Ever the Diplomat: Confessions of a Foreign Office Mandarin

Ever The Diplomat

Confessions of a Foreign Office Mandarin

SHERARD COWPER-COLES

Dedication

For Harry, Rupert, Minna, Freddy, Myles and Louise

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

List of Illustrations

Preface

Chapter 1 - The Third Room

Chapter 2 - School for Spies

Chapter 3 - Death on the Nile

Chapter 4 - Immortal Junior Typist

Chapter 5 - Potomac Fever

Chapter 6 - Back in the Office

Chapter 7 - Chinese Take-Away

Chapter 8 - Death on the Seine

Chapter 9 - The Gnome Secretary

Chapter 10 - Poppies of Palestine

Chapter 11 - In the Heart of Arabia

Chapter 12 - Afghan Afterword

Chapter 13 - Envoi

Index

Picture Section

Also by Sherard Cowper-Coles

Copyright

About the Publisher

List of Illustrations

FCO Letter of Appointment

‘Thatcher’s Thesaurus’

Middle East Centre for Arab Studies. Photograph by a local Lebanese photographer

TRH The Prince and Princess of Wales, and President and Mrs Sadat. Photograph by a member of the crew of HM Yacht Britannia

Foreign Office Planning Staff. © Brian Harris/The Times/NI Syndication

Permanent Under Secretary’s office. Photograph by an FCO photographer

Congressman Kennedy. Photograph by a member of his staff

Mrs Thatcher. Photograph by a member of Blair House staff

Governor Patten. © Roger Hutchings/In Pictures/Corbis

Hong Kong Handover Ceremony. © Reuters/Jason Reed

President’s House, Jerusalem. Photograph by a member of the President’s staff

Crown Prince Abdullah, the Prince of Wales and the author. Photograph by a Saudi court photographer

Crown Prince Abdullah, Prime Minister and the author. Photograph by a Saudi court photographer

All other photographs are from the author’s private collection and were taken either by him or by friends, colleagues or family members

Preface

This book is really a long love letter to an institution – the Foreign Office – for which I worked for some three decades. From the age of twenty-two until I was fifty-five, I was a British diplomat. Formally, I was a member of Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service, with a commission from the Queen. But for me diplomacy was much more than a job, or even a profession: it was my way of life. It was what I got up for in the morning, and what I went to sleep at night thinking about. For thirty-three years, I looked forward almost every working day to going into the office, or embassy, or wherever work took me. I was never bored. And I didn’t just enjoy being a diplomat. I also believed that what I did as a diplomat mattered in small but important ways. From Ireland to Israel, and Arabia to Afghanistan, in Paris or Washington, in long hours in London worrying about Europe’s future or Hong Kong after the handover, I tried as a minor cog in HMG’s foreign policy machine to make the world work better. I met the people who helped or hindered our efforts. I went to the places where foreign policy happened. I cared about the issues. And at the end of it all I wanted to share some of the highlights and low points, as I remembered them. I wanted to give the reader a flavour of what diplomats really do, and of what being a diplomat actually feels like. But mostly I wanted to show why I had enjoyed it all so much.

I kept no proper diary. The random private papers I did keep are now buried beyond easy recovery in barns and attics in Britain and France. I have made no use of official documents. But what I do have is memories: plenty of them, good and bad, of the tough times and the bright spots, of the fun I had, but also of the horrors I witnessed and of the mistakes we made. Of the people too, conscientious mostly, committed and often courageous, but some charlatans as well and others with more reptilian qualities. I have set down, place by place, post by post, the best and worst of those memories. All are the truth as I remember it, but not always the whole truth. The story stops at the edge of private turmoil. It alludes only in passing to the disreputable deal-making over top jobs that led me to choose early retirement, five years sooner than expected.

As with my first book, Cables from Kabul,* I have asked myself whether publishing an account of my experiences so soon after I left the public service was consistent with my obligations to my former employer. But Diplomatic Service Regulations state that ‘The FCO welcomes debate on foreign policy … The FCO recognises that there is a public interest in allowing former officials to write accounts of their time in government. These contributions can help public understanding and debate … there is no ban on former members of the Diplomatic Service writing their memoirs … but obligations of confidentiality remain …’

Like Cables, this book is the fruit of a conversation with my future agent, Caroline Michel, at a dinner at the Irish Embassy in London in 2009. It was Caroline who first suggested that I had a book or two in me. It was she who told me to set down my memories and share them. I shall be forever grateful to her for sticking so faithfully to that judgement.

I am also immensely grateful to the team at HarperPress who have given such enthusiastic and wholly professional support to this project: in particular my editor and friend, Martin Redfern, a diplomat if ever there was one, whose quiet judgement has often saved me from error, and who has driven the whole thing forward with determination and discrimination; to project editor Kate Tolley for putting the book together with efficiency and taste; and to Helen Ellis, publicist sans pareil, Minna Fry and the whole of the HarperPress gang.

I owe my research assistant, Max Benitz, a particular debt of gratitude for his hard work in establishing what really happened, in tracking down key documents or photographs, and in offering many excellent suggestions, all done with remarkable accuracy and to time. I have also been extraordinarily lucky in my copy-editor, Peter James, an Oxford contemporary, and in having had the help of the king of indexers, Douglas Matthews.

Two people have given me exceptional support and encouragement as I conceived and wrote this book: my friend Charles Richards and my wife Jasmine. I must also thank a number of former colleagues, including Nigel Cox and Andrew Patrick, for help and suggestions with different parts of the text. As with Cables from Kabul, we have had outstanding help and support from the Cabinet Office in clearing the text around Whitehall: I am very appreciative.

The mistakes which remain are my responsibility alone.

Ealing, July 2012

Chapter 1

The Third Room

The walk down Whitehall, from Trafalgar Square to the vast Italianate palazzo of the Foreign Office, seemed so long. I passed the statues of Sir Walter Raleigh and the generals* on the green in front of the Ministry of Defence with hardly a glance in their direction. I ignored the Cenotaph. My stomach was knotted with excited dread. I was worried I would be late. It was just like starting at a new school, right down to my new suit and shoes, my empty briefcase and my freshly filled fountain pen.

Nervously, I turned right down King Charles Street, under the bridge which joins in stone but not in style the two great departments of the British state – the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and HM Treasury – then right again, through the main-entrance arch of the Foreign Office. A single security guard waved me in across the quadrangle, to the steps in the far left-hand corner. Up I climbed, through the great double doors. Two grand ladies peered down from behind a high counter. I told them that I was a newly appointed member of the Diplomatic Service. I had been instructed to report by 10 a.m. to the Recruitment Section of the Personnel Policy Department. Gently they told me that I had come to the wrong place. ‘PPD’ was across the other side of Whitehall, in the Curtis Green building (now Cannon Row police station). If I didn’t hurry, I would be late. More nervous than ever, I retraced my steps, and eventually found the official whom I had been told to see.

The formal ‘fast stream’ induction course was not until the following month, and lasted only two weeks: we were taught not much more than how to use the Foreign Office telephone directory. But four members of the 1977 entry of seventeen young diplomats had been told to start work earlier. After minimal formalities, we were led back across Whitehall, and taken to our new departments in the labyrinth still known formally as the Old Public Offices. The Foreign Office believed in on-the-job training.

It was Monday 22 August 1977, and I had been told that I had been accepted into the Diplomatic Service only in April that year. I had graduated from Oxford in June. In July, out of the blue, had come a letter saying that I had been appointed desk officer for Ireland in the FCO’s Republic of Ireland Department. I was needed two weeks earlier than the official start date. I asked how I should prepare. Read three books, I was told: Ireland since the Famine* by the Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, F. S. L. Lyons; Tim Pat Coogan’s history of the IRA;† and, best of all, Robert Kee’s two-volume history of Irish nationalism, The Green Flag.‡ The few brief weeks between being a student and having a grown-up job had passed in a flash, mainly on my uncles’ farm in Devon. I immersed myself in the emotion-filled history of Britain’s engagement with Ireland. In my mind’s eager eye, deepest Devon became rural Ireland. I could hardly believe my luck: I was being paid to think about issues and events in which I would anyway have taken an interest. And I had learned the first and last lesson of diplomacy: know your history. It had been a narrow escape – had I not passed the Foreign Office selection process, I might instead have become a barrister or a merchant banker.

That selection process had had its moments. Sitting the initial Qualifying Tests with hundreds of others in Oxford’s cavernous Examination Schools had felt like retaking the Eleven-plus – with the same rather arbitrary pattern of success and failure. Some very bright people had fallen at that first fence, while some notorious dunces had somehow scraped through. The next stage was a series of extended interviews and of subjective and objective tests – the infamous ‘country-house weekend’, in a nondescript office block, long since demolished, just off Trafalgar Square. It was based on the techniques Britain had used in wartime to find capable officers, and it worked. The interview with the psychologist felt a bit weird. The invitation to ‘chat among yourselves’ while we were observed was even more artificial. But writing descriptions of oneself by a best friend and by a worst enemy was fun. So, in a masochistic way, was the Final Selection Board, in front of a group of grand officials high up over Horse Guards Parade. Less fun was the Positive Vetting. A creepy former Palestine Police officer asked if I had ever been drunk or in debt, and did not believe me when I said I had never taken drugs. A written questionnaire enquired whether I kept a radio transmitter, and how many of my friends were Communists (‘For the purpose of this form, the term “Communist” is taken to include the term “Fascist”’) – quite a few I had to say. Somehow I got through.

That first week in the Foreign Office began on a high note. My Oxford contemporary Bobby McDonagh* had just started in the Irish Foreign Ministry at Iveagh House in Dublin. I decided I had to ring him up, to tell him that I was the new Desk Officer for his country in London. ‘Guess what, Bobby,’ I said proudly, ‘I have been appointed desk officer for Ireland.’ ‘Aw, that’s nuthin’,’ boasted Bobby, in his seductive Irish accent. ‘I’m the Desk Officer for the whole of Africa and Asia.’ It was a good introduction to the blarney and bravado of one of the world’s smaller but more effective foreign services.

A second encounter was harder work. The First Secretary at the Irish Embassy in London, Dick O’Brien, invited me to lunch, at the Gay Hussar in Greek Street. I remember little of what was said at the lunch – although a great deal was said, mainly by Dick. As we ranged back over the eight years since the Troubles had flared up again, and far back beyond that, Dick wouldn’t concede a single point: it was good that I had studied my history and had taken a close interest in Northern Ireland ever since British troops had been put back on the streets in August 1969. I was flattered that Dick, an experienced first secretary, should have taken me, a newly appointed third secretary with no diplomatic experience, even half seriously. I suddenly realised that, in the eyes of those with whom I was dealing professionally, my job – my formal position and title – counted for more than I thought they did, or necessarily should. I was now an official representative of my country and my government. What I said or did would be seen or heard in that light. Diplomatic titles, the elaborate protocols of international intercourse, concealed – and eased – substantive exchanges, of information and opinion.

After a good lunch with plenty of wine, Dick insisted on three brandies each. I staggered back into King Charles Street at four in the afternoon, incapable of further work. If this was diplomatic entertainment, I was not sure how much of it I could take.

But I had a real job to do. As what was then called a ‘Grade 8’ new entrant, a third secretary, I was taking over from an experienced first secretary, Alan Goulty, an Arabist in his early thirties with several overseas postings under his belt. I would have to work hard to fill his shoes. Alan taught me straight away the two unwritten rules of the Foreign Office. The first – never knock on any doors – is meant to reflect complete trust among diplomats, but still leads to many embarrassing incidents. The second – call everyone by his or her first name, except ministers, ambassadors and the Permanent Under Secretary – seemed revolutionary in 1977: at twenty-two, I had great difficulty in addressing a fifty-nine-year-old deputy under secretary as ‘Antony’, let alone ‘Tony’. The only other occupant of my first office, sitting opposite me, was a diplomat even more experienced than Alan Goulty. Michael Hodge had joined the Prison Commission as a clerk, but, having proved himself at policy work, had transferred after only a year to the Foreign Service (as it was then) as a junior diplomat. I dealt with Ireland (or the Republic of Ireland as the Diplomatic Service formbook taught us to call it: ‘Irish Republic’ implied a republic embracing the whole island). Michael handled overseas interest in Northern Ireland – mainly forty million Americans claiming Irish descent. Michael gave me more wise advice than he will ever remember, about drafting, about what he called officemanship, about good and bad postings, and about good and bad ambassadors. As an incentive to stay the course, Michael shared his memories of foreign service, ranging from repatriating, in a shoe box, the remains of a British citizen killed in Uganda whose cremation Michael had had to perform, to travelling the Gulf as personal assistant to the Political Resident, Sir Geoffrey Arthur, during the last year – 1971 – of Britain’s quasi-colonial presence there.

Together, Michael and I made up what was called the ‘Third Room’ of the standard Foreign Office political department of the time. In the hierarchy above us, in rooms of their own (presumably the second and first rooms, though we never used the term), sat the Assistant (or deputy head of the department) and the Head of Department.

A fourth room contained two alarmingly efficient Foreign Office secretaries. Both took shorthand, but not from someone as junior as me. In a fifth and final room two clerks slaved away, carefully registering all the department’s papers, before placing them on files established according to a centralised system overseen by the Chief Registrar of the Foreign Office – the high priest of the cult of the file. Apart from the fact that most, but by no means all, papers were now typed, little can have changed since Victorian times.

I had my first lesson in pushing paper: the approved way to attach one paper to another was to punch a hole in the top left-hand corner of each, half an inch in from the top and side, and then to pass a tag through the holes. Paperclips become detached, or attached to the wrong papers; staples are a fiddle to unpick. In the Foreign Office then, as now, the India tag, aka the Treasury tag, ruled supreme: two small metal, later plastic, bars, joined by a miniature red cord. With the India tag went the key instrument of bureaucratic order: the hole punch – always in short supply, often purloined, never to be let out of sight, the only property I have ever ‘liberated’ from the Foreign Office.

My first Assistant (and therefore boss) was a kind and careful official, Peter Wallis, who had come to the Foreign Office via HM Customs & Excise. He took endless trouble to improve my drafts. We used special blue drafting paper, with wide margins for corrections. In those leisurely days, almost everything we wrote was prepared first in draft, in type or handwriting. Most serious pieces of work on Britain’s relations with Ireland started on my desk, as a draft by me. As that draft moved up the chain, it would change beyond recognition. But, as the new boy in the Department, I was the bureaucratic focus for Britain’s bilateral relationship with Ireland. I was the continuity person, the official responsible for knowing which plates we had in the air at any one time, and for keeping them there. It was at once exhilarating and intimidating. After university, the most difficult thing, by far, was dealing with a dozen real problems at once, rather than the single subject of that week’s essay.

We were told that the core of our job was influencing foreigners, in the British interest. In order to do so, we needed first to understand them, and then to put our messages in terms that would have the best chance of being absorbed and acted upon by those we were trying to persuade to do what HMG wanted them to do. Clear thinking equalled clear writing. And clear writing was most effective in explaining to ministers in London the realities of any particular foreign policy challenge, and of ensuring that the instructions resulting from our analysis had some effect. All this explained why the Foreign Office attached so much importance to ‘drafting’, and why, in my first job in London, and my second in Cairo, each of my bosses took such trouble to go through my drafts and improve them. And at the heart of all this – the lifeblood of any decent diplomatic machine – was and is the telegram: a collective classified message, as tautly drafted as possible, sent from overseas posts to London, and vice versa.

That was why in the autumn of 1977 we new entrants to the Diplomatic Service were told, only half jokingly, that, like the fountains in Trafalgar Square, Foreign Office officials operated only from ten till six. We didn’t need to arrive in King Charles Street before ten o’clock, because that gave time for the distribution, around the Office and Whitehall, of the overnight telegram traffic pouring into London via the former Diplomatic Wireless Service station at Hanslope Park, near Milton Keynes. The first thing we did each morning was read the telegrams.

I soon learned that Foreign Office life is a continual merry-go-round of postings, for yourself and for your colleagues. After only a few weeks Peter Wallis was posted, on promotion, to Ankara. He was succeeded by one of the most accomplished eccentrics of the Foreign Office of that time – an official who was anything but careful.

Trevor Mound was a minor hero to my generation in the Foreign Office. In idiosyncratic fashion, he encapsulated one of the attributes the writer and diplomat Sir Harold Nicolson had said were essential for success in diplomacy: a sense of proportion, but leavened with a sense of humour. Trevor never ever panicked. And he always saw the funny, often absurd, side of everything.

The son of a small Worcestershire farmer, Trevor had joined the Army as a private soldier without going to university. He had begun in the Guards, but before long he had been commissioned into the Parachute Regiment. Well over six feet tall, he had the erect bearing of the Foot Guard he had once been. A long thin face was framed by a sweep of reddish hair on top, and a small pointed ginger beard at the bottom, set off by twinkling blue eyes and an ever present smile. He could easily have been a late-nineteenth-century French novelist-adventurer. He was always immaculately turned out, in hand-made black jodhpur boots and deep-cut three-piece suits, with all sorts of extra features, including more pockets than anyone could ever use, and cuff buttons that really undid. Every day Trevor wore a cream silk shirt and a blue-red-blue Brigade tie, even though most of his military service had in fact been with the Paras. He had an OBE after his name, but would never say for what. There was an air of charmingly seductive mystery about him. Much married (or so he liked us to think), he loved women, fine wine and fun.

Trevor had joined the Diplomatic Service late, as a retired major. He had had a succession of tough postings, culminating in Beirut as we closed the Embassy at the height of the Lebanese Civil War. The last telegram Trevor had received in Beirut before he smashed up the cipher machine with the hammer provided in every embassy for just that purpose had been ‘You are instructed to proceed with closing down the Embassy in accordance with Volume 12 of Diplomatic Service Procedure.’ His reply to London had been ‘DSP already incinerated. But shutting down any way. Signed Mound.’

Back in London, financial pressures, including multiple alimony payments, had obliged Trevor to let out his own house and live in the top floor of the Foreign Office building as a resident clerk. In return for a reasonably generous allowance, and a one-bedroom flat in SW1, with stunning views over St James’s Park, resident clerks were expected to man the phones – and monitor the overnight telegram traffic – one night a week, and one weekend in six. Trevor used often to invite me up to his eyrie after work, for gin and tonic and a gossip. He used his flat to entertain generously and widely. With that in mind, he had persuaded the Foreign Office Home Estates Department that his bad back – the result, he said, of an awkward parachute landing in Malaya – required that a double bed be installed in his bedroom in the Clerkery, at some expense, and even greater effort for the workmen obliged to propel the bed up the narrow staircase. Sometimes Trevor would invite his latest ‘lady friend’ (as he used to call them) and any other guests to climb, quite illegally, out of the window of the Clerkery, to enjoy a drink on the roof of the Foreign Office, as the sun went down behind Buckingham Palace at the other end of the Park.

Over those talks with Trevor, I learned much about diplomatic life. The Army had trained him as a Cantonese speaker, although, when the Foreign Office had subjected him to its language-aptitude test on joining, he had been judged incapable of learning any foreign language. But Trevor’s first diplomatic love was China, and it was in Shanghai that he and I would next meet, eight years later. Perhaps because of his Chinese, Trevor’s English handwriting resembled an exotic, almost cuneiform, script. His written expression was anyway economical in the extreme. At least decrypting his written comments in the margins of my drafts gave me a chance to see him and talk. Trevor offered several pieces of career advice. One was that, if you wanted to rise to the top of ‘the Office’ (as he always called it), spend as little time as possible in distant or dangerous postings. Colleagues in faraway embassies were soon forgotten, accidentally or deliberately. It was naive to think that the reward for a tough posting would be a plum one. The ambitious knew that walking the corridors in Whitehall or in the Brussels near-abroad did far more for one’s career than working the far bazaars of Asia, Africa or Latin America. It was advice that Trevor, with his love of China, did not himself follow. He ended his career, serenely happy, as consul-general in Marseilles, untroubled by the anxious ambition that ate away at so many others. Trevor showed that striving too hard in the Diplomatic Service did not always lead to the best postings. In fact, as he once observed on seeing a hopeless colleague sent to govern a balmy Caribbean island, ours was a good service in which to fail.