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390 INTO THE THATCHER ERA
which Argentine naval intelligence officers were extending their
terror operations to Europe to kill dissident Argentines there.
Sadly, she was recalled to Buenos Aires and herself secretly
killed in January 1979Y
The main impediment to the junta's Falklands ambitions had
been the arrival of the highly principled Jimmy Carter in the
White House in 1977. The junta had been thinking about
repeating the Southern Thule episode by capturing South
Georgia, a dependency of the Falklands and a larger island than
Thule, which London would not be able to ignore. This, the
Argentineans believed, would allow them to negotiate from a
position of strength on the issue of the Falklands, which they
had long regarded as Argentinean territory. However, Carter
placed a moratorium on American arms exports to Argentina
because of its horrific human rights violations. By contrast, the
Europeans behaved like unprincipled bagmen. The British
rushed to sell the Argentineans some of their latest frigates, but
were outpaced by the Germans. The French sold them Super
Etendard jets and the latest Exocet sea-skimming missiles. The
Italians, Spanish and Belgians followed in their wake. All these
countries overlooked the disappearance of their own nationals
in Argentina as part of the 'Dirty War': in the case of Germany,
no fewer than forty-eight of their citizens had vanished without
trace. Britain secured a contract for the training of Argentinean
special forces, and even supplied a hundred specially silenced
Sterling sub-machine guns. In April 1982 these elite Argentinean
troops were in the first wave of invaders, and infamously
displayed captured British Royal Marines in front of Government
House at Port Stanley, the islands' capital. 12
Incredibly, when the Argentinean junta seized the tiny uninhabited
island of Southern Thule in 1976, the Foreign Office
covered this up, and it was only admitted to Parliament a year
later. Ted Rowlands, a junior Foreign Office Minister, was sent
to Argentina to undertake another round of appeasement.
Rowlands made pathetic pleas to Buenos Aires not to mention
the embarrassing Southern Thule incident publicly, resulting in