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| ISBN-13: | 9781907642555 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Elliott & Thompson |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2012 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 9.00(w) x 6.30(h) x 1.30(d) |
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Read an Excerpt
Diplomatic Anecdotage
Around the World in 40 Years
By Roger Carrick
Elliott and Thompson Limited
Copyright © 2012 Sir Roger CarrickAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-907642-96-8
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.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Diplomatic Anecdotage by Roger Carrick. Copyright © 2012 Sir Roger Carrick. Excerpted by permission of Elliott and Thompson Limited.
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Table of Contents
Introduction vi
Chapter 1 The Beginning, in Bulgaria: Legation 1
Chapter 2 More Cold War Diplomacy 23
Chapter 3 Bulgaria: Embassy 39
Chapter 4 Some Higher Diplomacy: Posting to Paris 60
Chapter 5 Singapore: Diplomacy for Change 81
Chapter 6 Sabbatical at University of California, Berkeley 105
Chapter 7 Counsellor and JIC Representative, British Embassy, Washington 111
Chapter 8 Consul-General, Chicago 131
Chapter 9 London Appointments: Desk Officer to Under-Secretary 153
Chapter 10 Ambassador to Indonesia, Land of Complex Diplomacy 193
Chapter 11 High Commissioner to Australia: Managing a Full, Friendly and Frank Relationship 245
Chapter 12 Reflections post hoc, and a Partial Look Forward 299