Operation Paramour: Executive Summary
Prologue
Second Falklands Islands War
Appendix 1: Argentina Military Modernization

Prologue

This scenario takes place in 2019, after the election of Sergio Massa to the Presidency of Argentina. The election is widely viewed both at home and internationally as fraudulent. The incumbent government of Kirchner’s former vice president Amado Boudou was accused of heavily influencing both the election commission’s vote count and the local media in favor of Kirchner’s populist wife and former President’s choice for the next President of Argentina. A Peronist party member since the 1990s, Massa had little experience in politics prior to his election as mayor. Owing his political connections to his personal relationship with the Boudou administration, and his wife who introduced them. Massa was a blend of savvy street smarts and shrewd political instincts, his skills at negotiations combined with his strong will led to his rise from the streets of Buenos Aires. 

Massa was born on April 28, 1972, in Buenos Aires. The son of Italian immigrants, a construction worker, and a housewife, Massa studied law at the University of Belgrano. Massa is married to Malena Galmarini, the daughter of Peronist Party (PJ) leader Fernando Galmarini, he adopted his father-in-law’s political views after the death of his biological father in the early 2000s, becoming more politically active than his father who was a supporter of the more moderate UCR party. Fernando Galmarini was a former Secretary for Sports and a political operative during Carlos Menem’s administration. Family connections allowed Malena to be appointed to the Municipal Council of Social Policies in late April 2008 where they first met. The couple has two sons. Both of these are active in political life but are guarded and removed from much of the complexities of the administration. MI6 in its profile of Massa has also uncovered numerous girlfriends of Massa over the years including one which he fathered another male child from. The mistress and the child grew up in the childhood neighborhood of Massa and now act as Massa emissary to the Buenos Aires organized crime syndicates. MI6 believes that Massa uses this broad network of family connections to maintain control of a vast corrupt political machine, which he inherited from the Boudou government before it.

Massa’s true political origins lie with the right-wing and almost extinct Center Democratic Union party. His shift away from popular socialism when economic problems arose eroded large bastions of his populist supporters and the core UCR support. These formed the majority coalition which could carry him into the mayor’s office, but soon after his first term, the largest of the non-Peronist political parties rejected him. Before his Mayoral reign or the later presidency, Massa became well-known for his work on the board of the Tigre Soccer Club where he used his connections with casino and bank owners to garner additional investment to keep the ailing football club financially afloat. During this time period, there is speculation that Argentine organized crime figures used the soccer club as a front to launder vast sums of money out of the country. The money is believed to come from both weapons and cocaine sales. It is during this time that Massa’s illegitimate son gain notoriety for handling these dealings, but no evidence ever emerged directly linking Massa to any Argentine OC figures or Russian mafia associates living in the country. Despite these rumors, Massa was beloved by many and feared by his enemies, as his power grew he was able to drive out much of the bureaucratic corruption which plagued Buenos Aires the largest city in the country for decades.

According to press reports, Massa is an ardent fan of the Tigre Soccer Club and enjoys relaxing with his family in the countryside outside of Buenos Aires. He admits he spends too much money on clothes and has a hectic life, smoking, eating junk food, and not sleeping enough. Massa touts his ability to work hard and maintain influential connections as his key strengths — talents that probably contributed to his meteoric rise, and near cult of personality which occupied the Presidential office after his election. He is considered a political wunderkind — at age 6, he reportedly began reading the newspapers and showed an interest in politics. By 27, he had whitewashed his past and his unsavory associates when he won a seat as a provincial deputy clerk in Buenos Aires province.

During his election run, average Argentines in the street loved him for his hours-long Castro-like speeches in which he would openly admit to drinking too much alcohol (usually wine) before speaking. The Argentines in mostly lower and middle class and urban poor loved him for what they viewed as his candor and openness, invoking the image of Ernesto “Che” Guevara another one of the founders of Castro’s Cuban Revolution. Massa won the street by vowing to open up the political process in Argentina which was still controlled by the rich elite and making transparency in government one of is key campaign promises. This appealed to many parts of the electorate in Argentina. Dozens of polls viewed corruption as the single greatest issue facing the nation. Massa rode the anti-corruptions wave which was created by the same very political parties of Boudou and was viewed by both the Argentine youth and socialists as a younger version of the late Nestor Kirchner. By the final month of his campaign, hundreds of thousands of people attended his rallies.

Massa’s rise was not without incident however during his last term as mayor, Massa was publicly accused of using his position as Mayor to block an investigation into the assassination of Argentina federal prosecutor Alberto Nisman. The Nisman murder was a major incident, he was killed in suicide which the federal police deemed highly suspicious. Nisman was attempting to connect the Amiga bombing of a Jewish center in the 1990s to a senior member of Iran’s government who was working with the federal government to forge a trade deal between Argentina and Iran.  Massa’s involvement in the cover-up of the murders was purely hypothetical and no direct evidence emerged. He became a target for media companies after the local government arrested dozens of executives, parading them in front of cameras and accusing them of tax evasion and bribery charges.  The media focused on one of his cabinet members named Marco Desemani, who was the Assistant Deputy Director of the Municipal Justice Ministry of Buenos Aires. He along with Massa is a childhood friend of infamous Argentine OC figure Miguel Nicolas Renvus; all three grew up as children in the same residential apartment building in Buenos Aires Central District in the late 1980s. But Desemani in grand jury testimony has publicly stated that he hasn’t had any contact with Revenues since the late 1980s when they parted ways after graduating high school. Renovus has not been seen in public for over 15 years, but is a well-known crime figure in Argentina, underpinning many of the black markets, and racketeering organizations, specializing in both cocaine trafficking and illegal weapons sales, he also brokers deals with a wide network of foreign crime syndicates, everyone from Hezbollah to Russian Organized Crime elements inside of Argentina. Renovus is rumored to be living in a compound in the tri-border region but has effective political protection from Massa in exchange for his street power and support. He has a 5 million dollar Interpol bounty and is wanted by the Federal Police for many crimes.

In 2018 Boudou government suspended the head of the largest labor union in Argentina after a driver’s strike stopped to flow of fuel oil and food throughout the country for 3 days. His heavy-handed response to what was a peaceful union strike included public beatings and arresting nearly 250 drivers. This created a widespread backlash in the country. Caught off guard by savvy protesters who used social media and cell phones to coordinate massive street protests. The protest brought out both women and men of all ages, who came to vent their frustration at Massa and his first year in government. After the fourth day of the driver’s strike, he order another crackdown and removal of an occupy-like tent city erected during the protests triggering a massive riot, which broke out in four major cities. The riot damaged some 735 million dollars worth of government property and commercial buildings. The riots ushered in a period of further instability, with the assassination of over a dozen local municipal politicians and police officials. In the chaos, the federal government declared martial law and attempted the mass jailing of protesters, and any police officers who refused to break up protests.

By this time the protester swelled in numbers jumping to over a hundred of thousand, with citizens joining them from all over the country. The government tried to calm the situation down by slowing the internet’s speeds to a crawl. The internet had become a critical tool in the protesters who used it for everything from stories about corruption, to spreading Marxist ideology and protest tactics. In order to stop the flow of information coming out of the capital, the government hacked into the main internet backbones seizing control of the four major exchanges and began to monitor all forms of communications spying on everyone to discern rebels from the population. These tactics enraged the vast majority of Argentines, they had largely followed what was a student protest, watching the protests on tv.   For weeks, many middle-class Argentines had sat out from direct involvement in the protests. But after this, the numbers grow to nearly a million people.

Argentina begins to crack up as rich rural landowners threaten to stop farming until the state can restore order, as the Media companies criticized the government for acting like a repressive middle eastern regime. Local police forces refused orders from the government to break up the strikers.  This gave the government an inroad into deploying federal police and newly formed paramilitary units to enforce strike-breaking plans. This created a feverish environment in which dozens of Argentine civilians were killed in standoffs with federal police. In the media, moderates become drowned out by a combination of government media and independent loyalist local media who is controlled by the same groups of industrialist seeking to expand Argentina’s armed forces. Former military generals claim that Argentina is strong enough to demand that the UK give back the administration of the islands to the government. In newspapers, the generals claim that not only can they capture the Falklands islands, but they could kick the UK out of the south Atlantic entirely, and project power beyond there their maritime borders as a major contributor to the maritime security of the South Atlantic after leaving it nearly 40 years ago.

The narrative of retaking the Falklands, was a long sore point between the UK and particularly Argentina, as Argentina’s government became more and more economically isolated. The simple monetary value of the Falkland’s vast oil basin became a grand bargaining chip for the warring political factions in Argentina’s increasingly unstable political body. Both the left and right wings were propped up by military industrialists who wanted war with England. They would reap the benefits and the billions in oil from the islands.  They also stepped up pressure on other South American nations to support Argentina’s claims to the Falklands. Both Uruguay and Paraguay have signed a joint UN petition to allow the Argentinians administrative rule of the Islands. Support for the Argentine claim remains deeply divided, populist countries such as Venezuelan and Bolivar both support Argentine anti-colonialism rhetoric, but Chile and Brazil, two of South America’s largest economic powers still not willing to side decidedly with Argentina. By this time nearly 3 months after the first protests began it affected international investors, who began to pull money out. For many years these international private investors provided a lifeboat to the struggling economy, so facing a new financial crisis and cut off from US-backed international monetary funds. The idea of seizing the oil-rich Falklands became a political reality that would solve all of Argentina’s problems.  As the government slipped more and more into chaos, Brazil and Chile’s publicity stated that the political violence was unacceptable. Boudou made the decision not to seek a second term as President, and hold early elections. This stopped the majority of street riots, and much of the country returned to normal, but the rhetoric regarding Argentina’s rights over the islands continued. Fear of a return to the instability of the 1970s and 1980s begins to become more real. The elections in 2019 were supposed to rebalance the government. Sergio Massa was seen as a reformer, and anti-corruptions candidate, despite his private ties with both previous administrations, who was running against a former vice president. The vice president was a popular UCR candidate and career politician severing in the Argentine senate for nearly 35 years, he had the support of both the labor unions and liberal media corporates who fell out of favor with the Boudou government as the economy soured.

After the election of Massa, his government quickly moved to push the Malvinas issue to the forefront of their government. Using the Boudou government’s narrative that the UK has been cheating and illegally extracting oil beyond the waters of the Falklands. They publicly claimed that Argentina was being cheated out of hundreds of millions of dollars in oil income.  As the stream of rhetoric coming from Argentina increases the MOD in the UK fails to take the matter seriously, and only takes minor measures. The UK didn’t want to publicly react to a matter which it consider long settled. The continued increase in the Argentine media coverage of the government’s threats that military force would be required to resolve the conflict was largely not taken seriously in the UK. Nevertheless, a small group inside the MOD, mostly senior Royal Navy commanders who were aware of the Royal Navy’s weakened condition and involved in the first Falklands War, saw the conflict consider different, perhaps the AAF and its politicians had finally calculated as such. So they covertly ordered the movement of some forces from South Africa into the South Atlantic. This included more Royal Marines on the eastern island and deploying two more warships. But without an aircraft carrier, the Falklands would be much more difficult to retake if at all.

The deployment of 900 Royal Marines to the western side of the Falklands island was not noticed by anyone, even local islanders, they left at night, in a twenty-nine vehicle convoy from Port Stanley, and availing from the sea was a reinforcement armored brigade was disgusted as a shipment of fuel containers to the main islands, covertly sent using civilian cargo ships. The SAS fearing the worse sent the entire Squadron D to the Sandwich Islands further east but within helicopter range. The deployment of heavy armor to the island will significantly aid the UK’s ability to repel an Argentine invasion. The is also a risk that Argentina intelligence services will detect this troop movement and publish it furthering the Argentina narrative that the UK is militarizing the South Atlantic.

The conditions in which GoA would attempt a military invasion of the island were outlined specifically in a classified document obtained by a foreign intelligence service and given to MI6. The document comes from the Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia Estratégica Militar (National Directorate of Strategic Military Intelligence, DNIEM) its author is an influential senior Argentina naval commander, and his report was widely circulated among the senior cabinet of Massa administration during the lead-up the invasion.

1. The British Government grants the Falklands Islands independence or by lack of action allows the Falklands to declare sovereignty over the Islands and its maritime boundaries.

2. The British Government positions enough military equipment, offensive systems, and personnel such that the Government of Argentina will not be able to operate with freedom of action in any humanitarian or military operation other than the war which the Government of Argentina may conduct under an UN-sponsored or other internationally recognized organization security operation.

3. The British Government stations for any period longer than the minimum required time for the safe transfer, or inspection of any type of nuclear material, warhead, missile delivery system, or any UN-defined weapon of mass destruction including any type of chemical and biological agents on the island.

4. The British Government refuses to or ends negotiations over the administration of the islands and blocks the peaceful reunification of them from the Province of Tierra Del Fuego.

As the governments in both UK and Argentina continue to tell the UN that they are not preparing for a military conflict, both sides make major moves that are contrary to that public stance. The AAF issued four secret orders on March 12th, which are viewed as the first step in actually carrying out the invasion. The first order is to prepare Argentina’s Marines for a combat exercise that is to take place in the Beagle Strait near the Chilean border, the order is communicated to lower-ranking officers and only four people are made aware of the true plans for the mobilization, the MOD of Argentina sends a communication to the Chilean embassy and informs them of the exercise and its dates. This information is confirmed to then be passed onto the UK MI6 by a Chilean double agent working inside the Intelligence services. The MOD issued a response to the exercise and a spy inside the CIA confirms that the UK believes that the exercise is slated to take place in the Beagle Straight, the misinformation campaign started the DNIEM launches the second order, which moves the special operations forces outlined the order of battle plan drafted by the four generals who planned the invasion. The activation of the special operations units is done in total secret using couriers. The units are ordered to dress as civilians and moved to preposition bases in the southern part of Argentina and held incommunicado, while the Air Force begins to move jet fuel to the base. The MI6 has agents in Argentina monitoring movements of military double-use materials like jet fuel, so the Army hides these trucks by loading them onto closed freight cars and transports them over railway lines. As military supplies slowly start to move south the final order is given to begin the clandestine intelligence-gathering operations on the island. The general’s plan has two phases the initial invasion and then securing the island and defending it from counterattack.