons of national self-interest.”

Nineteen American soldiers died in the initial assault and several days of skirmishes. Adkin said two Army Rangers also died when their parachutes failed to open.

He argued that the American soldiers had to overcome a lack of intelligence information on the island and poor preparation for the joint operation.

The U.S. military has done its own assessments on Grenada, finding fault with the lack of coordination and intelligence. Many details of those assessments remain classified, however.

A retired U.S. military officer, who served in the planning and execution of the Grenada invasion, acknowledged some problems but said Adkin “doesn’t tell the whole story.”

The officer, who spoke only on condition that he not be further identified, agreed that the troops operated without maps and up-to-date intelligence information but said Adkin should have noted that “a lot of decisions were made on the ground by ground commanders. They were able to adapt.”

However, he agreed that the various armed forces were ill-prepared to work together and said the decision to use a combined force at that time was wrong.