Ever the Diplomat: Confessions of a Foreign Office Mandarin. Sherard Cowper-Coles

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