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26in danger of becoming Hamlet, the tempo of exchanges betweenWashington and London began to quicken. At a political level, thegrowing crisis was viewed in a very different light on opposite sides ofthe water. In London, it was quite simple %u2013 the Falklands were Britishterritory and British citizens were under threat.In Washington it was more complex. The Falklands might be British,but they were in the American hemisphere and they carried a whiff ofVictorian colonialism about them which made Americansuncomfortable. They were also a bone of contention between two nationsfriendly to the US, and the last thing Washington wanted was to have afight taking place between friends on America%u2019s doorstep.When it became apparent first that the Argentineans were not goingto back down, and then that their fleet was at sea, the transatlanticmessages began to fly, and the atmosphere was not, to start with, entirelyharmonious. London wanted the US to lean on its South Americanfriends to stop them doing anything silly. The State Department duly didthat through its ambassador in Buenos Aires, but a message also went tothe British Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, urging caution.Carrington suffered a sense of humour failure and told the US Embassyin London bluntly that an aggressor was loose in the South Atlantic andthe US had better make up its mind which side it was on. It was not anauspicious beginning. However, the US ambassador%u2019s approach inBuenos Aires had been rebuffed, so President Reagan, urged on by MrsThatcher, intervened with a personal %u2018phone call to General Galtieri onthe evening of 31 March. He got nowhere, principally because Galtieriwas already being swept along by forces beyond his control. Theinvasion force had already been committed.Argentina%u2019s soldiers went ashore on East Falkland at dawn on 2 Apriland then put more ashore on South Georgia. Mrs Thatcher promptlyannounced to the House of Commons that a task force would be sent tothe South Atlantic. There now followed an extraordinary period duringwhich the US seemed to us in the British Embassy to be pursuing twodifferent policies: one public, originating in the State Department, andthe other more quietly, in the Pentagon.Let me briefly run through the public face of Anglo-Americanrelations first, which kept the British Ambassador, Sir NicholasHenderson, so heavily occupied. It was the principal concern of the StateDepartment that the contenders in the dispute should be kept apart, and