Mixed Signals
During these years, I learned more about American involvement in the Horn of Africa. “Eritrea’s course was to be shaped by the whims of topography and climate,” Michela Wrong writes in I Didn’t Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation. The discovery that radio signals from as far away as Finland, Brazil, and Australia could be picked up on the Hamasien plateau, where Kagnew Station was built, was to forever change the course of Eritrea’s development.
The story of how Americans came to establish a base near Asmara begins with Italy’s colonization of a new territory they named Eritrea in the late 1800s, after promising sovereignty to Ethiopia in exchange. That’s the first time Eritreans were sold out by a pact between Ethiopia and the West. The Italians poured resources and people into the colony, building roadways and a railroad, the Littorina, from the seethingly hot port at Massawa to a new capital on the plateau, Asmara. There the weather was temperate but dry, the air crystal clear. Along with the colonial investment of infrastructure, Eritreans were given a few rights—including limited municipal employment and meager education for young children—but largely lived in a segregated society defined by racism.
In early 1941, during World War II, the British, who were part of the Allied coalition, fought the Italians, an Axis power, in Eritrea and succeeded in taking control of it. The British initially favored “granting” Eritreans their independence. But in the spring of 1943, a U.S. Army second lieutenant named Clay Littleton, who was looking for a site for a radio station, landed in Asmara, where he found what remained of Radio Marina, used by Mussolini to communicate with the Italian naval fleet. That site became Kagnew Station.
Soon, Eritrean independence was ruled out by the Americans, who saw working with Ethiopia, a nation with which they had already established good relations, as more politically expedient than trying to negotiate with Eritrean independence fighters. Landlocked Ethiopia petitioned hard for governance of Eritrea in part because it would allow them access to a port. The United States supported their bid because they weren’t about to risk losing, as Wrong wrote, “one of the best places in the world—some have ranked it the best place on earth—from which to receive and transmit radio signals.”
The United States latched onto Kagnew and consigned Eritreans to the subjugation of Ethiopia’s feudal and ruthless government, a step back in time after the small rights conferred by colonial Italy. That’s the second time Eritreans were sold out by a pact between Ethiopia and the West.