Perhaps it is time to drop some of our pretensions. Is it really necessary to go on behaving as though Residences abroad, even small ones with only part-time domestic help, are regarded by the Service as some kind of Edwardian country house, but with all mod-cons, available for the repose of all travelling Ministers and senior officials? In reply to a point in a recent questionnaire issuing from somewhere in the FCO (yes, my wife gets them too!) she wrote, ‘I now detest official guests, who treat me as though I were part of the furniture. Can’t these people be put in hotels?’ I felt for her, and I wish her successors a fairer deal. Spouses who elect to give up their own careers and private lives for the furtherance of HMG’s business, especially spouses of Heads of Mission, should be paid or allowed to opt out.
Envoi
But it would be wrong to end on so carping a note. I have had an enjoyable and, I hope, productive career, much of it spent in exotic places and in exciting times. Gripes about the hotel management remuneration aspect apart, my wife and I have been fortunate to be able to spend almost all our married life together, unlike colleagues in the armed services and many other occupations that require overseas travel. We have been supported by a system and by colleagues who cared, and we have made lasting friendships all over the world, in and out of the Service. Our three children have had a tremendous launching pad for their adult lives. I would like to be starting all over again.
THOMAS
1. BDSA: British Diplomatic Spouses Association (nowadays called the Diplomatic Service Families Association).
‘For thirty five years, at home and in eight countries overseas, we have done everything together’
LORD MORAN, HM HIGH COMMISSIONER TO CANADA, JUNE 1984
Like others I have been sad to see the Office decline in public esteem. Much that is said about us is unfair but I think the Office is now often perceived (I hope not irrevocably) as having no gut feeling for our own people, as insufficiently zealous for British interests, as seeking agreement with foreign governments at almost any cost, as unreasonably obsessed with Europe, and as knowing and caring little about Britain north of Potter’s Bar. It was not always so. I recall a former Chief Clerk telling a startled candidate that you did not join this Service because you liked foreigners but ‘to do the foreigner down’. I regret too that our administrative procedures are now so Byzantine and, in this age of computers and microprocessors so extraordinarily slow.
But, nevertheless, much has gone well. I am grateful for all the help I have had from my staff in Ottawa … I pay tribute, as I have done in some of my speeches, to the incalculable contribution made to our efforts by a good many of our wives, unpaid but often making all the difference between success and failure. And in this, my last despatch, I should like to say thank you to my own wife. For thirty five years, at home and in eight countries overseas, we have done everything together. Mine has been an easier job than hers. But her contribution has been enormous. Doing it all together has made it fun. Indeed to have done it without her would have been inconceivable.
I am sending copies of this despatch to the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, the Governor of the Bank of England, the Secretary of the Cabinet, Heads of Mission at NATO posts and Canberra, to the United Kingdom Representatives at NATO and the United Nations, and to Consular Posts in Canada.
I am Sir
Yours faithfully
Moran
‘Farewell then, Valedictory Despatches’
CHARLES CRAWFORD, HM AMBASSADOR TO POLAND, SEPTEMBER 2007
Finally – proof that the tradition lives on. Charles Crawford left the Foreign Office in 2007, having served as ambassador in Bosnia, Serbia and Warsaw. At an earlier posting in South Africa, Crawford had as a mentor Robin Renwick, a future ambassador in Washington whose singular dry wit clearly made an impression on the young diplomat.
Crawford ended his career as ambassador in Warsaw. Valedictory despatches had been abolished the year before but Crawford neatly sidestepped the ban by sending his parting shot by email to colleagues (or eGram, in Foreign Office lingo) instead. His valedictory took the form of an awards ceremony for lifetime achievement. Crawford now writes an entertaining blog (www.charlescrawford.biz); he describes his Career Oscars as ‘a self-indulgent but droll list of the best and worst moments of 28 years’ service’.
En route to the exit, Crawford also wrote a more serious valedictory, about the historical fallout from the Katyn massacre. In 1943 the Nazis discovered mass graves in Russia’s Katyn forest containing the bodies of more than 20,000 Polish prisoners of war. They had been killed by Russian security forces, but for the next fifty years Moscow denied responsibility, blaming the murders on the Nazis. Right through to the modern era the international community, Crawford believes, has failed to hold former Communists to account for their crimes in Eastern Europe. To many Poles, and outsiders familiar with this largely forgotten atrocity, Katyn remains unfinished business.
THOSE FCO CAREER OSCARS! IN FULL!
Summary
So, Farewell then, Valedictory Despatches. Welcome instead … FCO Career Oscar Awards. In no special order:
Best Suppression of Hostile Reviews
In 1986: As Resident Clerk from a standing start at midnight helping secure an injunction at 0400 hrs against the Glasgow Herald to stop the printing presses and block their publication of Sir James Craig’s valedictory despatch on The Arabs.
Best Droll Repartee with Future Head of State
Soon after he was released from Robben Island in 1990 Nelson Mandela unexpectedly appeared at the Embassy in Pretoria. I (First Sec Internal) was running the shop. He abruptly asked, ‘Do you people want [Zulu leader] Buthelezi to be President?’ I said, ‘If he wins a free and fair election of all South Africans, why not?’ Long silence. Mandela: ‘Good answer.’
Best Action Sequence
The deafening gunfire outside our Moscow flat late into the night as the attempted 1993 Communist counter-coup against President Yeltsin ran out of steam. My teethmarks were visible in the carpet under the bed at the Skatertny Pereulok flat many years later.
Best Wildlife Sequence
Borrowing two wallabies from a Vojvodina zoo for a reception at the Residence in Belgrade to promote Fosters Lager (Note: as brewed in and exported from the UK).
Best Child Prodigies Scene
In Sarajevo early one morning in Spring 1997 when James and Robert Crawford (6 and 4 respectively) shouted ‘Wake up Mr Potato-Head’ through the keyhole of the bedroom of visiting Chief Clerk Rob Young, whose career never really recovered thereafter.
Most Appalling and Bewildering Balkan Stupidity Ever (Note: a record number of nominations in this category)
Winter Olympics, Sarajevo 1984: Tasked with the seemingly banal task of opening and closing a briefcase belonging to a member of the Royal Family, I somehow bent the internal brass hinge. My Belgrade Embassy Serb driver obligingly tried to twist it back into shape – but snapped it off, saying ‘Don’t worry, he won’t notice …’ …
Best Slapstick Sequence
Energetically knocking a full champagne glass across the table in No 10 Downing St at the start of talks between Tony Blair and President Kaczynski (2006).
Most Heroic Attempt at ‘The Italian Job: 3’
2006: Using a crane to lift a Mini Cooper S into the first floor reception room at the Warsaw Residence for a New Mini launch event …
Hottest Sex Scene Involving a KGB Attempt to get an Embassy Maid to Entrap Me
No entries (so to speak) in this category, alas. But we must always be alert to KGB penetration of our most secret places.
Finest Russian Existentialist Analysis of International Relations
Moscow 1996: Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Head of Baltic Section Alexander Udaltsov, in response to my argument that Russia should not link energy supplies to the problems facing Russian-speaking minorities in Estonia: ‘Meester Crawford: nothing is leenked. But everything is leenked.’
Sir R. R
enwick’s Old Ambassador’s Strategic Priorities
‘That’s very important. But it doesn’t matter.’ (Note: oddly tricky to translate this into Slav.)
Best Ever Supporting Actress
Helen Crawford (numerous glamorous leading roles in HMG productions overseas, mostly unpaid).
1. ‘The general level of intelligence of the Thais is rather low . . .’ Sir Anthony Rumbold’s withering parting shot from Bangkok was mistakenly given ‘Q’ distribution throughout the entire Commonwealth instead of the intended ‘A’ distribution (Canada, Australia, New Zealand). See pp. 72–5.
2. Sir Michael Weir, HM Ambassador to Egypt, 1985. Paragraph 3 of the summary has been partially obscured by the censors.
3. Lord Moran, High Commissioner to Canada, 1984. Moran’s remarks on the parochialism of Ottawa politics and its back-scratching politicians still pack a punch. In 2009 the contents of this despatch briefly became a national talking point in Canada when it was revealed in our BBC Radio 4 series.
4. Into the modern era; Sir Christopher Meyer’s valedictory despatch from Germany in 1997, released under the Freedom of Information Act. The Foreign Office refused to release Meyer’s 2003 valedictory from Washington.
5. Freedom of Information.
6. The sternest critics of an ambassador’s prose were often his colleagues back in Whitehall. Clerks back at ‘the centre’ could be ruthless in pointing out the defects in a despatch. Despite their reservations this valedictory from the United Arab Emirates was grudgingly submitted for printing, in accordance with the tradition.
7. Literary criticism. Extracts from Mr Oliver’s valedictory are on pp. 315–17.
8. The Henderson despatch.
9. A letter from Andrew Knight, editor of the Economist, to the government informing them that the magazine intended to publish Nicholas Henderson’s valedictory – having obtained not one but three leaked copies.
10. Roger Pinsent, HM Ambassador to Nicaragua, 1967.
11. Sir John Russell, HM Ambassador to Brazil, 1969.
12. A letter from the Foreign Secretary to Willie Morris, an accomplished Arabist, on his retirement from Cairo. Morris’s earlier valedictory from Riyadh is on pp. 228–30. We are happy to grant David Owen his wish (thirty years on) to see some despatches published.
13. Freedom of Information.
Notes on the Material
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION AND THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES
British diplomats’ despatches are classified documents. They are not supposed to be read outside of government. Many ambassadors’ working reports contain information which could, if revealed at the wrong time or to the wrong audience, wreck Britain’s relations with foreign countries at a stroke. At the extreme end, secrecy is a matter of life and death; the most sensitive despatches can touch on the work of the intelligence services, and confidentiality is essential if foreign agents and informers are to avoid being compromised.
Valedictory despatches rarely contained information of quite such mortal importance, but as the extracts in this collection show, they still had ample potential to cause considerable shock and embarrassment. As a result, they were restricted. Most of the despatches which feature in this book were graded ‘Confidential’, the third-highest security level, behind ‘Top Secret’ and ‘Secret’. Valedictories were often distributed widely across Whitehall, but when stamped ‘Confidential’ (or ‘Restricted’, the next level down) they could go only to people who had passed a rigorous security-clearance check. All sorts of precautions and penalties exist in the Foreign Office to stop this kind of material being read by unauthorized eyes, let alone published in a collection like this.
This chapter explains how we overcame that obstacle. In doing so, I hope it will offer some reassurance to any who may feel – as at least one listener did – that broadcasting some choice extracts from valedictories on BBC Radio 4 amounted to a national security threat (an argument which, by extension, would make publishing this book tantamount to treason).
Various laws exist in the UK which set a balance between protecting the government’s need for confidentiality and the public’s right to information. That balance shifted markedly in the public’s favour in 2000 with the passage of the Freedom of Information Act. The legislation enables any member of public to request, for whatever purpose, any information held by an astonishing range of government departments and agencies. The Act introduced for the first time a bias for disclosure – all government information was to be deemed releasable, in the event of a request, unless it fell under certain defined exemptions. Crucially, the legislation applied retroactively. For the first time, anyone who was curious might obtain confidential files written in the recent past by civil servants who had no idea at the time that their scribblings would one day reach a wider audience.
Journalists had already made many significant discoveries using the Freedom of Information process, but when I fired off our first requests to the Foreign Office in 2008 it was with low expectations. I thought the project was likely to founder on the so-called ‘qualified’ exemptions built into the legislation. These included provisions for government departments to withhold information where disclosure might prejudice international security, or defence, or the ‘formulation of government policy’ or – crucially – ‘international relations between the UK and any other state, international organization or court’. Ominously, there was also an exemption which could stop disclosure in order to protect the ‘free and frank provision of advice and exchange of views for the purposes of deliberation’.
The other obstacle was that in trying to identify which diplomats had written entertaining valedictories we were mostly shooting in the dark. The tradition of valedictory despatches was strong in the Foreign Office but not every diplomat wrote one – and of those that did many were routine reports; only a minority were likely to be really interesting. In order to narrow the field I set about researching ambassadors’ biographies, looking for interesting characters, high-flyers and mavericks among the many hundreds of men and women who had passed through the overseas service. I drew on obituaries, news reports and on a collection of ‘oral histories’; transcripts of recorded interviews with diplomats held at Churchill College, Cambridge. These transcripts were invaluable; the interviews were generally done shortly after retirement, and gave a good indication as to the preoccupations and temperament of the author around the time they would have written their valedictory. I also tried to identify diplomats who worked in interesting times and key posts, such as the embassies either side of the Berlin Wall before reunification, and posts in the Middle East around the time of the first Gulf War.
Altogether, I made Freedom of Information requests to the Foreign Office for nearly sixty valedictories written between 1979 and 2006. The results were pleasantly surprising. Forty valedictories were eventually released to me. Only five were withheld altogether because of exemptions. These included a valedictory from Israel (by John Robinson, 1981) and from South Africa (Dame Maeve Fort, 2000). Despatches from recent envoys to the superpowers were also, perhaps unsurprisingly, deemed too sensitive to release, including Sir Roderick Lyne’s valedictory from Russia in 2004 (although two other Moscow valedictories, from 1988 and 1992, passed the censors intact.) Sir Christopher Meyer’s parting shot from Washington in 2003 was also withheld. (This should be worth a read once it is eventually declassified. Meyer told us that when he sat down to write it, after five years in the most high-profile job in the service, ‘it all came out like a dose of salts’.) Meyer’s 1997 valedictory from Bonn was, however, released to us and appears in Chapter 1.
Most of the despatches which emerged from the process were censored with some sections obscured, commonly because of the exemption regarding ‘international relations’. The Foreign Office seemed particularly sensitive about releasing despatches written by ambassadors to conservative societies. One valedictory from Jordan (Peter Hinchcliffe, 1997) bore some particularly heavy redactions and another from Saudi Arabia
(Sir James Craig, 1984) was withheld outright. In both cases the Foreign Office wrote me a letter which made much of the need to maintain ‘trust and confidence’ in relations with the countries concerned. They seemed more relaxed about hurting the feelings of other mature liberal democracies when assessing the material for release; Lord Moran’s wonderfully scathing 1984 valedictory from Ottawa being a case in point.
Sometimes only a sentence or a few phrases would be hidden by the censors’ pen. In other despatches whole pages were obscured. Robin Renwick’s (now Lord Renwick) final telegram from Washington in 1995 bore some particularly swingeing partial edits which were fatal to the meaning. The ambassador began a section with some remarks on the first George Bush: ‘As President, he was an anomaly, devoting two thirds of his time to foreign affairs …’ The next three or four sentences, however, are redacted, and the next legible lines read: ‘I have got to know him well over the past three years. He is highly intelligent, pragmatic to the core, a good debater and has been personally very friendly to us. But there are few fixed points on his compass.’ A memorable phrase, which at first glance seems to give an insight into Bush’s character. But here Renwick was in fact summing up Bill Clinton, who succeeded Bush in 1993. It was a perceptive analysis and, given that Clinton’s ability to twist with the political wind became his hallmark, a far-sighted one. (A year after Renwick wrote his despatch, the Democrat known as ‘Slick Willy’ retook the White House, outmanoeuvring his opponents by ‘triangulation’ – stealing popular Republican policies.) It would be interesting to see what else Renwick had to say of Clinton beyond those foreshortened remarks, but the censor also struck out what remains of the section.
Parting Shots Page 33