‘The blunt question … do 2,000 people matter?’
SIR JAMES PARKER, HM GOVERNOR OF THE
FALKLAND ISLANDS, JANUARY 1980‘Mr Parker,’ wrote Robin Fearn, head of the FCO’s South America Department, ‘tends to look at the problem from the Islanders’ viewpoint.’
Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in April 1982. James Parker was the penultimate governor of the British dependent territory before the war. In 1980 the shooting was still some way off, and Britain and Argentina were in talks over the future of the islands. In his valedictory from Port Stanley, declassified for the first time in 2011, Parker calls on the British government to stand firm.
Britain’s successful defence of the Falklands is nowadays (in most quarters) a pillar of national self-esteem. It has achieved such importance to British pride that is hard to believe that in stating the case that the UK should negotiate robustly with Argentina before the conflict Parker actually blotted his copybook with his superiors at the Foreign Office.
Parker saw a need to defend Britain’s strategic and economic interests in the South Atlantic, as well as to protect the wishes of the Falkland Islanders. In the file Fearn notes critically that the Governor considered the islanders a ‘viable and solid community’, albeit one hamstrung by what Parker saw as neglect by the British government. It seems HMG disagreed.
Argentina was bellicose in stating her claim to the islands. Instead of negotiating with ‘apparent detachment’, Parker calls on British ministers to tackle the dispute ‘on the same terms’. But Fearn argued a different line. British policy was for a ‘compromise political solution’ with Argentina. In HMG’s cold-eyed assessment, the cost of sustaining the islands against ‘determined Argentine pressure’ was unaffordable.
‘We must try to ensure,’ wrote Fearn after Parker returned home, ‘that the new Governor retains a more objective view of his mission and of the need to bring the Islanders to recognise the narrow options open to them and to us.’ In the measured prose of the Foreign Office, this is serious criticism. It failed in its objective. The next governor, Rex Hunt, in place when Argentina invaded, was equally staunch in his defence of the islanders.
History suggests that, at least tactically, it was Parker who was right, and Fearn wrong. For it was General Galtieri’s misinterpretation of conciliatory British attitudes that encouraged him to invade. Critics cite the decision in 1981 to withdraw from service the Royal Navy ship HMS Endurance, Britain’s only naval presence in the South Atlantic, as suggesting to the Argentinian junta that the UK was unwilling and perhaps unable to defend the Falklands.
That was of course a misunderstanding. The eventual British victory energized Margaret Thatcher’s premiership and boosted Britain’s international status.
In the South Atlantic it was Argentina that was beaten. But back home in Whitehall the Foreign Office lost the Falklands War. At King Charles Street, Britain’s biggest military success of the 1980s saw resignations, recriminations and a lengthy formal inquiry.
Three days after Argentinian troops seized Port Stanley in April 1982 the Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, and two of his ministers stood down. Ever since then critics have sought to lay blame at the door of the Diplomatic Service, claiming dozy civil servants failed to alert ministers as Argentina moved on to a war footing. If so, Sir James Parker would not have been among them.
But the reality was more complex. The negotiations in the late 1970s between Britain and Argentina were expected to result in administrative and economic cooperation over the Falklands. But the ultimate aim for London was to alter the nature of the dispute from confrontation to partnership, and thus actually help to preserve, rather than end, British sovereignty in the South Atlantic.
As an institution the Foreign Office had clearly invested heavily in this strategy. The documents show that within the debate, the FCO – and Fearn – occupied one end of the spectrum: favouring a negotiated settlement with Argentina, as opposed to defending the status quo at all costs.
But by 1981 the drawbacks of the negotiation strategy had become apparent. Contrary to the popular myth of the FCO sleeping on the job, diplomats were by then warning ministers that the Argentinians might invade if they decided the British government was not negotiating on sovereignty in good faith.
Officially, the FCO was exonerated after the conflict. The Franks Committee, which investigated failings in the run-up to war, said the decision to invade ‘was taken by the Junta at a very late date’ and thus ‘could not have been foreseen’. And crucially for Fearn it dismissed as ‘without foundation’ the damaging allegation that the Foreign Office had pursued a policy of its own, separate from that of elected government ministers, aimed at ‘getting rid of the Falklands’. That would certainly be overstating it. But the spat chronicled here between the Governor and the office does suggest a private FCO view in Whitehall.
CONFIDENTIAL
28 January 1980
The Right Honourable
The Lord Carrington PC KCMG MC MP
My Lord
LAST IMPRESSIONS OF THE FALKLANDS
At the end of this month I will leave the Falklands after three intense, sometimes trying, but mostly happy years living among the Islanders as their Governor. Glancing through the despatches of my 20-odd predecessors a few, it seems, left with no regrets, and one or two had even had enough and were glad to go. Others had become so attached to the place they were sorry to leave, some with hope a better future might be possible for the Islanders if things turned out well, and many with concern about what that future might really hold for them. My own feelings are a mixture of the last three, and my concern is deep.
On my arrival, at short notice, just before Christmas in December 1976, I had little time to put my first impressions into clear thought. My immediate task was to calm down the decidedly emotional state the Islanders had got themselves into in the preceding year or so, when everything seemed to go wrong and apprehension about the future was high … The negotiations, in which their Councillors have been kept informed at every stage, have gone on at lengthy intervals since then, with no marked result so far …
What are my abiding impressions of the Islands as I leave them? A bare, rugged, isolated and unspoilt landscape, with abundant wildlife, mostly around the often strikingly dramatic coasts. A climate that is much maligned and which, while it sometimes produces bleak miserable days of rain and wind, mostly offers the clearest skies and brightest sunshine anyone could wish for. Some of the kindest, gentlest, most hospitable people in the world, gossipy, like all scattered island folk and occasionally slyly sharp in their humour, but not intentionally malicious. Hardworking, very versatile in their talents and skills, and with a better understanding of the world outside than the formal education of some of them would incline one to expect. Tolerant of human frailty, and with their social problems quietly under control. Intensely proud of their Falklands heritage, but totally loyal and totally British in their way of life, appearance, manner and outlook. Although so close to the South American mainland they have taken in none of its culture or habits. Historically they have had little to do with it … In earlier days, frequent shipping, the mail, the telegraph and periodic leave visits sufficiently bridged the 8,000 miles from Britain …
[L]ooking back over the colony’s history it is sad to see all the opportunities that have been lost to it. From the beginning, and throughout most of the last century, the cause can be seen in the lack of interest by successive British Governments in maintaining the place as very much more than a strategic foothold in the South Atlantic, across the Cape Horn route … More people, more investment and more resource development would have made a power of difference, both politically and economically. The Islands are still fairly prosperous; they could be more so, were it not for the now stultifying effect of the Argentine claim …
[The] greater part of a Governor’s time is taken up by the day-to-day maintenance of the community’s services … it is a necessary part of the job also to devote time to the planning of the further improvement of those services, alongside long term schemes for urban and rural development – just as if the place had the longest of all futures. And then the cold thought comes: that all this work and planning could be set at naught because of the need to meet the emotional and nationalistic demands of a country, Argentina, 400 miles away across the sea, which should have more to concern itself in the social, economic and political problems that face it inside its own frontiers. Is it then wrong to hold out the illusion of hope to the Islanders?
This brings us to the blunt question. If an irksome dispute with a country we may not much care about, but which has no scruples about its behaviour, can be ended, should we allow less than 2,000 Islanders to prevent it, just so that they can continue in their happy way of life without any change in their status? What, as one senior Argentine diplomatic official, perhaps not uncharacteristically, put it to a visiting journalist, do 2,000 people matter anyway? It ought to be possible to answer that by asking why should not these people matter, and why should they not be allowed to go on living in a way which does no harm to anyone. The stark answer to that one seems to be that, leaving aside a flurry of emotion over an alleged historic wrong, the Argentines are determined to strengthen their position in the South Atlantic, and thence in the Antarctic, by totally usurping ours, which we have not seemed too concerned to maintain.
I cannot see any way of disinterestedly reconciling the wishes of the Islanders with the demands of the Argentines … It might clarify thinking considerably if Britain were to drop her attitude of apparent detachment, assess her advantages and interests, and openly meet the Argentines on the same terms in the dispute as they have chosen for themselves …
What are our interests in the region, apart from that of just protecting the Islanders? We know there are substantial marine resources … There may also be oil and other seabed minerals, as well as those possibly under the ice. It is all wildly speculative at present, and it may take many many years for the right technology to be developed to reap what harvest there is. But other eyes are now fixed on those prospects, and no country is going to give up its position in the Antarctic and adjacent areas while those prospects remain. Except, it sometimes seems, Britain, which history has given the best of all bases; just because it is an ‘uninhabited rock’ we have even looked like loosening our grip on South Georgia, where we have an unassailable and vital position. One cannot imagine the French, for example, doing the same; they are clearly going to stick to their similar vantage point at Kerguelen, come what may.
In time, if things go badly for the Islanders in the negotiations, the Falkland Islands could also become a collection of uninhabited rocks, the Islanders having left, and few Argentines wishing to come in. That would be to no-one’s gain. It would indeed be a tragic loss if this unique little democratic showpiece of a community, with all the history that lies behind it, were to vanish from the earth just because of national ambition on the one side and on the other because policy, or so I think, got off on the wrong foot several years ago. But although I began this despatch on a note of pessimism, I will end it optimistically; I am hopeful a solution can be found, and the Falklands will survive …
I am sending a copy of this Despatch to HM Representative at Buenos Aires.
I am
Sir
Yours faithfully
J. R. W. Parker
‘It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Iceland is part of the British Isles’
KENNETH EAST, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE REPUBLIC
OF ICELAND, MARCH 1981Character, as they say, is destiny. And Kenneth East’s observations on the Icelandic character and its opposing tendencies do seem somewhat prophetic.
The Ambassador was struck, for instance, by Iceland’s love affair with borrowed money, in its early stages in 1981 as the country’s economy transformed away from fish to less tangible goods. This ill-starred romance was to hit the rocks finally in the 2008 financial crisis, with the collapse of Iceland’s banks, brought down by their unfeasibly large foreign debts, and eventually of its entire economy which had to be rescued by the IMF.
East was also perceptive in seeing how Icelanders, as ‘outliers’, were both drawn to and repelled by Europe. The British as good Europeans should try to make the Icelanders ‘feel they belong’. The official who received East’s despatch in Whitehall, David Gladstone, judged it to be ‘a fine example of an ambassador’s craft … I cannot fault his reasoning or his conclusions.’ Gladstone argued Britain should do ‘everything in its power’ to prevent Iceland – ‘effectively part of our own backyard’ – from ‘drifting away … into the American embrace’. Iceland’s response to this dilemma, a policy of mid-Atlantic neutrality, was another characteristically stubborn trait that did not survive the 2008 financial crisis. In 2009, Iceland decided it could no longer risk plucky isolation and, setting its face firmly east, applied to become a member of the European Union.
Character analysis aside, East’s main occupation in Reykjavik was mending fences. When he arrived in 1975 Britain and Iceland were waging low-level naval warfare against one another in the climactic round of an ugly fisheries dispute which became known as the Cod Wars. The catch that Iceland relied on for most of its foreign currency earnings was increasingly finding its way into the nets of foreign trawlers. Iceland’s response was to declare an Exclusive Economic Zone beyond its territorial waters in which British ships were forbidden to fish. The gradual and seemingly arbitrary extension over the years of the zone’s perimeter led to a series of clashes, with shots fired, nets cut and ships rammed. In 1976 Britain finally backed down and agreed to abide by the 200-mile limit. It is surely no accident, therefore, that when Kenneth East was in need of a rhetorical device to capture the bumpy history of British–Icelandic relations in his final despatch he should alight on the topography of the seabed.
‘Mr East has done an exceptionally good job of repairing broken relations,’ minuted Gladstone. ‘He will be a hard Ambassador to follow.’
CONFIDENTIAL
| WRC 014/3 | DS(L) 1701 |
Departmental Series
Western European Department
DS No. 12/81
VALEDICTORY DESPATCH
(Her Majesty’s Ambassador at Reykjavik to theSecretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs)
Reykjavik,
12 March 1981
My Lord
Six years is a long sojourn in a mini-post and carries a high risk of ‘clientitis’ – that blurring of the vision in which one’s hosts are increasingly seen at their own valuation. Perhaps that is why the theme of this report is that Iceland, its people, and our relations with them, matter, even though we have no hope of returning to fish their waters. The Country Assessment Sheet which I inherited (before the final Cod War) placed defence above fisheries as our primary interest, and everything that has happened since has magnified its importance and the consequent need to cultivate the keepers of this strategic portal.
The Icelandic character is not always admired in Whitehall. Colleagues from Ministries concerned with the sharing of natural resources – fish, air traffic, ocean bed – usually regard Icelanders as greedy, obstinate and shameless in asking for special favoured treatment. This impression is less than fair, but understandable. Having survived against all the odds, Icelanders regard themselves as a chosen people. But they are not organised in a way that facilitates negotiation. With no military experience in their history, they have never had to develop chains of command. Disputatious Parliamentary and legal traditions go back to the founding of the nation, but the executive branch is younger and less certain. Everyone tends to function as an individual, and to be wary of being committed, especially on paper. To procure internal agreement within coalitions is often delicate and time-consuming, and when it comes to projecting it outwards so that it can interact with the position of another state, finding compromises and adjustments, the difficulty is squared. Like Roman Legionaries, Icelandic delegates would rather confront the enemy than their own headquarters, and stone-wall or evade until the other side gives way. It took a hundred years of barnacle tactics to wear out the Danes and thirty years to get us off the fishing banks.
Before the age of the steam trawlers, Icelanders were (and still are to a certain extent) a nation of sheep farmers. Nowadays, the service sector absorbs twice as many workers as fishing and agriculture put together and most Icelanders are owner/occupiers of cosy urban dwellings. The present generation has experienced a social revolution, but traditions are strong (there are even stories of people breaking the law by keeping sheep in the basements of Reykjavik houses because they could not contemplate life without them). Attitudes of the peasant subsisting in marginally habitable conditions virtually outside any cash economy are mixed up with those of the inflation-happy flat dweller raising a bank loan to buy a package holiday on the Costa-del-Sol. Visitors to Iceland at the time of our fisheries dispute alternated between sympathising with the Icelanders because fishing was all they had, and being scandalised by their spending.
Below this ferment, Iceland is endowed with protein and natural energy, an educated homogeneous population, a strategic location and plenty of empty space. Barring natural disasters, to which it is prone, it is a good risk. So much the better for us, because it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Iceland is part of the British Isles. Old-fashioned maps were content to show the sea as blue and inhabited by monsters. But if, as we increasingly should, we use maps which range from white shallows to azure depths, we see that in an age where the use of submersibles will become routine, the way through the Shetlands and the Faroes to Iceland and Greenland is little more than a bicycle ride. It is a mere series of historical accidents that dealt out the various parcels of land to different monarchs. As the British Museum’s Viking Exhibition brought home, it was formerly just one trading/raiding settlement area. Iceland happens to be that link of the chain we inhabit which joins us to North America.
Icelanders would not, of course, care to be claimed as part of us, any more than do the Irish. They are a nation with a very distinct personality, and their pride is in inverse ratio to their numbers. But geographical facts remain while technology changes and our priorities should reflect both. It is important to have healthy, well-behaved neighbours, especially if they are relatives and you live in a terrace.
Without scaring the Icelanders into isolation (bearing in mind that their independence is as newly won as 1944 and that they were brought up in the faith of neutralism) the problem is one of making them feel they belong in the right company and that their security and economic needs could not be better met elsewhere. The fulfilment of these needs has moved Iceland westwards, first from dependence on Denmark to dependence on Britain (Himmler’s agent sent to gather the ‘Saga Island’ into the Nazi fold was disgusted to find it for practical purposes a British Colony) and then to strategic dependence on the United States when Britain alone provided insufficient refuge and strength. At the fringes were advocates of joining the British Empire and others of becoming an Atlantic Hawaii. But mainstream opinion through four decades, while accepting United States strategic dominance as unavoidable … has sought a point of balance. This involves close links with Britain and the Nordics, the widest attainable diversity of markets, and the pursuit of independence within the structures of NATO and EFTA-EC. We must hope these structures will continue to satisfy Iceland’s needs, though we may speculate whether the whole chain of Faroes, Iceland and Greenland will see itself and be seen as remaining an outlier of Europe or whether the gravitational pull of North America will ultimately prove to be irresistible.
‘The leisured, antiseptic society’
SIR JEFFREY PETERSEN, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
KINGDOM OF SWEDEN, JULY 1980Petersen gave over his final despatch, written on his retirement from the Diplomatic Service after thirty-two years’ service, to an analysis of the Swedish welfare system.
With a new Conservative government in power in Britain, the file shows that Petersen’s critique of the ‘Swedish model’ was well received in Whitehall. ‘This is a subject of interest to us in the UK as pioneers of the Welfare State,’ wrote Peter Vereker in the Western European Department. ‘The picture Sir Jeffrey paints as to where the Swedish experiment is leading them is an unattractive one …
‘The leisured, antiseptic society which the Despatch described clearly has many undesirable characteristics,’ Vereker went on. ‘Perhaps there are advantages, for those of us who have not yet achieved Swedish levels of income, leisure and elimination of unemployment, in being rather further away from Utopia.’
Sweden, once the cynosure of the social engineers now has social as well as economic problems. Apologists for the ‘Swedish model’ are inclined to attribute the former to the difficult economic climate of the past decade. But acute though the effects on Sweden of the oil crisis and the difficult external trading environment have been, I believe that deeper and more permanent influences have been at work in the sphere of social development and that these are likely to prove historically more significant. We are seeing now the effects on two generations of Swedish society of the world’s first outwardly harmonious and successful attempt at using democratic procedures to graft a system of socialist welfare policies into a highly evolved, essentially capitalist economy. Although there is room for much argument about the nature of the phenomena and the causal chains which have led to them, I believe that there is now enough evidence to justify concern at some of those effects.
I must first re-affirm the view, expressed in my ‘first impressions’ that there is an immense amount to admire in what has been achieved. If real trouble befalls a Swede it would be difficult, nowadays, to blame this on official indifference or material deprivation of any kind. In sickness and unemployment, in bereavement and other uninvited, as well as much self-inflicted, misfortune recourse to money to alleviate hardship and to services designed to repair personal and domestic damage is available to all … Wages and holidays are generous and secure. Health services are efficient, if impersonal, and sickness benefits cover absence from work from the first day. Great efforts have been made to improve working conditions … The old are very generously provided for. I am tempted, not for the first time, to quote Miss Katharine Whitehorn’s1 observation that the trouble with countries like Sweden is that once you have put all the sensible social ideas into practice you are left with only the silly ones. The social debate during my time here, lacking more urgent topics, has often come perilously close to the latter; for example the proposal to pay mothers an hourly rate for looking after their own children. Even in 1980, therefore, to have been born in Sweden is (to borrow a phrase from, I believe, Cecil Rhodes) to have drawn first prize in the lottery of life. And yet …
Absenteeism from work, not counting the recent strikes, is currently running on average at well over 20 per cent. Among schoolchildren the level of scholastic achievement is falling and consumption of alcohol has reached epidemic proportions. The teachers’ trade unions have defended the decision of their members at a few badly affected schools to absent themselves on certain working days when it is known, because of a conjuncture of holidays or particular celebrations, that a proportion of their pupils will appear in class unmanageably drunk. Teachers report that an increasing number of children have little meaningful contact with their parents and that many are left to their own devices even at weekends. The new high-rise housing complexes round the large cities, many of them built during the affluent days of the ’sixties, have become the major centres of crime. Both tax avoidance and tax evasion are major industries.
Already in 1976, shortly before they lost power, the Social Democrat party had held a conference to go into the question of why, with all the advances of the past 20 years, it was a matter of common observation that most Swedes grumbled and complained more, not less, than an earlier and less fortunate generation. The basic reason is, I suppose, that human beings lacking grave or urgent problems to occupy their thoughts are that way inclined. To quote Miss Whitehorn again, ‘… never mind whether affluence brings happiness: the prospect of affluence always does’. By world standards Swedes are already decidedly affluent and it is hard to see how in general they could become more so. Many of them see nowhere else to go. Harder work, more responsibility, can only bring higher taxes and few compensating benefits. Lacking the stimulus of a rewarding climb ahead many Swedes resort to the common outlets of grumbling, gambling and drink.
‘Not even the sun penetrates in winter let alone the outside world’
SIR ARCHIE LAMB, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE KINGDOM
OF NORWAY, DECEMBER 1980Lamb’s final despatch before retiring after forty-two years in the Diplomatic Service was warmly received in Whitehall as ‘an excellent example of the genre’. David Gladstone, head of the Western European Department at the Foreign Office, wrote of Lamb: ‘He has plainly found the Norwegians an unsympathetic people to deal with, insular and borné.’
Norwegian diplomacy towards the US Government … has been inept … Defence Minister Stoltenberg’s visit to Washington in June marked a new low in the US Government’s sympathy for the Government of Norway, the latter’s wetness having exasperated Washington. The Norwegian Government cobbled together in September a deal … for stockpiling heavy equipment for a US Marine Force in Trøndelag in mid Norway, 300 miles south of where it was expected to be and 600 miles from the frontier with the Soviet Union. This must be seen as a small but significant triumph for Soviet diplomacy … Their success was signalled in an article by State Secretary Hoist of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs published by the Norwegian Atlantic Committee: ‘Norway has emphasised that the size and location of any allied prepositioning in Norway will be limited so as not to constitute any real threat to neighbouring countries.’ So, in Mr Hoist’s Norwegian book, you demand your allies’ full support but restrict their ability to give it … ‘All for Norway’ is the Royal motto of The King of Norway: it sums up the Norwegian interpretation of the North Atlantic Alliance …
[T]he average Norwegian politician is essentially a person of narrow horizons. He (and she) come from and represent small constituencies, often tiny communities in fjords and valleys where not even the sun penetrates in winter let alone the outside world. There are few Norwegian politicians with whom one can enjoy a satisfactory discussion of The World Today. They still represent and personify ‘Little Norway’ and are resistant to persuasion …
‘The shadow is so often, deliberately, taken for the substance’
THOMAS SHAW, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
REPUBLIC OF CÔTE D’IVOIRE, FEBRUARY 1967In a file at the National Archives, Shaw’s valedictory is tagged together with a handwritten note from a senior clerk, commenting that it was ‘an interesting, if somewhat jaded despatch’. His Excellency plainly did not like Ouagadougou.
I have wondered from time to time whether the British interests we try to serve really have any need of us. Only seven years ago there was not even a British Honorary Consular presence in the Ivory Coast, Upper Volta or Niger … One could of course let Parkinson’s Laws have their head and generate activity for activity’s sake. But it seems more sensible to accept that the raison d’etre of an Embassy such as this is an act of limited but respectable presence. And at least here we perform the act in three countries …
Apart from anything else I have had frequent personal cause in the last three years to bless the system of multiple representation. Many African capitals offer little compensation for what may be the limitations and frustrations of diplomatic work there. Change of scene, climate and environment are a valuable safeguard against parochial distortions of all kinds. The moist miasmal monochrome of the lagoon country can be exchanged for the dust and blue skies of the Sahel; the cheerful openness and fecklessness of the northern peoples, touched by the dignity and discipline of Islam and the need to work, are a useful antidote to the stay-at-home, indolent, reserved complacency of the urban Ivoirien; a few days in Ouagadougou enable one to appreciate the real economic achievement of President Houphouet’s1 regime in the Ivory Coast, and the orderly well laid-out cleanliness, even the brash and glossy modernity of Abidjan, with its new office buildings and its pink and white villas proliferating among the palm trees like so many exports from the world of Jacques Tati’s ‘Mon Oncle’.2 The fate of a Head of Mission confined to Ouagadougou is not enviable, and a system which permits it scarcely humane.
I would not go so far as one of my diplomatic colleagues who observed on leaving Abidjan ‘at least I have learned how little there is to learn’, but I cannot say that three years’ observation of what has gone on in the Ivory Coast, Upper Volta and Niger leads easily to conclusions, still less to prognostications.
There is a story long current here of a scorpion who came to a river which he urgently needed to cross. But he found no means of doing so until he met a crocodile whom he begged for a lift across. Before agreeing, the crocodile wanted an assurance that the scorpion would not sting him in midstream. ‘But if I did’ replied the scorpion, ‘you would die and I should be drowned; of course I won’t.’ Half way across the river the scorpion did in fact sting the crocodile, who, as he died, cried ‘Why, why did you do it?’ ‘C’est l’Afrique’ replied the scorpion. And together they sank to the bottom of the river …
I left tropical Africa once before after 3½ years with few regrets. I cannot claim to feel many more now. A couple of years ago I was sitting alone in the bar of the hotel in one of my four capitals3 finishing the last bottle they possessed of a well-known brand of stout. I watched the African barman take down a vase of flowers from a bracket on the wall, carefully renew the water and put the vase back in its place. The flowers were artificial. After three years it is I think time to leave a part of the world where the shadow is so often, deliberately, taken for the substance.
I have, &c.
T. R. SHAW.
‘More of a retinal sensation than a coherent picture’
SIR LESLIE FIELDING, HM CHARGÉ D’AFFAIRES IN
PHNOM PENH, SEPTEMBER 1966Another example of how a well-penned despatch can be the making of a diplomatic career.
In 1964 an angry mob torched the British and American embassies in Phnom Penh. Once the women and children were evacuated, Leslie Fielding was flown in to take charge. Heroic, perhaps. Or perhaps not; Sir Leslie himself believes he was picked for the post as ‘an expendable fall guy’. Either way, given the circumstances, Fielding could count on there being at least a small group of interested – not to say concerned – readers in Whitehall of the reports he was to send from Cambodia over the next two years.
Nevertheless, as Fielding scribbled off the customary valedictory despatch before packing his bags in 1966, it was hardly to be expected that a routine report from a young and very junior diplomat would have gone very far up the Whitehall tree. And yet, on obtaining his personnel file recently from the Foreign Office via a Freedom of Information Request, Fielding was amazed to discover that his 1966 despatch had in fact reached the desk of the Prime Minister.
Harold Wilson was impressed. The file contained a memo sent back to the Foreign Office relaying his verdict: ‘First class – it tells me more than a hundred telegrams. Where is this chap going now?’
The Foreign Secretary’s office took the hint. ‘Fielding is being posted to Paris as one of the two First Secretaries in Chancery,’ they replied to Number 10. ‘As you know, this is a job on the way to stardom.’ (True enough; Fielding ended up in Brussels, as Director General of the European Commission’s Diplomatic Service.)
History, of course, was not to be so kind to Cambodia. Neither was Prince Sihanouk’s rule to continue unchallenged, as Fielding expected. Just four years after Fielding’s despatch the Prince was deposed by his parliament while on a foreign trip. He was briefly restored as titular Head of State by the Khmer Rouge in the mid-1970s, but ended up a prisoner of the regime, and fled into exile in China and North Korea, as Cambodia descended into genocide. Sihanouk was eventually reinstated as King in 1993 and abdicated peacefully in 2004. Fielding’s instinct – that the King was a survivor – proved sound. And, give or take a date or two, the hope he expresses when signing off, that he would still be alive when this despatch entered the public domain, has been fulfilled.
In retirement Fielding has once more taken up the pen, using his time in Cambodia as the inspiration for a film script. His most recent work in non-fiction is a serious look at some big international issues and the tools diplomats use to tackle them (Mentioned in Despatches – Phnom Penh, Paris, Tokyo, Brussels: Is Diplomacy Dead? (Boermans Books, 2012)).
THIS DOCUMENT IS THE PROPERTY OF HER BRITANNIC MAJESTY’S GOVERNMENT
| DU 1015/21 | Foreign Office and Whitehall Distribution |
CAMBODIA
23 September, 1966
Section 1
CAMBODIA: SOME FAREWELL IMPRESSIONS
Mr. Fielding to Mr. Brown. (Received 23 September)
| (No. 23. CONFIDENTIAL) | Phnom Penh, |
20 September, 1966.
Sir,
When I was invited at less than two weeks’ notice to proceed to Phnom Penh in order to assume temporary charge of a sacked Embassy, no one foresaw that circumstances would require me to conduct the Mission for nearly two and a half years. For this reason, I did not trouble your third predecessor with my first impressions of Cambodia. As some aspects of this country have always remained a mystery to me, the valedictory despatch which I now have the honour to compose must still be considered more of a retinal sensation than a coherent picture.
As long as he remains Head of State, the Kingdom of Cambodia is Prince Norodom Sihanouk. He is at once the most attractive and most infuriating of Asian leaders. Attractive, because his profound concern for his people, his dynamism and sheer native wit make him a national leader of international standing. Infuriating, because of his extreme sensitivity to criticism, his resistance to well-meaning advice, the unpredictability of his day-to-day conduct of affairs and the urchin-like quality which prompts him to hand out mockery and abuse on all sides.
Fortunately, the Prince has visibly slowed down over the past two years. The intractable problems with which he is faced, the various reverses with which (perhaps for the first time in his life) he has been confronted, and the growth of criticism at home, all have left him a quieter and (hopefully) a wiser man. Some say he is becoming a burnt-out case. But my astrological faculties assure me that the Mandate of Heaven has not yet been withdrawn from the God-King.
Norodom Sihanouk is likely to control the destiny of the Kingdom for as far ahead as we can see … [T]here remains no individual rallying point for dissent, no common courage or conviction among the critics and no sign of a possible move towards change. Sihanouk’s skill in handling his people gives daily proof that he is still the one man who can control the factions and unite the nation.
I have found that nation by and large a likeable lot. There is a strong mixture of Chinese blood, and more than a tincture of Siamese, in the veins of the upper class, whose lively but mixed-up members tend to be a little humourless and complexed. But the underlying hysteria of the Chinese races is alien to the easy-going, dark-skinned Khmer. They are a more primitive and occluded people than their neighbours and one sometimes has the frustrated impression of dealing with a pack of amiable simians (just as they privately think of us as long-nosed wonders from outer space). But their ethnocentricity, pride and deep Buddhist persuasions are the roots from which Sihanouk’s own policies of nationalism and neutrality draw their strength. Their country is a natural buffer-State on the long cultural and political frontier between the Indian and Chinese civilisations, between East and West in South-East Asia.
But Phnom Penh shivers to the shock of all kinds of conflicting ideologies and interests. Overshadowed by the Viet-Namese conflict, Cambodia is a field in which it is prudent that a modest British diplomatic effort should be deployed. We were wise not to break off relations after the Embassy was attacked by the mob in March 1964, and it has been worth it to have slogged on through the mud towards at least the illusion of green fields beyond. There is no inherent hostility towards the West and certainly none to the British in this country. Sihanouk’s tantrums are of a feminine nature; they can be soothed with manliness and a well-timed box of chocolates. It is perhaps less awkward for London than for Peking that Monseigneur should be a capricious mistress who will not be bought for money or ever be taken the slightest bit for granted.
In retrospect, and on the human plane, the fare has been rich. Loyal allies (not least the Australians) and a small but enthusiastic staff; international intrigue; an exotic court complete with a ballerina princess in the limelight and the old narrow-eyed Rasputin in the gilded shadows; the varying beauties of tropical nature, from the dark tiger-jungle to the white-sanded sea; the brooding solemnity of the Angkor temples and the fun-loving company of their modern Deva-Raja,1 Norodom Sihanouk. These have left me with no dull moments and few sad ones; I shall be sorry to step back through the looking glass into normality. It is all worth several books, but the Official Secrets Act and the chastity of diplomatic intercourse would prevent their publication.
There remains a handful of grey despatches printed in the Indo-China volume. To be circulated to officialdom around 1972, this magnum opus will eventually be released to an eager public on what I calculate may be my 80th birthday. I hope that I shall still then in some sense enjoy the honour of being, as to-day, your obedient servant.
I have, &c.
LESLIE FIELDING
(Chargé d’Affaires).
‘Some pigs more equal than others’
BARONESS PARK, HM CONSUL-GENERAL
AT HANOI, OCTOBER 1970Despatches from Vietnam rarely disappoint. Daphne Park’s valedictory from Hanoi is no exception, giving a vivid account of the difficulties Western diplomats experienced living and working ‘in Limbo’. As the representative of a country – Britain – which did not recognize North Vietnam’s claim to statehood, Park was granted only the most basic privileges in Hanoi.
The Consul-General’s empathy for the plight of the ordinary Vietnamese also leaps from the page. But Park’s own story is actually the most interesting of all. She was a spy.
Daphne Park spent thirty years in MI6, ending up as Controller of intelligence operations for the Western Hemisphere, which meant North America, South America and Canada. While in Hanoi she ran agents as a senior controller for the intelligence service, cultivating contacts over bottles of brandy at 6.00 a.m., and would fly with her top-secret reports out of the country in a light aircraft so as to evade surveillance. But Park’s most successful field of operations was Africa. In the 1960s she combined her spying with postings to the Congo – where she narrowly escaped execution by firing squad – and, as High Commissioner, to Zambia.
Baroness Park died in 2010. She used her formidable reputation in Africa to good effect: according to her obituary in The Times Park was held in such awe by leaders across the continent that she could gain access to them whenever she wished.
In her undercover work she used the opposite tactic. In the Congo, Park smuggled Lumumba’s private secretary, a would-be defector, out of the country in the boot of a Citroën 2CV. Her explanation was simple: ‘Nobody ever takes 2CVs seriously.’
FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICEDIPLOMATIC REPORT NO. 525/70
| FAV 1/24 | General Distribution |
NORTH VIETNAM
25 October, 1970
HER MAJESTY’S REPRESENTATIVE IN LIMBO: A VALEDICTORY
The British Consul-General in North Viet-Nam to the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
| (CONFIDENTIAL) | Hanoi, |
25 October, 1970.
Sir,
The Residence was formerly a house of ill-fame. Handkerchiefs are boiled in the saucepans, other dirty clothes in the dustbin. When the household cat disappeared, opinion was divided whether she had been eaten by the neighbours or the rats. When even more water than usual flooded the bathroom floor, and even less (though more noisome) water came from the tap, and the plumbers eventually came, they withdrew for three days to attend cadre meetings before removing the dead rats they found in the pipes. No rodent extermination service exists because, officially, rats have been eliminated. Unfortunately the rats do not know this. When Ambassadors come to dinner and it rains, the drawing-room floor is covered with buckets and saucepans to catch the water from the ceiling. The major-domo at the Residence has been at some earlier time an inmate of a mental institution; the misfortune is that he was ever released. Nearly every necessity of life must be imported, though only upon receipt, after some months, of import permits listing each jar of herbs, each bundle of toothpicks. The Director of Customs has sometimes refused a permit, or proposed to allow in only part of the order, on the ground that Her Majesty’s Representative ‘has had enough this year’ and does not need it. The presents most prized by local staff, when they dare to accept them, are razor blades, bicycle repair outfits, bottles (empty) and Aspro. Locally produced records of ‘people’s song and dance’, bought in the State shop, are confiscated by the Customs on departure unless their export has been approved by the Cultural Commission.
The small but fortunate number of those who have served here will find no difficulty in guessing that this despatch comes from Hanoi. They too have been Non-Persons, issuing visas on affidavits, and yearly Queen’s Birthday invitations to Viet-Namese, who do not come, on cards without crests. They have received warnings not to enter forbidden areas, but no map defining them. Out of tender Viet-Namese regard for their lives and health they have yearly been refused a bicycle, as well as being denied access to the swimming pool, the International Club, the diplomatic shop, and, for nine years, permission to travel outside the city. But like me, most of them have wanted to come here and have left with some regret – though never quite enough to ask for another year. The very great political interest of the post is still not enough to account for its fascination; I have tried therefore in this valedictory despatch to define the peculiar flavour of Hanoi, and to communicate what it is possible to learn about the North Viet-Namese from the sheer physical fact of living here.
The disagreeable and restrictive features of life in North Viet-Nam which I have cited are no more than incidental, though they wear away time, temper and sometimes health. The real hardship lies in the fact that, surrounded by Viet-Namese, we can know none of them. It is in part our non-recognition of North Viet-Nam which creates this special vacuum round us, and it is a wise policy which limits our tour here to a year: it might be difficult to report objectively for longer. Yet even if the end of the war should bring about the establishment of diplomatic relations and hence the relaxation of the present restrictions upon us, isolation from the Viet-Namese will continue, I believe, to be the rule. The unconsciously arrogant reserve which the Viet-Namese display at home, even towards their friends, will be increasingly reinforced by the defensive security processes of a Communist society. The shooting war over, the ideological war will go on, and there are few grounds for believing that Communism has been a temporary expedient here and that the rulers of North Viet-Nam are merely waiting to slough their Communist skin and appear in fresh and uncommitted nationalist colours. It may be a long time before this snake changes skins again.
The diplomatic heaven
Very few weeks pass in Hanoi without a national day, an army day, or a day to commemorate some Socialistic event. On those days, at 7 p.m. precisely, the long line of official cars disgorges diplomats and cadres at the International Club. Between March and October, when the temperature in the shade may stand at 110 degrees, and the humidity at an unvarying 98 per cent, shirtsleeves are worn, and like unhappy overheated penguins a long way from water, the Socialist Ambassadors line up at the top table on the right of the host and the Dean,1 flapping their paper fans: on the left stand the Viet-Namese. The arc lights burn, the mosquitoes whine, as the speeches are made – in Viet-Namese with no translation, in Bulgarian, or Polish, or Russian, with Viet-Namese translation only – and the diplomats cautiously clap, with one eye on the Dean. Toasts are offered and a curious Nuts in May ceremony is observed; first the diplomats file past the Viet-Namese, clinking glasses, then the Viet-Namese return the compliment. After that both parties eat, wise diplomats confining themselves to the soup and the bread, the rest laying up worms and worse; the tables groan with dishes full of what at best may be sliced dog, of pork rolls, and mudfish from the paddies, and bright yellow icecream. These rituals last two or three hours. Throughout, the Viet-Namese stay on the left, the diplomats on the right of the hall; and crossing over is not encouraged. These occasions represent, in microcosm, the co-existence without contact which is diplomatic life in Hanoi.
The Socialist diplomats, at first merely baffled by the bland unpenetrability of the Viet-Namese, soon find it hard to conceal resentment at being taken for granted. Like the large, damp, crumbling crates of machinery from Eastern Europe which lie month after month in marshalling yards or at the roadside, they stand about in bulky awkward groups, and the whole colonial effect is absurdly enhanced by the pith helmets still favoured by so many Viet-Namese. The Soviet Ambassador, guttering in the heat like tallow, mutters to the Mongolian: ‘Ah, how wonderful it would be to be cold, and see snow.’ Inward-looking, the ‘Socialists’ are more alien from the Viet-Namese than the most ruthless ‘imperialist’ could be, and without the common denominator of Marxist jargon, as well as aims, it seems doubtful whether there could be much communication between them … Socialist diplomats in Hanoi complain often and with justice that they see less of the country than visiting delegations: they are unable to meet even the Viet-Namese who have been trained for years in their universities and have learnt their languages, and meet Ministers chiefly when the Viet-Namese want something …
The Viet-Namese hell?
North Viet-Nam, like any Communist country, is run by the Politburo, and the most powerful members of this small body, all now in or approaching their sixties, may be seen, and sometimes heard, at receptions. Their speeches become basic texts for study by the cadres, industrious but individually expendable worker bees, unlikely to be queens, who, like their leaders, stand in ritual shirtsleeves on the left at each reception. Outside the hall, the Viet-Namese live in a different world. Diplomats and foreigners, driving to and from receptions, cease very soon to see them except as cyclists bent on suicide. Living in Limbo, we are nearer to them, for we walk far more, and especially at night when the children who in daylight pursue us shrieking Lien Xo (Russian), and leave us black and blue with inquisitive pinches, are gathered round the family brazier on the pavement, eating their rice, or are already asleep. Young and old, like battered bundles, sleep in the hottest months on the steps of the Ministry of Foreign Trade, on the pavement, in doorways, anywhere out of the stifling courtyards and the houses where they live, a family to each room. The rats run over them as they sleep, fight over scraps of garbage, and sometimes drown, in the water which gathers in the open concrete shelter-holes; and at flood time when the drains overflow and the streets for a while are two or three feet deep in rushing water, they swim along in the brown muddy flood with leaves, twigs and rubbish. There are rats even in the cinema.
Yet the squalor, the filth and the evident poverty are dominated by the intense vitality of the people and their capacity for survival. It looks out of the wizened faces of the old women, yoked to carts piled with coaldust, or balancing baskets on their shoulders, and those others who sit at the pavement edge selling sunflower seeds and nuts, strings of live crabs, a chili or two, slices of watermelon or sections of grapefruit or, further up the scale, stock a bootlace or two, thread, some cheap celluloid goods, envelopes, paper fans, paper knives made from crashed United States aircraft and nit-combs. The families camped all night at the bus and railway stations, drinking green tea or soup, may wait there for days. They are patient, but not torpid; and they do not beg. The children seem tireless, whether they are playing hopscotch, football with an old clog for goalpost, flying kites or spinning tops made from turnips. Boys hang round the one-man bicycle repair stands which in Viet-Nam take the place of garages; the more enterprising earn a little money pumping tyres with the family bicycle pump. The girls collect twigs and dry leaves and grass to take home for fuel. The babies ride in neat wicker chairs strapped to the carriers of their mothers’ bicycles, often almost extinguished under a large straw hat …
Two nations – the cadres and the rest – co-exist in North Viet-Nam. In the State shop one counter sells precious bicycle spares to cadres at specially low prices, and supplies never run out. Another counter sells the same range to the public who do not hold cadre ration cards: charges are higher, the goods are often not available … To the Viet-Namese the concept of some pigs more equal than others is not new …
Only a very strong and enduring people could survive, and with such pride and energy, the unremitting struggle that must be needed merely to stay alive in North Viet-Nam. It is almost impossible to imagine how it is done, on an average wage, with allowances, of 70 Dong a month to feed a family of four, on a staple diet of rice and farinaceous food, supplemented by minute quantities of sugar, meat and fat. Yet the miracle of self-respect and survival is performed every day. The houses belonging to the collective masters, are crusted with grime, but each window has its hanging garden, carefully tended, and on holidays shirts are white, and the children have firecrackers. On days of socialist labour or of emulation, when the whole population turns out to mend the dykes or carry earth for roadworks, the people are gay: they probably find such events a great deal less boring than the solemn and drab little street meetings conducted by the cadres on most evenings. Though it would be difficult to think of a place more totally devoid of diversion and amusement for the population than Hanoi, young teachers and medical assistants are constantly working their way back to the city from the horrors of village life, even in the Delta, with cries of nostalgia for the lights of Town …
When I arrived here 13 months ago buffaloes grazed on the grass in front of the Consulate-General, the factory defence militia practised unarmed combat and grenade throwing there, an occasional battered cyclo-pousse2 creaked past carrying a family and its chattels, and at night the bats swooped and the cicada were noisy. None of this has changed. But the sentry outside the Algerian Embassy has planted a garden round his sentrybox, Hanoi is full of new lorries, the shape of Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum is under debate, and the State Plan for 1970 has allowed the Residence roof to be mended; my successor will not need to catch the drips in the drawing room. A new kitten appeared at the Residence this month, and may one day kill rats if it survives. We have moved a few steps out of Limbo for we have been allowed to travel, and perhaps even hell is a little less hot than before. The children are back from the country and Hanoi is a year further from the war. I do not yet know, and neither do the Viet-Namese, whether that means they are a year nearer to peace.
I am sending a copy of this despatch to Her Majesty’s Representatives in Saigon, Washington, Paris, Moscow, Vientiane, Phnom Penh, Bangkok, Peking, Tokyo, Canberra, Wellington and Ottawa and to the Political Adviser to the Commander-in-Chief at Singapore.
I have, etc.,
DAPHNE PARK.
‘I am content to be dismissed as a disgruntled maverick’
KEITH HASKELL, HM AMBASSADOR TO THE
FEDERATIVE REPUBLIC OF BRAZIL, 1999The KCMG (Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George) is often the gong given to diplomats for long and loyal service to Queen and country, especially if they have served as Head of Mission to an important country. Eighteen of Keith Haskell’s nineteen immediate predecessors as Ambassador to Brazil were made Sirs, as was his immediate successor. But Haskell retired in 1999, after thirty-eight years’ service, without the customary honour.
Reading his valedictory it is not hard to find possible cause for this omission. The despatch came in two parts, one of which bore the eye-catching title ‘WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE DIPLOMATIC SERVICE’. Among the litany of organizational failings Haskell describes are that his bosses in Whitehall lack relevant experience and should have their jobs abolished, that many ambassadorial appointments were blatant stitch-ups, and that the Foreign Office had too many elected ministers who were a burden to serve. Haskell sent his despatch to all diplomatic posts, a readership of several thousand.
Whether merited or not, the long list of charges the ambassador lays at the door of the FCO bureaucracy amply supplies something which government ministers say they value above all in reporting from British diplomats in the field, and that is candour.
INFO ROUTINE HM TREASURY, DTI, DFID,ECGD, BANK OF ENGLAND INFO ROUTINE WASHINGTON, UKMIS GENEVA, UKREP BRUSSELS
SUBJECT: BRAZIL VALEDICTORY
I leave Brasilia and the Service today, after over 4 years in Brazil … It is the fifth largest country in the world, with the fifth largest population, 2700 miles from north to south and the same from east to west. I am proud to be the first British Ambassador (and possibly the first from any country) to visit all its 27 States. Much of my time has necessarily and rightly been spent with leading businessmen in Sao Paulo and Rio. But I have also visited the Yanomami (often described as the world’s most primitive people) in the jungles of Roraima. I have swayed to the emotion of a 100,000-strong football crowd in the Maracan Stadium. And dressed in shocking pink tights and a costume bedecked with huge sea-shells and mermaids, I have paraded with a top samba school during the Carnival in Rio. So my experience is broader than that of some less active colleagues, who spend their time immured in this remote and artificial capital.
When I first came to South America in 1975, it did not present an attractive picture. Virtually all its major countries suffered from military dictatorships, closed economies, bloated bureaucracies, corruption and widespread abuses of human rights. The continent was rightly low on the list of priorities for British government and business alike. But there has been a profound change in the ensuing two decades … So it is a pity that perceptions in London have often not caught up with reality. Partly this is because so few people have actual experience of South America. We have had some 20 Ministerial visitors, from Governments of both major British parties, since my arrival: to the best of my recollection, every one was a neophyte. More significantly, all were surprised by the size and sophistication of Brazil: especially its southern cities, which resemble Barcelona or Naples far more than the cities of other Third World countries. The Chairmen and Chief Executives of major British companies, when they can be persuaded to forsake their usual haunts, feel likewise. Unfortunately, governmental policy seems often to be driven by officials with no knowledge or understanding of today’s Brazil.
Brazil’s current President, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, is very good news for Brazil … a look at where Brazil stood when he took office on 1 January 1995 will show how much has been achieved in rolling back the boundaries of the state, privatisation, facilitating foreign investment and stabilising the currency … Progress would have been even faster were it not for the austerity measures imposed on the country by successive phases of the Asian economic crisis, culminating in the enforced devaluation of the Real last January. Though at that moment the future looked bleak, I was confident that Brazil would weather the storm and said so. This led Treasury and other commentators in London to criticise this Embassy’s reporting as unsound. It is a matter for some satisfaction that hindsight has proved us completely right, and I hope this will be remembered the next time pundits in London reach an unjustifiably gloomy assessment of a situation which they do not properly understand …
SUBJECT: VALEDICTORY: WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE DIPLOMATIC SERVICE
When I joined the then Foreign Service in 1961, its members serving overseas were paid only four times a year. Those working in London had their offices heated by open coal fires. Even quite large posts endured the drudgery of enciphering and deciphering telegrams with code books and one-time pads. Ambassadresses whose role models were the memsahibs of the Raj were at liberty to tyrannise junior members of the staff and their wives (note: wives, not spouses: a female officer who married had to resign from the Service). Close protection teams were unknown, but the first Embassy in which I served had a cupboard full of ancient .303 rifles and .45 pistols with which to defend ourselves against riot and revolution, like our predecessors in the Legation at Peking during the Boxer Rebellion.
So I am aware of and appreciate the benefits of change. But in recent years change seems to have been increasingly in the wrong directions …
EXCESSIVE CENTRALISATION AND BUREAUCRACY
The FCO has five full-time Ministers: far more than other countries of comparable importance find necessary. It is of course true that British Ministers carry a far greater burden of Parliamentary and constituency duties than their counterparts elsewhere. It is also true that it is helpful to have Ministers who can specialise in certain geographical areas and types of work, (though the advantage is lessened if they have little power to take decisions). But servicing this plethora of Private Offices carries a bureaucratic cost.
On the official side, the picture is the same. The PUS1 has five Deputies (not counting the Legal Adviser): other Foreign Ministries find it possible to manage with three, for political, economic and administration issues. Except for the occasional self-contained task (such as the creation of British Trade International), for which a temporary appointment could easily be made, the other two DUS2 posts add little value and could be eliminated, with their functions transferred to Director level.
Reducing the number of DUS posts would also enforce reform of the Board of Management, which to judge by the reports of its deliberations sent to overseas Posts has no clear role to fulfil. It would also enforce changes to the No 1 Board, which recommends appointments to the highest ranked and most desirable Missions. If the Board were to include Ambassadors from one or two European posts (or from further afield on leave) and, even better, some outside members, it would be in less danger of appearing like a self-perpetuating oligarchy. A similar reform would be desirable for the other Boards as well. The further one travels from London, the stronger one finds the suspicion that their decisions tend to be taken on a wink and a nod, and candidates serving overseas are disadvantaged …
[T]he bureaucratic load overall has greatly increased. As Ambassador in Lima, with a total of 9 UK-based staff of whom only 6 were from the DS,3 I once counted up the number of reports, returns, forms and other pieces of paper which the 9 of us annually had to complete and send back. Including all the paperwork connected with the accounts, and individual items like family certificates and applications for children’s journeys, the total was 3700. One bag brought us news that the Annual Personnel Security Certificate had been dispensed with, but that after our monthly consular visit to the 6 British drug-smugglers in jail a single report on their condition was no longer acceptable: we had to report separately on each. Down 1, up 60.
POOR RELATIONS WITH OVERSEAS POSTS
I do not want to return to the days of book cypher or the unlovely and temperamental Noreen. But the speed and capacity of modern communications systems creates a temptation to micro-manage which few Directors or Heads of Department can resist. Heads of Mission are no longer given general guidance on what to say and do and encouraged to use their initiative: they are told in precise detail exactly what to say, when and at what level. This adds to the burden of staff in London, who spend longer and longer hours drafting ever more detailed instructions and lines to take, while leaving those in the field feeling no better than a ventriloquist’s dummy. ‘You spoke well’ was a frequent accolade in the days when an Ambassador had to rely on his own intelligence and understanding: it is rare nowadays because the scope for initiative is rare …
I suspect that part of the problem lies in the limited overseas experience of senior officials in London. The FCO has 6 members of the Board of Management and 13 Directors (excluding non-career staff). Only one of the 19 has ever served in Latin America (a single posting to Havana 30 years ago), and 3 in Africa. But 12 of the 19 have been in Brussels, 5 in Washington and 5 in New York: and 9 of them (almost 50 percent) have spent more time in London than overseas. Properly to understand the difficulties of small posts, you have to serve in one …
CONCLUSION
I have addressed this despatch to all classified posts not out of vanity, but because the issues I have mentioned tend to be muttered about in private rather than stated openly in public: this inhibits reform. I hope that as many readers as possible will tell the Administration whether or not they agree in general with my criticisms. If they do, the Administration may for once have to take note. If not, I am content to be dismissed as a disgruntled maverick.
38 years is more than long enough to spend in a single job. I am lucky in that while quite a lot of it has been physically dangerous, much has been fun and very little has been boring. Like so many of my colleagues, I owe a truly enormous debt of love and gratitude to my wife, who has stood by my side in every situation from State banquets to a fusillade of pistol shots from a Libyan revolutionary (he missed). We now have time to stroll together and smell the roses (and perhaps slash the heads off a few more nettles …) .
HASKELL
‘A torpedo and a burning deck’
GEOFFREY CROSSLEY, HM ENVOY
EXTRAORDINARY TO THE HOLY SEE, MARCH 1980My thirty-seven years on the Foreign (and Commonwealth) Office pay-roll have been rich at least in adventure and incident. I recall a torpedo and a burning deck, typhoid, a Jewish terrorist attempt to bomb the Paris Embassy, a Greek guerrilla minefield, Malayan jungle snipers, a meeting on the coast of the South China Sea with Norodom Sihanouk1 campaigning against communist guerrillas, a glide up the Laotian Mekong in the Royal Pirogue, the receipt in my German letter-box of a sample of excrement in a paper bearing a swastika, involvement in the frustration of Qassim’s attempt to grab Kuwait,2 being blown off the air-strip while landing in a tropical storm in Nigeria, being hit over the head in a howling mob of Zanu terrorists on my lawn in Zambia, saving the child of the French Ambassador from a crocodile infested river, drifting on the Zambesi with broken-down engine towards the Victoria Falls, and oh how they thundered, practising pistol and machine gun fire with my guards in Colombia, and hoping for the best in a harassed Rome. Our service still offers lively adventure in addition to work which as well as being varied is particularly rewarding to those who remember that diplomacy is about people.