Atoll Trouble

As one of those incongruous specks on the map that once posted the British Empire, the isolated little island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean was no better known than it ought to be. Consisting of two slender strips of sand skirting a great lagoon--"like a V written by a shaky hand," wrote one visitor--it was overrun by forbidding jungle growth, wild donkeys and giant land crabs that, according to the few hundred migratory workers who settled the island and harvested its coconut palms, would mass like an army to attack and devour the unwary stroller.

But Diego Garcia--named after the Portuguese navigator who discovered it in 1532--now has come into its own.

The growing U.S.-Soviet rivalry for naval power in the Indian Ocean has suddenly transformed the tiny coral atoll into a strategic scrap of real estate and catapulted it into a storm of controversy reaching from the Kremlin to the U.S.

Senate, from Dar es Salaam to New Delhi. The brouhaha stems from U.S. plans to upgrade a small naval and communications station on the island into a $55 million base to support U.S. naval forces in the Indian Ocean.

The Pentagon has asked Congress to appropriate $29 million this year to deepen the harbor, lengthen the 8,000-ft. runway to 12,000 ft., and build barracks for the 500 naval personnel who will eventually be stationed there. Such an investment is necessary, contends the Pentagon, to counter the Soviet naval presence in the area, which now averages 30 ships; the U.S. presently has eight ships, including the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk, there. The Russian presence is expected to increase even more with the reopening of the Suez Canal. Then the Soviet supply line, from its Black Sea bases to the Straits of Malacca, will shrink from 11,000 miles around the Cape of Good Hope to 2,200 miles through the canal.

Excellent Perch. The Nixon Administration maintains that, initially at least, Diego Garcia will serve merely as a fueling station for American ships and a landing strip for reconnaissance aircraft. Inevitably, there has also been speculation that the base might be used for nuclear submarines and strike aircraft, including the new B-l supersonic bomber--a fact that may have prompted Izvestia 's castigation of the U.S. project last week as "totally unjustified" and dangerous to detente.

Diego Garcia's strategic position is evident. Almost equidistant from Indonesia and East Africa, India and Mauritius, the island sits astride the great sea lanes from the Cape of Good Hope to Singapore.

It is an excellent perch from which to observe ship traffic from the western Pacific to the oil-rich Persian Gulf and thence to the Mediterranean.

The U.S. began eying the island in 1966 after Mauritius, which had administered its affairs, became independent.

At that time, Britain bought Diego Garcia for $7.5 million, and signed an agreement with Washington for a joint U.S.British communications facility on it.

The countries rimming the area (India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Kenya and Singapore)--and U.S. congressional critics as well--fear that the base will increase big-power rivalries in the region. Last week Australia's Prime Minister Gough Whitlam joined the chorus of critics, saying that he would try to persuade Britain's Labor government to abrogate the agreement made by former Prime Minister Edward Heath. So far, Harold Wilson's new government has said only that the plan, like all foreign policy issues, was under "review."

The Pentagon, meanwhile, professed not to be taking the fuss too seriously. Much of the outcry, a spokesman declared, was intended for domestic political reasons. Many of the countries that have criticized the project, he added, privately hoped that the U.S. would proceed as planned in order to counter Soviet influence. Whether Congress will buy that argument at appropriations time remains to be seen.

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