On October 19, a large crowd marched up the hill, past Coard’s house, brushing past the armored personnel carriers (APCs) manned by soldiers who fired in the air to scare away the demonstrators. Undeterred, the crowd rescued Bishop. Coard watched from his living room window as the exultant swarm swept Bishop past his house again. The rescuing crowd carried Bishop into Fort Rupert, the army headquarters, on the other side of town.
At this point it was a standoff. Bishop, still getting his bearings after six days of house arrest, didn’t move to arrest Coard. Concluding that since the soldiers hadn’t fired on the crowd, he controlled the streets and the situation, he relaxed. But Coard grabbed the initiative and went after Bishop.
Under Coard’s orders, three APCs drove over to Fort Rupert, pushing through confused crowds that thought the vehicles supported Bishop. Coard’s hastily conceived plan was to make it look like Bishop had thrown a coup and was killed while the government was retaking the headquarters. This would make it more palatable to the citizens who were solidly behind Bishop. It would, of course, just confuse those citizens who asked how the head of the government could coup himself. But no plan is perfect.
When the soldiers arrived at the fort, they machine-gunned the crowd in front, killing dozens, and stormed inside. Bishop was easily captured but refused to die fighting. After checking back with Coard, the army lined Bishop and seven others up against the wall and shot them. Coard had graduated to Stalinist first class.
Coard, who had declined to witness the executions, formed a new government called the Revolutionary Military Council (RMC). Their first official duties were to implement martial law and a curfew, creating great hardship in a country where the revolution had not included providing electricity or refrigerators for many people. Their second duty was to dispose of the bodies of the former government leaders, a two-day process involving a series of trucks and jeeps, and culminating in burning the decomposing bodies in a pit behind a latrine.
Coard, already proving that his style of leading-by-hiding was brutal but effective, now receded even farther into the background as General Hudson Austin, the army chief, was named the head of the RMC. The next day Austin went to the vice-chancellor of St. George’s Medical School to assure him that the students would not be harmed. Until then the school administrator was totally unaware that any danger existed.
When news arrived in Washington of Bishop’s execution, Reagan’s cadre — always on a hair-trigger alert for any Communist provocation, even against other Communists — stood ready. Col. Oliver North, assisted by Fawn Hall, held the post of deputy on the National Security Council staff with the responsibilities of coordinating the various political and military departments. This role put him in a position to influence the legal decision-making process or to safely cut it out completely, as he later did during the Iran/Contra scandal.
On Grenada, however, North saw an opportunity to work within the system. Initially, the military chiefs were against an invasion of a sovereign country, no matter how small, without a really good reason. The students-who-could-easily-be-hostages concerned them, of course, but there hadn’t been any reports of actual harm to them. The hard-liners, who were convinced that Grenada was poised to become the nexus of a Communist push into Caribbean tourist hot spots, felt that this was too good of an opportunity to pass up. They recommended an invasion.
The Joint Chiefs, despite being rabid anti-Communists to a man, were reluctant to invade a country even if it was Communist (albeit secretly) and could be conquered in about seventeen seconds. There was virtually no intelligence on the size or composition of the enemy they would face on the ground. The CIA intelligence reports roughly went as follows: the beaches were lovely, the drinks icy cold, the Cubans were building a runway, and yes, in fact, there were American students-who-could-possibly-be-hostages. The one bright spot was that the island had been discovered to be infested with easily beatable Communists who had wandered into their gun sights.
It was a stalemate at the NSC, but North kept pushing. A request was arranged from the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, St. Kitts-Nevis, St. Lucia, Montserrat, St. Vincent, and Grenada) asking for American armed forces to please invade one of their member states. The fact that Grenada was a fully sovereign nation and a member of the British Commonwealth didn’t really matter much.
Over the weekend before the invasion, diplomats from the United States and Britain met in Grenada with RMC leaders and the vice chancellor of the medical school. American officials wanted to get every student out. Evacuating all six hundred could not be done by air from the smaller airport in the north, and the larger airport in the south, the new nexus of Communism, was not actually finished, so a commercial jet could not be flown in. A warship was suggested, but the Grenadans didn’t have any (they didn’t have any airplanes either), and they rejected using an American warship as an embarrassment, since it would look like an invasion. Using a cruise liner for the evacuation was posed as an alternative but was never followed through. Essentially, the students had gotten onto the island but could not get off.
The RMC sent two telexes to try to ward off an invasion. The first one was sent to the American embassy in Barbados, not an obvious hub of U.S. foreign policy. It was ignored. The other telex was sent to London, where it arrived at a plastics company instead of the British government because the wrong number had been used. The plastics company called the British government who told them to drop the telex in the mail. There was no follow-up from the Grenadan Caribo-Stalinists, who despite the swirling rumors of an imminent attack by the Americans, didn’t really seem to be paying attention.
Back in Washington, North pushed on with the invasion planning without any formal warnings or notification to the Grenadans, the British, most of the Pentagon, and almost all elected U.S. government officials. The main feature of the plan was that it be secret and quick, a giant hostage rescue operation, to ensure the safety of the students. The Pentagon had an invasion plan handy, as they do for many countries, but it was tossed aside as not germane. North’s vision for the invasion did not include involving such hangers-on as the head of logistics for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, someone presumably critical to planning an invasion, who was not informed. North believed he could not be trusted to keep word from leaking out.
Reagan was presented with the plan on Friday, October 21, 1983, and was so staggered by the enormity of invading another country that he immediately left for a weekend of golf at the famous Masters Championship course in Augusta, Georgia. Rather than involving just the two obvious military branches in the invasion — the U.S. Navy and Marines — North had pumped up the plan to make sure all the branches would get a slice of glory. Nothing brings out the pro-invaders at the Pentagon more than an easy win in the Caribbean followed by a lengthy beachside occupation.