Читать книгу Ever the Diplomat: Confessions of a Foreign Office Mandarin - Sherard Cowper-Coles - Страница 10
ОглавлениеI knew I shouldn’t have been watching television. As so often, I had promised myself I would be good, and work, but not quite yet. I wanted to see the big parade, to spot the tanks and guns and rockets and trucks in Egypt’s armoury. I wanted to see who was on the saluting base with President Sadat, as he and his ministers and generals celebrated the eighth anniversary of his great and only – the Arabs’ great and only – military victory over Israel, the Yom Kippur or Ramadan War of October 1973.
I couldn’t go in person, but the Ambassador was there, and so were the three defence attachés – military, naval and air – in tropical uniform. As the Embassy press officer, I had, however, been allowed the only television inside the secure area of the Cairo Chancery, and so I could watch the great day unfolding in grainy black-and-white, from the privacy of my office. It was better than redrafting yet again the Embassy’s Leading Personality Reports for Egypt. Or updating the Calendar of (past) Events every British Embassy was obliged to send to London each January, but which few in the FCO ever read.
It was 6 October 1981. The television showed lines of lumbering Soviet 6x6 trucks, with rows of soldiers sitting upright in the back, moving past the saluting base. Suddenly, the camera lurched and dipped away. The sound, of bands and truck engines and aircraft overhead, went dead. For twenty seconds or so, though it seemed much longer, the only image was a silent still of the ground beneath the cameraman’s feet. Then the Egyptian equivalent of the test card came up, followed five minutes later by archival propaganda footage of Egypt’s past military triumphs, with patriotic music to match.
I knew something was wrong, but not how wrong. It could just have been the usual technical difficulties which seemed to plague any outside broadcast in Egypt thirty years ago. But it could have been something more. There was no way of finding out quickly. Mobile phones hardly existed. Landlines were poor. In any case, whom would I call? I wandered along the Chancery corridor, and told one of the other young diplomats what I had seen – or, rather, not seen.
Then I struck lucky. The ancient telephone in my little office jumped, and its bell rang. The veteran Embassy switchboard operator said a Mr Wright wanted to speak to me, urgently. It was Jonathan Wright, of Reuters. Jonathan had been at the parade, but was phoning from a building near by. All he knew was that there had been an attack on the Presidential reviewing stand, by a group of soldiers. They had jumped off one of the trucks, before charging the saluting base, heading straight for the President and those around him. Several people had been killed and injured. Sadat had been wounded, possibly quite badly. Others too had been hit. All was now chaos. Jonathan assumed that the Ambassador and his three defence attachés were on their way back to the Embassy.
I thanked Jonathan for what turned out to be the scoop of my diplomatic career. I rushed straight to the office of the Embassy’s number two, Tony Reeve, and told him what I knew. He said at once that we needed to warn London, pending the Ambassador’s return. For the first, and last, time in my diplomatic career, I drafted a FLASH telegram: ‘Sadat wounded at October War parade. Ambassador believed safe. Further reporting to follow.’ Tony approved it, and it was rushed upstairs, for encryption and then transmission by the Embassy communicators. A FLASH telegram took precedence over all other cable traffic, and was supposed to be delivered instantly, at whatever time of day or night it arrived. On a Tuesday afternoon, our cable took a sleepy London by complete surprise.
Within an hour or so, the Ambassador and the three attachés had arrived back at the office, hot, tired and still in shock. We gathered in the Ambassador’s office. Everyone was on edge. Without warning, a heavy metal roller shutter dropped down, with a loud bang. Not hesitating for a second, the Air Attaché dived under the Ambassador’s conference table, yelling, ‘Get down! Take cover!’, only to crawl shamefacedly back out a couple of minutes later when he realised what had caused the noise.
The Ambassador described what he had seen at the parade. The soldiers leaping off the truck, and charging at the main stand, emptying their Kalashnikovs as they ran. Sadat had been hit: of that there could be no doubt. John Woods, the First Secretary at the Australian Embassy, whom many of us knew well, had been badly wounded. The Israeli Ambassador, Moshe Sasson, had been pushed to the ground so hard by his bodyguards that they had – it later emerged – broken several of his ribs.
We soon established that the President had been flown by helicopter to the Military Hospital south of Cairo, with Madame Sadat at his side. The US Ambassador rang ours to say that the Americans believed that Sadat was badly wounded but stable. We reported this to an increasingly worried London, now starting to react to reports on the agency tapes.
But the Americans were wrong. Sadat was already dead, and had probably been so since the first moments of the attack. He had had over thirty AK-47 rounds pumped into him. His Vice President, Hosni Mubarak, had survived, and so had the rest of the senior leadership. Later that evening, Egyptian television carried a formal statement, announcing Sadat’s death, and that Mubarak had taken over as acting president.
In 1981 Egypt was still basking in the warm afterglow of the Camp David accords of 1978, and the American-orchestrated Western approval that had accompanied Egypt’s one-sided peace with Israel. In 1977 Sadat had broken the mould of the Arab–Israel dispute by flying to Jerusalem. He had become the first Arab leader to make peace with the Zionist enemy. But he had taken the biggest threat to Israel out of the fight without securing anything for the Palestinians other than continuing talks on autonomy. Three years later, American, Arab and Israeli negotiators were struggling to turn those words into reality – as they still are, more than three decades on.
Deep down, many of us thought that through his violent death Sadat had paid the price for that peace and, at least as important, for the love affair with America, and with American and Western ways, which had accompanied his accommodation with Israel. There had been many examples of increasingly pharaonic, not to say eccentric, behaviour as Egypt’s leader lost touch with his long-suffering people. For me, and probably for millions of desperately poor Egyptians, the low point had been Frank Sinatra singing at a fashion show for the President’s wife, before the floodlit Pyramids. Another symptom of Sadat’s grandiose style had been the live broadcast, on prime-time television, of three wretched Egyptian professors of English literature examining Madame Sadat on her recently submitted doctoral thesis on Shelley. What the fellaheen made of it I never found out; but the Cairo intelligentsia had plenty to say about the very high mark her treatise had received. Sadat’s decision to offer the Shah of Iran refuge in Cairo when he fled Tehran in 1979 was a gesture of quixotic kindness that did him no good at all with ordinary Egyptian Muslims. Today there are roughly twice as many Egyptians as when I served in Cairo thirty years ago. But then, as now, after a second Egyptian revolution, their priorities are the same: work, security and the dignity of being able to choose how they are governed and how they express their faith.
Sadat’s funeral was not, however, the time for negative reflections. Solidarity had to be shown. Western politicians were falling over each other to attend an event boycotted by almost the whole of the rest of Arab world.
I was plunged into making arrangements for the first of four funerals for Arab heads of state I was to witness in my diplomatic career.* The British delegation selected itself: the Prince of Wales, who had visited Egypt on honeymoon only a few weeks earlier; the Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington; and, to represent the Opposition, the former Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary Jim Callaghan, himself a recent visitor to Egypt.
But, as always in the modern Middle East, we were outgunned by the Americans: three US presidents – Nixon, Ford and Carter – led an American delegation hundreds strong, in which President Reagan’s first Secretary of State, General Alexander Haig, cut a relatively minor figure. Not to be outdone, the Israelis sent their Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, and many other senior Israeli admirers of the late President. Typically, Begin’s attendance was complicated by the fact that, as the funeral took place on the Jewish Sabbath, his religious views meant that he could use no mechanical device, including cars. He had to walk everywhere, creating nightmare difficulties for those charged with keeping the hated Israeli leader safe.
Our delegation had arrived in an RAF VC10 the evening before. They had their own minor dramas. Sadat had awarded both the Prince and the Princess of Wales the Order of the Nile, First Class, when they had visited Egypt on their honeymoon in August 1981. Sadat’s funeral would be just the occasion to wear this decoration, out of respect for the late President. But Prince Charles found that his valet had packed the Princess’s insignia, not his. Worse still, the valet had forgotten to bring a ceremonial sword to go with HRH’s naval tropical-dress uniform. Our Naval Attaché spent the evening frantically buffing up his own long-neglected sword. The next day, no one important seemed to notice when the heir to the British throne appeared at the funeral wearing the insignia of the equivalent of a Dame Commander of the Order of the Nile.
The funeral was chaos, but satisfactory chaos, as most big Arab funerals need to be: somehow the pushing and shoving, and sweating and waiting, are all part of the liturgy of respect for the departed. Lesser men do not have a press of hundreds or thousands at their obsequies.
Our Ambassador decided that the Death of Sadat was worthy of a formal despatch to London, to be printed and circulated, on special blue paper, around all Foreign Office posts and departments, and across Whitehall too. Flatteringly, he asked me to have a go at the first draft, which I did, with relish. I cannot now remember how much of my effort survived. But I can take credit for the pretentious final line, from Lucretius: ‘Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum’ (Such is the evil that can be brought about by religion), applied by the Roman poet to the sacrifice of Iphigenia, which was supposed to appease the gods and allow the Greek fleet to sail for Troy. The previous Foreign Secretary, David Owen, had banned the use of foreign languages in diplomatic reporting, as pompous and old fashioned (he was right, of course). But we broke the rule for Sadat. Paradoxically, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, later confessed to the Ambassador that an expensive education hadn’t equipped him to decrypt the vital phrase, and that he had had to ask for help from private secretaries who had been more diligent students of dead languages.
At about the same time, the Ambassador sent a telegram offering a pen portrait of Hosni Mubarak, and an assessment of the prospects for his Presidency. We reported that Mubarak had been a loyal and competent deputy to his larger-than-life leader. We recorded the nicknames Egyptians gave him – ‘Tefal’, because something (we didn’t know what) didn’t stick, and ‘La Vache Qui Rit’, based on a popular TV ad for the cheese, featuring a yes-man to whom Egyptians compared Sadat’s loyal Vice President. The Ambassador concluded that Mubarak’s limited political and other abilities meant that he was unlikely to last more than six months as president. He would be a transitional figure, before a new strong man emerged.
I had started my job in Cairo, just over a year earlier, in late July 1980. It was soon Ramadan, and many people, including the Ambassador, were away. The quiet heat of summer gave me time to settle in. My first priority was to find a flat. I quickly did, in the once smart district of Zamalek, which occupied much of the island of Gezira (meaning ‘island’) in the Nile. The flat was on the first floor of a grimy block built in Cairo’s modern prime, in the 1930s. It was not slick, but it did the job that I, as a bachelor, wanted it to do: to provide good spaces for entertaining my guests, and for having visitors from London to stay. The furniture was reproduction Empire, what we called Louis Farouk. There were ceiling fans in the main rooms, plus loud and noisy wall-mounted air conditioners there and in every bedroom – this soon became the subject of comment among the Embassy wives, as at that time third secretaries were supposed to have only one air conditioner, in the main bedroom, and one other in the guest room, and no others. Everything was covered in dust and, at times, sand. A balcony gave a sideways-on view of the Nile.
I was delighted, and even more so when, aged twenty-five, I found myself looked after by an elderly cook cum houseboy (known in Egypt as a suffragi) and an almost equally ancient maid. The former, known as Abdul since his days with the Eighth Army, was a Nubian, and carried a faded photograph of Mr Churchill in the breast pocket of his galabia. Like Mr Abu Awad, Abdul could speak a few unprintable words of British military English. At 7 a.m. every day except Friday he produced porridge, and a full cooked breakfast. Lunch, served when I returned from the Embassy at 2.30 p.m., was always three courses: a heavy soup, meat or fish and fried or boiled vegetables, and then pudding, usually with custard. I began rapidly to put on weight, something corrected only when I married the next year. Abdul could also do a good dinner party, even, as one Embassy wag suggested, ordering up the guests. But his fondness for the dregs of the wine bottles made his performance, and that of his Sudanese friends drafted in for such occasions, increasingly erratic as the evening progressed. Once, when the Embassy got rid of its emergency stock of British Army ‘compo’ rations, Abdul asked me to bring him a ten-man pack: all he wanted was the British military Spam, remembered fondly from forty years earlier. Poor Abdul, and all the other suffragis in the building, lived in windowless rooms off the garage underneath the apartment block. They travelled back to Sudan to see their families only once a year, by train, and then by boat across Lake Nasser.
Um Nasr was different. She was Egyptian, from the Delta, and had no English whatsoever. She kept the flat reasonably clean, and washed my clothes. But they were ironed by an ancient makwagi, or ironing man, in his open shop across the street: from the front balcony I could see him heating up his flat iron on a venerable coal stove, and then spitting on the clothes to wet them before they were subjected to a pounding from his iron. Shirts from Jermyn Street did not long survive such brutal assault.
In 1980, despite the pretensions of the British Embassy in Jeddah (then headed by our most distinguished Arabist, Sir James Craig), the British Embassy in Cairo was still our largest in the Arab world. It was, it seemed to me, a proper embassy, headed by a proper ambassador. Sir Michael Weir had read classics at Balliol before joining the Foreign Service. After MECAS, he had spent most of his career working in and on the Middle East. He had started as an assistant political agent in what were then the Trucial States, manumitting slaves by allowing them to touch the flagpole of the British Government compound. He had gone on to key Middle East policy jobs in London, Washington and New York. But Michael was certainly not an ambassador out of central casting. He had gone to Oxford after service in RAF intelligence and from a Scottish grammar school, and spoke with a hint of a Scots accent. Highly intelligent, with excellent judgement (despite the miscall over Mubarak’s prospects), he was neither pompous nor censorious. He had a wry sense of humour. And he had four amusing children, of roughly my age, who came out for holidays and were at the centre of young expatriate Cairo: one of them, Arabella, became a successful actress and author, rising from playing an anonymous rustic wench in The French Lieutenant’s Woman to starring in The Fast Show. Michael’s second wife, Hilary, with whom he had two younger sons, had also been a member of the Diplomatic Service. Again, appearances were deceptive. Hilary Weir had been educated at Benenden and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and had all the confidence and poise of the upper-middle-class milieu from which she came. Hilary’s family and mine lived close to each other in Kent, and she had had the same riding teacher as my brothers. Whereas Michael was relatively short and quiet, Hilary was tall and could be loud. But all that was superficial: what mattered to us in the Cairo Embassy in the early 1980s was that Michael and Hilary Weir operated as a true team. In their love of their work, of Egypt and – it has to be said – of each other, they showed what a powerful tool for promoting national interests and influence a committed diplomatic couple can be. Together, they entertained, and were entertained, not just in the usual society circles in which diplomats move in most capitals, but far beyond, among Egyptian architects and archaeologists, painters and poets, Nasserite intellectuals sceptical of what Sadat was about, and orchard-owning horse breeders who wanted nothing to do with politics. They shared a sceptical left-of-centre view of the world, born of wide experience and high intelligence. In my first post, I felt lucky to be working with and for such a talented couple. More than twenty years later, in September 2006, I was honoured to be asked by Hilary to give an address at Michael’s memorial service. Two years later, I proudly entertained Hilary in Kabul, which she was visiting in order to see what the Brooke Trust (which she chaired) could do to help the working animals of Afghanistan. Within weeks, she was dead, of a cruel and unexpected cancer. I still mourn them both.
But a real embassy is much more than an ambassador. In 1980, Her Britannic Majesty’s Embassy in Cairo had everything a proper embassy should have: its staff list covered a full page of the ‘White Book’, the list of staff in Diplomatic Service Posts Overseas, published twice a year by the Foreign Office.
Below the Ambassador came the Deputy Head of Mission, who stood in as chargé d’affaires whenever the Ambassador was away. He was also the Political Counsellor, or senior political officer in the Embassy. For my first eighteen months or so, the job was done with great flair by Nicholas Barrington, a bachelor-diplomat of great gifts who knew all about social networking long before it had been invented. His successor was the altogether more modest Tony Reeve, whose dry appreciation of the ridiculous and insightful intelligence more than compensated for a social diffidence that I suspected was more affected than real. Using a pseudonym, Tony already had two novels about diplomatic life under his belt. In their very different ways, both Nicholas and Tony were supremely talented diplomats, who went on to the highest levels of the Diplomatic Service, retiring, respectively, as high commissioners to Pakistan and to South Africa. It was a measure of Cairo’s importance in those days that the post of deputy to the Ambassador was filled by officers of such obvious quality.
Alongside the Political Counsellor, but slightly more junior, was the Commercial Counsellor, in charge of the Embassy’s trade promotion team. Below them both, right at the centre of the Embassy, was the key figure of the Head of Chancery: effectively the Embassy’s chief operating officer, in charge of its political work, but also of its administration and daily functioning. The Administration Officer, responsible for managing the Embassy’s people, property and money, reported to him. So did HM Consul, in charge of the Visa Section and of a small consular team looking after British nationals living in Egypt or, increasingly, visiting as tourists. I have already mentioned the Defence Section, headed by three attachés (officers of roughly colonel rank), often enjoying a diplomatic posting as the final job in a career which had taken them far and wide, but not as high as some of their contemporaries. Of the Embassy, but not quite in it, was the Cultural Attaché, in charge of the British Council’s work in Egypt, promoting British culture, but also increasingly involved in development work and English language teaching. In 1980, the British Council Representative in Cairo, Malcolm Dalziel, was a rather grand figure, and a far cry from the cross-cultural communications experts the Council sends abroad today. With his elegant beard and double-breasted suits, he came across as something between a regius professor and a director of one of our racier merchant banks. He really was Britain’s cultural ambassador to Egypt. The Embassy also had a first secretary (aid), in charge of a small but growing development programme, sponsored by what was then called the Overseas Development Administration, part of the Foreign Office, but which became the independent Department for International Development in 1997.
In theory, my post, initially as third secretary (Chancery) (before I was promoted to second secretary), in this mission of some fifty British public servants, and at least twice that number of locally engaged staff, mostly Egyptian, put me at or near the bottom of the pile. But the practice was different: as one of only a handful of London-based staff who spoke Arabic, and with my Arabic fresh from my time in Alexandria, I had an advantage over others. More than that, I belonged to the small political team at the heart of the Embassy. Rather like the young Army officer newly posted to his regiment, as a member of the Diplomatic Service fast stream I was treated by some of the main-stream officers in the Embassy with a respect I didn’t deserve and certainly hadn’t yet earned. All this created expectations I had to live up to: I had to know more about Egypt, report more, do more, draft more quickly, than other members of the team. It was a daunting prospect.
I was helped by the fact that, as in the embassies of almost all major powers, other members of staff were in fact spies in disguise. In those days, insiders could tell a real diplomat from a fake one: one give-away was that intelligence officers knew how to type (in order to operate their communications equipment on their own), whereas few ‘straight’ diplomats could. Other clues were time before joining the ‘Foreign Office’ in the Army or – back then – a colonial police force: the Royal Hong Kong Police was a favourite; or a better sporting but patchier academic record than weedier true fast-streamers tended to have. Paradoxically for a secret service, intelligence officers tended – and still tend – to be more colourful, or eccentric, than their rather more boring ‘straight’ Foreign Office colleagues. In Egypt at the time, linen suits and silk handkerchiefs tucked carefully in the cuff, plus sojourns with the desert bedouin and a carefully calibrated gentleman’s degree, were among the tell-tale signs. But to outsiders, and to many Embassy staff, it wasn’t, or shouldn’t have been, apparent who was a real diplomat and who was really an intelligence officer operating under diplomatic cover.
On one occasion an intelligence officer went native, to the extent of having a tailor run up for him a natty, even naff, Egyptian equivalent of the Mao suit then worn by almost all Nasserite apparatchiks: Michael Weir’s predecessor had sent him a rather pompous note telling him that ‘native dress was not to be worn in the Chancery’.
Intelligence officers operating under a false diplomatic flag had to live their cover, and often found doing two jobs hard pounding. Inevitably, their diplomatic cover work suffered. At a time when the US television series Dallas ruled the world, one such officer charged with summarising the daily Arabic papers solemnly told the Chancery morning meeting that Sadat had announced the previous day that the Dallas approach had no place in the politics of the modern Middle East. Puzzled, we consulted the papers: Sadat had been referring to President Eisenhower’s somewhat dictatorial Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Without vowels, Arabic made no distinction between the two. On another occasion, an intelligence officer masquerading as a ‘straight’ diplomat struggled at a dinner in his flat to remember the assumed names of the colleagues from London he was hosting. At least his discomfort should have entertained those on the other end of the microphones infesting the great chandelier swinging over us.
And there were microphones everywhere. In 1980, it was only a few years since Sadat had turned westwards, kicking all the Soviet Bloc advisers out of Egypt. But the Communist influence remained, particularly in his security services. A few years earlier our Head of Chancery in Cairo had switched on the radio at home in Zamalek only to pick up what sounded like a live broadcast from the drawing room of the British Defence Attaché a few doors up the street. He rushed round, and soon confirmed what his ears had told him. It was a live broadcast: a poorly tuned radio microphone installed in the Defence Attaché’s house by, presumably, Egyptian intelligence had been broadcasting on the frequency on which you normally expected to pick up the BBC World Service. On another occasion, the most senior British intelligence officer in Egypt had been surprised to meet the Embassy’s chief switchboard operator emerging from the headquarters of the Egyptian intelligence service – presumably after a regular debriefing. But in those Cold War days, and for another nine years, the main target was ‘Sov Bloc’ – hence the enthusiasm of intelligence officers for invitations to diplomatic receptions discarded by more senior or more genuine officers: all too often, bending over the buffet at the Czech Embassy, or pushing my way through the crowd at the Polish national-day party, I would encounter a colleague from a Western embassy, his card inscribed ‘First Secretary (Regional Affairs)’, cruising for passing Communist trade, in the diplomatic equivalent of creeping among the bushes on Clapham Common. Equally amusing was intelligence colleagues’ passion for joining or setting up social clubs for young foreign diplomats in Cairo. You had to admire the persistence with which intelligence officers worked at finding individuals who could, by carrot or stick, be persuaded to betray their governments for the sake of the British Crown. When the Falklands War broke out in 1982, an intelligence officer sidled up to me to ask whether I could persuade a distant cousin’s husband, who worked on the trade side of the Argentine Diplomatic Service, to become a British agent: I said simply that I would never even consider suggesting that he should betray his country.
Another reason why Cairo seemed like a proper embassy was that the Ambassador was driven round in a Rolls-Royce. Keeping the ancient machine going in Egypt was hard work. Egyptian gasoline was far too coarse for the refined taste of the Rolls-Royce, so, in an immensely dangerous operation performed by the Ambassador’s chauffeur, it had to be diluted with aviation fuel. The Roller often broke down, including, memorably, en route to the opening of a Rolls-Royce gas-turbine power station (manufactured by the other R-R) in the Delta. Riding in the car with the Ambassador, with the special Union flag flown by ambassadors fluttering over the bonnet, gave me a frisson of pride. The use of the Rolls-Royce seemed the best perk of being chargé d’affaires.
In the summer of 1980, the irrepressibly energetic Chargé d’Affaires, Nicholas Barrington, used the Rolls-Royce to take his guests down to the centre of old Cairo, after iftar (the evening meal with which Muslims break the daily Ramadan fast) in his historic house in Zamalek. Ramadan in Cairo was pure magic. In Cairo’s ancient heart, we saw and heard jugglers and musicians mingling with the crowds celebrating what is for Muslims a month of Christmases. Everywhere there was light and noise and jubilation. I watched entranced as a magician levitated a man, having first passed an iron hoop around his body to prove the absence of wires.
The Cairo Embassy lay in the shadow of the tangled history of Britain’s engagement with Egypt since the late nineteenth century, when Sir Evelyn Baring, later Lord Cromer, had been Britain’s consul-general in Egypt, with a modest title which belied great powers. The Residence itself, on the banks of the Nile in Garden City, had been built by Lord Kitchener, and its ballroom (in 1980 housing the Embassy Visa Section, but now restored to its original state) had had the only sprung dance floor in Africa.
The most notorious of Sir Michael Weir’s predecessors was Sir Miles Lampson, who had been ambassador to Egypt throughout the Second World War. Immensely grand, he had referred to King Farouk as ‘the boy’. But what Egyptians really remembered – and resented – about him was the action he had taken in February 1942 when Farouk had persisted in appointing a pro-Axis prime minister. When the King had refused to back down, Lampson had had the Abdin Palace in Cairo surrounded by tanks. A prime minister more sympathetic to the Allied cause was soon appointed. This was still known to Egyptians as the ‘4 February incident’. In blissful ignorance of the date’s sensitivity, the BBC planned one 4 February to hold a party in Cairo to promote its Arabic Service: the Embassy intervened just in time.
Another story about Lampson was more personal, and was told me by John Keith, a City solicitor who had served during the Second World War as Lampson’s military ADC. Halfway through the war, Churchill had decided that the somewhat pompous Lampson should be ennobled, as Lord Killearn. Shortly afterwards, the exuberant Shakespearean actor Sir Donald Wolfit had visited Cairo with his troupe of players. As the Ambassador’s lunch for the visiting thespians drew to a close, Sir Donald chinked on his glass. He wanted ‘to say a few words’ to thank the Ambassador for his hospitality. As he sat down, he added, with a flourish, that it had been ‘particularly nice to have been entertained by you, Lord Killearn, as we have heard such terrible reports of your predecessor, Sir Miles Lampson’. John Keith said that the ensuing silence was long and painful.*
But what did an embassy like this actually do? First, we provided the Foreign Office in London, and many other parts of Whitehall, as well as other British diplomatic posts in, or interested in, the Middle East, with a pretty comprehensive political intelligence service. We reported to London by telegram and letter – not in those days by telephone – sending back vast quantities of the reporting and analysis that made Britain’s Foreign Office the best informed in the world. What it was all for none of us asked.
We kept a close eye on what we called ‘Egypt Internal’ – the political state of the nation behind the façade of the Sadat regime, and of a National Democratic Party that was neither national nor democratic nor a real political party, but still won well over 90 per cent of the votes in national elections. For one of those elections, we spread out over the country to monitor exactly how Egyptian democracy worked in the early 1980s – long before such exercises had become commonplace. The results were not encouraging. At a deserted polling station in a village on the edge of the Delta, we found two police officers desperately putting crosses on ballot papers and stuffing them into the ballot boxes, worried that they wouldn’t have filled their quota before the regional police commander did his evening round, to check on the state of the polls.
More interestingly, without offending a regime with whom Britain had good political relations, we tried to find out what we could about the sources of opposition to Sadat’s increasingly autocratic and eccentric rule. Improbably, impossibly, one of the main sources of that opposition sat in a crumbling palatial villa only a few hundred yards from the Embassy, in Garden City beside the Nile. This was the home of Fuad Serageddin Pasha, a larger than life ancien régime figure, who, as King Farouk’s interior minister, had dealt with the anti-British riots of January 1952 that had precipitated the Free Officers’ Revolution of July that year. He led the Wafd Party, which took its name from the wafd or delegation which had tried to travel to London in 1918 demanding freedom for Egypt from British imperial rule. Serageddin used his Turkish title of pasha with some style. He used regularly to receive me in his palace, embracing me with a bear hug, a slobbering kiss and a fat cigar. He came from a different era. For all the Pasha’s talk of democracy and reform, in those and later days there seemed to be less to the Wafd than met the eye.
The same could not be said of the Islamists with whom we struggled to make contact. Even before Sadat’s assassination, we knew that, despite or perhaps because of the efforts of one of the most effective police states in the Arab world, tens of thousands of Egyptians were devout conservative Muslims, strongly opposed to the one-sided peace Sadat had made with Israel and to many of the more worldly aspects of his rule. The Muslim Brotherhood had been banned in Egypt since 1954, but, in many ways, it was less interesting and less effective that the more extreme fundamentalist groups which had given birth to the plot to kill the President. The much feared Egyptian internal state security service, the Mubahith Amn al-Dawla, kept many thousands of citizens under surveillance – when they were not behind bars.
At the other end of the spectrum were the Marxists and Nasserites of the old Egyptian intellectual left. They shared the Islamists’ opposition to the Camp David accords and to the close alliance with America, but they favoured a secular society. Many of them had been educated or trained in the Soviet Union, and, as with the Afghan former Communists I was to meet a quarter of a century later, they had acquired there a fondness for vodka which made them less than perfect Muslims.
One reason why the Foreign Office at that time put so much emphasis on political reporting was that we had utterly failed to foresee the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The internal FCO inquiry, conducted by a bright young diplomat called Nick Browne,* had concluded that the Embassy in Iran had been too preoccupied with selling tanks and tractors to the Shah to notice what was happening in the bazaars of south Tehran. We needed to be on the lookout for similar earthquakes elsewhere in the Muslim world. At the time, I accepted this verdict. Later, however, I came to see that the comment made by the Ambassador in Tehran at the time, Sir Anthony Parsons, when he exercised his right of reply, was probably closer to the mark: our failure to foresee the fall of the Shah was, he wrote, due not to a shortage of intelligence or information, but to a failure of imagination. We simply could not conceive of Iran without the Shah. Just as later we found it difficult to imagine Egypt without Mubarak, or Libya without Qadhafi.
Despite this, the conventional wisdom in the Cairo Chancery in 1980 was that opposition to Sadat was growing, but did not threaten the regime. The murder of the Pharaoh – which we totally failed to foresee – did not change that view. That was not, however, the judgement – or wish – of the American and other Western media, who poured into Cairo in the days after Sadat’s death looking for harbingers of a revolution that was not to come for another thirty years. Out of desperation, they ended up interviewing each other. One crestfallen US network decided to justify the expense of having sent a camera crew to Cairo to cover the revolution by instructing them to make a documentary entitled, rather lamely, Why Was Cairo Calm? None of that stopped a famous British foreign correspondent known for colourful prose connected only loosely to the truth from filing from Upper Egypt a piece suggesting that Egypt was on the edge of an abyss.
The firm grip which the Egyptian regime had on power did not mean that occasional demonstrations weren’t allowed. We would go along to watch. Cruelly, I once persuaded a gullible friend from London, keen to accompany us to such a demonstration, that diplomats did so in disguise. With great enthusiasm, he donned the ‘Arab sheikh’ outfit he had bought at a tourist stall by the Pyramids. Imagining himself a latterday T. E. Lawrence, he turned up, with his black brogues protruding from beneath his galabia, looking more like Thomson or Thompson in a Tintin story. The languidly linen-suited diplomat who was going to lead us to the demonstration observed, witheringly: ‘I think that’s rather overdoing it, don’t you?’
But, with the Government struggling even then to provide Egypt’s teeming masses with the cheap food and decent jobs to which Nasser had told them they were entitled, it was a question not of whether there would be another revolution, but when: we would never have thought it would take another three decades.
Another area to which we paid close attention was the position of the Coptic Christian minority in Egypt. The Copts make up about 10 per cent of the population, and can justifiably claim to be the original Egyptians – ‘gypt’ is the same root as Copt. In 1980, the Coptic Pope, Shenouda III, had just been sent into internal exile by Sadat for criticising his rule. He died as I was writing this chapter, in March 2012, having performed a skilful balancing act over many decades, protecting his people, while maintaining relations with successive Egyptian regimes, including, latterly, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.
Sadly, in 1980 there were very few Jews left in Egypt from a community that had once numbered many thousands and had made an immeasurable contribution to the country’s commercial and cultural life. But the great synagogues in Cairo and Alexandria were still there, looked after by aged custodians, and visited by some of the Jewish tourists then arriving in Egypt in great numbers. The ancient synagogue in Old Cairo was of particular interest, as it had hosted the priceless deposit of papers known as the Geniza, and now lodged mostly in the Cambridge University Library. This was essentially a large waste-paper dump, as Jews were not allowed to destroy papers on which the word of God had been inscribed. Incredibly, the ancient tailor recommended to me by rather dress-conscious colleagues in Cairo turned out to be Jewish, though he kept very quiet about it. Sadly, his age meant he was no Montague Burton: the buttons soon flew off his suits, none of which survived my return to London.
One of the most bizarre tasks I was given as the junior Chancery officer was to take an inflatable rubber cushion up to an ancient British lady known as Omm Sety. She lived, with dozens of cats, in a hut amid the ruins of the ancient city of Abydos in Upper Egypt. Born and raised in Blackheath, after falling downstairs and suffering a severe concussion aged three and then a trip to the British Museum, she had believed herself to be the reincarnation of the nanny of Seti I, a pharaoh of the Nineteenth Dynasty. She went on to study Egyptology, marry an Egyptian and work for the Egyptian Antiquities Department. Highly detailed dreams informed a remarkable ‘recall’ of life in the Pharaoh’s palace. The Embassy regarded itself as having consular responsibility for her.
But we didn’t look just at what was happening inside Egypt. As a Permanent Member of the United Nations Security Council, and a prominent member of the European Economic Community and of NATO, as well as the former colonial power across much of the Middle East, in the 1980s, as today, Britain still regarded itself as a significant player in Middle Eastern affairs. In fact, Britain’s moment in the Middle East had long passed, probably with our precipitate scuttle from Palestine in May 1948, but certainly with the Suez debacle of 1956 and then, more recently and painfully, our humiliating early departure from Aden and South Arabia in November 1967. Anyone who had suggested back then that, thirty years later, we would be joining the Americans in not one but two ill-fated invasions of Muslim lands would have been dismissed as a fantasist.
In the 1980s, as now, much of our sense of diplomatic self-importance was based on unhealthy doses of nostalgia and of wishful thinking. Yet the irony was that, like many other people in the Third World, the Arabs then – and still today – attribute to Britain more power than it actually has. Perhaps more justifiably, they believed – or often told us that they believed – that Britons in general, and British diplomats and spies in particular, understood the Arabs better than the Americans. We would lie back proudly and think of MECAS. It probably was true, however, that Britain’s diplomats spoke more Arabic less badly than those of any other power, except perhaps the smooth operators of the KGB.
In 1980, as in every year since 1948 until the present, top of the Middle East agenda was the dispute between Israel and its Arab neighbours over Palestine. The familiar theme was of European dismay at American reluctance to do much to promote real peace: at the time the excuse for US inactivity was a visceral refusal to acknowledge that the Palestinians were entitled to a state of their own, and a total boycott of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. At their summit in Venice in June 1980, the nine member states of the EEC had issued a declaration acknowledging the Palestinians’ right to self-determination, and the PLO’s right to be involved in peace negotiations, based on the famous Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, passed in the wake of respectively the 1967 and 1973 wars. These days those European pronouncements look like little more than common sense or natural justice, but in 1980 this was revolutionary language, putting clear blue water between America and Europe on the Middle East.
So it was not surprising that much of the debate in the Middle East over the next few years was over whether we could expect a European initiative, with Britain and France in its van, to break the logjam. But such talk came up against two iron laws of Israel–Palestine diplomacy: first, that, for all sorts of reasons, America is essential (if not always enough) for progress, and, second, that no one can dance unless the all too imperfect Israeli democracy can be persuaded to come on to the floor. On this, as on so many other issues, the Europeans excelled themselves at producing towering clouds of puffery, but little or no significant action. They couldn’t accept they had no real leverage over Israel. It was all too reminiscent of one perceptive journal editor’s verdict on something I once submitted to him: ‘Like much that comes out of King Charles Street, my dear Sherard, this is elegantly drafted – and utterly irrelevant.’
But inability to make a real difference was never an obstacle to diplomatic activity. And so throughout my three years in Cairo, the Arab–Israel dispute was Britain’s main preoccupation in the Middle East. We in the Cairo Embassy spent much of our time talking to the Egyptians, still locked in the embarrassingly unproductive, US-brokered talks with the Israelis on the Palestinian autonomy that had been the other half of the Camp David accords. And we would cajole the American Embassy, from the Ambassador down, into telling their trusted friends, the Brits, what was really happening. At the time the officer in the US Embassy Political Section handling the ‘peace process’ was Dan Kurtzer, a devout Jew who spoke fluent Arabic and Hebrew, and who has dedicated his life to the cause of Middle East peace. It was a delight to come across Dan again in 2001 as my US colleague in Tel Aviv, after he had had a tough tour as ambassador to Egypt. All the information the Embassy picked up was distilled into thousands of ‘groups’ (the unit in which telegram traffic was then measured) telegraphed back to London, and into hundreds of letters, sent by the diplomatic bag, giving more context. British ministers toured the Middle East, talking privately and publicly, giving interview after interview, but never making any real progress: Lord Carrington came (and managed to fit in a Nile cruise) and so did his successor as foreign secretary, Francis Pym (but without the cruise). The Foreign Office Minister of State for the Middle East, Douglas Hurd, included Cairo in one of his regional tours. Arranging such visits, and reporting on them, gave the young diplomats in the Cairo Chancery plenty to do. We loved it.
But Egypt wasn’t just an Arab state at the heart of the peace process. As Sadat and his Foreign Ministry used to remind anyone who would listen, it was also a Muslim state, and an African one. The Arab, Islamic and African circles of Egyptian diplomacy, plus the hangover from its role in the Non-Aligned Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, meant that Cairo was still a crossroads of international diplomacy. Following the Camp David accords, most Arab states had either closed their embassies in Cairo or reduced them to ‘chargé d’affaires’ status. The Arab League had left its purpose-built headquarters overlooking Tahrir Square and moved to Tunis. In its place, Sadat had set up a Potemkin ‘League of Arab and Islamic Peoples’: a formal call on its Secretary General by our Political Counsellor, Tony Reeve, and me ended in us both collapsing into helpless giggles at the absurdities of what we were being told. Despite the Arab boycott, there was plenty going on in Cairo with which to fill our reports to London. When I started work, I was told by Tony’s predecessor, the meticulous Nicholas Barrington, that my first task was to report on Egypt granting political asylum to the son of Zog, former King of the Albanians. A month later, I was struggling to draft, on Nicholas’s instructions, talking points for Denis Thatcher to use with Madame Suzanne Mubarak, during the official visit which Vice President Mubarak was to pay to London in September 1980.
Two Palestinian intifadas (or uprisings) and hundreds of thousands of Israelis settled in the Occupied Territories later, it is not easy now to recall the heady days of Egyptian–Israeli rapprochement of 1979–81. In those days, the hotels of Cairo were full of Jewish tourists, mainly from America, combining a week in Egypt with a week in Israel. Two young Army-officer friends of mine, one of whom was to rise to the top of the military establishment, were stationed in Cyprus with their regiment, the Green Howards. They decided to come over for a ‘pulling expedition’ up the Nile on one of the cruise boats then plying between Luxor and Aswan. They equipped themselves with panama hats, slick tropical clothes and a case of the Embassy’s gin. A week later, they returned, crestfallen: they had been the youngest passengers on the cruise by about forty years, and had spent the week playing bridge with ancient widows and divorcees from Florida and New York.
In those days, the Jerusalem Post (then a much more balanced paper than it was later to become) was sold openly in the main newsagents of central Cairo. Israeli experts were helping install drip-feed irrigation systems in the agricultural schemes on the margins of the desert and the Delta. And, most convenient of all, there were regular long-distance bus services across the Sinai, between Cairo and Tel Aviv.
As foreign secretary in 1974–6, Jim Callaghan had ruled that all Foreign Office Arabists, fresh out of MECAS, had to go on a familiarisation visit to Israel before or during their first posting in the Arab world. When in 1982 my turn came, I was able to take the bus from Cairo to Tel Aviv, and begin a fascination with, and affection for, the Jewish state that has never left me. But the law of unintended consequences kicked in: what was meant by Callaghan as an effort to recalibrate the camel corps had the opposite effect. The uncompromising line taken by the Israeli briefers, the determination with which the early settlements around Jerusalem and across the Green Line* were then being established, and the obvious plight of the wretched Palestinians, particularly in Gaza, all served only to reinforce the conviction of the young diplomats sent on the course that a grave injustice had been done, and was being still being done, to the Arab inhabitants of historic Palestine.
As so often in the Middle East, the peace turned out to be too good to be true. In early June 1981 Israeli aircraft bombed the Osirak nuclear reactor south of Baghdad, and all hell broke loose. Years before the neocons had developed the doctrine of pre-emptive defence, the international condemnation was universal. Even the United States criticised the Israeli action, while blocking serious punitive action in the Security Council. Sadat reacted with fury at what he saw as a betrayal by his Israeli partner, Begin. The rapid cooling in Egyptian–Israeli relations that followed was unavoidable. And those relations were never as good again.
Alongside covering Egypt’s internal politics and its external relations, my third area of work in the Cairo Embassy was as press attaché. In this, I faced in two directions: towards the Egyptian media, and towards the corps of impressive Western correspondents then based in Cairo. My daily routine involved repackaging for the Egyptian media a constant stream of good news stories about Britain (in reality, charmingly amateurish propaganda) sent out by the Central Office of Information. These ranged from texts of speeches by the Prime Minister to pieces puffing British products. I remember trying to place articles praising the merits of the new Austin Mini Metro, then rolling off the British Leyland line at Longbridge. Once a month, I would call on the head of Egyptian State Television and offer her a selection of news and feature clips from Britain to help fill the schedules. None of this was quite as absurd as it now seems: the state-controlled Egyptian media were hungry for material, and not too fussy about where it came from. If it helped promote the interests or exports of a country regarded as an ally, so much the better.
My propaganda work assumed a bit more importance during the Falklands War of April–June 1982, as Britain sought to build political and diplomatic support round the world for its claim to sovereignty over the islands the Argentines called the Malvinas. To my surprise, I did manage to secure some sympathetic coverage in the instinctively anti-colonialist Egyptian media, mainly because I could offer better images than the opposition. But the Newsweek cover of HMS Hermes and the task force steaming south, bearing the caption ‘The Empire Strikes Back’, was more help than all my efforts: the world needed to know that Britain meant what it said, and the victory which followed earned us grudging respect in Egypt and indeed across the Middle East.
In those days, there were three main daily Egyptian papers in Arabic, Al Ahram, Al Akhbar and Al Gomhuria, two in English, the Egyptian Gazette and the Egyptian Mail, and, perhaps surprisingly, one in French, Le Progrès Egyptien, whose origins lay with Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798. Of these, the one that mattered most, and was least easy to influence, was Al Ahram (or ‘Pyramids’). Gone were its glory days under Nasser, when its brilliant editor, Mohammed Hassanain Heikal, had been the voice of the Arabs. It was now the voice of the Government and the party. But that did not mean that some talented individuals didn’t work for it, particularly the nest of Nasserites in the Al Ahram Centre for Strategic Studies, or that it wasn’t worth engaging with them. The paper’s name did occasionally cause confusion: I remember taking the former British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, to call on the editor, only to find that we were approaching the Sphinx on the edge of the desert west of Cairo: the driver had confused the paper with one of the greater glories of Pharaonic Egypt.
By contrast, the Egyptian Gazette was a rather run-down affair, obviously produced on an ancient press, full of mistakes and misprints. On the day the Israelis withdrew from Sinai, the Gazette managed to mark the event by printing on the top of its front page an upside-down map of the peninsula. Its staff usually included one or two young British interns, brushing up their Arabic and having fun at the same time.
The other side of being press attaché was liaising with the foreign journalists in Cairo. This was useful and important, as well as enjoyable. Cairo in the early 1980s was the place from which the Western media covered the Middle East. The BBC, Reuters, AP and UPI had big bureaux there. CNN was just getting going. All the major British papers had Cairo correspondents, many of them full time, as did the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Meeting the range of talent and experience they deployed was a big privilege for a young diplomat – and I learned much from them, including some of the old ways of the Street of Shame. The hacks worked hard, but also played hard. After one memorable party, given by the correspondent of a British Sunday broadsheet, the host had to ring round all his guests to apologise for the way things had got out of hand the night before. A visiting correspondent regaled us with stories of his conquests on the night train to Aswan. For the British Embassy, the dean of the corps was the BBC bureau chief, Bob Jobbins, a reporter of scholarship and flair. One of the MI6 team in Cairo said we should treat Jobbins as ‘cleared up to confidential’, on the basis that he could be trusted with sensitive information, and that we could learn as much from him as he could from us. But the journalist of whom I saw most was a university friend, Charles Richards, who graduated from sub-editing the Egyptian Gazette to writing for the Financial Times and, later, the Independent. He knew the real Egypt better than any of us.
I also learned – the hard way – the importance of setting the ground rules before saying anything significant to a working journalist, even in a social setting. After a particularly gruelling visit to Egypt by the Duke of Edinburgh, I relaxed over supper with the Guardian correspondent and his wife – a member of one of Britain’s most famous families, who worked part time as a stringer for the Daily Express. At dinner, I explained how almost everything that could have gone wrong with the visit had gone wrong. Fog had meant that we had had to cancel a visit to Sinai by Prince Philip, who was in Egypt in his capacity as president of the World Wildlife Fund. Instead, we had tried to take him to the wetlands of Lake Fayoum. Almost incredibly, crossing a desert with only two roads, the Egyptian police escort had lost their way. The convoy juddered to a halt. An unfortunate police major tried desperately to explain to the Duke what had happened. ‘Your Highness, the road has been washed away’ was the best he could do. ‘I don’t believe a word of it!’ snapped Prince Philip, who strode off into the desert. On our return to Cairo, I had arranged for the Duke to brief the Egyptian press, expecting no difficulties from them. But Prince Philip was in no mood for flannel, telling them that the problem with their country was that ‘you Egyptians breed like rabbits’. Asked at the end whether he planned to come back, he retorted, ‘You must be joking.’ Without warning me, my hostess put some – but luckily not all – of this on the front page of the Daily Express.
But the royal visit which caused us most difficulty was the honeymoon of the Prince and Princess of Wales in August 1981. Out of the blue the Ambassador called me in one morning to read a long personal ‘DEYOU’ (meaning it could be decrypted only with the Ambassador present) telegram from the head of the Foreign Office in London. It explained that the Top Secret plan was for the Prince and Princess of Wales, embarked on the Royal Yacht Britannia, to pass down the Suez Canal at the end of their honeymoon cruise through the Mediterranean from Gibraltar. On the assumption that they would have avoided the world’s media during the cruise, the first ‘press availability’ would be at Port Said at the northern entrance to the Canal. The Ambassador’s instructions were to plan for this, but to tell no one, certainly no Egyptian. In desperation, the Ambassador asked the Naval Attaché and me to help.
The first task was the most dangerous. Once Britannia had passed through the Canal, the idea was that Their Royal Highnesses would picnic on a beach on one of the deserted coral islands at the northern end of the Red Sea. The Ambassador was instructed by the Flag Officer, Royal Yachts (FORY) to find a ‘mine-free, shark-free’ beach. There was nothing we could do about the sharks, and the only way we could establish whether a beach was mine-free was for the Naval Attaché, complaining furiously, to be sent there in great secrecy and walk up and down it.
Somehow Britannia did elude the press as she made her way east through the Mediterranean, although there were one or two close calls. The Suez Canal Authority reserved a berth for Britannia alongside their majestic building in Port Said. Telling the Canal administrators meant that we also had to tell the President. To the fury of the Austrian Government, Sadat promptly cancelled, at about a week’s notice, a state visit to Vienna, citing ‘security reasons’, in order to have dinner with the Prince and Princess of Wales when they arrived in Port Said. As Britannia steamed closer, the signals flew back and forth between the Rear Admiral in command and the Ambassador. One memorable exchange read something like: ‘FORY to HMA: at dinner HRH will be wearing Royal Yacht Squadron rig’ (none of us knew exactly what Royal Yacht Squadron rig was, but we guessed it involved a black bow tie); ‘HMA to FORY: dinner jackets have not been worn in Egypt since the Revolution’.
Eventually, Britannia tied up in Port Said. The world’s press, whom I had assembled on the roof of the Suez Canal Authority building, went mad. They couldn’t see the Prince or the Princess, but they did now know where they were. Suddenly, I got a laconic message from my friend and Diplomatic Service colleague Francis Cornish, who was on Britannia, working as assistant private secretary to the Prince of Wales. ‘Their Royal Highnesses are thinking of taking a private stroll on deck before dinner, and do not want to be observed. Please clear the press from the building.’ And that was it. I had 200 baying journalists, scribbling, filming, photographing, recording, and had been told to prevent them covering the royal story of the year. The Egyptian police refused to help. After about thirty minutes of pushing and shoving, I managed to get them all down the stairs, and out of sight of the Yacht. Last to go were the BBC’s Kate Adie and an aggressive leather-clad German news-agency photographer. ‘All clear,’ I signalled to Francis. ‘Sorry,’ came the reply, ‘TRH have changed their minds: no stroll on deck this evening.’ I could have throttled him.
Dinner over, press availability done, Britannia steamed south through the Canal, bearing her precious cargo. Passing Ismailia, halfway down the Canal (Francis told me later), the Officer of the Watch observed a scruffy little boat, rowed by two Egyptians, making for Britannia. Getting out a megaphone, and using their fruitiest language, the officers of the Royal Yacht instructed the Egyptian rowing boat to stay clear. But it just kept on coming. Somebody spotted several wooden crates in it. In later years, the Royal Marines would have opened fire. But in those innocent days the Suez Canal Authority pilot was allowed to ask the two oarsmen what their business was. ‘On behalf of President of Egypt,’ they replied, ‘we bring boxes of mangoes for Highness Diana.’ At dinner a day earlier, the Princess of Wales had confessed to Sadat her love for Egypt’s favourite fruit. The President had his priorities.
Eventually, Britannia made landfall, at the Egyptian Red Sea resort port of Hurghada, where a VC10 of the Royal Air Force was waiting to take the honeymoon couple back to England. Sadat sent his Republican Guard to give the royal visitors a proper send-off. The world’s press were too busy photographing and filming the newlyweds to notice the coal-scuttle helmets, field-grey uniforms and jackboots of a military formation that betrayed only too obviously Sadat’s wartime sympathies.*
The other major royal visitor during my time in Cairo was Prince Andrew, then aged twenty. His Royal Highness had just won his helicopter wings – a qualification which, within a year, he would be using in war. But in 1981 as a reward for his success the Queen treated her second son to a Nile cruise. As the Chancery bachelor, I was detailed to accompany the young Prince. All I can say is that neither the Prince nor the Third Secretary did full justice to the distinguished professors of Egyptology whom the Egyptian Government deployed at every one of the great Pharaonic temples between Luxor and Aswan. But fun was had, not least during the last leg of the holiday in Cairo, during which Hilary Weir arranged for the young Prince to go riding in the desert and for a poolside barbecue (which became a bit more exuberant than she had intended).
As a result of this, Prince Andrew was kind enough to invite me to his twenty-first birthday party at Windsor Castle. About a thousand people were there, ranging from the Prime Minister and Mr Thatcher through to younger friends of the Prince. I found myself sitting next to one of them – a dashing American blonde – when, halfway through the evening, we moved into the Waterloo Chamber (I think it was) for a concert. A man in cap and spectacles strode on to the stage, sat down at the piano and started singing. I had no idea who he was, and turned to my neighbour to ask. ‘You caaan’t be serious,’ she drawled, ‘you are sooo sad. Don’t you recognise Elton John? I flew over with him on Concorde two days ago.’
None of us had dreamed that one of the guests at the poolside party in Cairo a few months earlier would achieve fame, for a sadder reason. In helping Lady Weir draw up the guest list, I had suggested that we include a young Egyptian diplomat, Rifa’at al-Ansary, who had just returned from a posting to London and was going places in the Egyptian Foreign Ministry. He duly came, and delighted the girls at least with a bravura display of disco dancing. Soon afterwards, he was transferred to what was then a front-line post for Egypt – the Embassy in Tel Aviv. The next time I heard of him he was on the front pages of the British press, dubbed by the tabloids the ‘Cairo Casanova’. In Israel, it turned out, he had reconnected with a British diplomat, Rhona Ritchie, whom he had met during his posting to London. During what was by all accounts a passionate love affair, she had allegedly shown al-Ansary British diplomatic telegrams. Observing this, the Israeli security service, the Shin Bet, had tipped off Britain’s Security Service. Apparently without the Foreign Office being properly briefed on what was happening, Ritchie was called back to London on a pretext and then arrested by the Special Branch at Heathrow, before being tried for espionage. In my view, and that of many of Rhona Ritchie’s Diplomatic Service colleagues, it was a ridiculous overreaction to a serious lapse of judgement – to which the right response would have been dismissal, not imprisonment. When my Ambassador in Cairo, Michael Weir, was told that Rhona Ritchie’s crime was to have shown al-Ansary British diplomatic telegrams, his response was that he did that all the time with the American Ambassador – with no authority, although admittedly America was a much closer ally than Egypt. Trading information is the core business of diplomacy: no successful diplomat can ever get it exactly right. Rhona Ritchie wasn’t the first or the last to have got it seriously wrong, but she was unwise enough to have done it under the eyes of the world’s most unforgiving security agency.
Some visitors to Cairo weren’t royal, but expected to be treated as such. One of these was the Lord Mayor of London, in those days without any rival at City Hall, and conducting himself during his year in office with pomp and ceremony that have since – wisely – been greatly reduced. The guidance from the Mansion House told us that the Lord Mayor enjoyed a status equivalent to that of a Cabinet minister, although few Cabinet ministers travelled with a sword bearer and someone who described himself as the Chief Commoner of the City of London. As press attaché, my job was to ensure maximum favourable publicity for what was primarily a commercial visit. With this in mind, I arranged a showing in my flat of a Central Office of Information film about the job of Lord Mayor. But I fear this ancient newsreel-style production left my Egyptian guests more confused than enlightened. The film had opened with the Lord Mayor riding through London in his gilded coach, surrounded by the pikemen of the Honourable Artillery Company: that was what most Egyptians thought a Lord Mayor was. But then, presumably in order to show that the Lord Mayor was human, we cut to a scene of the same man, dressed in very English weekend-shabby clothes, digging potatoes and passing a trug full of the produce of his vegetable garden through the kitchen window to a grateful wife. Egypt grew some of the finest spring potatoes in the world, but her journalists thought that only peasants dug them. They couldn’t work out what was going on with the Lord Mayor.
Nor did the Embassy press release announcing the imminent arrival of the Lord Mayor help much. There is in Arabic no exact equivalent for mayor. ‘Governor’ is not right; nor is ‘head’ or ‘president’. So we opted for umda, the village headman of London. Translating ‘Chief Commoner’ into Arabic was even more difficult: we ended up with rais al-fellaheen, head of the peasants of London.
But these royal visitors and the Lord Mayor were only the most prominent of a constant flow of official visitors to Cairo in those days. The cynics in the Embassy couldn’t help noticing how the numbers fell away in the hotter months of summer, and how many of our visitors managed to combine a day or two in Cairo with a fact-finding visit, official or unofficial, to Upper Egypt. Once again, I remembered my university friend who, on failing to get into the Diplomatic Service, had joined Thomson Holidays.
Away from the Embassy, there was plenty of fun to be had in Cairo in the early 1980s. Both there and in Alexandria, the heady days of the Second World War were not such a distant memory. Groppi’s tea house was still there, as was Shepheard’s Hotel, although it had been moved and rebuilt, hideously. There were still plenty of older Egyptians who remembered what the Eighth Army had called Groppi’s Light Horse and Shepheard’s Short Range Group – the men and women of General Headquarters Middle East.
In the villas and grander pre-war apartment blocks of Garden City, Zamalek and Heliopolis could still be found Egyptians who mourned the pre-revolutionary cosmopolitan days, which some hoped that Sadat’s infitah, or opening, would bring back. Sitting next to an ancient hostess at a lunch – she would have said luncheon – party in Garden City, I was asked, seriously, whether we still danced the Charleston. She then recalled that, in her family, which was a branch of Egypt’s former royal family, they spoke four languages: English for business, French in society, Turkish within the family and Arabic to the servants.*
There was also an Eighth Army dimension to the way I used to spend some winter weekends: staying with the settled bedu of Wadi Natrun, halfway along the desert road between Cairo and Alexandria, trying to shoot duck and occasionally snipe. We never killed anything much, but Nick Kittoe, the friend with whom I organised this, and I had huge fun. The night before the duck shoot we would stay with the sheikh of the local tribe, Abdul Gader, before rising at dawn to wait for the duck to come in. We built hides, and paid Abdul Gader to put down food for the ducks. But mostly we talked. Abdul Gader had spent the war working in the Wadi Natrun NAAFI canteen. Using his few words of British military English, he would mimic the way he had been taught to answer the telephone: ‘Wadi Natrun 234 Hello’. He was proud of his four wives: we would see them all, unveiled and unashamed in the way bedouin women are, feeding their babies in line along the wall of the majlis (or sitting area) in his breezeblock hut.
Fun too, though also terrifying for a hopeless non-horseman like me, were hours spent riding in the desert around the Pyramids. Sadly, Frank Gardner’s memory, in his book Blood and Sand,† of me as a fine horseman galloping across the desert is a mirage. But gazing at the view of the Pyramids, over a glass of Stella beer, from one of the rest houses of Sahara City (later demolished by Sadat) was one of the great pleasures of that time in Cairo.
It was the combination of Arabic (which she had studied at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London) and horses which had brought my future wife, Bridget, to Egypt. After a holiday there, she and her sister (who taught ballet) and a girlfriend (who taught English) had decided to spend more time in Cairo, renting a flat by the Pyramids and spending much of their time riding. About the only things they brought with them from England were three English saddles. As the Embassy bachelor, I was introduced to the three girls by the Economist correspondent in Cairo, Alan Mackie, in February 1981. Bridget and I married, in London, the following January. Our eldest son, Harry, was born in Cairo in November 1982, at a hospital on Roda Island in the Nile – just near where Moses was supposed to have been found in a basket among the rushes. Witnessing a birth in an Egyptian hospital was not easy. Bridget was given, quite unnecessarily and perhaps dangerously, a general anaesthetic, Harry was extracted with a pair of forceps that I could have sworn were rusty, and, immediately after his arrival, I, as the lucky father, was expected to give a thank-offering, in dirty Egyptian pound notes, to each of the delivery room staff. In the end, however, all was well: thanks in part to Um Nasr’s attention, Harry thrived in Egypt, and I was for ever after known to Arabs as Abu Heneri – the father of Henry.
Three and a half years in Egypt passed quickly. Soon it was time to return to a job in the Foreign Office in London. Before I did, I had to hand over to my successor. Michael Crawford had joined the Foreign Office after doing research at Oxford on the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia and after qualifying as a barrister, so he was a bit older, and much wiser, than me. He also had better Arabic. So, full of enthusiasm, I showed him the business card (reproduced in the endpaper of this book) which I had had printed locally, with English on one side and Arabic the other. ‘You must have one of these,’ I gushed. With the quizzically dry manner for which he was later to become well known, my successor examined both sides of the card. ‘Sherard,’ he said, ‘there is something wrong here. The English describes you as “Second Secretary (Information)”, but the Arabic gives your title as “Second Secretary (Flags)”.’ I grabbed the card back, and my heart fell: a misplaced accent had changed the Arabic for ‘information’ to ‘flags’. What a humiliation! But, just as I hadn’t noticed, nor over three years had any Egyptian. Perhaps they had been just too polite to say anything, or perhaps they had thought that the British Embassy really did have a junior official with the quaintly antique title of ‘Second Secretary (Flags)’.
That mistake in Arabic had been a blow to my pride, but not potentially fatal. The Political Counsellor in the Embassy, Tony Reeve, had, however, had a rather closer call. One Monday morning he asked me breezily to remind him what the Arabic for ‘mines’ as in land mines was. I told him: alghaam. He turned white. He had spent the weekend with his family on the Red Sea coast. Like the Prince and Princess of Wales, he had wanted to find a mine-free beach from which the family could swim. He had asked a feckless Egyptian sentry if there were any mines on the beach they had chosen. None, the sentry, had replied. But Tony now realised that, from his dimly remembered MECAS Word List, he had retrieved the word for mineral mines (managim), not that for land mines. He was hugely relieved, the more so when a few weeks later we heard that two Norwegians had chosen the same beach for a swim. They had stepped on a mine, and left nothing but their shoes.
In late July 1983, Bridget, Harry and I left Cairo by Land Rover. We crossed the northern Sinai Peninsula, taking the coast road past the Israeli settlements which had been demolished when Israel had finally withdrawn from Sinai in April 1982. On the Egyptian side, the border post was a fly-blown affair, with a hut, a guard and an ancient field telephone. We were looking forward to relaxing in Jerusalem with the friends with whom we planned to stay. But not so fast. The border guard announced that nine-month-old Harry could not leave Egypt. He had an exit visa, to be sure, but no entry visa. As patiently as I could, I pointed out that he had been born in Cairo, and could not therefore have an entry visa in a passport issued by the British Embassy there. The border guard insisted. I got him to try to raise Cairo on his field telephone. After cranking the handset for what seemed like an age, he announced that there was no reply. But then our secret weapon kicked in: Harry started to cry, very loudly. Egyptians are kindly people, and none can resist the sound of a bawling child. The border guard offered a compromise: Harry (and his mother) could leave Egypt on the exit visa, go round the hut, re-enter on an entry visa the guard would provide for a fee, and then leave again. It was a neat solution to a problem that should never have been: the Egyptian Arabic for red tape is al Ruteen.
We crossed the frontier, to be greeted by striking Israeli women border guards, flaunting Uzi sub-machine guns. But appearances were deceptive: courtesy was not a quality they shared with the Arabs on the other side of the fence. We raced on, through the pine groves of the Gaza Strip. Three happy days in Jerusalem followed, and then we set off for the port city of Haifa and the ferry back to Piraeus, via Cyprus and Rhodes. Our fake Egyptian diplomatic number plates (which the Embassy garage had run up for me, after the originals had had to be returned to the Foreign Ministry) attracted surprisingly friendly attention within Green Line Israel but hostile stares in the Occupied Territories. We soon worked out why: Israel had opened its border with Lebanon to its Maronite allies in the South Lebanon Army, and Arabic number plates from Christian Lebanon were not an uncommon sight in Israel. Nothing in the Middle East was simple.
As we sailed from Haifa, with all its memories of the British Mandate over Palestine, I little dreamed that, in eighteen years’ time, I would sail back into the great harbour as British ambassador to the State of Israel.
