Diego Garcia

• 1. Introduction

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  Diego Garcia is a ring of coral in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and in 1966 it held 924 people, mostly contract workers on coconut plantations. Today, according to David Vine, between 3,000 and 5,000 American troops and civilian support staff live there at any given time. Apart from some recreational fishing, every bite of their food arrives by sea or air. The U.S. Navy has nicknamed the place the "Footprint of Freedom", a nod to its shape and its strategic position.

  The atoll lies just south of the equator, 3,535 kilometres east of Tanzania. It is the largest island of the Chagos Archipelago. Why does a speck of land this remote matter so much to two governments? What happened to the people who worked its plantations before the base arrived? And who will hold the island in the years to come?

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• 2. A Name Made by Mapmakers

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  In 1512, the Portuguese navigator Pedro Mascarenhas came upon an uninhabited island and called it Dom Garcia, in honour of his patron, Dom Garcia de Noronha. Mascarenhas had been detached from the Portuguese India Armadas and was sailing on a voyage that ran into 1513. In 1544, another Portuguese expedition, carrying the Spanish explorer Diego García de Moguer, rediscovered the island, and he named it after himself. He died that same year off the South African coast, on the way home to Portugal.

  Historians assume the island took its name from one of these two men, since one was a Garcia and the other a Diego. A third idea holds that the name is a garbled version of Deo Gracias, which means thank God.

  The early maps do little to settle the matter. The Cantino planisphere of 1504 and the Ruysch map of 1507 show the Maldives clearly, but nothing to their south matches the Chagos. The first map to name Los Chagos in about the right position was made by Pierre Desceliers in Dieppe in 1550, and it leaves Diego Garcia unnamed. Mercator, in Duisburg in 1569, and Abraham Ortelius, in Antwerp in 1570, both labelled an island Don Garcia.

  Then, in 1589, Jodocus Hondius of London made Don Garcia change its name to I. de Dio Gratia. Edward Wright's world map of 1599 was the first to use the present name, possibly because someone misread Dio, or just the letter D, as Diego, and Gratia as Garcia. Hendrik Hondius II repeated the name in 1630, and Dutch mapmakers spread it across their charts.

  Whoever first set foot on the atoll left no trace that anyone has found. Some speculate about visitors during the Austronesian diaspora around AD 700, because an old Maldivian name for the islands may come from Malagasy. Oral tradition in the southern Maldives speaks of traders and fishermen who were marooned on a place called Foalhavahi Chagos and later rescued. Lasting residents were still centuries away, and the first grant of the island came in 1778.

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• 3. Plantation Island

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  In 1778, the French governor of Mauritius granted Diego Garcia to a Monsieur Dupuit de la Faye. Evidence exists that French visitors came and went, collecting coconuts and fish. A handful of Frenchmen were living in what the record calls a dozen huts when the British East India Company tried to found a settlement in April 1786, and they abandoned the island. The Company's 275 settlers soon found their supplies swamped by 250 survivors of the wrecked East Indiaman Atlas, who landed in May. By October, the colony had failed.

  After the British left, Mauritius began marooning lepers on the island. In 1793, the French set up a coconut plantation worked by enslaved labour. It exported cordage made from coconut fibre, and it sold sea cucumbers as a delicacy in the Far East.

  The Treaty of Paris of 1814 passed the island to Britain after the Napoleonic Wars. From then until 1965, it was run from Mauritius. The main plantations stood at East Point, which was the principal settlement, at Minni Minni, 4.5 kilometres to the north, and at Pointe Marianne on the western rim. All three faced the lagoon, and workers lived there and in villages scattered around the atoll. Two coaling stations served steamships crossing the Indian Ocean from 1881 until 1888. In 1882, a French-financed company based in Mauritius, the Société Huilière de Diego et de Peros, took control of every plantation in the Chagos.

  The people who made all this work built a culture of their own. Between 1793 and 1810, the French brought enslaved people from Madagascar. From around 1820, Malay slaves arrived from the market on Pulo Nyas, an island off the northwest coast of Sumatra, until the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 ended the trade. Their descendants became the Îlois, a word meaning islanders in French Creole, and they spoke a French-based dialect now called Chagossian Creole. Since the late 1990s they have been known as Chagos Islanders or Chagossians.

  The workforce was broader than that. It included Franco-Mauritian managers, Indo-Mauritian administrators, and Mauritian and Seychellois contract employees, with Chinese and Somali workers added in the late 19th century. Across the whole archipelago, the plantations held roughly 1,000 people, about two-thirds of them on Diego Garcia. The peak count on all islands came in 1953, at 1,142.

  War touched the island twice. In 1914, the German light cruiser SMS Emden stopped by in the middle of its commerce-raiding cruise during the first months of World War I. In 1942, the British opened RAF Station Diego Garcia, with a flying boat unit at East Point staffed by No. 205 and No. 240 Squadrons, which had been based on Ceylon. Their Catalinas and Sunderlands searched for Japanese and German submarines and surface raiders. A Royal Marines detachment installed two 6-inch naval guns at Cannon Point, and Mauritian and Indian Coastal Artillery troops later took over their operation. The station closed on the 30th of April 1946.

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• 4. Emptying the Island

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  By the early 1960s, Britain was withdrawing its forces from the Indian Ocean, keeping only RAF Gan in the Maldives, which stayed open until 1976. The British agreed to let the United States build a naval communication station on one of their island territories there. The Americans asked for an unpopulated island, to avoid political trouble with newly independent countries. In 1962, the Chagos Agalega Company of the British colony of Seychelles bought the old plantation company, and moved its headquarters to Seychelles.

  In November 1965, the United Kingdom bought the Chagos Archipelago from the then self-governing colony of Mauritius for 3 million pounds. This created the British Indian Ocean Territory. The plan was to close the plantations eventually, leaving an empty territory for American military use. In April 1966, the British government bought all the assets of the Chagos Agalega Company for 600,000 pounds and leased the plantations straight back to it. The operations never made money, thanks to new oils and lubricants on world markets and vast coconut plantations in the East Indies and the Philippines. The company ended its lease at the close of 1967.

  On the 30th of December 1966, the two governments signed an Exchange of Notes. It let the United States use the territory for defence for 50 years, until December 2016, with a 20-year extension to 2036 unless either side gave notice in a two-year window. No money changed hands. Instead, a declassified addendum shows that Britain received a 14-million-dollar discount on Polaris missiles.

  The man behind the idea was Stuart Barber, a civilian working for the U.S. Navy at the Pentagon. In his view, Diego Garcia sat far from any threat, had few people living on it, and attracted no interest from other countries because it had no economic value. He devised a strategic island concept, in which the United States would acquire as many sparsely populated islands as possible for military use. The island is often called "Fantasy Island" for its seclusion.

  The plan rested on the perceived absence of a native population. The British government told the Americans that the island held hundreds of people. The real figure was around 1,000.

  In 1968, the first measures to shrink the population began. Islanders who left, whether on holiday or for medical treatment, were refused permission to return. Those who stayed received only restricted food and medical supplies, in the hope that they would leave willingly. Another tactic was an order to kill all Chagossian dogs.

  To satisfy the agreement on an uninhabited island, the plantation on Diego Garcia was closed in October 1971. Workers and their families were moved to the plantations on Peros Banhos and Salomon, to the northwest. Mauritius, by then independent, refused to take the islanders without payment, and in 1974 Britain gave it a further 650,000 pounds to resettle them. Anyone still on Diego Garcia between 1971 and 1973 was put aboard cargo ships bound for Mauritius and Seychelles.

  No one agrees on how many evacuees truly counted as Îlois. In 1972, Britain and Mauritius settled on 426 families, totalling 1,151 individuals, as due compensation. A Mauritian body, the Îlois Trust Fund Board, certified 1,579 people in 1982. Fifteen years after the last expulsion, the British paid compensation of 6,000 dollars per person, and some received nothing. As of 2016, the case was still in litigation, and Chagossians were living as marginalised outsiders in Mauritius and Seychelles.

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• 5. Building the Base

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  In March 1971, United States Naval construction battalions arrived on Diego Garcia to begin work on a communications station and an airfield. By 1973, the Naval Communications Station was finished. A string of reversals soon made Washington want more. The fall of Saigon, the Khmer Rouge victory in Cambodia, and the closure of the Peshawar Air Station listening post in Pakistan and Kagnew Station in Eritrea all hurt American capabilities. So did the Mayaguez incident, and so did a Soviet naval build-up in Aden and a Soviet airbase at Berbera, Somalia. The United States asked for a fleet anchorage and a larger airfield, the British agreed, and the Seabees doubled their workforce.

  The fall of the Shah of Iran and the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979-1980 raised fears for the flow of Persian Gulf oil through the Strait of Hormuz. Permission followed for a 400-million-dollar expansion. It included two parallel 12,000-foot runways, wide parking aprons for heavy bombers, 20 new anchorages in the lagoon, and a deep-water pier. There were port facilities for the largest vessels in the American and British fleets, plus hangars, an air terminal, and a fuel storage area of 1.34 million barrels. Housing and dining facilities served thousands of sailors and support staff. In the early 1990s, the closure of American bases in the Philippines brought workers from Subic Bay and Clark Air Base.

  The Americans have called the atoll the "Malta of the Indian Ocean", because it lies equidistant from all points. It has served as an "unsinkable aircraft carrier" during the Iranian revolution, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Operation Desert Fox, Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. With Andersen Air Force Base in Guam, it is one of two critical American bomber bases in the Indo-Pacific. American gunships based there took part in Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia in late 2006. During operations against Afghanistan from 2001 to 2006 and Iraq from 2003 to 2006, Australian, Japanese and South Korean forces were also stationed on the island.

  The base has carried several names. Informally it was Camp Justice until July 2006, when it was renamed Camp Thunder Cove. Formally it is Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia, or Permanent Joint Operating Base Diego Garcia in British usage. The British presence is small, roughly 40 to 50 personnel, mostly from Naval Party 1002, which forms the island's civil administration and some naval forces. Britain keeps full and continual access.

  Offshore, the atoll shelters Maritime Prepositioning Ship Squadron Two. Its ships carry tanks, armoured personnel carriers, munitions, fuel, spare parts and even a mobile field hospital. During the Persian Gulf War, the squadron moved equipment to Saudi Arabia. Before 2001 it had up to 20 ships. Ashore, a satellite tracking station and a GEODSS facility belong to Space Operations Command. NASA also designated the island an emergency landing site for the Space Shuttle, though none of the facilities were ever used.

  Everything the garrison consumes comes in by ship or plane, and all non-biodegradable waste goes out the same way. From 1971 to 1973, Navy landing ships handled that traffic. In 2004, Navy recruitment literature called the island one of the world's best-kept secrets. In July 2023, Reuters confirmed that a fibre-optic cable spur had been built to the island in 2022, branching off the Oman Australia Cable.

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• 6. Anatomy of an Atoll

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  Seen from above, Diego Garcia is a nearly complete rim of land around a lagoon, closed along 90 percent of its perimeter and open only to the north. The atoll covers about 174 square kilometres, of which only 27.19 are dry land. The unbroken stretch of rim runs 64 kilometres, the longest continuous dryland rim of any atoll in the world. Three small islets sit in the northern pass: West Island, Middle Island and East Island. A fourth, Anniversary Island, shows up only as a sand bar in satellite images.

  Rain is the island's only source of fresh water, and it falls at more than 2,600 millimetres a year. The rim is made of porous coral rubble and sand, so rain sinks straight in and floats on the heavier salt water below as lens-shaped pockets of fresh water. The base draws on over 100 shallow wells in the Cantonment lens, producing over 560,000 litres a day. Overuse or drought can let seawater creep in, and a polluted lens may need years to flush clean.

  The ground itself is restless. A earthquake of magnitude 7.6 struck on the 30th of November 1983 and lasted 72 seconds, causing minor damage and wave damage along a 50-metre stretch of the southern end. When the Indian Ocean tsunami came in December 2004, the island was shielded in part by the 650-kilometre Chagos Trench, which plunges more than 4,900 metres about 80 kilometres to the east. Even so, a stretch of shoreline 200 to 300 metres long was breached, around 10 percent of the eastern arm. Cyclones rarely form so near the equator, but a storm in 1901 blew over more than 1,500 coconut trees. One in September 1990 flattened the tent city being built for American bomber crews during Operation Desert Storm.

  A 1997 Navy-commissioned survey found about 280 species of land plants, none of them endemic. Only 36 were native. A botanist named J. M. W. Topp, collecting data every year from 1993 to 2003, found that three new plant species arrived on average each year.

  The animals tell a similar story of arrivals. No mammal is native. Donkeys numbered over 400 in 1972, and by 2005 only 20 remained. The last horse was seen in 1995, and by 2005 just two cats were thought to have survived an eradication program. Coconut crabs thrive instead. These animals can weigh 4 kilograms, and the eastern rim holds 339 per hectare, the densest population recorded anywhere in their range. At night, the so-called warrior crabs overrun the jungle.

  The 680-hectare Barton Point Nature Reserve was named an Important Bird Area for its large colony of breeding red-footed boobies. Scientific expeditions in 1996 and 2006 described the lagoon and nearby waters as exceptionally unpolluted and pristine. Green turtles have been seen nesting in every month of the year, and an average female lays three clutches a season of 113 eggs each.

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• 7. Courts and Treaties

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  On the 23rd of June 2017, the United Nations General Assembly voted 94 to 15 to ask the International Court of Justice to clarify the legal status of the Chagos Islands. In February 2019, the court gave an advisory opinion. It held that the decolonisation of Mauritius had not been lawfully completed when the country became independent in 1968. The United Kingdom was, in the court's words, "under an obligation to end its administration of the Chagos Archipelago as rapidly as possible". The UK Foreign Office said the ruling was not legally binding. In May 2019, the General Assembly backed the court and demanded that Britain withdraw its colonial administration.

  A separate fight had already run through the waters around the island. On the 1st of April 2010, Britain declared a Chagos Marine Protected Area. Mauritius objected, and on the 18th of March 2015 the Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled the area illegal under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. It found that Mauritius had binding rights to fish there and to any minerals or oil found nearby before the islands were returned. Leaked diplomatic cables suggested a quieter motive. A senior British official reportedly told an American diplomat that a marine reserve would make it hard, if not impossible, for former residents to press for resettlement.

  In June 2020, a Mauritian official offered to let the United States keep its base if Mauritius regained sovereignty. On the 3rd of November 2022, Foreign Secretary James Cleverly announced talks on sovereignty. On the 3rd of October 2024, Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Pravind Jugnauth of Mauritius announced that the islands would be handed over. The deal paused after the 2024 American presidential election. On the 1st of April 2025, the new administration approved letting the talks continue.

  On the 22nd of May 2025, Starmer signed the treaty. Mauritius gains sovereignty over the whole archipelago, but Britain leases back Diego Garcia and a surrounding buffer zone for 99 years, with a 40-year extension and a right of first refusal after that. Britain is responsible for defence and security there, and it may not issue coins or postage stamps for the island. Natural and marine resources belong to Mauritius. Exiled Chagossians and their descendants may not return to the island. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination voiced deep concern about the terms.

  The agreement soon met fresh resistance. In June 2025, British Conservatives asserted that it would cost taxpayers more than expected. In January 2026, Donald Trump reversed the earlier American approval in a post on Truth Social, tying his criticism to the Greenland crisis. In February 2026, Conservatives accused Defence Secretary John Healey of misleading parliament. In May 2025, he had warned of imminent legal losses and an inoperable base, but Article 298 of the Law of the Sea convention exempts disputes about military activities.

  In March 2026, Iran fired two ballistic missiles at the base during the 2026 Iran war. One failed in flight, and a U.S. warship shot down the other with an SM-3 missile. Iran later denied the launch, calling the claim an Israeli false flag. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte told CBS News the alliance could not confirm it.

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• 8. Secrecy and Suspicion

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  The British Indian Ocean Territory has no local government at all. Its commissioner, appointed by King Charles III, works from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office in London, with an administrator and a small staff. On the island, the officer commanding British Forces, known as the "Brit rep", enforces the laws and regulations the commissioner issues. After Mauritius became independent in 1968, administration moved to Seychelles until that country's independence in 1976, and then to a desk in London. Each year, officials hold the Pol-Mil Talks, short for political-military, at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to settle issues with the Americans.

  Some questions have never been answered. The African Nuclear Weapons Free Zone Treaty lists the territory as covered, but neither Britain nor the United States accepts that. Peter Sand has argued that their stance blocks the treaty from taking effect. Nobody has said publicly whether nuclear weapons were ever stored on the island.

  Suspicions about prisoners go back to 2004. In June of that year, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said American authorities had repeatedly assured him that no detainees had passed through or landed on the island. In 2005, the island was first rumoured to be among the CIA's black sites, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is among the high-value detainees suspected of being held there. In October 2007, the Foreign Affairs Select Committee announced an inquiry into continuing allegations of a prison camp, citing comments from the retired American general Barry McCaffrey.

  In June 2007, a formal allegation about the transport of rendition prisoners reached the Council of Europe. On the 21st of February 2008, Foreign Secretary David Miliband admitted that two American extraordinary rendition flights had refuelled on Diego Garcia in 2002. He said he was very sorry that earlier denials had to be corrected. Months later, on the 31st of July 2008, an unnamed former White House official alleged that the United States had held and interrogated at least one suspect there during 2002 and possibly 2003. The UN special rapporteur Manfred Nowak said credible evidence supported claims that ships serving as black sites had used the island as a base. The group Reprieve alleged that detainees were held aboard American-operated ships moored just outside the island's territorial waters.

  In 2015, Lawrence Wilkerson, once chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, said three American intelligence sources had told him the island served as a transit site. He used the phrase "nefarious activities". Since October 2021, the island has also hosted asylum seekers.

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