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

had asked for the present Italianate design, in place of Gilbert Scott’s Gothic vision, which instead became St Pancras Station. In 1977, the hugely imaginative and expensive restoration programme for the Old Public Offices had not yet started. They were still in a state of post-war squalor. The glories of the Locarno rooms were concealed behind plywood partitions, erected to create more office space in wartime. The beautiful marble floor of the Durbar Court of the India Office was covered with Nissen huts, housing communications equipment, even though the Court was roofed over (rather leakily). Only ten years earlier, the building had still been heated by the coal fires which adorned most offices. The ashes of that era still seemed to cover everything in a fine film of dust. The Republic of Ireland Department was hidden away in the roof spaces of what had once been the Colonial Office. Only yards away was the old Colonial Office Library which still houses the stuffed anaconda, known fondly as Albert, brought back from distant parts who knows when or why. As gradually I found my way round the great building, I came to know and love the place where I was to spend much of the next three decades. I was immensely proud of its wonders, and its stories. Even then I used to invite friends in to show them the marvels of the India Office or of Sigismund Goetze’s kitsch post-Great War murals – apparently detested by Lord Curzon when he was foreign secretary – which adorn the great landing at the top of the main staircase. Then, as now, I marvelled at the allegory of Britannia Pacificatrix, surrounded by her victorious allies at the end of the First World War: France in her revolutionary bonnet, Belgium and Serbia depicted as naked maidens, Africa represented by a small black boy with a bowl of fruit on his head. Or the hooded figure invoking ‘Silence!’ above the door into the Foreign Secretary’s office. Best of all is Britannia Nutrix, breast-feeding her young colonies, just beside the Ambassadors’ Waiting Room where the Foreign Secretary’s visitors sit before they are summoned in. One of the best things the Foreign Office ever did was to institute guided tours of this magnificent labyrinth, at the heart of our imperial history.

      From my first day in the Foreign Office, I knew that I was going to love the job. I was thrilled when, after six months, Philip Mallet told me that he quite liked my work, even though there was plenty of room for improvement. I had already noticed that he used bits of some of my drafts.

      The weeks passed into months, and our group of new entrants began to wonder what next. We knew that the usual pattern was a year learning on the job in London, before language training and a first posting overseas. We called ourselves – and still do – the G77, borrowing the name of the UN developing countries’ caucus. We met regularly for drinks and dinner, usually at Mon Plaisir in Monmouth Street, and compared notes. One of us had been sent straight abroad, as the annual reinforcement for the British mission to the UN in New York for the General Assembly session. We asked him what life was like overseas; the answer came back that it was even better than in London. Living abroad, working with foreigners, was just as rewarding as advertised: it was what we had joined the Diplomatic Service for. And the free accommodation, and allowances, would help pay off our debts.

      When sitting the Qualifying Tests at Oxford, and again soon after joining the Diplomatic Service, we had been obliged to take a language-aptitude test. The test involved learning Kurdish in an afternoon. It examined every aspect of aptitude (or otherwise) for learning foreign languages: aural as well as oral ability, written expression, grasp of grammar and so on. Foolishly, I had a glass of wine at a picnic in the park with my aunt just before the second test, on the grounds that it would improve my fluency. I was quite wrong, but my average mark over both tests was just good enough to suggest that I might be capable of learning what the FCO Training Department called Class I languages: essentially, Arabic, Chinese or Japanese. It didn’t take me long to choose. My poor ear for pitch meant that I could not hope, so I thought, to master a tonal language such as Chinese or Japanese. But what tipped the balance was that I knew very little about the Far East, and a bit more about the Middle East, based mainly on my study of ancient history. I opted for Arabic, and was told that I would start at the Foreign Office’s famous Middle East Centre for Arab Studies, or MECAS, in the village of Shemlan, above Beirut, in September 1978.

      Three other contemporaries were selected for Arabic training. Others went off to learn Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian. About half of the entry managed to avoid hard language training and instead brushed up their French, or acquired German or Spanish, for European postings.

      We had taken our first steps on the perpetual treadmill of diplomatic life: with the average posting lasting three or so years, you are always either speculating about your next posting or preparing for it. The sense of continual anticipation of working somewhere on something, or with someone, more interesting than your present job is what keeps many diplomats going – and what makes life such a let-down when the wheel finally stops turning.

      That summer of 1978 I met up with an Oxford friend who had failed the Foreign Office entrance exam, and asked him what he was now doing. He was working as a rep for Thomson Holidays, ‘on the basis’, he said, ‘that the work will be much the same as in the Diplomatic Service’. As I soon discovered, he wasn’t far wrong.

Chapter 2

       School for Spies

      ‘Where did you learn such good Arabic?’ asked the man in the suq. ‘In Lebanon, at Shemlan above Beirut’ was my answer. ‘Ah,’ with a knowing look, came the reply, ‘the British spy school.’

      For a generation of British diplomats and spies, such were the first words of tens of thousands of encounters across the Middle East, as the graduates of the Foreign Office’s Middle East Centre for Arab Studies engaged, in Arabic, with real Arabs.

      MECAS was set up in Jerusalem in 1944, as the end of the war approached. Its job was to teach British diplomats, spies, officers and other officials Arabic, and about the Middle East. Its first Chief Instructor was Jewish: Major Aubrey Evan of the British Army, later, as Abba Eban, Israel’s UN Ambassador and Foreign Minister. In 1948, when Britain pulled out of Palestine, the school moved to Lebanon, eventually to a purpose-built mini-campus in the Christian village of Shemlan, in the mainly Druze-populated mountains above Beirut. It was the Egyptian ruler, Gamal Abdul Nasser, Colonel Nasser, who in the run-up to the Suez crisis of 1956 had dubbed MECAS the ‘British spy school’. The name stuck. For thirty years, anyone of any education in the Middle East, and many of no education, knew of the British spy school, thanks to the free air time Nasser had given the institution.

      Despite Nasser’s flattery, the school was probably never quite as good as its reputation. It turned out Arabists with a good grasp of basic grammar and political and economic vocabulary. They could communicate with each other in the curious self-referential dialect they learned and practised in the village cafés of Mount Lebanon, and in the bars and suqs of Beirut. But once sent out into the wider Middle East they faced the barrier confronting every student of Arabic: that, while written Arabic is more or less standardised across the Arab world, the spoken language varies widely, from country to country, and sometimes from region to region. Converting the ingratiating wheedle of Lebanese colloquial into words that worked in Aleppo, or Baghdad, or Cairo, let alone in Abu Dhabi, or Jeddah, or Kuwait, or Sana’a, or Tripoli, was harder work, usually never fully accomplished. Opening one’s mouth, however, and speaking something that sounded like Arabic, was a start at least, and showed willing.

      But in the summer of 1978 all that was ahead of me. I was proud to have been selected for MECAS, to have been chosen as a prospective member of the Foreign Office’s cadre of Arabists – the ‘camel corps’ much abused by some of the department’s Zionist detractors – an elite within an elite. And I was relieved that it had been decided that MECAS would definitively reopen that September, having suffered since 1975 a series of temporary closures caused by the Lebanese Civil War.

      After the austerity of months in the salt mines of London, preparing for an overseas posting felt a bit like the run-up to Christmas. Once the posting had been confirmed, a letter from the FCO’s Personnel Services Department arrived, describing the allowances we would receive overseas, and the advances of such allowances we would be given even before we left the United Kingdom. For me, aged twenty-three,