Diplomatic Anecdotage E-Book

Sir Roger Carrick

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 624

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

From Bulgaria to Berkeley, Indonesia to Australia, Roger Carrick has travelled the world as an English diplomat. He was shadowed by the secret police in Sofia, witnessed the 1968 riots in Paris, befriended Shirley Temple at Stanford University and negotiated the withdrawal of British troops from Singapore. In between he rose to the heights of ambassador to Indonesia and High Commissioner to Australia. All in a day's work for a distinguished diplomat. Diplomatic Anecdotage is a reflection on his career and on the ups and downs of diplomatic life. By turns witty and thoughtful, it is an absorbing and appealing read and a unique behind-the-scenes look at diplomacy in action. It is also an account of a changing world, whose author has played a discreet role in shaping its course.

Leseprobe

First published 2012 by Elliott and Thompson Limited

27 John Street, London WC1N 2BX

www.eandtbooks.com

ISBN: 978-1-907642-55-5

This electronic edition published 2012

by Elliott and Thompson Limited

epub: 978-1-907642-94-4

mobi: 978-1-907642-95-1

PDF: 978-1-907642-96-8

Text © Sir Roger Carrick 2012

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders for images used within this book. Where this has not been possible, the publisher will be happy to credit them in future editions.

The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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This book is for Hilary, without whom the story would have been impossible, and with whom it has been a lasting joy; and for John and Charles, who contributed much and coped admirably with the drawbacks of our peripatetic life.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1

The Beginning, in Bulgaria: Legation

Chapter 2

More Cold War Diplomacy

Chapter 3

Bulgaria: Embassy

Chapter 4

Some Higher Diplomacy: Posting to Paris

Chapter 5

Singapore: Diplomacy for Change

Chapter 6

Sabbatical at University of California, Berkeley

Chapter 7

Counsellor and JIC Representative, British Embassy, Washington

Chapter 8

Consul-General, Chicago

Chapter 9

London Appointments: Desk Officer to Under-Secretary

Chapter 10

Ambassador to Indonesia, Land of Complex Diplomacy

Chapter 11

High Commissioner to Australia: Managing a Full, Friendly and Frank Relationship

Chapter 12

Reflections post hoc, and a Partial Look Forward

INTRODUCTION

I thought I had invented the word ‘Anecdotage’ until I recently came across a quotation attributed to Disraeli: ‘When a man falls into his anecdotage, it is a sign for him to retire from the world’. With respect, it is too early for me.

It was a Royal Marine officer, visiting my grammar school in late 1955 to explain National Service to the sixth form, who first caused me to realise how best to advance my ambition of joining the then Foreign Service. He explained that a small number of particularly fortunate young men were recruited each year into the Royal Navy for National Service. Five a year would become upper yardsmen – cadet officers. Others would learn Russian to a high standard and, if successful in examinations, would work for Naval Intelligence. Since two years’ National Service was a requirement for all fit young men (and it had genuine appeal for me) this route, if it could be achieved, would be both a bargain and a help towards joining the Foreign Office. Despite emotional pleas from my mother, who had lost a Royal Navy submariner brother during the First World War, and with the helpful advice of my father that I had a rather distant cousin who was a naval officer, I duly registered for the Royal Navy. The Navy selected its Russian students before they were allowed to join, in contrast to the Royal Air Force and Army who selected theirs only after basic training; so with the Royal Navy, one could have some certainty about the following two years. The advance medical examinations, language aptitude tests and interviews went well, the last perhaps in particular because I could name a family connection ‒ with the cousin so distant that we did not meet until over fifty years later, since when knowing Colin Harris has proved a real pleasure.

The examinations and interviews for my Diplomatic Service entry grade successfully behind me, the Foreign Office (FO) thoughtfully asked me to spend a very short time in the Office in September 1956 before I joined the Navy. This meant 11 days trying to help out in the Levant division, as the support staff for the Arabists in the Levant department was known. For those remarkable 11 days I was paid £11; the lowest salary point on the relevant entry grade pay-scale then being £365 p.a. After induction into the most basic procedures, I was allowed to certify the craziest of the huge quantity of letters to the Foreign Office about policy towards Suez as not worth the time and effort of replying: they then were filed in one of a long series of boxes marked LU (for ‘lunatic’, I supposed). My chief recollections, however, are of the demeanour and concern of the desperately worried but impressively calm Arabists as they laboured to advance their view of the deep folly of the Suez policy then being worked out at the highest level of government. It quickly became clear to me how inimical to real British interests it would be to take on Nasser in the way Eden planned, and alongside France and Israel. It was a privilege to be shown an historic document in the Levant department: a last-ditch attempt by senior officials to persuade the prime minister against his intent. This was a round robin, signed in a circle of senior names to demonstrate unanimity and to disguise hierarchy of signature. Among the mainly Foreign Office signatories were a few senior Treasury mandarins; a rare coalition indeed, and deeply impressive. Of course, the last-ditch effort was of no avail.

Basic training in the Royal Navy at Portsmouth was short and pleasant, evidently in contrast to the experience of many in the other two services. I recall playing rugby, enjoying coach drives to and from matches, learning a little of naval history and practice, very little drill and only two serious parades, or ‘divisions’. We were trained to use a Bren gun in hot climates since, the demands of the Russian course notwithstanding, we were expected to go to Suez, arriving in landing craft to fight in pursuit of that so wrong-headed policy. Instead of Suez, there was, in the event, a short course in radio theory, and a few of us joined ships for a NATO exercise radar system. The system had been developed and fitted in three ships in time for the exercise, but no one had thought to train operators, and we National Service Russian students were thought able to learn quickly. Our brief training presented no problem. Three of us travelled to the Clyde to join HMS Sheffield, the Second World War veteran ‘Shiny Sheff’, predecessor of the Sheffield burned and sunk in the Falklands conflict. There was only one problem of which we were aware aboard the ship, but it was a serious problem. As mere probationary Coders (Special) we were unable to persuade the bridge that our (accurate) reports of positions of ‘enemy’ submarine periscopes briefly raised above sea level, and ‘over the horizon’, were credible. Officers of the midnight watch had not been briefed on the capabilities of the then highly classified new radar and, despite our protestations, did not believe the range we very junior ratings were reporting. Neither would they awaken the captain, whom we knew was ‘cleared’ and fully briefed. In consequence, our ship was ‘sunk’. I should like to have been present at the post-exercise ‘wash-up’.

Next came the Joint Services School for Linguists (JSSL) outside Crail in Fife, Scotland and an intensive and very well taught Russian course, whose length had been first reduced from 14 to 11 months, and then to the 7½ months we were allowed. That was my first experience of the power, influence and effectiveness of the ‘bean counters’ in the Treasury. I was awakened one night in the mess by a shower of naval boots hurled to stop me chanting Russian irregular verbs far too loudly in my sleep. I scraped through the Russian exams and, despite the collaboration in that ineffectual yet impressive round robin, have been prejudiced against HM Treasury ever since. Indeed I found throughout my Diplomatic Service career, little reason to alter my animus.

I much enjoyed the pure Royal Navy aspects of National Service, which were a sharp change from learning Russian. The naval staff at JSSL were all friendly, but the natural, swift and sometimes devastating sense of humour of the lower deck is especially memorable. Most weeks at JSSL, we Coders(Sp) broke away from linguistic endeavour to do something naval for some 40 minutes – seamanship, dismantling Bren guns, or a drill of some kind. Late one Sunday night before an early morning rifle drill, and after Russian homework was done, two of us were challenged to race down the long mess, hand-over-hand along two pipes suspended high against the ceiling. My competitor was David Fairhall, later a journalist, including as defence and shipping correspondent of the Guardian. Quite soon in the race we both learned that the pipes carried the hot water: they were unlagged and seemed (in those less energy-conscious days) to contain steam. Yet we carried on, but fast. I cannot recall who won (so it was probably David) but we both left large shreds of skin from our hands on the two pipes. Next morning we paraded before the drill instructor, a three-badge petty officer called Mangham, who told us he had been sent to JSSL as a punishment, and was still trying to work out what he had done quite so wrong. David and I showed PO Mangham our hands and explained that we were fit neither to drill with a rifle, nor to do justice to his ‘power of command’ – of which he was particularly proud. ‘Ah,’ said the good PO, ‘I know what that is: that’s a self-inflicted wound – and in this man’s navy a self-inflicted wound is a chargeable offence.’ ‘Self-inflicted? Petty Officer,’ we protested, ‘we’re not masochists!’ The reply came instantly: ‘I don’t care if you’re ruddy Greek Orthodox, it’s a chargeable offence’.

Service outside Kiel in northern Germany followed JSSL, and featured many hours of listening on headphones, recording and transcribing Russian in a small contribution to the prosecution of the Cold War. There was the occasional real excitement, for example when well-guarded Russian ‘trawlers’ anchored in the Kiel Fjord, just off our base, to try to monitor what we were doing. (Three or four of us monitored them at dead of moonless night, using black-painted canoes and paddles, black clothes and our eyes and ears, the latter once pressed to the hull to surprisingly useful effect.) That tour of busy duty also permitted just a little time to see something of Germany and Austria. The British Kiel Yacht Club close by our base provided a first-class 13-week spare-time course in sailing with a rigorous qualifying examination at its end. Success in that both allowed me, as a ‘Baltic Helmsman’, to skipper former German Navy ‘windfall’ ‘30-square’ yachts and sail them to such delightful ports as Sønderborg in Denmark. That happy experience engendered a lifelong love for sailing – a love later pursued and fulfilled in many parts of the world.

Curiously, I did not carry into civilian life the then Royal Navy practice, begun in 1655, of drinking rum. ‘Up Spirits’ was ‘piped’ at 1100hrs every morning. Senior rates and officers drank theirs neat if they wished. We on the lower deck had ours diluted – two of water to one of rum. That meant one-eighth of a pint of reputedly 95.5% Caribbean rum with a quarter of a pint of water. I was sure that it was the rum that kept me fit during a fierce winter in east Fife – where the icy wind evidently blew straight from Siberia in, some thought, a Soviet Russian plot. Oddly perhaps, I was not more than usually cross with the Treasury for having reduced the cost of the Russian course further by decreeing that we should be among the first Coders(Sp) not to be promoted to midshipmen on passing the interpreter examination near the end of the course – we became merely leading Coders(Sp). I was rather more moved by the Treasury conspiracy, as many believed it to be, to coerce the Admiralty to end the rum ration, which, despite a long-waged rearguard RN action, finally disappeared on ‘Black Tot Day’ some years later.

National Service for me was a bargain. There was high quality language instruction and practice, sailing, an educative variety of naval experiences, and a taste of naval intelligence and the business of the Cold War. Those two years in the RN were, even more than then conceivable, an ideal preparation for of the rest of my career.

In the autumn of 1958, I joined establishment and organisation (E&O) department of the Foreign Office, where a number of new entrants at my level had their first jobs. The head of department was the delightful, able and original Laurie Pumphrey, who had been a private secretary to Prime Minister Clement Attlee. I saw Laurie again a few years later when he was counsellor in Belgrade and I a third secretary in Sofia. His last job in a distinguished career was (as Sir Laurence) HM ambassador to Pakistan. In E&O department I learned something of the craft of diplomacy, and met the salvation of my career, Hilary. We married in 1962. In those days, and for another decade, lady members of the Foreign Service who married, thereupon resigned – and did so without fuss or complaint at the rule. Hilary duly resigned, though while I took my allotted seven days’ marriage leave, she began to fulfil a written request sent by letter from the then foreign secretary, Sir Alec Douglas Home, to work on for a few weeks after her wedding. Such was the depth and breadth of Hilary’s extra security clearance that it took time to identify, clear and induct a successor. Later, as a diplomatic wife, Hilary was again, and for much longer, to prove a most useful exception to Foreign Office rules.

For the academic year before our first posting, the Foreign Office sent me to London University to learn Bulgarian. That was an exercise in conversion from the (really useful) Russian I had brought from the Royal Navy. The two languages share most of the Cyrillic alphabet, which was developed by two Greek-born brothers and monks, Cyril and Methodius, who lived in Bulgaria. Bulgarian and Russian share the roots of many words, all but three letters of the Cyrillic alphabet (named for Cyril), but little grammar and less pronunciation, though Bulgarian has a wealth of words of Turkish origin not found in Russian. However, Slavic philology was a bond, and it was possible to read all the pre-communist and often philosophical and charming Bulgarian prose and poetry. Due to the deeply thoughtful, understanding and expert guidance of Dr Vivian Pinto at London University, I successfully read a degree course in the one academic year, and thoroughly enjoyed doing so. Dr Methodie Kussef, a Bulgarian émigré of extraordinary gifts and style, who happily provided in his warm and welcoming Islington home both evening conversation lessons in his native language and invaluable insights into the Bulgarian national character. The Bulgarian section of the BBC Overseas Service was also welcoming and helpful, and encouraged me to broadcast a number of times in Bulgarian, the broadcasts also being recorded on vinyl discs – then the best available method.

Language exams and wedding over, Hilary and I left England for our first posting, the real beginning of our diplomatic career, in which, rather like the Church of England, the employer in those days benefited from two for the price of one. It was a fortunate and happy career: one of extraordinary variety; of failure and success; of heartache and fulfilment; of diplomatic adventure; of only very occasional deep concern that either I or the United Kingdom were wrong in analysis or foreign policy; of involvement in momentous decisions and events – and of fun … please read on.

CHAPTER 1

THE BEGINNING, IN BULGARIA: LEGATION

The year is 1962. Hilary and I were junior Diplomatic Service officers. Hilary had served in London and Geneva. I had completed National Service in the Royal Navy, spent three years in the Foreign Office learning something – a little – about the business of diplomacy, and an academic year at university doing a degree course in Bulgarian studies. We were married in September. In November we left Britain for our first diplomatic posting, to the British legation in Sofia, Bulgaria. I was to be the third secretary in chancery – the political section, the information officer and the cultural attaché. Hilary was now to be a diplomatic wife.

1962: the very height – or perhaps depth – of the Cold War, shortly after the Cuban missile crisis. As I saw our national position, only a few years after Suez, the United Kingdom was still coming to terms with a bipolar world. We had declining but still substantial colonial responsibilities around the world. We had important military and intelligence, trading and diplomatic assets and skills. Following the hard long grind of economic recovery after the Second World War, we were doing quite well in international trade and investment. We were playing a key role in prosecuting the Cold War, and in preventing it becoming a hot war. A posting to Bulgaria (a small cog of a country in the massive machinery of the Soviet bloc) – to a small diplomatic mission but a comprehensive one, offered the chance for some front-line diplomacy, albeit in a junior job.

1962: the worst winter in Europe for decades. We drove to Dover. Well before the present access roads to the harbour were built, we stopped there in a complete traffic jam. While it persisted I had time to buy a hat in Dunn’s and to have it steamed in the practice of the day to ensure a good fit and style. We boarded a car ferry to Calais and drove to our first post across a largely frozen Western Europe, through north-eastern France, Belgium, West Germany, over the Austrian alps, through Yugoslavia in worsening weather and over snowstorm-swept mountains on a pot-holed, even makeshift road to the Bulgarian border. In 1962 there were no road tunnels to help drivers through eastern Yugoslavia and modern Macedonia. Our proud new Morris Minor 1000, equipped with snow tyres and a snow shovel, and with most of our worldly possessions in the boot and on a roof-rack, carried us through the passes, once across fields for a few kilometres in preference to the road, and made it to Sofia in style. The conditions defeated other, bigger vehicles, including trains. Indeed, ours was the last motor vehicle into Bulgaria from the west until the following spring.

1962: the Bulgarians had not made a successful strategic decision for over 800 years. The centuries of oppression seemed to show in their demeanour. The Cold War raged and Bulgaria was now tied fast and close to the political apron strings of the Soviet Union. That, too, showed. At the first May Day parade we witnessed in Sofia, there was much mostly Soviet-made military hardware on display – for Western military attachés to count and analyse. The vehicles and endless squads of soldiers, members of communist youth organisations, schoolchildren and others paraded through the main square before the assembled party bosses, themselves dwarfed by huge pictures of Soviet and, in subordinate positions, Bulgarian party and government leaders. There were floats, amateurish constructions, including a crude and arrogant USSR display, indicating world dominance and adding, patronisingly, it seemed, and almost as an afterthought, ‘Greetings to the Bulgarian Communist Party’.

Bulgarian loyalty to the USSR was apparently total, ingrained, indoctrinated into each generation, beginning in the crèches. Nevertheless, we hoped that the devotion to the false god of communism was only skin deep, or at least penetrable with time and effort. We hoped that by providing, through the British legation, a window on the West, to demonstrate the advantages of real, British style freedom and democracy, we might achieve something. We might at least offer some hope to those Bulgarians who knew there was a better way for their country. The much debated disadvantages of democracy are as naught compared to the gross inefficiencies, oppressions and other evils of communism in practice. Such painstaking Cold War work was hard sledding, and we measured our successes with a fine Vernier gauge of diplomacy. We were a legation because, put simply, relations with Bulgaria were not good enough then to rate an embassy – and there were only four British legations in the world at the time.

Yet there were real plusses. Bulgaria is a beautiful country, known in the region as the Switzerland of the Balkans. It also has some wonderful Eastern Orthodox Church architecture. It has a chequered history, some suppressed by the communist government, some exaggerated, some distorted. There were some interesting and challenging modern problems between our two countries. I was to be something of a diplomatic dogsbody, but the political and cultural work I did meant that for me it was the best job in the legation. And having the language, I could explore and enjoy the countryside and get to know the people far better than most. (Despite the Bulgarian ban against listening and the not infrequent jamming of the signal from London, I did later meet a number of people who had heard me broadcast in Bulgarian from London on the BBC’s Overseas Service.)

And we had prepared. We had read everything on the approved reading list. There wasn’t much in English. We had also read those most diverting two slim volumes by Lawrence Durrell, Esprit de Corps and Stiff Upper Lip. A decade or so before we went to Sofia, Durrell served as a temporary information officer at the British embassy in Belgrade and drew on his experiences in Yugoslavia to write those wonderfully amusing stories. We laughed a lot, aloud, as we read the two books, and concluded that for the sake of comic effect, Durrell must have exaggerated these experiences. After a few months of diplomatic life in the Balkans, however, we knew that on the contrary, he must, in the modern phrase, have ‘dumbed down’ the stories to achieve some degree of credibility. Sad and funny, tragi-comic country though it was in many ways, Bulgaria was also our honeymoon posting, and we welcomed the adventure it promised.

The minister (in this usage a diplomatic rank one below ambassador) in charge of the legation was a strict, correct, but hardly a warm boss. He was a stickler for diplomatic protocol, of the old school. We diplomats in Sofia followed the ‘book’ on such arcane but then useful practices as leaving visiting cards, inscribed with letters such as p.r. (pour remercier), and without a corner turned down, in nineteenth-century practice; and on how and when to arrive at and leave diplomatic gatherings. The British legation was a severe but useful school in the lubricant ways of the language of protocol.

The day after our arrival in Sofia, Hilary and I were summoned to call on the minister and his wife, who were known formally and with no hint of irony in the office as ‘Leurs Excellences’, and referred to in internal minutes (memos) by the abbreviation ‘Ll Ee’. The summons was for sherry at 11am. During the interview (for that is how it felt), Their Excellencies’ Siamese tom-cat strode purposefully into the small drawing room to join us. I naturally bent to greet it, whereupon it attacked my hand with a paw, claws to the fore. For some strange reason, Osric’s words in Hamlet leapt to my mind as I attempted to draw back: ‘A hit, a very palpable hit’. But the cat scored again, firmly sinking another set of claws into my hand. As I straightened to stand, the cat did not let go, but subtly eased the pressure a little so that the incisions in my hand were long and deep as he slowly, archly, descended by way of my hand to the carpet, and stalked off triumphantly into a neutral corner. Neither of Their Excellencies made any noise of comfort or regret. As I sought to staunch the flow of blood, they offered neither bathroom nor first aid. Rather, they maintained an apparently contented silence, each smirking with evident pleasure at the cat. As Hilary later remarked, ‘No hand of friendship there’.

Some months later, early one morning in the office, I was summoned by the minister to be austerely and soundly censored for having sung American words to the British national anthem at a diplomatic musical evening the night before. I was guilty as charged, but what a silly charge: ‘My Country ’tis of Thee’ is an American song, admittedly patriotic, and a small gathering of Western diplomats were singing a number of songs around the piano being played after dinner in her residence by the American minister. (Eugenie Anderson, a fine public servant and noted concert pianist.) It would in my judgment, then and now, have been discourteous to have refused to sing the words we were given, even if the tune was derived from that of our own national anthem – via a German adaptation.

The British minister was also a stickler for correct British ‘Diplomatic Practice’ (the title of the Foreign Service’s then ‘bible’ on the subject). He once instructed me to draft for him a despatch on the Stalinist or otherwise Soviet-influenced background of the members of the Bulgarian cabinet. One might nowadays question the value of such a piece of research and work, but for the minister it then made sense, and would help his conduct of relations with senior members of this difficult and pretty obtuse communist government, and perhaps inform the Office in London. When I had completed the draft, I submitted it to him, complete with flagged references and tied in the regulation red tape, via his PA. He soon appeared in my office, bearing the bundle, laid it on my desk and said that he would not accept work presented in this sloppy fashion. He left. I thought hard. I checked that the flags were in alphabetic order, and all pinned safely with the points of the pins buried in the cardboard of the flags, as officially prescribed. Eventually, I picked up the papers, and moved the bow securing the red tape from the front to the back of the bundle. I took the bundle back into his office, and laid it on his desk. He looked, paused, and silently nodded his acceptance.

As already exemplified in our snow-swept journey across Europe, we had good cause to feel confident in our Morris Minor 1000. Very early in the spring of 1963, the legation needed someone to cross Bulgaria from Sofia in the west to the east, the Black Sea coast, to attend to a consular emergency in Burgas. There were no aeroplanes flying, nor trains running; and no one had made that journey by road since before the winter. The consul was a lady, single, of course, and did not speak Bulgarian – so Hilary and I took on the task, by Morris 1000. There were very few cars in Bulgaria, so it was no surprise that there were only two operational petrol (as opposed to diesel) stations in the capital city, and perhaps three more in the rest of the country. Where, and when, one could buy petrol, it was of distinctly low octane. While our Morris Minor was being manufactured in England, its cylinder head and pistons had therefore been modified to lower the compression ratio. Sometimes, particularly when the petrol station’s own tanks were low, water was present in the petrol pumped into our cars. The petrol naturally floated on top of the water, but from time to time water was drawn by the fuel pump out of the petrol tank, and, in winter, would freeze in the pumps or pipes overnight, or when waiting for the Queen’s messenger at Sofia railway station. At least, when cars would not then start, we knew the likely problem. Another less frequent, but embarrassing problem occurred when the water slopping around the bottom of the Morris Minor’s petrol tank mixed with air as the little car bounced along the bumpy roads; eventually a noticeable increase in the petrol consumption betrayed the fact that the petrol tank was rusting through. We had our perforated tank replaced in Denmark during a drive home for leave.

The day before we set off from Sofia for Burgas, we filled the tank with petrol. The weather was still wintry, and there was a lot of snow and ice about, so we also checked with the Bulgarian motoring organisation. This was a fledgling affair. The official said he was confident that we would have no difficulty driving across the country to Burgas. No doubt he, and the management of the hotel we booked, alerted our constant shadows, the so-called secret police, who followed Western diplomats everywhere in those days, and sometimes tried to ensure that we landed in trouble one way or another. That said, they could be helpful too, if, for example, we fell victim to a puncture, which, given the poor state of the roads, was not uncommon. This help was given on the implicit, unspoken, but clear understanding that if the secret police car had a puncture, then we would stop too, rather than drive off on our own having shed them and their pursuit. Given the state of their tyres, they had far more punctures than we, so if we stuck to the understanding, they had the better deal. This may be one reason why they often tailed us in pairs of cars. The secret police would vary from rear to front tail, and seek to confuse; but it was all too tempting for us to play tricks on them.

We set off early the following bitter cold morning and entered the broad central valley of Bulgaria. When we reached the Valley of Roses, where attar of roses is grown for the French perfume trade, we stopped. I strolled across the uncultivated strip, through one of the regular access gaps and behind the thick hedge protecting the rows of roses – for purposes of relief that were obvious. The Bulgarian secret policemen in the cars behind were evidently pleased by my action, since they decided to emulate it. Their Russian-built cars then had no heating, so to try to keep warm their occupants wore regulation issue ground-length overcoats with a dozen or so buttons down the double-breasted front. They probably also drank quite copiously from hot flasks, or cold bottles, in the cars. Six large Bulgarian secret policemen scrambled out of two Volga cars and made for the gap in the hedge 50 metres back down the road from us, undoing their buttons as they ran. I stood behind the hedge, striking, as it were, an attitude.

The timing of my next action was critical. When the moment seemed propitious, I ran fast from behind the hedge back to the Morris Minor, jumped in and closed the passenger door as Hilary let in the clutch and we tore off down the road eastwards towards Plovdiv. Our stratagem was a success. The secret policemen were caught, mid-stream, and, quite evidently, were collectively unsure what to do for the best. Some continued to do what they (but, despite all appearances, not I) had begun. Others, with a more panicky cast of mind, or possibly with a more highly tuned sense of duty, ran back to their cars, mid-stream or no mid-stream. We much enjoyed the sight, receding in the driving mirror, of those people behaving like scalded cats, until, in something passing for charity, but out of sight round a bend, we stopped and waited for them to catch up.

Much later that day, our secret police shadows had unaccountably disappeared. We were to learn, or to surmise, why. Notwithstanding the motoring organisation’s advice, driving conditions deteriorated sharply once we left Plovdiv. The road was frequently flooded – by muddy water: a couple of inches, then a few more, then less. We stopped and checked the map – a rudimentary and misleading map. The contours in particular, we later established, were inaccurate, whether for deliberate, if wildly overdone, military reasons, or due to simple incompetence, we could only guess. It looked from the map that we were at last beginning to climb into the hills, so we pressed on carefully. We were driving through some three inches of water (presumably from the Maritsa river, whose banks had not burst), when we noticed great chunks of ice floating in the floodwater. Before we knew it, we were propelled down into a huge hole, which the ice, swirling in a fierce local current, had gouged out right across the road. For years afterwards, I could still dream of the wave of yellow-brown water rolling up the bonnet of the Morris 1000 as we plunged down into the hole, some three or four feet deep.

I braked, of course. We graunched to a stop. The engine died. We were stuck in the bottom of the hole, with the little car’s nose pointed down as if in a steep kamikaze dive into a flooded crater. Hilary, resourceful as ever, scrambled into the back of the car and hoisted up from the well onto the back seat the expensive BBC radio monitoring equipment we usually carried, and saved it. I climbed out through the driver’s window, which I believe to be a practical impossibility, even in the two-door version Morris 1000 we had. I was certainly slimmer in early 1963, but to this day, I do not know how I managed it.

Landing in the icy water, I thought, initially, that it was not too bad. I had had the flu the week before, however, and by the time I reached the front of the car, the cold seemed to enter the marrow of my bones and I thought I might faint. I had had the idea of using the starting handle and reverse gear to wind the car out of the hole, but because the winding would have to be done under opaque water, I thought I should first try pushing. At such times, a reserve of energy seems to come from nowhere, and in the nick of time. I bent down and heaved the car – with Hilary aboard – back up out of the hole. I carried on pushing, and then winding, with Hilary steering, until we found some almost dry ground. After the no doubt medically unwise but uplifting action of taking some reviving nips – nay, slugs – from the bottle we carried in the boot, I changed out of wet clothes into something dry from the top suitcase. The same suitcase contained a dry towel that we had packed because Bulgarian hotels never then provided such luxuries: with it, I began the long process of swabbing and drying out the accessible parts of the engine and its electrics. There was, of course, no sign of our secret police shadows. They had presumably known what we had not known: that the Maritsa river, full but fairly gentle in summer, frozen through the winter, and now just threatening to melt, had been dynamited to prevent it from flooding Plovdiv; and that we would not make it along that road.

Some little time later, an ambulance especially equipped for floods, with a high raised body and engine, and long sharply sloping drive shaft and steering rod down to the axles, appeared from the other direction. I spoke to the ambulance driver. He readily accepted my advice to drive the ambulance into the field and widely to skirt the hole we had driven into. Before he continued his errand of mercy, I asked the driver to send a tractor or lorry and some help from the next village. Sure enough, a collective farm lorry soon arrived, full of chattering villagers. They jumped off the lorry and excitedly ran towards us, glad to have something to do, and possibly glad to be allowed to talk to a bourgeois capitalist Westerner. They rushed in a body for our little engine, and began to pull out all sorts of wires at once, upsetting my laborious but methodical work. I protested. They apologised, and helped more carefully. Then, suddenly, one pronounced the engine ready to fire, removed the oil cap, stuffed in a rag he had just before inserted into the fuel tank, and, pulling a box from his pocket, was about to put a match to the petrol-soaked rag. At this I shouted a swift and fierce negative. (Немоля, не! No, please, no!) He stopped, astonished. Did I not want the engine started? This was usually the way they started the collective farm lorries and tractors, he explained. I responded that they were fuelled by diesel, while this car had a petrol engine. Had he really meant to blow us all up? Petrol was clearly beyond their experience, but they backed away. We chatted a while, and later, when I thought the dangerous petrol had evaporated and we were ready, we returned to the car, turned it around with enthusiastic Bulgarian assistance, and the lorry gave us a tow to try to help the Morris 1000 start.

After half a mile or so, and several attempts, first one cylinder fired, then two. Eventually, after almost a mile, and via several lightly flooded areas, three cylinders fired, at which stage I cast off the tow and thanked our cheerful and successful saviours warmly. We drove several more miles before the fourth cylinder would fire (a good moment, that), and then fought our way the 150 miles or so back to Sofia through a snow and ice storm – and with our tails rather between our legs. Back at the legation, my failure to get through to the Black Sea coast and Burgas did not go down well. Next day, the car was taken into intensive care at the legation garage; the engine stripped down and overhauled, the carpets removed and cleaned, the whole vehicle refurbished – and a new hidden microphone and transmitter fitted so that the secret police could once again hear what was said in the car.

We did make it to Burgas shortly thereafter. The worst of the floods there subsided enough for the airport to reopen. We took the first, and dramatic, flight of the year. The early Tupolev aeroplane just scraped over the mountain tops. There were neither seat-belts, heating nor pressurisation. The aisle was full of extra passengers standing and hanging on to the luggage racks – giving the phrase ‘strap hanging’ a new meaning. Pigs and other livestock were crammed into the back few rows. Chickens flapped and tried to out-fly the aeroplane from inside it. Goats bleated. And the pigs made a loud squealing fuss about proving that they could fly. The flight culminated in a really soft landing, the wheels digging deep into the still very soggy ground, and mud plastering the underside of the fuselage. But we did reach Burgas and the consular emergency – just short of too late. The need was to help an old Bulgarian who had spent many years in the British Merchant Navy, and had acquired British nationality. He had had an accident, was seriously ill and the Bulgarian authorities were refusing free medical help because of his dual nationality. Only in Bulgaria, communist Bulgaria.

The fact that my earlier failure to reach Burgas did not go down well at the legation should not be thought to indicate that the British staff there were other than splendid people. The pressures, the peculiar difficulties and restrictions, and the extra care we had to take in all we did as diplomats working behind the Iron Curtain, could have been a real strain. Yet, for nearly all the time, far from lowering morale, those constraints operated as a stimulant to high morale and brought out the best in the fine people who were our colleagues.

Part of maintaining morale and enjoying life in communist Bulgaria was the fun we had at the expense of those Bulgarian secret police. On one occasion, Hilary and I and a colleague visiting from a Foreign Office research department were driving to Veliko Turnovo in our valiant Morris Minor. We stopped and changed drivers from time to time, sometimes in sight of our faithful followers in the Moskvitch behind, sometimes not. When it was Hilary’s turn to sit in the back of the Morris, we changed drivers out of sight, and without a word, lest it be transmitted to the Moskvitch, Hilary lay down on the back seat and covered herself with a blanket. After a while, it must have dawned on the police behind that they could now count only two occupants of our car. Where was the third, and what dastardly deed was the missing Western diplomat up to? What dreadful fate would befall the policemen when they reported to base? The Moskvitch overtook us, and all four secret police occupants tried to peer into our car. We made it difficult for them, and they were evidently confirmed in their fear that we had dropped one of our number somewhere along the way. We now had a front tail. We, in turn, overtook, and, with the rather more powerful car, drew away and lost our no doubt now seriously worried tail. Hilary removed the blanket and sat up. We drove fast to Turnovo, parked outside the hotel, hurried into the restaurant, sat and ordered lunch. Sometime later, four policemen rushed in, saw us, and, as they saw that we were three again, changed their expressions from fear to relief, wonderment, then to bafflement. They marched up to the desk in the lobby and interrogated the manager for some five minutes. It seems doubtful that they ever solved their conundrum, and we wondered what they reported to base. Only in communist Bulgaria.

I mentioned the hidden microphone in the car. Counter-measures against Bulgarian spying, eavesdropping and action by agents provocateurs occupied some of our time and effort. The Bulgarians were mostly well trained, presumably by the Soviet KGB, yet were sometimes curiously inept, sometimes brutal, sometimes surprising. One day, under cover of a noisy working lunch gathering, our visiting experts found a hidden microphone in the plaster of our dining room wall, neatly obscured by the white distemper. Our experts instantly began to extract it with the most sophisticated counter-intelligence tools of the day – club hammer and cold chisel. They exposed, grabbed and pulled the business end of the microphone, together with its attached wire. From the other side of the party wall, someone (we knew that a colonel in the secret police lived there) yanked both the wire and our man hanging on to it, back to the wall. Our man hauled back in turn, and a tug of war ensued. The microphone and our length of the wire went to a classified museum, not far from Milton Keynes. I do hope they are still there.

Bulgarian bugging of our premises was often more amusing than irritating. Our military attaché’s office was tapped via a hidden microphone and its wire concealed by the vertical weld in the drainpipe outside his window. I thought that one quite clever, but we found it – and our offices anyway had effective counter-measures. That military attaché’s predecessor had been declared persona non grata (in effect deported from Bulgaria) for photographing parked military aircraft from under a coat draped over his arm. His successor, our colleague, used to have confidential conversations in his garden on a winding walk among the shrubbery, rather than in his house which was surely heavily bugged. In the garden, our visiting experts found hidden microphones at appropriate intervals in the ground either side of where the military attaché and his interlocutors walked.

Then there was the administration officer’s wife. He was a former Army officer, on his second career; a good man. She was a classic loyal Army wife, and lovely. She was flabbergasted and deeply offended, not at the discovery of a microphone in their flat, but at its location – secreted in the bed-head. How could they?! (That discovery gave the phrase ‘pillow talk’ new meaning for us.)

Bulgarian plumbing was different, and in those days quite wonderful in its inefficiency. Our flat had been designed by a Swiss architect, who had ensured that the bathroom floor was tiled, sealed save only for the drain in the middle, and sunk three or four inches below the level of the rest of the flat. Thus when, as frequently happened, the complex valves on the water intake for the lavatory failed, and water under fierce (mains) pressure flooded the bathroom, little real damage was done – normally. However, late one Saturday night, when we returned from dinner exhausted by the effort of conversing for many hours in a couple of foreign languages, Hilary and I opened the door of the flat to find the carpets gently undulating and the entire flat under water. Ours was the first-floor apartment, and below us were garages and boiler room. Both had drains, so they could wait until morning. In rather less than good humour, we did what little we could in our flat to stop the flood and reduce the level of water. Just before giving up and splashing our way to a damp bed, I opened and addressed the rudimentary and crowded meter and fuse box in the roundest of lower-deck Bulgarian. I told the assembled fuses and other electrical paraphernalia in the cupboard precisely what I thought of Bulgarian plumbing under the People’s Republic; of the bureaucracy; the government; and, at some length and with a good deal of Saturday night colour, of the whole system of communism and the Bulgarian Communist Party. Hardly an exercise in conventional diplomacy, I readily admit. Yet, next morning, the front door bell rang early – very early for a Sunday. There on the doorstep was a Bulgarian workman, complete with a wonderful moustache and a Gladstone bag. He said he was from the Bureau for the Service of the Diplomatic Corps, and that he had been ordered to come because we urgently needed a plumber – that was he. Hidden microphones do have their uses, perhaps especially in communist Bulgaria.

Hilary and I, well trained, conducted no conversations of any value to any others in our home, in hotels, restaurants or shops, or in cars, including, of course, our Morris Minor. Hilary took a driving test in Sofia, but, by force of regulation, not in our car but in a Moskvitch. Most of the few cars in Bulgaria were those two basic Russian models, the Volga or the smaller Moskvitch. Motorists were thus expected both to encounter mechanical problems and to be able to solve them. The driving test therefore included a 45-minute formal oral examination on what went on under the bonnet; on basic automotive electrics and how to repair common faults as well as the Bulgarian equivalent of our highway code. For foreigners, an interpreter was permitted if needed, but no one who possessed a driving licence was allowed to interpret.

Hilary had driven for a year on an international licence, but the time had come for a test. Her kitchen Bulgarian, while useful and effective, was insufficient for this purpose. We took along one of the British legation’s best locally-engaged Bulgarian translators, Mrs Atanasova, whose job included this occasional duty. As a concession, I was allowed to sit in, but not to contribute – because I had a full licence. It soon became clear, in my view, that the rule about who was permitted to interpret was silly. Mrs Atanasova, skilled though she was in translating, simply had none of the Bulgarian vocabulary related to cars and driving – let alone the equivalent English words. I recall two simple examples. Poor Mrs Atanasova had no idea what the Bulgarian words for ‘indicator’ and ‘steering wheel’ – putepokazatel and kormiloto (пътепоказател and кормилото) – meant. Eventually I interceded and was allowed, under sufferance, to interpret. I soon learned that there was something in the rule after all. I was very tempted to translate an answer Hilary gave to one question about the minimum stopping distance for a car behind a stopped tram by giving in Bulgarian the figure of seven metres that I was sure was the answer. However, I just managed to resist the temptation and translated the figure Hilary had given – ten metres. ‘Точнотака’ (‘Correct’), said the examiner. I was not tempted again, and Hilary passed the oral with flying colours (‘безпогрешно’ – no mistakes). The practical part of the test included a short drive along a stony river bed and up a rough mountain road, normal enough for the outskirts of Sofia then. Hilary found no difficulty in passing a test a good deal more rigorous than any other test either of us has taken, before or since, anywhere around the world. Such were the scarcity of cars and motoring facilities in Bulgaria in the early sixties, that the rigour was more than justified. It has stood us in good stead ever since. So did our teaching ourselves how to skid on otherwise deserted, ice-bound cobbled roads in Sofia’s severe winters. We could waltz our Morris Minor down a wide road called Oborishte (УлицаОборище) – the place of the byre – while singing the ‘Blue Danube’ or the ‘Skater’s Waltz’. Only in Bulgaria.

I used to think of the Iron Curtain as also a curtain of ironies. Despite their generally passive demeanour, ordinary Bulgarians in those generally unhappy days could occasionally surprise us, and lift the heart – usually only in private. The death of President Kennedy in 1963 was, of course, a great public shock throughout the world. The British Diplomatic Service abroad went into strict court mourning for a week. Hilary could not wear her only black indoor garment – a cocktail dress – all day and all evening, so had to buy some of the only available and very poor quality East German black cloth from a Bulgarian government-run shop, and to make a suit, overnight. The cloth was so shoddy that the suit lasted exactly the week of Court mourning. The day following the appalling shooting in Dallas, Texas, Hilary and I drove up into the hills, and spent some quiet time walking around the grounds of a monastery at Dragalevtsi. We were of the generation that, despite incipient, even growing cynicism, saw Jack Kennedy as a hope for the succeeding generations, the young people of the world, and not just the then Free World. We returned to Sofia to find a most welcome surprise. The queue to sign the American legation’s book of condolence was huge, perhaps a kilometre long and three or four deep. The legation, entry to which for Bulgarians (as at the British Legation) was controlled by the Bulgarian militia on guard outside, was soberly yet warmly welcoming. Here was a window on the West indeed, but the terrible tragedy had so gripped the Bulgarians as they had heard the news on the radio, that they had flocked to express real grief and sympathy. To us this was an extraordinary sight and moment in the bitter Cold War. After the assassination, only hours earlier, we had felt hopeless. Now, the Bulgarians, of all repressed and depressed people, spontaneously, and in impressively large numbers, had made a singular and singularly important gesture and demonstration of genuine feeling. Out of the tragedy, they had conjured, for us, real hope: they renewed our confidence in what we were trying to achieve. Such a cheering and inspiring surprise could perhaps occur – only in Bulgaria.

British visitors to Bulgaria in the depths of the Cold War were very few. This was before the days of tourism, and visitors were either seriously misled ‘fellow-travellers’, or people we warmly welcomed: Queen’s messengers, or the very occasional British minister trying, usually in vain, to persuade the Bulgarians, where we diplomats had failed, of some argument in foreign policy. Despite the paucity of our national commercial efforts in Bulgaria then, we also, from time to time, could welcome British businessmen. There were several reasons why we tried so little to foster trade with communist Bulgaria. The Bulgarian economy was small, was constrained by its membership of the Soviet-dominated Council for Mutual Economic Assistance or ‘Comecon’, had little hard currency available for imports, was rarely interested in barter (nor, then, was nearly all of ‘UK Ltd’); and the Bulgarian government was prejudiced against trading with the West. A few deals were done, for example by the fine British company, Molins, who supplied a cigarette-making factory in Bulgaria with their machine tools and expertise; but deals were few indeed, and with those few, there were frequent problems with payment. Another reason was the attitude in the early 1960s of many in the then Foreign Service to commercial diplomacy. At that time, while, as I recall with professional envy, the West German commercial office in Bulgaria having six West Germany-based people pursuing with some serious success their country’s commercial interests, the British legation officially devoted only very limited time to commercial work in support of British companies. The British minister at the head of our legation, while explaining to me that I should stay away from anything like commercial diplomatic work, once actually used the infamous phrase, ‘gentleman do not dirty their hands with trade’. He said it with a slight smile, but he meant it. Fortunately the attitude and practice in the Service later changed radically, often to very good effect. Unfortunately, the effort has not always been sustained. The Service must not lose this skill or practice, and must always regard it as a high priority, whatever the predatory attacks upon the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s resources.

Some of us did welcome and try to help visiting British businessmen. A rather inexperienced, jejune, but very decent and well brought-up young British salesman came to Sofia to try his luck with the communist government purchasing agencies – the only way a foreign company could then sell anything in Bulgaria. The secret police were only too willing to invest in the opportunities these trips provided to set up the visitors for later blackmail. We ensured that the young man was warned. After his first day’s work, and dinner with one of us, he went back to his hotel room – to find a bright and beautiful blonde in his bed. Affronted, he threw her out. Next night, the Bulgarians tried a sultry brunette. Even crosser, our hero threw her out too, in something of a temper. So, on the third evening, he surely could not have been surprised when he found waiting for him a rampant red-head. As I recall his account, his rage as he threw her out must have been terrific to behold … unwise, but terrific. We warned him again. By his next and last night he really thought the Bulgarians would have given up. Not a bit of it. And when he found the fresh-faced young boy draped across his bed, he nearly committed murder. We had to rescue him and calm him down. Only in Bulgaria.

In late 1963, Hilary and I visited a Bulgarian vineyard and wine production plant. This was well before the days of the export to Western Europe of the Bulgarian wines enjoyed here today. But there were just a few aspirations in that direction, and, very much a believer in trying to stimulate two-way trade, though it was not, strictly speaking, my job, I was keen to see if I could offer any pointers. We knew already that such were the vine stock, the climate and the soil and other growing conditions, as well as many years of expertise, that there were some good Bulgarian wines. We also knew from experience that quality control then was weak: there was usually at least one bad bottle in every case, and Bulgaria in the early sixties was a good place to learn cork extraction the hard way.

In the communist system, marketing was almost unknown. Hilary and I were conducted through dowdy, factory-like processing rooms, not in any logical order, but finally to the bottling plant. There we watched two fairly basic machines bottle the wine and cork the bottles. We were mildly impressed to see that machines, not people, were doing this work. In the last of the production processes, Bulgarian female workers stuck the labels on the bottles. The labels were basic: rectangles of poor, rough, off-white paper with badly printed, smudgy words in the Cyrillic alphabet recording the type and sometimes the region of the wine, the name Vinprom [Винпром] – Wine Production Enterprise – and the year. The girls were using glue brushes to paste these labels onto the bottles. I wandered over to speak to the girls, and noticed that the labels, for Gamza (Гъмза) wine, had the wrong year on them – the previous year. I gently queried this. The answer was, quite cheerfully, ‘Oh, we haven’t yet used all the 1962 labels’. Only in Bulgaria.

Medical and surgical practice in communist Bulgaria in the 1960s left a good deal to be desired. When I needed an appendectomy, the Bulgarian surgeon was most reluctant to perform the operation, because, he said, of the uncleanliness of his operating theatre and its equipment. He spoke of rusty scalpels and no gloves. The British minister was also most concerned, primarily about his view that under anaesthetic, I might reveal British state secrets. He therefore instructed that a roster be established of so-called volunteers from the UK-based staff to attend the operation and when necessary to shout me down or silence me in whatever way they could. Volunteers were forthcoming only after Hilary led the way. Apparently unaware of these precautionary preparations, the surgeon then announced that the general anaesthetic at his disposal was of such poor quality that the risks of using it were too high; instead, a local anaesthetic would be administered.

The Treasury medical officer, who looked after British diplomats from London, took a third and different view: that if humanly possible, I should fly immediately to London for the operation. There was then one direct flight a week. I suppose the kindly Bulgarian GP to the Western diplomats, French-trained Dr Sarafov, came to my rescue. He prescribed many ice bags, and the condition was thereby calmed enough for me to be able to fly in a turbo-prop aeroplane the next day, via Belgrade and Amsterdam. The Treasury doctors advised that I be accompanied, so Hilary came too. Welfare section of personnel department were their usual kind and effective selves. As just one example, we were met at the foot of the aeroplane steps at Heathrow by a Foreign Office car and, to us, a huge advance of salary in sterling – 25 pounds. We were driven straight to Guy’s hospital where the appendectomy was performed immediately.

Two postscripts: first, specifically medical events apart, throughout my career, I only once felt I had cause to be grateful to or to admire the Treasury as a body. That once was in their superintendence of what later became the Civil Service College (Chapter 9). Otherwise, personal liking and respect for individuals there notwithstanding, I had no cause for real respect of the Treasury. The institution seemed to me excessively devoted to the short-term and to the view of trees rather than the woods. The second postscript is far, far sadder, as well as more objective. Recent (post-communist) and credible research by the Bulgarian Medical Association shows that Dr Sarafov was arrested, imprisoned, accused of espionage, sentenced to death and executed. That tragic example of Cold War paranoia presumably reflects the communist government view of his connections with the West in general or possibly with a country other than the UK. I am confident, of course, that our British Foreign Service rules and practices would not have put Dr Sarafov at the least risk. And there was extensive, unjustified and cruel repression and persecution of intellectuals, including medical professionals, by the communist authorities in Bulgaria.

The case of the ‘diplomatic dentist’ may have been analogous. Dr Kirov’s was the government-licensed practice for the diplomatic corps. His equipment included the best drill in Sofia, we were told. It was a treadle drill, which operated at speeds varying from slow to stop. Local anaesthetic was unavailable. I recall being present as interpreter when Dr Kirov and I together had to restrain Hilary, who in her pain at the drilling, seemed intent on climbing up the drill in an attempt to remove it from her mouth. I find it impossible to believe that the senior Bulgarian communist government officials did not have access to a dentist with an electric drill, and to anaesthetics. We in the British legation were always scrupulous in avoiding any action with regard to medical practitioners that might expose them to any real danger. We heard, a good deal later, a strong rumour that a fate not dissimilar to that of Dr Sarafov had befallen Dr Kirov.