Operation "Sol" in 1976 had secretly landed a force of 50 men from the Argentine military under the command of Captain César Trombetta on the unoccupied Southern Thule, which belonged to the British South Sandwich Islands, where they established the military outpost of Corbeta Uruguay. This led to a formal protest from the United Kingdom, and an effort to resolve the issue through diplomatic rather than military means. Operation "Journeyman", the dispatching of a small military force to the South Atlantic by James Callaghan's Labour government, may have helped avert further action and subsequent reports from the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) in 1977, 1979 and 1981 which suggested that "as long as Argentina calculated that the British Government were prepared to negotiate seriously on sovereignty, it was unlikely to resort to force." However, if "... negotiations broke down, or if Argentina concluded from them that there was no prospect of real progress towards a negotiated transfer of sovereignty, there would be a high risk of its then resorting to more forceful measures, including direct military action."