Ever the Diplomat: Confessions of a Foreign Office Mandarin

I made my first acquaintance with the world of secret intelligence. We received a steady flow of intelligence reports, of varying quality. Some were gold dust, real secrets, but many were little more than gossip, which we would sooner or later have picked up anyway. Others had more comedy than political value. One reported solemnly on a conversation between two IRA men, during which one managed to set himself on fire as they talked. The report’s editor prissily inserted ‘[expletive deleted]’ more than a dozen times, but we could guess what ‘Seamus’ had been saying. Another revealed that a senior Irish diplomat had visited Belfast disguised as a priest, to find out what was happening there.

Like every other British embassy, the Chancery in Dublin kept, and regularly updated, a folder of Leading Personality Reports on key figures in Irish life. Each individual entry was in a set format, with basic biographical information, followed by an account of the subject’s career, and ending with comment and some more personal details. Later much of the juicy stuff was removed, after Mrs Thatcher, as prime minister, complained that Foreign Office LPRs were too gossipy. In 1977, however, it was still possible to record that one senior Irish minister had ‘an unconventional method of mounting a horse’.

Another great advantage of being trained while working on Ireland was that the job involved dealing with much of Whitehall beyond the Foreign Office. The Home Office, for example, was concerned with the operation of the Common Travel Area. The Department of Energy was interested in talking to Ireland about oil and gas in the Irish Sea. The Department of the Environment was anxious to reassure Ireland about discharges from the Sellafield nuclear-waste processing plant in Cumbria. The Ministry of Agriculture had many exchanges on Irish farming issues, both bilaterally and in the context of the European Community. At that time the President of the British Friesian Cattle Society was an Irish priest.

A symptom of the intimate complexity of the relationship was the problem of desertions decades earlier by Irish citizens who had enlisted in the British Army. The Special Branch at Dover would run anti-terrorist checks on lorry drivers passing through the port. Almost every week, or so it seemed, their records would show that twenty or thirty years earlier Sean Higgins (or whoever it was) had deserted from one of the British Army’s Irish regiments. Although an Irish citizen, as a deserter he was subject to British military law, and was immediately transferred to the custody of the Royal Military Police. With his lorry abandoned at Dover, a horrified middle-aged Irishman would then be taken to the depot of his parent regiment, often many miles away, formally to receive a dishonourable discharge. In the meantime, his firm or family would have alerted the Irish Consulate in London, who would ask me to find out what was going on. It was a small but painful hangover from history.

But in 1977 the government departments most concerned with Irish issues were the Northern Ireland Office and, to a lesser extent, the Ministry of Defence. Dealing with these two very different departments was an invaluable experience. The NIO had been formed only in 1972, when the Government in London had imposed direct rule on Northern Ireland. It was composed, in a hurry, of able and dedicated officials from across Whitehall, mainly from the Home Office, but also from the FCO and elsewhere. With bases in London and Belfast, the NIO’s purpose was to work itself out of existence, by restoring devolved government to Ulster. The whole NIO was thus dedicated to the proposition that Northern Ireland needed a political solution, and that a security-only approach would never be enough. The failure of the Sunningdale process had been a huge setback. It had been launched by Ted Heath’s Conservative Government in 1973, but had collapsed thanks largely to the new Labour Government’s unwillingness to face down the Ulster Workers’ Council strike the following year. But even then everyone knew that, as proved to be the case twenty years later, the eventual solution would be on the broad lines of Sunningdale: power-sharing in Northern Ireland, with an ‘Irish dimension’ – that is, recognition that Dublin should have a benign role in overseeing the governance of the six counties of Ulster. As the Social Democratic and Labour Party MP Seamus Mallon was to remark in 1998, the Good Friday Agreement of that year was ‘Sunningdale for slow learners’.

The NIO’s officials – and most of its better ministers – never lost their humane and intelligent vision of how the conflict would, and did, end. And many of them came to love Ulster, and its rich landscapes and cultures. At the same time, they understood that the Nationalist minority’s aspirations had to be accommodated politically in an all-Ireland arrangement which took account of the wish of the Protestant communities – the majority in Northern Ireland, a minority in the whole island of Ireland – to remain part of the United Kingdom.

The Ministry of Defence was rather different. A vast military–civil bureaucratic machine, it had a divided population. On the one hand, enthusiastic officers from all three armed services, socially and intellectually confident but taken temporarily from what they regarded as proper soldiering to ‘drive a desk’ in Whitehall, as a necessary stage of purgatory on the military cursus honorum. On the other hand, career MOD civil servants, generally better educated, at senior levels more intellectually gifted than their colleagues in the uniformed branch, but less well paid and less socially ostentatious. It was, and is, an uneasy union, that works, more or less, provided there is clear direction from the politicians at the top, and from the most senior civil servants who support them.

Working on Ireland also acquainted me with civil servants from shadowier parts of Whitehall: not just the smooth extroverts of MI6 (or Secret Intelligence Service, SIS), many of whom operated under Foreign Office cover, but also the quieter, somewhat more stolid (and probably therefore more reliable) operatives of MI5 (or the Security Service), as well as the frighteningly clever, and often rather geekish, introverts of Government Communications Headquarters (usually known as GCHQ). All three agencies ran courses to present their wares to new entrants to the Diplomatic Service. ‘Six’ came across as a bit too slick. ‘Five’ or ‘Box 500’ (after the PO Box they used) seemed more conservative: every one of our lecturers wore a military tie. They spoke, perfectly sensibly, about the threat from Communist espionage and from Irish terrorism. But there was also some alarmingly right-wing talk of the need to monitor the trade unions and keep an eye on industrial subversion. The ‘West Country’ course – GCHQ is based in Cheltenham – felt a bit like a seminar for prospective mathematics students.

In a separate – but not lower – league were the senior officers of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch. They came across as real Flash Harrys, who dressed and behaved like the stars of some cool television series. They took us, at police expense, to Italian restaurants, and ordered in what was meant to sound like Italian. They were a world away from Whitehall. But they knew what they were doing: the Special Branch had, after all, been created as the Special Irish Branch to deal with the threat of Fenian terrorism in the late nineteenth century.

Back in the Foreign Office, I learned how everything revolved around the Foreign Secretary, known in house as the Secretary of State. In 1977, only nine years after the Foreign and Commonwealth Offices had merged, there was still a rearguard action to remind everyone that the minister in charge was technically the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary, and to describe him as such. But it was a battle finally lost when Sir Geoffrey Howe, on becoming secretary of state in 1983, said that he wanted to be known simply as the ‘Foreign Secretary’. And there was a definite feeling that working on Commonwealth issues wasn’t serious foreign policy: Trevor Mound had told me that, India apart, it was better to avoid being sent to a Commonwealth post – where our embassies were known as high commissions – if I could.

In August 1977, the Secretary of State was Dr David Owen, at thirty-seven the youngest Foreign Secretary since Eden. He had been promoted by the Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, in April that year, when Tony Crosland had died, in the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, of a heart attack after going to fetch the Sunday papers. I woke up one morning in Oxford to hear the terrible news, and regretted that I wouldn’t be working for Crosland, if and when I joined the Foreign Office that autumn.

Owen was a man in a hurry, determined to make a difference, above all on the problem of Rhodesia. There the insurgency against Ian Smith’s illegal minority regime was gathering pace. Owen spent much time on shuttle diplomacy with President Carter’s envoy, the former Mayor of Atlanta, Andy Young. In the rush for results, Owen lost patience with Foreign Office procedures. He preferred to operate through the SIS network, sending messages on their channels, rather than using the Foreign Office’s rather more stately telegraph system. Owen’s apparent disdain for conventional diplomacy showed me how important it was to work in ways which satisfied the demands of politics.

Rumours filtered down of tensions between the Secretary of State and officials at the top of the Office. In one of his regular private messages to ambassadors abroad, the Permanent Under Secretary described the Foreign Secretary as tired and under strain, as a result of trying to do, and travel, too much.

All that only added to the sense of awe when I was asked occasionally to walk urgent papers down to the Foreign Secretary’s office, or to retrieve them from there. The Private Office (as it was known) consisted of the Foreign Secretary’s own magnificent office, with its views across Horse Guards and St James’s Park, and, separated from the Secretary of State and from the corridor by great oak doors, the private secretaries’ room. The walls of the latter were covered with small portraits, latterly photographs, of every previous holder of the office, including Tony Crosland and Jim Callaghan. Around the side of the room sat the four private secretaries at their great desks: in the far corner, with a bust of Pitt the Younger behind him, the Principal Private Secretary. The other occupants of the room were two bright mid-career diplomats as assistant private secretaries, and a diary secretary. The Principal Private Secretary seemed impossibly grand: I never dreamed that one day I would do his job.

‘Walking a paper down’ meant entering the private secretaries’ room, and approaching the desk of the private secretary in question, always aware that at any time the great oak door might swing open and the Foreign Secretary himself emerge. The first time I went down, pretty terrified, I was pleasantly surprised that, in the middle of the maelstrom, the Assistant Private Secretary who dealt with Ireland, Kieran Prendergast, had time to ask me who I was and what I did. It turned out that he had known my Dutch journalist cousin during his last posting, in The Hague.

But the Foreign Secretary isn’t the only minister in the Foreign Office. Usually, he is the department’s sole representative in the Cabinet, but there are at least four other ministers, including a peer to cover Foreign Office business in the House of Lords. For Ireland, in 1977, our junior Minister was Frank Judd. Personable, able to take a brief and speak to it, Judd was all that officials wanted in a junior minister. He did the political and representational jobs the Foreign Secretary couldn’t do, but without interfering unnecessarily in policy.

Ministers apart, the most intimidating aspect of starting in the Diplomatic Service is getting to know your way around a building that once housed four separate ministries: the Foreign, India, Colonial and Home Offices. Palmerston had asked for the present Italianate design, in place of Gilbert Scott’s Gothic vision, which instead became St Pancras Station. In 1977, the hugely imaginative and expensive restoration programme for the Old Public Offices had not yet started. They were still in a state of post-war squalor. The glories of the Locarno rooms were concealed behind plywood partitions, erected to create more office space in wartime. The beautiful marble floor of the Durbar Court of the India Office was covered with Nissen huts, housing communications equipment, even though the Court was roofed over (rather leakily). Only ten years earlier, the building had still been heated by the coal fires which adorned most offices. The ashes of that era still seemed to cover everything in a fine film of dust. The Republic of Ireland Department was hidden away in the roof spaces of what had once been the Colonial Office. Only yards away was the old Colonial Office Library which still houses the stuffed anaconda, known fondly as Albert, brought back from distant parts who knows when or why. As gradually I found my way round the great building, I came to know and love the place where I was to spend much of the next three decades. I was immensely proud of its wonders, and its stories. Even then I used to invite friends in to show them the marvels of the India Office or of Sigismund Goetze’s kitsch post-Great War murals – apparently detested by Lord Curzon when he was foreign secretary – which adorn the great landing at the top of the main staircase. Then, as now, I marvelled at the allegory of Britannia Pacificatrix, surrounded by her victorious allies at the end of the First World War: France in her revolutionary bonnet, Belgium and Serbia depicted as naked maidens, Africa represented by a small black boy with a bowl of fruit on his head. Or the hooded figure invoking ‘Silence!’ above the door into the Foreign Secretary’s office. Best of all is Britannia Nutrix, breast-feeding her young colonies, just beside the Ambassadors’ Waiting Room where the Foreign Secretary’s visitors sit before they are summoned in. One of the best things the Foreign Office ever did was to institute guided tours of this magnificent labyrinth, at the heart of our imperial history.

From my first day in the Foreign Office, I knew that I was going to love the job. I was thrilled when, after six months, Philip Mallet told me that he quite liked my work, even though there was plenty of room for improvement. I had already noticed that he used bits of some of my drafts.

The weeks passed into months, and our group of new entrants began to wonder what next. We knew that the usual pattern was a year learning on the job in London, before language training and a first posting overseas. We called ourselves – and still do – the G77, borrowing the name of the UN developing countries’ caucus. We met regularly for drinks and dinner, usually at Mon Plaisir in Monmouth Street, and compared notes. One of us had been sent straight abroad, as the annual reinforcement for the British mission to the UN in New York for the General Assembly session. We asked him what life was like overseas; the answer came back that it was even better than in London. Living abroad, working with foreigners, was just as rewarding as advertised: it was what we had joined the Diplomatic Service for. And the free accommodation, and allowances, would help pay off our debts.

When sitting the Qualifying Tests at Oxford, and again soon after joining the Diplomatic Service, we had been obliged to take a language-aptitude test. The test involved learning Kurdish in an afternoon. It examined every aspect of aptitude (or otherwise) for learning foreign languages: aural as well as oral ability, written expression, grasp of grammar and so on. Foolishly, I had a glass of wine at a picnic in the park with my aunt just before the second test, on the grounds that it would improve my fluency. I was quite wrong, but my average mark over both tests was just good enough to suggest that I might be capable of learning what the FCO Training Department called Class I languages: essentially, Arabic, Chinese or Japanese. It didn’t take me long to choose. My poor ear for pitch meant that I could not hope, so I thought, to master a tonal language such as Chinese or Japanese. But what tipped the balance was that I knew very little about the Far East, and a bit more about the Middle East, based mainly on my study of ancient history. I opted for Arabic, and was told that I would start at the Foreign Office’s famous Middle East Centre for Arab Studies, or MECAS, in the village of Shemlan, above Beirut, in September 1978.

Three other contemporaries were selected for Arabic training. Others went off to learn Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian. About half of the entry managed to avoid hard language training and instead brushed up their French, or acquired German or Spanish, for European postings.

We had taken our first steps on the perpetual treadmill of diplomatic life: with the average posting lasting three or so years, you are always either speculating about your next posting or preparing for it. The sense of continual anticipation of working somewhere on something, or with someone, more interesting than your present job is what keeps many diplomats going – and what makes life such a let-down when the wheel finally stops turning.

That summer of 1978 I met up with an Oxford friend who had failed the Foreign Office entrance exam, and asked him what he was now doing. He was working as a rep for Thomson Holidays, ‘on the basis’, he said, ‘that the work will be much the same as in the Diplomatic Service’. As I soon discovered, he wasn’t far wrong.

Chapter 2

School for Spies

‘Where did you learn such good Arabic?’ asked the man in the suq. ‘In Lebanon, at Shemlan above Beirut’ was my answer. ‘Ah,’ with a knowing look, came the reply, ‘the British spy school.’

For a generation of British diplomats and spies, such were the first words of tens of thousands of encounters across the Middle East, as the graduates of the Foreign Office’s Middle East Centre for Arab Studies engaged, in Arabic, with real Arabs.

MECAS was set up in Jerusalem in 1944, as the end of the war approached. Its job was to teach British diplomats, spies, officers and other officials Arabic, and about the Middle East. Its first Chief Instructor was Jewish: Major Aubrey Evan of the British Army, later, as Abba Eban, Israel’s UN Ambassador and Foreign Minister. In 1948, when Britain pulled out of Palestine, the school moved to Lebanon, eventually to a purpose-built mini-campus in the Christian village of Shemlan, in the mainly Druze-populated mountains above Beirut. It was the Egyptian ruler, Gamal Abdul Nasser, Colonel Nasser, who in the run-up to the Suez crisis of 1956 had dubbed MECAS the ‘British spy school’. The name stuck. For thirty years, anyone of any education in the Middle East, and many of no education, knew of the British spy school, thanks to the free air time Nasser had given the institution.

Despite Nasser’s flattery, the school was probably never quite as good as its reputation. It turned out Arabists with a good grasp of basic grammar and political and economic vocabulary. They could communicate with each other in the curious self-referential dialect they learned and practised in the village cafés of Mount Lebanon, and in the bars and suqs of Beirut. But once sent out into the wider Middle East they faced the barrier confronting every student of Arabic: that, while written Arabic is more or less standardised across the Arab world, the spoken language varies widely, from country to country, and sometimes from region to region. Converting the ingratiating wheedle of Lebanese colloquial into words that worked in Aleppo, or Baghdad, or Cairo, let alone in Abu Dhabi, or Jeddah, or Kuwait, or Sana’a, or Tripoli, was harder work, usually never fully accomplished. Opening one’s mouth, however, and speaking something that sounded like Arabic, was a start at least, and showed willing.

But in the summer of 1978 all that was ahead of me. I was proud to have been selected for MECAS, to have been chosen as a prospective member of the Foreign Office’s cadre of Arabists – the ‘camel corps’ much abused by some of the department’s Zionist detractors – an elite within an elite. And I was relieved that it had been decided that MECAS would definitively reopen that September, having suffered since 1975 a series of temporary closures caused by the Lebanese Civil War.

After the austerity of months in the salt mines of London, preparing for an overseas posting felt a bit like the run-up to Christmas. Once the posting had been confirmed, a letter from the FCO’s Personnel Services Department arrived, describing the allowances we would receive overseas, and the advances of such allowances we would be given even before we left the United Kingdom. For me, aged twenty-three, with an overdraft dating back to university, it was unbelievably exciting.

The full list of Foreign Office overseas allowances was breathtaking. As minister resident in the Mediterranean, Harold Macmillan once complained that the two very distinguished diplomats advising him, Harold Caccia and Roger Makins, seemed obsessed by allowances and car entitlements. ‘Why do diplomats never discuss anything except houses, furniture, motorcars, food, wine and money?’ he wrote.* Reading the list one could see why allowances mattered so much to members of the Diplomatic Service, and to their spouses.

First, and most important for someone whose main means of transport in 1978 was a Honda 50cc motorcycle, was the interest-free Car Loan. Provided you bought British, you were entitled to order a car tax-free and at a discount for diplomats, usually 15 per cent, and to run it in Britain for six months before taking it abroad. A complication for those posted to the Middle East was that makes such as Ford were subject to the Arab boycott, on the grounds that they were sold in Israel. But I wanted something racier than the Hillman Avengers which most young British diplomats then posted to the Arab world seemed to run. I opted for what I thought of as a Mini Cooper, even though, as my brother woundingly pointed out, the British Leyland Mini 1275 GT of 1978 was far from the original Cooper creation. The only colour available in the time in which I needed my car was what the British Leyland catalogue described as ‘Reynard Metallic’ – a sort of liquid light brown. When eventually I arrived in Shemlan, the MECAS Director immediately and cruelly described my beloved first motor as ‘diarrhoea colour’. I was glad when my Mini was covered in the dust and dirt of Middle Eastern motoring.

Also of interest was the Climatic Clothing Allowance. In those days, diplomats posted to especially hot or cold countries were entitled to extra clothing allowances. Based on his experience travelling up and down the Gulf, Michael Hodge of the Republic of Ireland Department had recommended that I buy a set of washable nylon suits that could be worn after a night on a hanger in a hotel bathroom. I thought that, as a fast-stream officer, I was entitled to something grander. I ordered a lightweight sand-coloured suit from the tropical outfitters Airey & Wheeler of Savile Row. The suit turned out to be an expensive sartorial folly. It showed every mark, and I soon learned that Arabs expect any serious Westerner to wear a dark suit. But sporting my Airey & Wheeler extravagance in England that rainy summer I thought I looked the part of the young diplomat en route to the Middle East.

Even more welcome for an ex-student with little more than a kettle and some chipped mugs in the way of household goods was money for equipping my future Middle Eastern residence for representational purposes. The list of favoured suppliers issued by the Overseas Allowances Section of the Personnel Services Department recommended Thomas Goode of South Audley Street, W1, as a shop (if that is the right word for such an emporium) which offered good discounts for diplomatic orders. So there I went, in search of glasses and china, and found that, even at discounted Thomas Goode prices, my budget stretched only to half a dozen crystal tumblers and a remaindered, and incomplete, dinner service. I would have been better off at Habitat. I went round London discovering that, as the Treasury must have known, the reality of what the allowances would buy was much less than the promise. I remembered Trevor Mound’s cautionary tale, of the first grammar school boy to have joined the Foreign Service fast stream, just after the war. In order to keep up appearances, and encouraged by some who should have known better, he had almost ruined himself by ordering a Lagonda for his first posting, to Buenos Aires, only to arrive in Argentina and find that all the supposed toffs in the Chancery were running around in Ford Populars.

Most of the ‘representational’ stuff I acquired that summer went straight into storage, to await shipping to my first substantive posting, somewhere – I didn’t yet know where – in the Middle East, once MECAS was over.

The next task was actually getting yourself to post. Until only a few years ago, Diplomatic Service Regulations offered those travelling out to or back from postings a choice between what was called the Approved Route, and one or more Optional Routes. In 1978, the Approved Route for MECAS was by Middle East Airlines to Beirut, with an allowance for taxis at both ends. The Optional Routes were more exciting, providing, incredibly even in 1978, for train and sea travel. With two friends and colleagues who were also starting at MECAS in September, I decided that it would be fun to drive from London to Beirut. We would make our own ways to Turkey, and rendezvous in late August on top of the ancient citadel of Pergamon – now Bergama – on the Aegean coast north of Smyrna – now Izmir. With my brother as co-driver, I would travel via Paris (where we would meet friends) down to the heel of Italy. From there we would take the ferry from Brindisi to Patras (reliving my schoolboy classicist’s journey eight years earlier) and drive up through Greece, before crossing the Bosphorus at Istanbul.

The Mini needed some mechanical attention to equip it for Arabia. I had not realised that poor-quality fuel in much of the Middle East meant that the famous 1275cc engine would have to be converted from high to low compression, by boring out the cylinders, very expensively. At the insistence of my worried mother, the garage also fitted a massive sump guard, to protect the underside of the low-slung transverse engine against bumps in the road. More powerful shock absorbers were installed. The car now looked ready for the Middle East equivalent of the Monte Carlo rally. In reality, the super-heavy sump guard dragged the car even lower, making for jarring encounters with even relatively small obstacles of the kind then found on most roads east of Trieste.

The journey out to Pergamon went smoothly enough. As a condition of our driving to Beirut, the Foreign Office had insisted that we call in at each British embassy en route to check that the deteriorating situation in Lebanon had not become so bad as to oblige us to turn back. I therefore dropped in at our embassies in Paris, Rome and Athens, obtaining glimpses of a grandeur I was to encounter later in my career. But no problem was reported. Passing through Greece the short-wave radio I had installed in the Mini relayed the signature of the Camp David accords, bringing peace between Israel and Egypt, but not between Israel and the Palestinians or its other Arab neighbours. I little guessed how they would dominate much of my diplomatic career.

The three cars met at Pergamon, exactly as planned. From there, we raced across Asia Minor in convoy, full of excited anticipation. My brother flew back from Antalya. The rest of us crossed into Syria, and went straight to Damascus, our first encounter with one of the greatest of Middle Eastern metropolises. After checking with the Embassy there, we headed almost due west up over the hills to the Lebanese frontier. Entering and leaving Syria, and entering Lebanon, we used what seemed like relics of a bygone age of international motoring, the huge orange customs Carnets de Passage obtained from the AA in London, guaranteeing that our cars would be re-exported. Frontier formalities took ages, a succession of guichets and tickets and stamps and fees, all resulting in passports proudly adorned with more stamps (with postage stamps affixed) than they had gathered traversing the whole of western Europe.

Once over the border, in Lebanon, the atmosphere changed. The roads were lined with Syrian Army vehicles, Soviet Bloc equipment of every variety, wheeled and tracked, armed and unarmed, armoured and soft-skinned. Sitting and squatting in, on and under them were hordes of feckless Arab conscripts, the ballast of a Middle Eastern army, thirsty, hungry, bored and occasionally frightened. We remembered the advice of our Embassy in Damascus: never ever look Arab soldiers or policemen in the eye. Descending into the Beka’a Valley (the northern extension of the Great Rift Valley), and then climbing the winding road back up the eastern slopes of Mount Lebanon, we passed through checkpoint after checkpoint, manned by Syrian soldiers and military police, and, more sinisterly, the goons of Assad’s intelligence service, the much feared mukhabarat in their trademark cheap safari suits.

And then, over the top of the mountains, with the Mediterranean glistening before us, and Beirut below, we swung left and south off the main road which led down to the city, and took the route along the ridge, through the little town of Suq al-Gharb (or ‘market of the west’) to the village of Shemlan. There, in the centre of the village, a great white sign proclaimed, in English and Arabic, ‘Middle East Centre for Arab Studies’.