ICELAND: The Keflavik Incident

For weeks relations between Iceland’s 170,000 citizens and the U.S. garrison at the great NATO base at Keflavik Airport had been growing steadily touchier. On the Fourth of July a group of U.S. airmen went on a drinking spree at Thingvellir, a pastoral spot sacred to all Icelanders as the first meeting place (in A.D. 930) of the Althing, the oldest continuous Parliament in the world. Last month a U.S. officer’s wife was arrested on the suspicion of drunken driving. She phoned the airbase and almost immediately the Icelandic police were surrounded by U.S. troops and had to surrender her.

Then came the mud-puddle incident : four civilians confidently entered a restricted area of the Keflavik base, were challenged by a U.S. sentry and ordered to lie flat on the muddy ground for 15 minutes while a sergeant was summoned. Last week every daily newspaper in the capital city of Reykjavik was spread with flaming headlines. The “intruders” proved to be two officials of the Icelandic Civil Aviation Administration and two American pilots bound for a hangar where the Americans’ plane was being repaired. A U.S. spokesman hastily explained that it was a mistake on both sides: the area where the men were halted was open during the day but restricted at night.

Unappeased, Iceland’s representatives cut short the weekly meeting of the Icelandic-American Defense Council, and an Icelandic protest was handed to the State Department in Washington. With Iceland’s elections scheduled for next month, the only gainer seems likely to be the U.S.-hating Communist Party, already third strongest in the land with i some 15% of the vote.