So on towards the policy core of Craig Murray’s Murder in Samarkand – his policy disagreement with the FCO over torture and the War on Terror.

In Chapter 9 Craig describes an EU human rights Ambassadorial demarche. I have analysed the genre here.

His description bears out my earlier point, that these laboriously conceived group Ambassadorial representations are in fact less effective than successive private individual meetings. They even may be counter-productive.

In this case the French Ambassador makes a studiously perfunctory protest on behalf of the European Union to the new Uzbekistan Foreign Minister. Craig (properly) weighs in afterwards, pressing some sharper points about the serious unfairness of legal processes in Uzbekistan to his EU colleagues’ evident distaste.

Helpful outcome of this exercise? Nil. If anything it will have made the Uzbeks sneer at the EU even more. EU Junk diplomacy.

Subsequently Craig is asked for his views on a UK-funded project paying for proper court transcripts, a limited but not unuseful attempt to bring some transparency and accountability to the Uzbek courts system. Should a pilot project be rolled out elsewhere in the country? Craig points out that so far not a single acquittal has been reported from courts using this service. He decides not to extend the scheme, as it risks giving the Uzbek authorities a veneer of respectability while achieving nothing positive.

An interesting moment, since it brings out the Limits of Diplomacy in chipping away at repressive regimes. If initiatives like this do not show results straight away, what else might? Over what timescale is success measured?

Craig does not really go into this key dilemma in his book. A pity, since it is central to the issue of what diplomacy – and indeed Ambassadors – can hope to achieve in such tough circumstances.

One of his UK staff (the man who was reported as fighting with his next-door neighbour) temporarily ‘loses it’ after hearing graphic accounts of torture. Craig does not tell us how if at all he reported that episode to London and if not, why not – the colleague concerned seemed to be getting dangerously stressed out, for one reason or the other.

Craig is seeing intelligence material from MI6, passed to them by the CIA who had got it from the Uzbek intelligence services.  Sure that at least some of this material must have been extracted by torture and that it is illegal under international law to receive or use such material, he decides to send a ‘hard-hitting telegram’ to London about it, forcing the issue to Ministers’ personal attention.

He makes what seems to me to be a perfunctory check with the US Embassy about their view on the matter (ie he sends a colleague to ask them, but does not go and see the US Ambassador privately to talk the issue through – perhaps because he was too obnoxious with the US Ambassador when they first met?).

And he sends off his Top Secret ‘bullet’ telegram, which presses the case for stopping receiving any intelligance material probably obtained from Uzbek torture and insists that even to receive such material regularly amounts to being ‘complicit’ in that torture (UN Convention against Torture, Article 4). Ministers could, he argues, be in breach of the law if they failed to act.

This telegram, Craig says, hit the target. High-level meetings were held to discuss the issues it raised. But all he achieved was "to increase to sizzling point the hostility towards me at the senior levels of the British government and particularly from the intelligence services".

A key moment in the whole story is reached.

Until this point little evidence is offered by Craig that he is generating serious if any ‘hostility’ at a higher level. What changes this? His message or his behaviour?

I suspect both.

As he describes this telegram in the book, it was couched in pretty combative terms and sent from a posting where he was far from the core circle of decision-makers on any of the issues he raised. Craig must have known nothing whatsoever about any policy and legal deliberations in London about the use of intelligence possibly extracted by torture by evil foreigners. By his own account his understanding of the legal position was based on a chance conversation with one academic expert.

Basically, he plonked down on senior London desks a fiery telegram sent by someone with relatively low authority in the hierarchy who was unsighted on key aspects of the issues he was raising. Top officials and especially Ministers just don’t like it when someone far from their vantage-point of the wider picture (and at post for only a few months) tells them in tabloid-style language that they are being negligent or callous. Funny, that.

What else might Craig have done?

I think he was right to raise the issue frankly. I did not do so, as my own preoccupation at the time was helping the new democratic leadership in Belgrade deal with the aftermath of Milosevic. Nor was I confronted with any of these torture issues, other than helping the Serbian government identify corpses found in the river after Milosevic’s massacres in Kosovo. The War on Terror and its intelligence evidence issues were far away.

But the way Craig raised it was clumsy, unwise and unhelpful. He could (for example) have sent a much less intemperate and more quizzical private letter to the Permanent Under Secretary, copied as necessary to key Private Offices of Ministers, and asked to return to London for a meeting with the PUS to discuss his professional concerns.

An approach of that sort would have made his core arguments ring much more credibly and constructively back at HQ. It would have helped him position himself as bidding to be part of the solution – an inner core, serious, responsible person at one key diplomatic coal face of these profoundly complex issues. A colleague offering intelligent partnership with those in London, not sending them ‘bullets’.

Craig in this chapter mentions approvingly the 2005 House of Lords judgment about the use in British deportation proceedings of evidence possibly extracted by torture, as if this judgment somehow vindicates his stance.

This important judgment shows that his basic understanding of the law was (not surprisingly) just Wrong. The Law Lords showed great understanding of the policy and operational dilemmas faced by democratic governments in dealing with foreign-sourced information which might be poisoned by torture. Far from saying that the government should not receive it, they pointed out that they would be wrong to ignore it if it led to vital new information about threats to British lives – a blow for common sense.

So insofar as Craig was encountering ‘sizzling hostility’ from senior colleagues in London then and afterwards, in my view he was primarily to blame himself for not working in a reasonable and disciplined way.

See also Brian Barder, who in 2006 looked in great detail at these questions and reached what I think is a broadly similar view.

Professional Judgement Rating: 2/10

Right idea, clueless delivery. It is not enough to be passionate and principled. You have to be (at least mainly) right – and convincing.

By taking such a confrontational stance vis-a-vis his own colleagues, Craig significantly narrowed their options and his own. As an Ambassador you are expected to show Judgment in both style and substance. Craig in this chapter in his own words shows just why the FCO was right to start to conclude that he was deficient on both counts.