8

THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP:

OUR MAN IN TASHKENT

THE BRITISH EMBASSY, TASHKENT, UZBEKISTAN, JULY22, 2 00 4—Down the corridor from the ambassador's office was a large metal door, which opened with a combination. Behind it was a small room, hardly bigger than a cupboard. It was 3:00 P.M., the time for the afternoon telegrams. Her Majesty's ambassador, Craig Murray, walked into the grandly named Registry and checked over an urgent telegram he'd addressed to the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw. Unusually, this telegram, to be sent through an encrypted computer system, was marked not only for London but for copies to go to British missions around the world. The ambassador wanted to make sure his views became known. The subject of his message was the CIA and torture. It began:

CONFIDENTIAL

FM TASHKENT

TO IMMEDIATE FCO

TELNO 63

OF 220939Z JULY 04

INFO IMMEDIATE DFID, ISLAMIC POSTS, MOD, OSCE POSTS UKDEL EBRD

LONDON, UKMIS GENEVA, UKMIS NEW YORK

SUBJECT: RECEIPT OF INTELLIGENCE OBTAINED UNDER TORTURE

SUMMARY

1. WE RECEIVE INTELLIGENCE OBTAINED UNDER TORTURE FROM THEUZBEK INTELLIGENCE SERVICES, VIA THE US. WE SHOULD STOP.IT IS BAD INFORMATION ANYWAY. TORTURED DUPES ARE FORCED TO SIGN UP TO CONFESSIONS SHOWING WHAT THE UZBEK GOVERNMENT WANTS THE US AND UK TO BELIEVE, THAT THEY AND WE ARE FIGHTING THE SAME WAR AGAINST TERROR.

Murray was writing about intelligence supplied by Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), also known as MI6. It contained reports, passed by the CIA, of interrogations conducted under torture. His own deputy, he said, had visited staff at the U.S. Embassy in Tashkent who “readily acknowledged torture was deployed in obtaining intelligence.” Not only, he said, were Britain and America condoning the torture, but they were also being cheated. The “confessions” were being manipulated to tell the story that Uzbekistan wanted their allies to hear: Local Islamic dissidents were in league with the forces of Osama bin Laden.

On the usefulness of the material obtained, this is irrelevant. Article 2 of the [UN] Convention [Against Torture] to which we are a party, could not be plainer: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” Nonetheless, I repeat that this material is useless—we are selling our souls for dross. It is in fact positively harmful. It is designed to give the message the Uzbeks want the West to hear.

Murray's telegram reminded the foreign secretary of how he had spoken publicly against the use of torture. And yet this intelligence collusion stood in direct contradiction to his public stance. There was a postscript, too: The British and the Americans were not just receivers of the intelligence. They had instigated some of this torture, too. Prisoners captured in Afghanistan, Murray was saying, had been sent back to Uzbek jails. They had been rendered.

Plainly it was a breach of Article 3 of the Convention [Against Torture] for the coalition to deport detainees back here from Baghram, but it has been done. That seems plainly complicit.

It was the last telegram the British ambassador would ever send from Uzbekistan. One week later, Murray took a plane home to London for his annual leave and some medical treatment. Month after month his return was delayed. Then on October 13, the telegram was leaked to the media. Speaking in public, he defended its contents. Within four days, he was fired from his post.

For more than two years after he had arrived, Our Man in Tashkent had been clashing with his own government. Impulsive and perhaps arrogant, Murray was a man who took risks. He took risks in his job, and took risks in his private life. But, though perhaps self-destructive, he had at least accomplished one thing. He had focused attention on the most corrupt of regimes, and on one of the most questionable destinations of the CIA's rendition program—a country ruled by an ex-Communist, President Islam Karimov, who, eight hundred years after Genghis Khan ravaged through, still boiled some of his prisoners alive. Murray helped expose how intelligence gleaned from such tortures was routinely circulated and consumed by the West.

CRAIG Murray was never your typical British diplomat. Educated at a grammar school and Scotland's Dundee University, not the traditional Eton and Oxford, he had shunned every form of old-school tradition. An eccentric, he wore smart three-piece suits combined with Wallace and Gromit ties. He drank heavily, enjoyed late-night bars, and had a succession of extramarital affairs, including with a fellow ambassador's daughter. I once asked Murray what the best thing about being a diplomat was. “Oh, the sex,” he replied, half serious.¹

But what had troubled Murray's superiors more than his personal conduct was the lack of inhibition in his professional life. Murray showed no concern for the polite conventions of diplomacy: He was a passionate individual prepared to abandon form and euphemisms, and ready to speak forcefully and publicly about what he believed. From almost the day he touched down in the capital of Uzbekistan, Murray had been battling from the inside to expose what he saw as a scandal—the West's support for a ruthless regime.

Many said Murray's campaigning zeal made him unfit to be a senior diplomat. Yet, fit or unfit for the post for which he had been selected, Murray would throw a spotlight on a thorny dilemma like no one else: how, in fighting for the goal of spreading global freedom, the West had ended up extending support for some of the world's least free regimes. In Britain, Murray's accusations had an additional explosive mix. Prime Minister Tony Blair had vowed to be America's closest ally, to maintain what London still called the “special relationship.” At the heart of that relationship lay the exchange of intelligence. Every key piece of information in the war against terrorism should, by secret treaty, be exchanged across the Atlantic.² Murray, by speaking of the CIA's secret intelligence reports, had broken a cardinal rule. Nothing should ever be revealed about each other's information. In doing so he had assaulted that relationship, but he had also opened up its results to public scrutiny. The CIA's traffic, he said, contained information obtained using torture. Some were the fruits of the agency's rendition program. Was Britain, in taking part in this exchange, now buying into the CIA's complicity in torture?

I first met Murray that summer, in the month before he was fired. He was staying in a luxury apartment overlooking the Thames. Belonging to a friend, it was beautifully furnished, but Murray had managed to make a complete mess. There were papers scattered everywhere, empty coffee cups in the sink, and an atmosphere of confusion, as Murray chased around the apartment looking for things he had lost. I liked him immediately. In many ways he seemed quite a typical whistleblower, a risk-taking maverick prepared to lose everything in his quest to do things his way.

By then I had heard about Murray's July telegram but had not seen it. There was a buzz among diplomats that it concerned extraordinary rendition—the very topic I was researching. Murray then surprised me. “It was actually your piece that helped inspire me to write that,” he said. “I read your article in the New Statesman, and by then I realized it was happening in Uzbekistan, too.” He was referring to the piece I'd published in May that had reported on America's network of prisons and planes. Since that piece, I had started to track the movements of this fleet of CIA planes, and I was curious as to why Uzbekistan should be so important. After two years of frequent visits to Tashkent, the CIA planes' visits seemed to have stopped overnight, in September 2003.³ Had there been a rupture in relations?

The importance of Uzbekistan to the CIA was obvious from its geography, as obvious as it was to the great generals of Alexander the Great, who reached its frontiers; to Genghis Khan, who marched through and sacked its cities; and to Tamerlane, who made the southern city of Samar-qand his capital; and to the Russians and British who jostled for influence in the nineteenth century's espionage war, the Great Game. When Craig Murray first met President Karimov, he reminded Murray of this. “The greatest misfortune in the history of the Uzbek people, is what happened in what you call the 'Great Game,’” he told Murray.⁴ Located on the ancient Silk Route between the great civilizations of East and West, Uzbekistan stood within striking range of China. It controlled the route south from Moscow toward Iran, Afghanistan, and India, and it stood at the northeastern frontier of Islamic influence. After the fall of the Soviet empire in 1991, the CIA moved quickly to win new influence and, while touring the region, offered to establish a formal relationship with President Karimov. This move angered the Russians. Their then prime minister, Primakov, telephoned the CIA to register his protest. “We know what you're doing there,” he said, “trying to establish relationships with the Near Abroad. It's not acceptable …. The Near Abroad is ours.” But the CIA persisted.

In the 1990s, the CIA had a more specific interest in common with the Uzbeks. The decline and then end of communism in Uzbekistan saw the revival of religion, and with that the emergence of new Islamic political forces. Brutally repressed by Karimov, these forces splintered into different factions, including some that urged a violent revolt, or jihad. Most of these Islamic groups were purely nationalistic in character, seeking merely to challenge Karimov's rule. But across Central Asia, tensions were boiling, heightened by the brutal actions by Russian troops in Chechnya. Some of these groups were prepared to support the wide international jihad, both against the Russians and against all secular forces, including the United States. The victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan in September 1996 had provided a home for those escaping Karimov's repression and, for the Uzbeks and the CIA, it also now provided a common enemy. In practical terms, Tashkent became the only practical base for operations against the Taliban, and against Osama bin Laden, who lurked within their borders. The only outpost of revolt against the Taliban within Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance, was located in the northern Afghan mountains of the Hindu Kush. Nearby Pakistan was actively supportive of the Taliban, Iran was a “no go” for the CIA, and Tajikistan, though lying closer and also hostile to the Taliban, was too unstable a place for an effective agency base (as well as already hosting a garrison of Russian troops). Karimov approved a plan, devised by the CIA's CTC, to stage a snatch operation for Osama bin Laden out of an airstrip in his country.⁵ Then in September 2000, it was from Uzbekistan that the CIA launched its secret unmanned Predator spy plane flights against bin Laden. The agency's paramilitary Jawbreaker teams also deployed from Tashkent to provide direct covert assistance to the Northern Alliance, and to install a covert listening post to intercept communications.⁶ After 9/11, the Jawbreaker program was revived. The CIA's Counter-Terrorist Center deployed the first teams of U.S. operatives on the ground. They flew by CIA Hercules transport planes from Frankfurt, assembled their gear in Tashkent, and then moved south by road, and then in an old Russian Mi-17 helicopter or light plane.⁷

After 9/11, the giant ex-Soviet base in the south, near the towns of Kharshi and Khabanabad and known to all as K2, became the public face of cooperation with Uzbekistan. Lying ninety miles north of the border, it was once a supply route for Russians in Afghanistan. It was now a supply route for the American military in Afghanistan.

Named Camp Stronghold Freedom, the base earned Karimov $15 million a year from the Pentagon in leasing fees for the base until 2003, and a total of $280 million in U.S. aid in 2002, 2003, and 2004.⁸ American, British, Canadian, and Australian Special Forces all mounted their southern operations from this huge base in the desert. But after the Taliban were overthrown, allowing the United States to establish new bases within Afghanistan, the Uzbek base became less important. America's giant transport planes could fly directly to Kabul and south to Kandahar. But having established the base, the United States was not going to give it up easily. As a crucial strategic foothold in a hostile region, what was now being called a “lily pad,” the K2 base was considered a model for future operations—one of a chain of outposts that could be used as part of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's concept of a modern form of rapid-deployment flexible warfare. This then was the public side. The maintenance of the base became a crucial U.S. goal. But there were other operations, managed by the CIA, that were considered important too. This was the darker side of this new relationship.

MUNICIPAL COURT, TASHKENT, AUGUST 28, 2DD2—TheBritish ambassador stood within in a crowded throng, sweating in a three-piece suit. Before him inside a crudely made cage, painted white, was a thin, twenty-three-year-old man, the youngest of the six defendants on trial. The judge, who sat with no jury, could barely disguise his anger or his prejudice. “I don't suppose anyone could hear you through your long Muslim beard,” said the judge, laughing at his own joke.⁹ Isanker Khu-doberganov was not laughing.¹⁰ Like the others, he knew he faced the death penalty by firing squad. Khudoberganov said he had been seriously tortured, and three members of his family had said that they had even witnessed some of it. The judge, a rotund and smug figure named Nizamid-din Rustamov, was not impressed. “You are just telling us about torture, and not about your crimes,” he told Isanker. Another time, when he complained of torture marks, Rustamov stopped him to remind him he had been at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which was, in the judge's words, “not a holiday resort.”¹¹ For Murray, the trial of Khudoberganov was his introduction to reality, what he would later call his “awakening.”

Murray had arrived in Tashkent just a few days before, traveling first class with Fiona and his children, Jamie and Emily, on an Uzbek Air 747 jet. It had landed at 2:00 A.M., and he was greeted at the airport by his key staff: Karen Moran, his deputy head of mission, and Chris Hirst, his information officer and Karen's partner. It was a small posting, small for its significance, with just four fully accredited UK diplomatic staff, as well as about a dozen local and British nondiplomatic staff. Outside the terminal his official flag car was waiting. It was not a Rolls-Royce or Jaguar, like at bigger, more prestigious embassies, but instead was a rather humble Land Rover. Still, as they drove away, he was proud of the British flag fluttering on its hood and its number plate, “16 CMD.” The “16” was code for a British diplomat and the CMD meant chef de mission diplomatique. Twenty minutes away was his new embassy, an old two-story building surrounded by a fence, a small garden, and concrete antiblast barriers. Long ago it had been the home of Alexander Kerensky, the leader of the first post-tsar government in 1917. Now its grandeur was subdued by the demands of its many functions. The staff of the mission was due for expansion, and a new, separate residence for Murray was under construction. When completed by Christmas, it would be lavish, boasting an eight-seat Jacuzzi, a sauna, and en suite bathrooms for each of its five bedrooms. The garden included a fabulous water feature, an elaborate fountain, installed at Murray's request. For now, though, the ambassador and his family were lodged in what was effectively an apartment over the shop. A door from the residence led straight into his office.¹²

Murray's appointment to Tashkent had been announced in April in the appointments column of The Times of London.¹³ At forty-three, he was to be one of the UK's youngest ambassadors, although not the youngest. The next few months had required an intensive course in Russian, and his preparation had ended with three weeks of briefings. These had concentrated, said Murray, on three crucial areas: the department's management system; Uzbekistan's role in the war on terror; and the Central Asian country's vital economic potential (its cotton industry and, above all, its oil and gas). There was little discussion, he claimed, about the regime's human rights record, and yet he was able to garner some basic facts. Karimov, as all knew, was essentially an old-style Communist. After years in the party, he had seized power in 1989, while the country was still under Soviet control. When the Moscow regime collapsed, he had held onto control. He had renamed his party the People's Democratic Party, but had left the system and one-party rule almost entirely intact. His last election saw him win with an impressive 91.9 percent.¹⁴ All major sectors of the economy remained in state hands. Karimov was also proudly repressive. Back in 1999, he said: “I am prepared to rip off the heads of 200 people, to sacrifice their lives, in order to save peace and to have calm in the republic.”¹⁵ He boasted of executing about hundred people a year. More than six thousand political opponents were locked in his jails. Threatened by the revival of Islam, he ordered a huge crackdown on religion. The definition of “crime” came to include having a “Muslim” beard, or holding a prayer meeting at home.¹⁶ Tortures were said to include ripping out fingernails, pulling teeth, electric shocks, suffocation, and rape.

It was in that Tashkent courtroom where Murray saw the reality of this state-sponsored torture. In a letter to his mother and sister, written a month after the trial in which his confessions were recorded, Khudoberganov wrote of how he had endured weeks of torture in the hope of a fair trial: “They tied my hands from behind, hit me with truncheons and chairs and kicked me on the kidneys. They hit my head against the wall until it was bleeding.” Starved of food, and with his family threatened, he had only then confessed to being a terrorist.¹⁷ Murray had seen how these kinds of accusations were treated—with complete disregard.

More tangible evidence emerged a few days later. Murray was shown an envelope of photographs of the body of a dissident named Muzafar Avazov, aged thirty-five, that was covered in burns, and that had a wound on the back of the head and fingernails missing. Avazov had been detained in the prison of Jaslyk, where he was serving a sentence for his membership in Hizb-ut-Tahrir al-Islami, the Islamic Freedom Party. This banned organization, popular across Central Asia, had disavowed violence as a means to achieve power and establish an Islamic state. But the Karimov regime had repressed members brutally, and pressed Western governments to declare it a terrorist group.¹⁸ Avazov's sixty-three-year-old mother, Fatima, had brought the photographs herself to the British Embassy. (She was later thanked by the regime with a six-year jail sentence for attempting to “overthrow the constitutional order.”)¹⁹ Murray sent the photographs back to London for analysis. A report from the University of Glasgow pathology department, headed by Dr. Peter Vanezis, declared that his death had followed severe torture. “The pattern of the scalding shows a well demarcated line on the lower chest/abdomen, which could well indicate the forceful application of hot water whilst the person is within some kind of bath or similar vessel.”²⁰

Murray was now enraged by what he knew. And yet he found little interest among others in raising these subjects, particularly his fellow ambassadors. The problem was Uzbekistan's strategic importance. Was it wise to start rocking the boat? In an angry telegram dispatched on September 16, the ambassador laid down his conclusions. It was just over a month since he had arrived. The telegram began:

CONFIDENTIAL

FM TASHKENT

TO FCO, CABINET OFFICE, DFID, MODUK, DSCE POSTS, SECURITY COUNCIL POSTS

16 SEPTEMBER D2

SUBJECT: US/UZBEKISTAN: PROMOTING TERRORISM

SUMMARY

US PLAYS DOWN HUMAN RIGHTS SITUATION IN UZBEKISTAN. A DANGEROUS POLICY: INCREASING REPRESSION COMBINED WITH POVERTY WILL PROMOTE ISLAMIC TERRORISM. SUPPORT TO KARIMOV REGIME A BANKRUPT AND CYNICAL POLICY.

Murray wrote of the seven thousand to ten thousand political and religious prisoners, the boiling alive of dissidents like Avazov, the dispatch of two leading dissidents, Elena Urlaeva and Larissa Vdovna, to a lunatic asylum, and the fact that all political opposition groups remained banned. “Terrible torture is commonplace,” he said. Yet, just a week earlier, the U.S. State Department had declared that Uzbekistan was improving “in both human rights and democracy,” freeing up $140 million in aid for the country. Official British policy was one of engagement with the Karimov regime, and yet to make sense “it must mean grappling with the problems, not mute collaboration.” It was time, he felt, to up the ante.

FREEDOM HOUSE, TASHKENT, UZBEKISTAN, OCTOBER 1 7,2002—John Herbst, the lean and gangly ambassador of the United States, was first to step up to the podium. A fifty-one-year-old career diplomat and fluent Russian speaker, he had been in Tashkent for three years. Before him was an audience of diplomats, campaigners, and Uzbek officials. The occasion was the launch of Freedom House, a U.S. organization dedicated to the spread of democracy. In Uzbekistan, as everyone knew, there was precious little evidence of this. Herbst, however, was there to emphasize the positive. Uzbekistan, he said, choosing his words carefully, had “made public commitments to democratic reforms and the protection of human rights.” It had made “some progress toward meeting those commitments” was his guarded comment.²¹ One observer, a local human rights activist, was to describe his speech as “pale, watery by comparison with the speech that followed.”²²

When Her Majesty's ambassador Murray stood up to speak, he began innocuously. Whiskey and liberty, he said, went well together, and how difficult it was to find real whiskey in Tashkent. He became blunt: “Uzbekistan is not a functioning democracy, nor does it appear to be moving in the direction of democracy.” The audience looked shocked. He spoke of the cases of Avazov and another dissident called Alimov, both “apparently tortured to death by boiling water,” but stressed that “all of us know” it had not been an isolated incident. “Brutality is inherent in a system where convictions habitually rely on signed confessions rather than on forensic or material evidence.”²³ As Murray said “thank you” and stepped down, the backlash was already beginning.

Back in London, at the Foreign Office's Eastern Department, the mandarins of the civil service were not amused. Behind the formulation of a speech lay a bitter dispute. In one corner was Our Man in Tashkent. In the other back in Whitehall was his supervisor, Simon Butt. At its heart was the question of tact: In the art of diplomacy, should brutality be called brutality?

Butt believed Murray was fast becoming a campaigner. “You're an ambassador, not an NGO,” he wrote, two days before the speech.²⁴ A day later, Butt wrote to his boss, the permanent under-secretary, Michael Jay, that “we are fast developing a problem with Craig Murray.”²⁵ Jay wrote back endorsing Butt's view. But Murray was having none of it. “The Butt method,” he wrote to Butt, was impotent and crippled by equivocation. “My style is more direct, and in my view, more effective. I am sorry but I am never going to turn into Polonius.”²⁶ One of Butt's officials told Murray to avoid “language which is too outspoken,” what they called “the soapbox tone of the peroration.” In particular, said another official, the word “brutality” should definitely be cut.²⁷ But Murray had allies outside the Eastern Department, including in the Foreign Office's human rights department. And so, approved by fax from London, the word “brutality” had survived, and so had the outspoken tone.

The president of Uzbekistan was not used to criticism like this. In London, the Uzbek ambassador, Dr. Alisher Faizullaev, came to protest to Simon Butt at the Foreign Office. Butt said that London was behind her ambassador. In the telegram to Tashkent that followed, Murray was told “the Uzbeks are clearly riled to have been told some home truths.”²⁸ But still many at the Foreign Office believed Murray's loud approach, if continued, would reduce British influence with the Uzbek regime. Murray disagreed, believing it was pointless to try to seek to influence an ex-Communist dictator like Karimov with quiet words—a strategy of “mute collaboration” as he called it. It was pressure that was needed, he thought. For now, though this dispute was a secret. Murray's speech became part of the official record, and was republished in full in the Foreign Office's annual human rights report.

AS an ambassador, Murray's contacts were not just with his direct superiors in the Eastern Department, but also with policy experts in all areas, as well as other government agencies, including the intelligence services. Twice a day, going to the embassy's tiny registry, Murray would pick up the latest telegrams. The most secret ones, containing secret intelligence, were known as CX traffic, and were generally for the ambassador's eyes only. It was among these that Murray would make his most important discovery

Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, he had been briefed, had no declared station in Uzbekistan. In fact, as he reported later, they had no operative “within a thousand miles.” Without an official liaison with Uzbek intelligence, it meant that most intelligence from the Uzbeks was coming from the Americans. CX traffic was routinely marked “from a friendly intelligence service.” The information about Uzbekistan, he noticed, often contained information derived from the confessions of captured prisoners. Sometimes they referred to “detainee de-briefing.” Murray was clear in his mind about what had happened. “This was information obtained under torture. That's how they do interrogations here,” he said. “It was clear the CIA was just picking it up, and we were buying what they told us.” Murray said he sent Moran, his deputy, to check the facts at the American embassy. She reported back, he said, that the Americans acknowledged that torture was plainly involved.²⁹

Murray now believed that he had discovered a major issue. If Britain was receiving intelligence obtained under torture, albeit from the CIA, then British ministers were effectively colluding in that torture. To that effect, he wrote a telegram to London, marked “Top Secret,” that warned ministers of this torture evidence circulating in intelligence reports, and that the government could be in violation of Article 2 of the UN Conventions Against Torture, which banned any “complicity” in such acts. As he also noted, much of the information was also unreliable. One CX report spoke of a training camp in the hills of Samarqand. Yet his own military attache, he said, knew exactly the same area, and said that there were certainly no training camps. It was not until March of the following year that he received a full reply to these allegations from London—a month when the ambassador's life would turn a corner in many different ways.

RAWALPINDI, PAKISTAN, MARCH l, 2003—The events of that month would begin in Pakistan, in a small apartment in an outer suburb. It was here, after years of searching, that the CIA would finally capture one of their biggest prizes. The architect of 9/11 and of many of Al Qaeda's biggest attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was now in U.S. custody. He was transferred quickly to a secret location. Just eighteen days before the United States and Britain invaded Iraq, the CIA had begun questioning him. On March 2, a plane set out from Washington, the CIA's Gulfstream V. Pausing to refuel in Prague, the Czech Republic, it flew on with a new flight plan: “Prague—Tashkent, Uzbekistan.” Time and again, after a key arrest or key event, the same pattern had been repeated. The plane's movements were a log of what the CIA considered important. Arrested in Pakistan, the CIA's top prisoner had been flown on to a secret location. Was it Tashkent? Or was the plane merely stopping off, then heading for another “black site” in an allied country farther east, like Thailand? I never discovered the plane's final destination. But one thing was apparent: The capital of Uzbekistan had become a vital hub in the CIA's world operations. No other destination east of Jordan had received so many flights from the CIA fleet, nor from the particular planes like the Gulfstream that were used in renditions.

That year, a Danish journalist named Michael Andersen was following events in Uzbekistan. A distinguished radio reporter, he had crisscrossed much of Central Asia, and he had followed closely the resurgence of Islam. The most militant elements of that revival, he knew well, were based in the countryside, such as in the desperately poor Ferghana Valley, a region that is shared by Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Under pressure from the Karimov government in Uzbekistan, many young Islamists had fled the country and ended up in Afghanistan. And after 9/11, American forces entered and began to capture them, both in Afghanistan itself and in next-door Pakistan. “As I traveled around, I spoke to many of these men's families,” he recalled. “And I began to realize what was happening. These militants were being sent home.” Sometimes the returnees would be interrogated and then freed, and then forced to appear on local television. “It was like something from Soviet Russia. They would stand up and make a confession—admit they had been with Al Qaeda, apologize for all their crimes, and be publicly shamed.” Others, it was clear, were simply transferred into prisons. “Their families would get word they were back in the country, and that they were in the hands of state security.” Andersen knew who was behind these transfers. “Everyone knew it was Americans. Several family members told me that their sons had told them that Americans had been transferring them back. They were organizing a repatriation into Uzbek jails, and of course that meant a transfer into torture …. This was a country that boiled people alive.”

IN early March, Craig Murray was in Brussels, Belgium, attending a conference on European Union (EU) policy toward Central Asia when he received what he called a “rather terse summons” to a meeting in London. After his protest about torture and American policy, Murray was convinced he was about to be fired. But the meeting, in fact, was to answer the question he had posed: Was it right to receive intelligence obtained from torture? As was his habit, Murray arrived a little late. All the other key people were already in place, seated around a mahogany table. Chairing the meeting was Linda Duffield, director for wider Europe, speaking on behalf of Jay, the permanent under-secretary. Also present was Michael Wood, the Foreign Office's legal adviser, and Matthew Kidd, from the Whitehall Liaison Department, the link between the Foreign Office and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Duffield, said Murray, was brusque. Jay, she had said, “does not think it is wise to commit such matters to paper.” But the matter had now been considered at the “the highest level,” including by Jack Straw and “C,” the traditional reference to the head of MI6. Wood now presented the legal viewpoint: Nothing in the UN torture convention prevented a country from receiving torture intelligence. The only ban was on using such intelligence in court. A letter from Wood would confirm his advice in writing, an official admission that the receipt of torture evidence was considered legally acceptable. The use of intelligence from torture “did not create any offence” under law, he wrote.³⁰ At the meeting, Kidd spoke briefly. The material from the Uzbeks was “operationally useful.” He would not elaborate. In just a few minutes, the meeting was over. Murray left with a sense of renewed outrage. “I just had the impression they did not really care,” he recalled. “I was the one that dealt with the victims, the people who had been tortured, but for them it was just not important.”³¹

Murray had failed in his battle with Whitehall. Intelligence from the CIA—regardless of how it had been obtained—would simply not be turned away, nor not passed around. And yet he had confirmed one important thing: The Foreign Office, under a Labour Party government that once had spoken proudly of creating an “ethical foreign policy,” was fully aware that some of its intelligence was being obtained under conditions of torture. Could Murray himself turn away from the subject? Only seven months into the job, his reputation back in Tashkent was made. Like it or not, he was an ambassador of human rights. Dissidents and campaigners turned up again and again at his door, and how could he just walk away?

Later that March, Murray had a guest in town, Simon Butt, on a two-day visit. On the second day they drove to Samarqand and had two key meetings. The first was with the regional governor, or hokkim, Shavkat Mirziyaev.³² And the second was with Jamal Mirsaidov. He was a professor of literature at the city's university, but he was also a leading Tajik dissident. They arrived at Mirsaidov's house at about 4:30 P.M., and the professor greeted the pair with a spread of dried fruit and pastries. It was a pleasant exchange. The shock came the next day. In the early hours of the morning a badly bruised body was dumped on the doorstep of the professor's house. It was Mirsaidov's grandson, Shukrat. “The lad was eighteen,” Murray said later. “His knees and elbows had been smashed by blows from a hammer, or perhaps a spade or rifle butt. One hand had been immersed in boiling liquid until the flesh was peeling away from the bone. He had been killed with a blow that caved in the back of his skull.”³³ Murray, who was informed of the death later that day, after Butt had already left the country, interpreted the killing as a punishment. “The Russian Ambassador told me, from his excellent sources, that this was intended as a warning to both dissidents and me not to meet each other.”³⁴ The shocking death of Mirsaidov's grandson, apparently as a direct result of his meeting, hardened Murray's determination to continue his struggle. And yet the escalation of the conflict was putting lives in danger. Could he really survive the mental pressure? Did he have the personal strength to confront or persuade both Karimov and his own Foreign Office? The sad truth was that Murray did not have such strength. Here then, was the root of what became his own tragedy.

Murray, as described, was no ordinary ambassador. It was a desire to be different that had put him in contact with the regime's opponents, and had taken him beyond his embassy's walls to discover the reality of its repression. But the same contrary nature infected his personal life, too, and he had struggled for years to stay faithful to his family. That March, in the midst of his turmoil, Murray was in his favorite nightspot when he became particularly attracted to a young dancer. Her name was Nadira. After pursuing her for several days, he started an affair.

Back in his small embassy, Murray had other problems too—ones of considerable advantage to the Karimov regime. His third secretary, Chris Hirst, was being accused of a bizarre assault, of attacking a neighbor with a baseball bat and his rottweiler dog. To complicate matters, Hirst's partner was Moran, Murray's deputy. In May, Hirst was withdrawn back to London, and he quietly resigned from the diplomatic service. But, back in Tashkent, the atmosphere had become poisonous. Some staff blamed Murray for the man's dismissal. When a Foreign Office official visited in June to discuss the matter, he picked up details not only of the diplomat's conduct but of a series of rumors about Murray himself. Murray by now was in mental turmoil. A doctor diagnosed acute anxiety.

THE OLD ADMIRALTY BUILDING, THE FOREIGN OFFICE, LONDON, AUGUST 21, 2003—In a bland office just off St. James' Park, Craig Murray sat down to face his accusers. He heard a list of extraordinary charges:

Allegation 1

That he had facilitated visas for girlfriends, paying money for air tickets, receiving sexual favours in his office in return.

Allegation 2

That he regularly turns up at the office drunk or hung-over and late before going home to “sleep it off”, then returning to the office at 1650 demanding people start late work with him.

Allegation 3

That he took a girlfriend as an interpreter on an up-country trip after which no note was produced … .

Allegation 5

That at an away-day Craig encouraged drivers to take Embassy vehicles down staircases … .

Allegation 8

That he “knows” the SBU [local intelligence service] are watching him but doesn't worry because he is open about his behaviour. But he is scared his wife will “find out” and divorce him, taking the children.

Allegation 9

That certain locally-employed staff “dollybirds” are employed in eg visa section at double normal rates “because he says so” … .

Allegation 12

That he frequently takes the flag car out (with driver) until 02.00-04.30.³⁵

All of those charges were ultimately to be withdrawn, but Murray was now caught in a pincer movement. The Foreign Office had decided the ambassador must go. Murray had returned that morning, summoned from a holiday in Canada. He discovered that while he was away a London of ficial had traveled to Tashkent and collected a total of eighteen allegations. Each, the official reported, was supported “by at least one member (often up to four) of the UK-based staff.” Though varying in seriousness, for an ambassador these matters were hardly frivolous. The Foreign Office had a clear duty to investigate. But had Murray been set up? To some it had all the air of a quiet hint from on high, just like that of King Henry II, when he declared: “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Internal documents, though revealing nothing of such an order, do reveal a clear desire to find a basis for firing Murray. While he holidayed in Canada, one official was warning: “I'm not sure we can lay a trap for him before he returns to post.”³⁶ Another appeared to recommend a manipulative approach: “Very helpful in clarifying for me the kind of person we're dealing with. I agree we should call him back; say we've been reflecting on his own self-questioning … and say he should leave quickly on operational grounds and return to London.”³⁷ The response from above was curt: “Fine. Please go ahead. It will be messy.”³⁸

The confrontation, as it turned out, was both messy and Kafkaesque. It started not with the serious disciplinary allegations, but with a simple demand that Murray resign from his post. The request for resignation, he was told at the August 21 meeting, was on “operational grounds,” not because of the disciplinary allegations. Murray, though exhausted with jet lag, refused to quit. He saw it all as a devious maneuver to force him out. And the charges themselves, he said, were ludicrous and without foundation. The Foreign Office, at the same meeting, now issued some further “advice”: While the investigation occurred, Murray could discuss the allegations with no colleague in Tashkent.³⁹ The Foreign Office feared he would put under pressure local staff, over whom he had great power. But Murray was outraged: “It was all utterly unbelievable. I was faced with these incredible accusations made by anonymous individuals and was told I had almost no means of defending myself and no one that I could go to for advice. Can you imagine the mental strain?”⁴⁰

TASHKENT, AUGUST 2 3—Back home at the residence, Murray pondered what to do. In his post as ambassador now for just over a year, he had challenged his superiors on every level, forcing them to approve his robust speech at Freedom House, and pressing them over intelligence from torture. But his dissidence, until now, had been largely internal. Murray had bent the rules but not openly flouted them. Now, when his job and his reputation had been placed squarely on the line by those in London, Murray decided to cross that line and fight back.

The only way to win was to take the Foreign Office on and to gather support. Orders or no orders, he would return to the embassy and speak to his staff. Gathering key people in his office, Murray told them that “the view had been reached in London that this post would operate more efficiently” if he were to leave.⁴¹ By about five o'clock Tashkent time, Murray's staff had drafted, signed, and faxed a letter to London that protested his innocence. Other British expatriates were informed too, and they too signed a letter that was faxed off to London.

On August 28, the struggle escalated. In a letter from a personnel official in London, Murray was told he had flouted the advice given to him, and he was now to “remain off the Embassy premises until further notice.” The letter continued, however, to emphasize that “you're not being suspended from duty: you remain HM Ambassador to Uzbekistan.” But it was essential “you do not speak further to your staff—UK-based or locally-employed—about this matter.”⁴²

Banished to the residence, Murray now lobbied his friends, and they intervened. On September 7, a British businessman in Tashkent wrote to The Times in protest: “The common belief here is that Mr Murray is being sacrificed to the Americans, since the US Embassy makes no effort to conceal its inveterate dislike of the way in which he repeatedly and unequivocally slams the Human Rights record of a region so heavily under US influence.”⁴³ On October 1, The Times reported that the “Foreign Office insisted that it supported Mr Murray's line on human rights in Uzbekistan.” But it was the beginning of a storm of press allegations.

By now the stress was getting to Murray. At the beginning of September, a Foreign Office official, Tony Crombie, came to investigate the charges. A day later Murray had collapsed with acute anxiety, and he was medevaced to London and put on suicide watch. While he sat in the hospital, and then convalesced, the case of Craig Murray was now becoming a celebrated cause. “Ambassador Accused After Criticizing US,” the London Guardian reported. Many hinted that the “sick leave” was a ploy by the Foreign Office. And yet, Murray's health problems were far from fictitious. On November 14, Murray returned to Tashkent, but in forty-eight hours he had collapsed, ill again. It was a pulmonary embolism, blood clots in his lungs that deprived him of oxygen. Rushed to the hospital, he was lucky to survive. He was back on an air ambulance to a London hospital. In Tashkent, meanwhile, Crombie had combed through the allegations, but he was later to conclude that they contained almost no substance. One internal document concluded that “in by far the majority of the allegations, there is no case to answer in conduct and discipline terms and that, where there is a case to answer, Mr Murray's behaviour does not seem to him [Crombie] to constitute gross misconduct.”⁴⁴ Murray might have been a socialite. He might have visited bars after dark. But there was no evidence that this had infected his work. The British press was also at work, swarming to Tashkent to investigate the claims. They too could not prove any impropriety. Most left concluding that they were a simple smear.

In January, Murray left the hospital and returned to Tashkent. All charges had now been withdrawn, except for the offense of speaking to his staff about the initial charges. He received a reprimand, and was told to return to his post.

But Murray was now a deeply troubled man. Wearied by illness and months of confrontation, he no longer had the energy for his interventionist approach. It got worse in March, when a British tabloid newspaper, the Mail on Sunday, carried an extravagant headline: “Torture Row British Ambassador Dumps Wife for 22 year old Uzbek Hairdresser.” The story was out about Murray's affair with Nadira and that his wife, Fiona, had returned home to Britain. Life for Murray, then, was unraveling.

MURRAY'S stay in Tashkent was nearly over, but not quite. The story of investigations of torture took one final twist. The story of Abu Ghraib had now broken, and he read my account of the CIA's rendition system. He thought back now, he said later, of some people he had met. They were pilots and ground crews from an American company who used to go drinking in an expatriate bar called the Lionheart.⁴⁵ Their missions, they had said, were for the U.S. government. And they had even flown prisoners from Bagram in Afghanistan to Tashkent. “They told me they were in the aviation business, doing contracts for the US government,” he would say. “It was clear they were doing something special.” One of them had even married a local Uzbek, and then he suddenly just disappeared and left her behind. The only news of him was a brief phone call from Frankfurt. Murray by then had also met Michael Andersen, the Danish journalist, and he had heard from him of the wider story, how men were appearing in Uzbekistan's jail after their captures by the United States in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Now, he believed, his discoveries made sense. The CIA, it was clear to him, was not only taking evidence from torture; it was actively procuring that torture. Many of the prisoners had been delivered to the Uzbeks. They were handed over to face torture.

In July, Murray sat down to compile his conclusions and to write the telegram on rendition that would, ultimately, end his career.

Two months later, when I met Murray in his apartment, he was still officially Her Majesty's ambassador but, in truth, he knew the game was over. The issues he had fought for were now too important. “I'm not going to apologize,” he said. “I'm not going to be silent.” I wished him well and left London shortly afterward for a trip to Baghdad. While I was away things moved fast. His July telegram was leaked to the Financial Times, and he was formally withdrawn from his post by e-mail. And then Murray went on BBC Radio 4, criticizing the government. The same day, October 15, he was suspended from duty.⁴⁶ Murray found a lawyer and threatened to sue the Foreign Office for unfair dismissal. He finally left the service with a $575,000 severance package and a Foreign Office explanation of “compassionate and medical circumstances.”⁴⁷ He instantly vowed to continue his battle politically, taking on Jack Straw as an independent candidate in the British general election of May 5, 2005. He received just 5 percent of the vote.

ANDIJAN, FERGHANA VALLEY, UZBEKISTAN, MAY 13,2005—Protesters had seized a government building and demanded the release from jail of a group of businessmen, members of an Islamic group that was considered by most as moderate. A crowd, most of the town, was milling around outside. Then, without warning, at 5:20 P.M., the armored cars arrived and starting firing. Estimates said between six hundred and one thousand people were killed.

Galima Bukharbaeva, an American-trained journalist, was a witness:

As they drove up to the square, they opened fire without warning, and everyone ran. I also ran. The bullets flew at such a rate that it seemed hail was falling on all sides. … I ran in fear amid the roar of weapons, and saw several men who were running next to me fall down …. The shooting stopped for a while. The first row of APCs had done their work. But scarcely a minute had gone by when a second row of APCs appeared which also opened fire. Only when back in the hotel did I get my notebook with telephone numbers, I opened my backpack and saw that a bullet had passed through my notebook, along with the … journalist identity card.⁴⁸

In the days that followed the world reacted with outrage. A State Department spokesman, Richard Boucher, at first urged caution, warning of the escape of prisoners, “including possibly members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, an organization we consider a terrorist organization.” But later the United States too realized that what had occurred was a massacre, and it joined condemnations of the Uzbek government by Jack Straw and other European governments, including Greece and France.⁴⁹ The State Department found itself unable to certify the country's record on improving human rights, and a tranche of U.S. aid was now blocked.⁵⁰ The Russians and the Chinese chose a different approach, refusing to interfere in the country's “internal affairs.” Two months after the massacre, President Karimov announced the closure of America's K2 base, and strengthened his relations with the Russians and Chinese instead.⁵¹

In some ways, there had always been a simple choice: to work with Karimov and to accept, or at least try to soften, his abuses, or to condemn him and lose all cooperation. Craig Murray had chosen to force not only his government but the hand of the United States. As an ambassador, chosen to represent his government, he had exceeded his role. As an individual, he had achieved a great deal. He opened a window on another frontier of the rendition system, and showed how a dictator would share evidence obtained under torture with Western intelligence agencies for his own political purposes: to secure international support or acquiescence for his own ruthless clampdown on the dissidents who oppose him. He had exposed to the world a very uncomfortable alliance: between a superpower that proclaimed the importance of human rights and an unre-formed Communist who boiled his prisoners alive. Steve Crawshaw, UK director of Human Rights Watch, remarked, “Craig Murray may not have been a good ambassador; that's not for me to judge. But the abuses he pointed to were real, horrific.”⁵² If this was the war on terror, many would ask, was it really worth fighting?