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When the American forces did arrive and gain control of the island, Grenadians were eager to direct them to leaders in hiding who, many felt, had betrayed the revolution. Marines ringed the house in which Coard and his wife Phyllis had taken refuge. Only when a U.S. officer began a loud countdown, threatening to open fire on the building, did the two emerge and were taken into custody. Austin was holed up in a palatial coastal resort that once was a haven for the island's leading capitalists. He fell for a ruse by Grenadian intelligence agents who pretended to accept his offered bribe of $2,000 to take him by boat to the neighboring island of Carriacou or $3,500 to get him to Marxistdominated Guyana. Instead, they set him up for easy capture by Army paratroopers. The U.S. held the two for eventual return to the custody of a new Grenadian government, which, it is assumed, will bring them to trial for the murder of Bishop and for the Wednesday massacre.
Sir Paul Scoon, meanwhile, became in effect a one-man local government, backed by the authority of U.S. guns. He acted decisively in severing all diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and Libya, ordering them to close their embassies. He directed that the Cubans retain only one diplomat on the island. The three embassies were guarded by U.S. troops. Officially, this was for the protection of the diplomats. Privately, a State Department official in Washington admitted, "We don't want them rattling around the island."
With normal communications between Grenada and the rest of the world cut off during the invasion, and then apparently kept that way by U.S. military authorities, the U.S. played a most unusual role: it served as the only communications channel between the isolated Soviet embassy and Moscow. Washington relayed a list, provided by the embassy, of Soviet citizens in the Grenada chancellery to Moscow, as well as the embassy's request for instructions on what to do next. The Kremlin orders, sent through Washington, were that everyone, including a number of East Germans, North Koreans and Bulgarians, should leave the island, as Scoon had demanded. The Soviets, who had paid $40,000 each for two Mercedes embassy cars, reached the dealer on the island to see if he would buy the autos back. He did, for $4,000 each.
When Soviet Ambassador Gennadi I. Sazhenev rode one of the Mercedes to the new airstrip, where 126 occupants of the Soviet embassy were to board a U.S. military C-130 transport, a bizarre diplomatic clash occurred. U.S. soldiers insisted on searching the car. "We're looking for bombs," an American officer disingenuously explained. The ambassador grumpily assented. But for nearly eight hours he angrily resisted efforts by U.S. soldiers to search all of the Soviet baggage, including a number of unsealed crates. When he finally and reluctantly yielded, the reason for his obduracy became clear: one crate contained 28 AK-47 automatic rifles, 300 loaded AK-47 magazines and five loaded pistols. The cache was confiscated before the passengers were flown to Mexico to catch an Aeroflot jet to the Soviet Union.