Chapter 7 of Craig Murray’s book describes his first serious skirmish with the FCO, over a speech he makes about human rights.

By the date of the speech he has been in Uzbekistan exactly 56 days. His nonetheless bold aim:

… to fracture what I believed had become a conspiracy of silence by the West on human rights in Uzbekistan and to outline a distinctive British position in favour of democracy and reform which made it plain that we did not simply follow the United States.

Hmm.

What ‘conspiracy’, and what silence? A distinctive British position? Or a distinctive Murray position? Not necessarily the same thing?

Already he is falling out with his ‘lead’ department in the FCO, Eastern Department. His description of them is … let me choose my words carefully … utterly ridiculous:

… stilted working practices of a previous century … obsessed with the need to prevent the Uzbeks from knowing what we were thinking … old Sovietologists remained steeped in the paranoid culture of the Cold War…

Why is this utterly ridiculous?

Three reasons.

First, the Department would not have been full of ‘old Sovietologists’. Indeed if anything there are not enough of them around these days, hence our recent misjudgements over Putin/Kosovo/Georgia.

Second, as Craig himself puts it (p 37) the Uzbek regime left the USSR to keep the Soviet system, not to destroy it. So maybe some residual Cold War instincts back in London were going to come in handy?

Third, as Craig will have known the department had access to far more information than he had about Uzbek and ex-KGB type attempts to attack his Embassy’s security. If he wanted to be taken seriously in London, he in turn had to respect their views in this area, even if it made life awkward at times.

Craig breezily tries to gloss over this point, telling them that:

I knew my emails were almost certainly being intercepted [by the Uzbeks] … that was all to the good: it would save me the effort of telling them.

No.

Useful now and again, of course. I used the same technique in Sarajevo. But in principle a professionally trite and personally self-defeating approach, the more so if disagreements start to appear over Policy, when the Uzbeks will quickly grasp that Craig does not enjoy London’s full authority.

Craig’s plummet from FCO grace has quite a lot to do with communications problems of all sorts.

Basically (as I understand it), he did not have a Confidential email system. He did have an Unclassified FCO email system (which in Tashkent’s circumstances could not have been regarded as secure) plus a separate more cumbersome system for sending Confidential and even higher rated Telegrams.

This was a real disadvantage to Craig (as it was to many other Embassies at that point, ie while the new CONF systems were being installled one by one round the globe). By then the FCO Main Building/Whitehall was operating primarily on CONF email, so he was ‘out of the loop’ for many normal purposes.

It all comes down to cost, of course. Installing a CONF email system in a tough place like Uzbekistan and then keeping it secure meant heavy new security measures and (probably) building works by UK contractors.

A pity that the book does not make all this clear – and tell us what (if anything) both sides did to address these real communication issues sensibly.

Professional Judgement Rating: 2/10.  Fatuous attitude right from the start of his posting evinced towards key colleagues in London, whom he needed to get on-side if he wanted to achieve anything during his tour. (NB Diplomacy starts with one’s own colleagues). Plus flippant approach to security, potentially a serious problem. Commendable intention to stake out a firm public UK position on human rights – but needs to be careful not to get out on a limb in policy terms.

Next: that Craig Murray speech.