The Ambassadors

Murder In Samarkand: A British Ambassador’s Controversial Defiance of Tyranny in the War on Terror
By the UK’s former Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray

DC Confidential: The Controversial Memoirs of Britain’s Ambassador to the US at the Time of 9/11 and the Run-up to the Iraq War
By the UK’s former Ambassador to the United States Sir Christopher Meyer

Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World’s Last Dictators by 2025
By former US Ambassador to Hungary, Mark Palmer

Reviewed by Ben Rogers

For anyone interested in foreign policy, passionate about freedom or sceptical about the diplomatic service, there are three books which are absolutely essential reading. All three are written by former Ambassadors, two British, one American. All three offer insights into the strengths and weaknesses of British and American foreign policy. And all three provide ideas for how our foreign policy – and the pursuit of freedom and democracy – can be better conducted.

These three books, though different in style and substance, provide – together – a valuable guide to how to be an Ambassador. All three – Murray, Meyer and Palmer – in their different ways break the mould of stereotypical diplomats. Unstuffy, creative, bold and colourful, they show the influence an Ambassador can have in another country – and the opportunity to use that influence for good.

Murray and Meyer’s books have several themes in common with each other:

• Both were British Ambassadors with colourful personalities and private lives.
• Both men’s first marriages ended in divorce, and both fell in love with glamorous, if problematic, blondes whom they met in the line of duty.  They are remarkably open about their personal lives in their books.
• Both men had serious, near-death, heart problems towards the end of their careers, brought   on, perhaps, by the stress of the job.
• Both had, in different ways, brief forays into domestic British politics after retirement –   Murray stood as an independent candidate against Jack Straw in Blackburn in 2005, and alleges Labour corruption during that campaign, while Meyer’s wife tried unsuccessfully to become Conservative candidate for Kensington and Chelsea, and was a leading voice against the European Constitution.
• And both, it seems, were stabbed in the back by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO)   bureaucracy because they did not toe the line. In Meyer’s case, after he had refused a further extension to his posting, the FCO refused to authorise a heart-valve operation, despite US medical advice that it was necessary. And although to his face senior FCO officials gave him   fulsome praise when he retired, he was told by Prince Andrew that “someone very senior” at the FCO had claimed “you had deserted your post just when you were needed.”

Murray’s story is the most extraordinary. It reads like a Jeffrey Archer thriller – sex, murder and conspiracy – and it is hard to remember that it is not fiction. A damning indictment of realpolitik taken to the extreme. Uzbekistan, according to Human Rights Watch, had some 7,000 political or religious prisoners, subjected to barbaric torture. Yet, Murray claims, before he went to Tashkent as Ambassador, “in three weeks of Foreign Office and other UK government briefings prior to taking up my post, there had been scarcely a mention of human rights and none of torture.”

Although not briefed by the FCO on torture in Uzbekistan, Murray quickly discovered it. He met a man whose grandson had been tortured in front of him. “They beat his testicles and put electrodes on his body. They put a mask on him to stop him breathing. They raped him with a bottle,” the old man told Murray. Another victim, he learned, died of immersion in boiling liquid. “Before he was boiled to death, his fingernails had been ripped out and he had been severely beaten around the face,” Murray recalls.

The book reports other cases of rape, sodomy, asphyxiation, drowning, electrocution and beating of prisoners. Healthy dissidents were deliberately placed in hospital wards full of tuberculosis patients, “so they contract the disease”.

As Ambassador, Murray resolved early on to:

“dedicate every fibre of my being to stopping this horror in Uzbekistan. I would not spend three years on the golf course and cocktail circuit. I would not go along with political lies or leave the truth unspoken.”

It seems he was as good as his word.

Murray did what any Ambassador from a democracy should do. Yet his actions caused astonishment among the diplomatic community in Tashkent, amazement among Uzbek people, and outrage in London. He attended the trial of a dissident, something no Ambassador in Uzbekistan had ever done.

When the family thanked him for coming, Murray went through a moment of self-doubt. “Realistically what could I do – and if I could do nothing, why was I there?” he asks. But soon his self-questioning turned into anger, “against a system that promotes torture and execution, as well as against fellow diplomats for their complacent acquiescence.”

Freedom House, a leading human rights organisation, was able to open a Tashkent office, despite the Uzbek regime’s reign of terror. Murray was invited to speak, and his speech caused a huge stir. Although it had been cleared by the FCO, it was not without a fight. The speech was a straight-talking assertion of basic freedoms:

“It should not be a crime to practise your religion, nor to tell others about it... I believe that people are born with an instinct for liberty, and that freedom and democracy come naturally to people everywhere, once they are given the chance.”

He called on the Uzbek dictator, Islam Karimov, to release political prisoners, register opposition political parties and human rights groups, permit a free media, freedom of assembly, and multi-party elections.

A reporter from the US, David Stern, said: “Murray caused a sensation for doing one small thing that very few people seem to have done here: he told the truth …. ‘To me the fundamental question is not why did he say this, but why the other ambassadors didn’t?’, said one Western observer.”

But speaking the truth led Murray on a collision course with the FCO. London moved from concern to anger to a full-blown campaign of character assassination. Initially, an FCO official told Murray that he was “over-focused on human rights”. Then another told him: “No ambassador should ever make such a speech … You seem to lack any sense of proportion.” Murray was subsequently told his reports on human rights violations were “over-emotional”. His response? “I am sorry if I get emotional about people being boiled to death, or children being raped in front of their parents.”

Both Murray and Meyer’s books share another characteristic: humour. While both cover some of the most serious themes of our day, both show flashes of wit. A London civil servant due to visit Tashkent for an international conference was worried about the SARS epidemic in China. “Should I wear a face mask in the conference hall?” she asked. Murray replied: “I don’t know. How ugly are you?” At British Embassy dinners, Murray made self-deprecating jokes about not understanding the placement rules. “This only failed with the Germans, who would take this as an invitation to work out the rules properly and re-arrange everyone into formal order while the soufflés sank.”

In an exchange descriptive of the FCO’s meanness and reminiscent of Meyer’s experience of having approval for a heart operation denied, Murray expressed concern about security in his Tashkent Residence. It had no bullet-proof windows. Given both the UK’s role in the War on Terror, and his own outspokenness, he had cause for concern. But he was told by London that there was no money for bullet-proof glass. “I should therefore ‘plant quick-growing conifers … to screen the house’. I wondered just how fast they thought conifers grow… I went back with some rejoinder and received further advice to keep the curtains closed.”

Both Murray and Meyer are critical of the War on Terror, and particularly Iraq, but for different reasons. Murray personally disagreed with the Iraq War from the start, calling it “an illegal war in support of extreme right-wing American Republicans and to the advantage of the oil and weapons industries.” Meyer supported the war itself – and makes a strong case for it on the grounds that Saddam Hussein had persistently humiliated the UN:

“Saddam’s decade-long corrosion of the UN’s credibility was argument enough for dealing with him once and for all… To make the case against the Iraqi leader, it was never necessary to have the horror of 9/11, never necessary to prove a link between the Iraqi regime and Al Qaeda, never necessary even to show that he had WMD … Saddam’s threat was his ambition and intent.”

Meyer is critical, instead, of the timing, and the lack of post-war planning.

But regardless of opinion about Iraq, Murray is right about one thing:

“There was no excuse for torture, for abandoning human rights, for betraying the values we claimed to be fighting for. And that is what we were doing.”

Uzbekistan was an ally in the War on Terror – and that was why London went ballistic when Murray started speaking out about human rights.

Meyer is convinced that for Bush and Blair, the spread of freedom and democracy was central to their motivation in the War on Terror, and the Iraq War. But Murray argues that:

“it was impossible to believe that US foreign policy was about freedom … Why were we going to war to remove Saddam Hussein while subsidising Karimov?”

The FCO – described by Murray in one part of the book as “ponderous, self-important and ineffective” and in another as seeing “no distinction between diplomacy and brown-nosing” – retaliated in the most bizarre way. “The policy of backing nasty dictators was bound to rebound on us – it always does – but they just couldn’t see it,” he writes. But they did not want to admit such a profound policy difference – so they sought to remove Murray on disciplinary grounds.

A concoction of allegations of sex, drunkenness and corruption was levied at him. Almost all were false, although Murray is endearingly honest about his sex life and his unbuttoned social life. He frequented bars and had an affair with an Uzbek woman which broke up his marriage. Of his wife’s ultimatum to him on a visit to the UK – that he had to choose between her or his Uzbek mistress – Murray asks:

“Why did Fiona need everything to be so black and white? Why was she forcing on me a choice I wanted to put off when I was just off the plane? An unjust resentment made me feel peevish. I didn’t want clarity. For the last ten years, my personal life had been swathed in ambiguity, comfortably cocooned in grey mists of various duplicity. I had a wife I loved, wonderful children, and a comfortable and well-ordered home. And I had wonderful, madcap booze-filled evenings out, full of wit and wrongdoing, and a string of mistresses.” He admits that “in my private life I behaved pretty badly”.

But the FCO accused him of being drunk at work, issuing visas for sex, and 18 other charges which were mostly completely fabricated or exaggerated and were subsequently dropped.

From Murray’s account, even to accuse him of focusing on human rights at the expense of other issues is wrong. He appears to have been extremely energetic in promoting British business interests – and won unrivalled praise from the commercial sector. Many British companies, including British Airways and British American Tobacco, wrote to the FCO in support of Murray. They said:

“Craig Murray is without doubt the British Ambassador who has put the most effort into promoting British commercial and economic interests, and the only British Ambassador who has had real clout with the Government of Uzbekistan.”

Indeed, the argument was that by standing up to the Karimov regime Murray won more respect from the regime than those who kow-towed.

Meyer’s book is lighter reading than Murray’s. In fact, until the chapter on the build-up to the Iraq War, it is remarkably lacking in substance, though fascinating nonetheless. It contains some valuable reflections on the “Third Way” – “less a coherent philosophy of government, more a tactic for election-winning”, he argues – and some amusing reflections on New Labour ministers – “There was a minority of capable ministers, who stood out like Masai warriors in a crowd of pygmies,” he says.

John Prescott’s bumbling encounters with American politicians make the reader laugh aloud. Meyer recalls studying at Harvard and writing a paper which was judged by an academic as “great fun” – Harvard-speak, he explains, “for lightweight, if tolerably interesting”. Possibly a good description for the first three-quarters of DC Confidential.

In contrast to Murray, Meyer, Britain’s longest-serving Ambassador to the US since the Second World War, is passionately pro-American. “The American people are the most generous-hearted on earth,” he writes. He describes meeting George W Bush in Texas before he became President and his observation was: “He was as smart as a whip … someone not to be underestimated.” Later descriptions portray Bush and his wife as “geniality and hospitality personified”. Bush was also, Meyer noted, someone who views countries and people “in black and white: good and bad, friendly and hostile, loyal and unreliable”, and was profoundly committed to liberty and democracy.

Meyer’s account of 9/11 is gripping, in particular his assessment of the significance of Britain’s response. Blair’s presence at Bush’s speech to Congress turned him into “an American hero”. On 13 September, the Coldstream Guards played the “Star-Spangled Banner” at the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace – an act which brought Condoleezza Rice to tears. Only the Prince of Wales let Britain down. A month after the terrorist attacks, he was due to visit New York – but was replaced by Prince Andrew because, Meyer says, “shooting at Balmoral had taken precedence.”

Much of Meyer’s book is interspersed with the account of his wife Catherine’s battle with the German courts for access to her children. Her first husband, a German, was refusing to allow her to see her sons – and her cause soon became prominent in the US. She received more support from the US Government than from the British.

Like Murray, Meyer feels at times he was undermined by his Government, but for different reasons. He was never the victim of a brutal or concerted a campaign of destruction as Murray was, nor was he ever seriously at odds with his masters, but Downing Street’s clique of self-important spin merchants sought to exclude him at times from key events.

“By the time I retired … I had reached the unhappy conclusion that what I had achieved as ambassador had been as much in spite of Downing Street as because of it.”

Both Murray and Meyer found the FCO in London surprisingly uncommunicative. Before he went to Tashkent, Murray met then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. They discussed nothing of substance – and by the time he left the room, Straw appeared to have forgotten which country Murray was being posted to. During his time as Ambassador, he only had one meeting with an FCO minister.

“This is a sad reflection on the fact that in the New Labour government, ministers’ diaries were driven entirely by spin and the news agenda. If a crisis happened and a country hit the news, it would get ministerial attention. The idea of quiet, unacknowledged work to prevent a crisis had no attraction for them. ‘Where’s the headline?’ was always the key question,” writes Murray.

And even when a country is in the news, the FCO was not in power. “Between 9/11 and the day I retired at the end of February 2003 I had not had a single substantive policy discussion on the secure phone with the Foreign Office,” Meyer recalls. Downing Street was in charge. “This was in contrast to the many contacts and discussions with No.10.”

Insights into the Blair-Bush relationship dominate the latter part of Meyer’s book. Blair, contrary to popular opinion, was not a “poodle”, Meyer argues, but in fact a driving force behind the philosophy of pre-emption. “He needed little convincing of the desirability of bringing down Saddam. Blair was a true believer before Bush himself,” he says. However, there were times when the UK “risked being taken for granted” – although Dick Cheney’s staff told Meyer that the UK was “the only ally that mattered”.

Whether the UK used this unique position to full effect, however, is in doubt. “Britain should have made its participation in any war dependent on a fully worked-out plan, agreed by both sides, for the rehabilitation of Iraq after Saddam’s demise … Had Britain so insisted, Iraq after Saddam might have avoided the violence that may yet prove fatal to the entire enterprise.” Instead, Meyer concludes, “planning in Washington for the administration of Iraq after Saddam’s demise was rudimentary” … post-war Iraq, he adds, was a “blindspot in Washington … The White House appeared to have bought fully into the neocon idea that with the overthrow of Saddam, all would be sweetness and light in Iraq.”

Mark Palmer’s Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World’s Last Dictators by 2025 is, along with Natan Sharansky’s The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror the most important handbook for human rights and foreign policy. Very different from Murray and Meyer’s books – which are more autobiographical – Palmer has written a step-by-step guide to democracy promotion, drawn from his own experience in Hungary and as a Reagan speech-writer.

In a chapter called Embassies as Freedom Houses, Ambassadors as Freedom Fighters Palmer argues that diplomats from democratic nations should use their resources and status to support indigenous democrats and dissidents in dictatorships by providing them with a platform, taking part in protests alongside them, and championing the cause of those in prison.

“Once ambassadors and embassies realise that they can be local political actors, they will find hundreds of ways to express their affection for the local people, promote people-to-people cooperation and support democrats. These can range from the sublime to the ridiculous or at least the lighthearted, and definitely not traditionally diplomatic,” Palmer writes.

Murray displayed these characteristics many times in Uzbekistan, by intervening in individual cases of injustice in a way that was highly undiplomatic. “Keep chipping, chipping, and you’ll crack the marble,” he writes. In one case, three brothers had leased farm land from the State, and the State wanted it back. The brothers refused, and as a result one was murdered and another jailed. The third was in hiding, while their 84 year-old mother was beaten up and their apple orchard destroyed. Murray drove five hours to Karshi to investigate, came face-to-face with the murderers, and took over the District Procurator’s office for a few hours.

At a check-point on the way to address a conference held by the Uzbek opposition parties, Murray’s car was held up for longer than normal by the police. Losing patience, he went into the police office, threw the police radio into the fields and tipped over the police officer’s desk. He then got back into the car and ordered his driver to drive on through the barriers. A dissident poet accompanying him was jumping up and down with laughter and excitement. “I have lived my life under Stalin, Brezhnev, Andropov, Karimov. I have waited so long to see someone do that!”

Palmer sets out the case for democracy and human rights – not only the moral case, but the argument that it is in our own interests to bring down dictators. Tyrannical regimes threaten their own people, their neighbours, their regions and ultimately ourselves. They sow instability, conflict, corruption, famine and misery. Palmer’s book is a great complement to Murray and Meyer’s books – Palmer’s is the textbook, Murray’s, and to lesser extent Meyer’s the case studies in diplomacy. All three shatter the image of the buttoned-up appeasers who typically dominate foreign affairs – and yet at the same time highlight the continued dominance of such appeasers.

Britain has a key role to play in the world, and Meyer and Murray show in their books the difference an Ambassador can make.

“We are no longer an imperial power and we are not a superpower; but Britain is a great power,” Meyer writes. And as a great power, we need diplomats who stand up for the values which have shaped our greatness: freedom, democracy, human rights. We need more diplomats who believe, like Murray, that “if you cross the path of tyranny … there is a duty to fight it.”

Murray concludes Murder in Samarkand with these words:

“Some of the symptoms of tyranny are the use of torture, imprisonment without proper trial, government figures being above the law and censorship of books. The thing with tyranny is that, if you don’t try to fight it when it starts, it very quickly gets too strong for you. If you achieve a voice that will be heard, you should use it to speak up for the voiceless and oppressed. If you possess any power or authority, you must strive to use it to help and to empower the powerless.”

That is what an Ambassador should do.

Benedict Rogers reviews three books on diplomacy, freedom and the war on terror. Ben is Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission and was Conservative Party Parliamentary Candidate in the City of Durham in the 2005 General Election. He is a human rights activist and journalist, author of a book on Burma, and co-author with James Mawdsley of New Ground: Engaging people with the Conservative Party through a bold, principled and imaginative foreign policy.

Comments

[Frazer]

Craig Murray deserves recognition for his stance in Uzbekistan.The more he irritates the FCO the happier we should all be !

[Anthony King]

I've read the first two books and have to add that I feel that Meyer really "towed the official line" with this one. That he tried his hardest to be controversial...but failed miserably.

The idea that an ambassador to the United States would not keep his mouth shut, and would REALLY spill the beans is nonsensical. Bottom line Meyer's book is boring!

Craig Murray on the other hand has produced an emotional, detailed thrilling read obviously straight from the heart...I just felt that Meyer was the official excuse boy for both the US administration and Blairs shenanigans.

I strongly recommend Murray's amazing book.....send Meyers to the bottom of the pile!