Free Radical

by Cable, Vincent

  In truth, my job – certainly in the early stages – was tedious and I struggled to fill the day productively. It led me to question the deployment of so many good brains – my colleagues were often Oxbridge firsts with impressive linguistic skills – in rather humdrum administrative work when, in their thirties, they should have been involved in serious decision-making. Even as a fairly elevated first secretary, my minutes had to pass through three tiers of bureaucracy before reaching ministers. An inordinate amount of time was spent pandering to the whims of visiting ministers and the social contacts of ambassadors. Underemployed diplomats in London would scuttle round, amid great drama, to deliver some pointless courtesy note from their foreign office to ours. I would spend much time reading and distributing political analyses from our overseas ambassadors and their staff which had already been covered, much more succinctly, in the British press. When Lord Rothschild’s Downing Street think tank turned its reforming guns on the Foreign Office in 1975 there was a brief spasm of fear, but outraged ex-ambassadors were mobilized to launch a fierce counter-offensive in the Lords and The Times and the FCO survived the bombardment intact. My own, private, view was that Lord Rothschild had been far too indulgent.

  There was, of course, a social life, which for some colleagues was a rich source of sustenance. The nearest Olympia and I came to it, however, was an invitation to a royal banquet. We dressed up as required, myself in a penguin suit and Olympia, absolutely stunning, in ‘national dress’ (a sari), but I forgot the problem of transport. At that stage we had a battered Mini estate used for camping, supermarket shopping, and carrying waste to the dump and the children to nursery school. The back doors were inelegantly held together by string. As we approached Buckingham Palace it became clear that we were somewhat out of place among the Rollses and Daimlers and we were interrogated for a long period at the entry gate before being reluctantly admitted. A Foreign Office colleague witnessed this episode and the story, suitably embellished, established me as an eccentric and fully paid-up member of the awkward squad. The event was given added spice by a diplomatic incident in the receiving line. Olympia offered the Queen a traditional Indian namaste instead of a handshake and, perhaps distracted by the boredom of innumerable greetings, the Queen appeared not to notice and continued to proffer her hand to be shaken. There was a prolonged stand-off as neither appeared willing to compromise until we were at last led away by clucking courtiers.

  Since I was determined to make good use of my two years, and not just mark time, I set about making the job more interesting. I started with responsibility for Venezuela, Ecuador and Colombia, but discovered that I had a talent for office imperialism and, by the time I left, had taken over the Inca, Mayan and Aztec empires, also adding Fidel Castro’s Cuba, despite some misgivings by security-conscious colleagues who were alarmed at the exposure it would give me to the intelligence services.

  Hugh Carless was also smart enough to realize that, with the rise of OPEC, the big diplomatic growth areas were trade promotion in oil-rich countries and international economics. On the principle that in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king, I was put forward as a great authority on these economic matters, helping to create new areas of work for the Latin America department.

  Hugh’s biggest success was to outwit the DTI in taking the lead role in a big trade promotion push in Latin America. The Foreign Office rarely got the better of the Treasury in the endless territorial skirmishes; and the MoD guarded defence sales jealously, but the DTI was a softer target for predatory raids. Much to the fury of the DTI, I was made secretary to a CBI trade mission to Venezuela and Ecuador, and, on the back of it, spent six months involved in detailed trade diplomacy alongside leading UK companies.

  The mission leader, Sir Peter Hope, was a remarkable character: an enormous, tall, bear of a man with an impressive intellect – he had achieved a maths first at Cambridge in two years – and a strong pedigree in business, the intelligence world and diplomacy. He had a withering contempt for the clubby amateurishness of the traditional British merchant banks and boardrooms where he worked and for the sheltered recesses of the diplomatic service. Caracas was one such recess, and when we arrived in the Venezuelan capital with our collection of British industrialists and bankers, the ambassador’s aristocratic nostrils visibly quivered with disdain at this vulgar assemblage of trades-men who were disrupting his attempts to build cultural bridges to the Venezuelan literati. Within hours, a list of dead wood, headed by the ambassador, had been drawn up and I was charged with ensuring on our return that it was duly chopped – or whatever more genteel form of demotion was permitted under Foreign Office personnel rules. It was the first time I had been exposed to this style of abrasive management after the cosy, protected environment of the civil service and academia. I found it exhilarating, despite the obvious harshness for some individuals who would now suffer a permanent black mark against their careers for having failed to jump to attention at the right moment. Sir Peter was surprised to discover that I shared his drive and enthusiasm, and we managed to energize the British contribution to what would otherwise have been a long ritual of courtesy calls and visits to steel plants and dams.

  It was more difficult to energize our Venezuelan hosts. Venezuela was just discovering the vast riches that would flow from its oil, thanks to OPEC, whose founder and intellectual inspiration was a Venezuelan, Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso. As in other oil-rich countries, oil money flowed into government; much was absorbed by senior ministers and officials and their business associates in the social elite, and a trickle emerged to be spent on the millions of poor people whose shanty towns clung to the sides of the steep valleys around Caracas. The country was nominally democratic, with the two parties (Acción Democrática, essentially social democratic, and COPEI, a Christian Democratic party) alternating in power. At the time of our visit, the presidency was held by Carlos Andrés Pérez, a clever, upwardly mobile politician with a populist touch who envisaged a transformation of the country through state industries (with a modest role for the local private sector). The extent of the venality of Pérez and his entourage only emerged later, but it was clear at the time that fabulous wealth was being created among a small number of well-connected people who hadn’t worked or saved or taken risks to achieve it. Much of the wealth was on display, decorating the fabulously beautiful women with whom the country’s leaders surrounded themselves. The greed, wastefulness and vulgar ostentation of the Venezuelan political elite help to explain why, two decades later, Colonel Hugo Chávez was able to overthrow it and install his own, populist, alternative.

  Our hosts, then, took an obvious pleasure in having queues of gringos soliciting business from them and their arrogance was sharpened by a brittle nationalism, given historical shape by the exploits of Simón Bolívar in the war of independence from Spain. Our team managed to extract enormous and elaborate promises of future collaboration but precious few real orders. Such business as was actually secured from the Venezuelan government could mostly be traced back to a shadowy arms dealer and locally based Brit, Sir Arnold Smith, who drove around Caracas in a Rolls-Royce and entertained us at his remarkable mansion overlooking the city. My job was to ensure that the gap between aspiration and reality was closed in the aftermath of the mission.

  On the visit I was also introduced to the hitherto hidden world of British intelligence. I had developed over the previous year a friendly relationship with Our Man in Caracas, a young man who was keen to make a splash in London with his reports from the front line. I had helped to put him on the map by hyping his rather insubstantial reports and copying them far and wide in Whitehall. Between us we succeeded in talking up Caracas as the new epicentre of the Cold War, and I managed to embellish several of his colourful accounts of Venezuelan ministers’ love affairs and their tenuous links with Cuban officials to get the reports on to the Foreign Secretary’s desk. This was more Graham Greene than Le Carré. But we helped each other to enliven our small corner of the geo
political universe. In grateful appreciation of my help, he invited me to his favourite nightclub, became very drunk, and encouraged me to join MI6 (now better known as the SIS). The offer survived his hangover. I was invited to an assignation a few days later with the regional director of the service, who happened to be in town: a small, totally bald, portly man with dark shades who was introduced by my awestruck friend as the mastermind behind an anti-communist coup in Guyana some years earlier. We had several meetings over the next few days and it quickly became apparent to the MI6 man that my casual approach to security, poor linguistic skills and left-leaning politics made me utterly unsuited to this new career. I did not, therefore, follow in the footsteps of Lord Ashdown.

  I remained, however, well suited to the role I had been given, orchestrating this initiative to promote Great Britain Ltd in Latin America; organizing visits from Venezuelan ministers (and Pérez himself), and the less well-endowed Ecuadorians, to secure their elusive signatures on contracts; acting as a hub for some of the complex negotiations involving government guarantees; and passing the intelligence gleaned from intercepts or CIA contacts to our business friends to help them gain an advantage over their French and Italian competitors. In my more reflective moments the ghost of Adam Smith would appear to remind me that this corporatist world was the antithesis of everything I believed in. But the flattery of the captains of British industry and the envy of my departmental colleagues were more than adequate compensation.

  There were, however, some firm defences in Whitehall against the potentially corrupting influence of excessive familiarity with the corporate world. On one occasion I tried to make a case for breaching the rules on export credit guarantees in order to favour a Clydeside shipbuilding company, whose representative had been on my delegation, and which was endeavouring to sell frigates to admirals in Ecuador. Ecuador’s oil barely qualified it for OPEC membership and any big deals would have to be lubricated by what the French call ‘credit mixte’ – i.e. subsidy – outlawed under an international ‘gentlemen’s agreement’. I managed to mobilize the FCO, MoD and DTI in support of this bid, and my first-hand accounts of ‘badly needed jobs on Clydeside’ obviously touched the heart of the FCO minister who signed off my submission. It duly reached the Treasury and I was summoned to a meeting with the undersecretary responsible, a Miss Kelly, whose kindly manner disguised a formidable brain and ruthless effectiveness. She sat me down like a little boy at school and gently tore up my arguments one by one. Not only that, but she thanked me for serving up the most perfect example she had encountered of pandering to commercial vested interests, using fallacious, mercantilist arguments. She then treated me to an undergraduate lecture on the ‘lump of labour fallacy’ which I had infiltrated into my paper. The final humiliation came a few days later in the form of a letter from the Chancellor to the Foreign Secretary and I was required to explain why the Foreign Office had been so brutally routed by the Treasury. When my embarrassment had subsided, I acknowledged a greatly enhanced respect for the intellectual integrity and competence of the best of our senior civil servants, particularly in the Treasury.

  My next escapade was to test the limits of the arms export control regime. I became increasingly concerned at the volume of lethal weapons that I was authorizing on a daily basis to go to fragile and unsavoury regimes. Expressions of disapproval would have confirmed suspicions that I was just a feeble-minded lefty, so I decided to challenge the system in other ways. One day a letter arrived on my desk from a manufacturer in West Bromwich who wanted approval to sell an armour-plated car – in effect, a mini-tank – to Fidel Castro for his personal protection. Since Castro had been on the receiving end of several assassination attempts it was clear why he wanted the car. The Midlands firm could supply it. My colleagues, and the DTI, were, however, nervous. Cuba was, after all, a communist country and the official guidelines said that export approval should not be given to arms sales to Cuba. I ignored nervous colleagues and approved the sale, arguing that this transaction could hardly be held to be an arms sale in the normal sense, and that it might help to facilitate our small but growing trade with Cuba and the blossoming of relations favoured by some ministers, like Mrs Hart. My superiors would neither approve nor reject my recommendation and passed the matter further up the chain of command with great alacrity. Eventually it reached the Foreign Secretary, Mr Callaghan who, no doubt recalling my role in the Ecuadorian frigates affair, saw trouble coming. He, in turn, referred the matter upwards, to Mr Henry Kissinger. A week or so later a reply was received from Washington to the effect that Mr Secretary Kissinger was surprised to be asked; he would never, otherwise, have known or cared about the matter, but, since he had been asked, the answer was ‘no’. Castro survived without the armoured car. A few workers in West Bromwich lost their jobs. And the obsequious, one-sided nature of our ‘special relationship’ was starkly revealed.

  My annexation of Cuba had occurred a little earlier when my room-mate, had asked me to cover for him during an absence. Nominally junior to myself, he operated independently and I gathered that he was being groomed for a role in the intelligence services, though he would always bat away my cheeky questions with diplomatic evasiveness. Unlike the gossips and misfits I had encountered previously, he seemed perfectly suited to the role of a spy, though, as with most of the spooks I encountered, his world view was deeply conservative. Nonetheless, he had resisted pressure from our ambassador in Managua to find a place at Sandhurst for the son of the appalling Somoza, until overruled by the head of the department. When he took time out to learn an East European language, I covered the Cuban brief competently and was allowed to keep it.

  Anglo-Cuban relationships were minimal but for two factors. The first was a group of Labour MPs who retained a positive, perhaps nostalgic, view of Castro and the Cuban revolution and wanted a Labour government, at the very least, to balance its commercially driven ties with the juntas in Brazil and Argentina with friendly overtures to Cuba, and to distance Britain from the USA. Judith Hart was most clearly identified with this view. The second was the closeness of intelligence cooperation between Britain and the USA, which involved sharing data on communist states and, in particular, on the large Cuban embassy staff, most of whom seemed to have links with the Cuban equivalent of the KGB. My dealings with both our internal and external intelligence services left me with very mixed views. When dealing with specific issues and individuals they were totally professional, meticulous and immensely painstaking in piecing together detail without coming to premature conclusions. But whenever they let drop their prejudices on the wider political scene, these were invariably plucked from the Daily Telegraph, and occasionally reached out to the wider political fringes, as with the assertion I heard on several occasions that Harold Wilson, the prime minister, was an active Soviet agent.

  Then, a large number of Cuban soldiers were reported as having joined the civil war that was unfolding in Angola. My own instinctive reaction was that the principal villains were the South Africans, who had launched cross-border raids into Angola. As the arguments raged among analysts internally and commentators externally, it became clear that there were two fundamentally different ways of looking at the world. On one hand, a lot of my diplomatic and intelligence colleagues saw it exclusively through a Cold War prism. Whatever our personal reservations about them, the South African apartheid regime, Ian Smith’s rebel regime fighting Mugabe’s ZANU (PF), and the residual anti-Marxist forces in Angola and Mozambique were ‘on our side’ against the communists, who were embodied by those Cuban troops. I represented the alternative view – shared (I hoped) by ministers – that the ‘threat of communism’ existed primarily because of those resisting majority rule. I saw at first hand, since I was part of the process, how briefings to the Joint Intelligence Committee and to ministers, and intelligence ‘facts’, could easily be coloured by one or other of these preconceived prejudices (foreshadowing Iraq many years later). Fortunately, even among the protagonists there was an unde
rlying professionalism and I engaged in detailed, and basically good-natured, debates with Foreign Office research staff and the intelligence services about the precise sequence of events. On one important matter I was proved wrong: it transpired that Cuban troopships had set sail for Africa before the South Africans had invaded Angola from Namibia.

  In another respect, however, I was vindicated. There was a mysterious department in the Foreign Office, the Information and Research Department, dealing with ‘grey’ propaganda: material that appeared non-attributably in newspapers and magazines around the world under the name of some academic or expert but was actually ghosted in the FCO. The head of the department, Ray Whitney, subsequently became a Tory MP. Much of its material was innocuous, even creditable. But from time to time articles appeared from the department that extolled the virtues of right-wing dictators who were allies in the Cold War, including General Pinochet. I felt I needed to act when it was clear that, in the context of the Angolan conflict with Cuba, material was appearing in support of apartheid in South Africa. I obtained the support of the acting head of the department, who had been up to this point studiously uncontroversial but on this occasion either shared my outrage or saw an opportunity to earn some brownie points with Labour ministers. The matter went to Anthony Crosland, the new Foreign Secretary, who was incandescent to discover that civil servants had been churning out extreme right-wing propaganda under the noses of Labour ministers. The department was closed (I believe temporarily).

  I was elated by the arrival of Anthony Crosland. He had long been a hero. His Future of Socialism was one of the most persuasive political tracts I had ever read and had played a significant part in moving me from Liberal to Labour while a student. He was not easily pigeonholed as ‘right’ or ‘left’, though clearly in the social democratic tradition. He was, or seemed, decidedly earthier than the other leading social democrat, Roy Jenkins. Crosland also contrasted sharply with Callaghan, who was very shrewd but deeply conservative and over-respectful of the flummery, fancy dress and protocol surrounding diplomacy. Crosland questioned everything, irreverently. He was particularly effective in gently deflating heads of department, like mine, who would argue that Latin America was the centre of the known universe. He firmly declined to spend his time massaging the egos of visiting foreign ministers or ambassadors. When he was eventually persuaded to pay a short visit to Latin America, it was on the strict understanding that he would return before Saturday evening’s Match of the Day. Crosland sadly died at the end of my stay in the Foreign Office, to be replaced by his minister of state, David Owen. I did not get to see much of David Owen in his new role, but I know the FCO collectively groaned at the prospect of someone without Callaghan’s gravitas and avuncular charm, and without Crosland’s intellect and sense of fun, but with an ego to match both of them combined. To Owen’s credit, however, he emerged from two years as Foreign Secretary with a considerably enhanced reputation and, unlike his predecessors, he made time to set out his approach to the job in a book on human rights. I encountered him again a decade later as my party leader.