The base is also one of an “extremely limited number of places worldwide available to reload submarines” with weapons like Tomahawk missiles, says Mr Savill, and the US has positioned a large amount of equipment and stores there for contingencies.
Walter Ladwig III, a senior lecturer in international relations at King’s College London, agrees the base fulfils “a lot of important roles” – but that “there is this level of secrecy that seems to go beyond what we see at other places”.
“There has been this hyper-focus on controlling access and on limiting access, which… seems to go beyond what, given what we publicly know about the assets, capabilities and units are based there.”
During my time on the island, I am required to wear a red visitor pass and am closely monitored at all times. My accommodation is guarded 24-hours-a-day and the men outside make a note of when I leave and return – always under escort.
In the mid-1980s, British journalist Simon Winchester pretended his boat had run into trouble next to the island. He remained in the bay for about two days, and managed to briefly step on shore before being escorted away and told: “Go away and don’t come back.”
He tells me he remembers British authorities there being “incredibly hostile” and the island as “extraordinarily beautiful”. More than two decades later, a Time magazine journalist spent 90 minutes or so on the island when the US presidential plane stopped there to refuel.
Rumours have long swirled about the uses of Diego Garcia, including that it has been used as a CIA black-site – a facility used to house and interrogate terror suspects.
The UK government confirmed in 2008 that rendition flights carrying terror suspects had landed on the island in 2002, following years of assurances that they had not.
“The detainees did not leave the plane, and the US Government has assured us that no US detainees have ever been held on Diego Garcia. US investigations show no record of any other rendition through Diego Garcia or any other Overseas Territory or through the UK itself since then,” then-Foreign Secretary David Miliband told parliament at the time.
On the same day, former CIA director Michael Hayden said that information previously “supplied in good faith” to the UK about rendition flights – stating that they had never landed there – had “turned out to be wrong”.
“Neither of those individuals was ever part of [the] CIA’s high-value terrorist interrogation programme. One was ultimately transferred to Guantanamo, and the other was returned to his home country. These were rendition operations, nothing more,” he said, while denying reports that the CIA had a holding facility on Diego Garcia.
Years later, Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to the former US Secretary of State Colin Powell, told Vice News that intelligence sources had told him that Diego Garcia had been used as a site “where people were temporarily housed and interrogated from time to time.”
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