United States military presence in Iceland

The American military presence in Iceland is both a Cold War-era strategic arrangement and a persistent domestic controversy. The island’s position made it valuable for monitoring the North Atlantic, but the base also brought economic dependence, public resentment, and recurring disputes over who had the right to authorize military action on Icelandic soil. The secret operation on Vatnajökull Glacier turns those long-running tensions into an immediate test of Icelandic sovereignty.

Strategic foundations

The U.S. base at Keflavík was established after the Second World War on Midnesheidi, a wind-blasted area amid lava fields about an hour’s drive southwest of Reykjavík. Iceland’s location in the North Atlantic gave the base a strategic role during the Cold War: it offered a vantage point from which a military power could monitor Soviet submarines, shipping, and aircraft in the Arctic region.

The United Kingdom occupied Iceland at the beginning of the Second World War, then handed responsibility for the country’s defence to the Americans in 1941. The U.S. headquarters was initially in Reykjavík. The original troop detachment was later reinforced by the 5th Infantry Division, commanded by Major General Cortlandt Parker, who had fought in Tunisia. At its wartime peak, the American occupying force numbered about 38,000. Though the occupation and later base presence belonged to different phases, the novel places them in a continuous history of foreign military involvement shaped by Iceland’s strategic location.

Political friction and economic dependence

The American military presence remained contentious after the war. The 1949 defence treaty provoked a riot outside the Icelandic parliament, and left-wing parties continued to oppose the base, with little effect on its operation. The treaty established a framework for defence cooperation, but it did not erase the disagreement over the political costs of hosting a foreign military force.

Official policy held that Iceland should not profit from the presence of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on its shores. The military therefore did not pay directly for its facilities at Keflavík Airport. In practice, however, civilian contractors and service companies doing work for the military received tens of millions of dollars, including firms with influential contacts in politically sympathetic parties. Nearby villages also came to depend on the Iceland Defense Force. When operations at Midnesheidi were scaled down at the end of the Cold War, local residents protested vociferously. The contrast between a public commitment not to profit and a local economy reliant on the base captures the arrangement’s basic ambivalence: opposition to the military could coexist with dependence on its spending and presence.

Michael Thompson gives that contradiction a personal voice when he speaks with Kristín and Steve. Having arrived in Iceland in 1955 after service in Korea, Germany, and the Philippines, he describes the cold, dark isolation of the base and the hostility he felt from local people. He accuses Icelanders of discouraging contact with the army while insisting that they cannot manage without it, and contrasts earlier protests outside the gates with demands to retain the base as military operations are reduced. His account is his own, not an official statement of Icelandic policy; its force lies in showing how the political dispute was lived by a serviceman stationed on Midnesheidi. When Kristín asks why he stayed, he answers that it was because of a woman.

Military secrecy and public cover

The presence of U.S. forces also made Iceland a setting for operations that officials wanted to conceal from the public. In 1967, Leo Stiller, then involved in surveillance flights, thought he saw something on the ice and flew back and forth taking photographs. A helicopter failed to land in the winter conditions. A small expedition with a metal detector followed, and preparations then began for a much larger operation, conducted in secrecy.

Military intelligence sought to disguise the troop movements by bringing Armstrong and other astronauts to Iceland for training exercises in lava fields north of Vatnajökull Glacier. The public was told that the interior landscape resembled the moon, a rationale Thompson dismisses as preposterous. In his account, the astronauts’ welcome provided cover for the largest movement of American troops and equipment in Iceland since the war. The plan built on an earlier episode: in 1965, a group of astronauts had stopped incognito at Keflavík, and the press office’s handling of the visit had captured public attention. Captain Parker, who had been involved in that earlier group, later proposed inviting Armstrong for the 1967 operation, when his Gemini 8 command would make the visit an even greater sensation. The episode shows how an apparently civilian or scientific occasion could be used to make military manoeuvres less conspicuous.

The glacier operation and Icelandic authority

The contemporary operation brings the conflict into the open. American officials tell Icelandic ministers that military intelligence has been monitoring a section of Vatnajökull Glacier under the defence treaty and that satellite images have revealed a German aircraft. They plan to excavate it, transfer it to the base, and eventually repatriate it to the United States, a mission requiring substantial movements of personnel and equipment through Iceland. The foreign minister identifies the central issue: the Americans need the Icelandic Government’s permission. The U.S. representatives promise discretion and describe the expedition as scientific, with senior scientists accompanying the military personnel, while also insisting that it must proceed in absolute secrecy.

That request for cooperation is undercut when an American general says that the aircraft is not Iceland’s concern. The prime minister objects that the Americans have not asked permission but have merely announced their plans; proceeding without consent, he warns, could violate the defence treaty and provoke the Icelandic media. The dispute is not simply about disclosure of an aircraft’s identity. It concerns whether treaty-based monitoring gives the United States a right to act unilaterally within Icelandic territory.

The American explanations also change according to their audience. In a separate account of the operation, Vytautas Carr faces questions from the U.S. Secretary of Defense about a C-17 left idle in Iceland and the presence of Delta Force operators. Carr invokes the Walchensee gold as historical context for the aircraft’s cargo, then discloses that much of the gold was taken from concentration camps. The secretary understands the political danger: the plane under American command may contain plundered Jewish gold. At the Icelandic meeting, however, the explanation offered for urgency is a bomb on the glacier. Later, Ratoff tells a flight lieutenant that the German aircraft is safe and contains no bomb, while denying knowledge of a Nazi bomb or of Armstrong’s role in searching for the plane. The differing accounts reveal how secrecy fragments information even within the military, while allowing officials to offer sharply different justifications to different listeners.

Sovereignty under pressure

The Icelandic Government’s limited control over events becomes especially clear when American officials demand that the prime minister stop the rescue team already on the glacier. He says that the government has no authority to order the team to turn back and that the rescuers were already there before the previous meeting. The general responds that the United States cannot be held responsible for their welfare. The prime minister counters that one man has died and another is critically injured, rejecting the attempt to separate American military action from the danger to Icelandic rescuers.

The general then invokes the share of Iceland’s gross national income that derives directly or indirectly from the United States. Economic reliance becomes an explicit instrument of pressure. The prime minister answers with political measures: a formal protest, demands for thorough public investigations in Iceland and America, closure of roads between the glacier and the base until full disclosure, and an address to the nation. Only after he rises to leave does the general reveal that the aircraft carries an old German bomb and that specialists are attempting to remove it. The sequence makes the warning consequential but also exposes how withholding information has narrowed the government’s choices.

Across these episodes, the U.S. military presence is neither a simple foreign occupation nor an uncomplicated defence guarantee. Its strategic value, the treaty, local economic dependence, public opposition, and American control of sensitive information pull in different directions. The glacier operation brings that imbalance into sharp focus: Iceland is asked to cooperate, denied a full account, reminded of its financial reliance, and then confronted with the risks created by an operation already under way.