Craig Murray

For other people named Craig Murray, see Craig Murray (disambiguation).

Craig Murray
Craig Murray delivers an address on 23 September 2006 aboard a Peace Train on the subject of Afghanistan.
Personal details
Born	(1958-10-17) 17 October 1958 West Runton, Norfolk, England
Education	MA (Hons), University of Dundee
Occupation	Political activist Former ambassador
Website	craigmurray.org.uk

Craig John Murray (born 17 October 1958) is a British former diplomat. He was formerly the British ambassador to Uzbekistan, in the process becoming known as a whistleblower. Subsequently, he has been active as a human rights campaigner, political activist and blogger, as well as writing several books on history, including Sikunder Burnes: Master of the Great Game (2016), and a memoir Murder in Samarkand (2006). He was the Rector of the University of Dundee (2007–10).

While Ambassador in Tashkent, he accused the Karimov administration of human rights violations, which led to conflict with his superiors and attempts to remove him from his post. Murray complained to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on multiple occasions that intelligence received by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from the Uzbek government was unreliable because it had been obtained through torture. These assertions were later confirmed by European investigators and found to have formed part of Extraordinary rendition.

Murray was eventually removed as ambassador to Uzbekistan on 14 October 2004; he attributed this to his complaints about human rights violations.

Early life and career

Family and education

Murray was born in West Runton, Norfolk, and was raised in neighbouring Sheringham. His father, one of 13 children, had worked in the docks in Leith, Scotland, before joining the Royal Air Force. He was educated at Sheringham Primary and then at Paston School (now known as Paston College), an all-boys state grammar school in North Walsham in Norfolk, which he greatly disliked. He told John Crace in 2007 that pupils were obliged each week to don "military uniform and become cadets. Either I skipped school or refused to take part, so I was frequently suspended". His A-levels suffered as a result.

According to his blog, Murray joined the Liberal Party in 1973, refounding, with two others, the defunct North Norfolk constituency Liberal party. Murray wrote to the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe to request a candidate. Thorpe's private secretary, Richard Moore, read the letter and volunteered himself to be the candidate. On arrival in Sheringham, he was surprised to find his sponsor was 15 years old. Moore (father of journalist Charles Moore) fought North Norfolk in both 1974 elections, the first Liberal to fight North Norfolk for several elections.

Murray became President of the East Anglian Federation of Young Liberals. Aged 16 he was elected to the National Council of the Liberal Party to represent the Eastern Region of England. At the University of Dundee, to which, Murray said, he barely gained admission to read Modern History, and "made a policy decision not to attend any lectures". Instead he "read voraciously" to teach himself, and graduated in 1982 with an MA (Hons) 1st Class. At Dundee University, Murray remained active in Liberal then Liberal Democrat politics. Murray was elected President of his University Students Union as an avowed Liberal.

Having already been on the Students' Representative Council, Murray became President of Dundee University Students' Association, elected to this sabbatical office twice (1982–1983 and 1983–1984), an occurrence so unusual that the university court (the highest body) changed the rules to prevent him running a third time. He spent seven years in total at the university, he had to re-sit one year for not attending tutorials, compared to a normal four years for a Scottish first degree.

Early years in HM Diplomatic Service

Murray sat the 1984 Civil Service Open Competition exams in his second year as the Students' Association President because a woman he was interested in was also sitting them, although he had no interest in entering the civil service. Later, after he was told he was in the top three of his year, he chose the HM Diplomatic Service because "it seemed marginally more glamorous than anything else on offer".

Murray had a number of overseas postings with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to Nigeria, Poland (in the 1990s, where he was first secretary heading the embassy's political and economic section) and Ghana. In London, he was appointed to the FCO's Southern European Department, as Cyprus desk officer, and later became head of the Maritime Section. In August 1991 he worked in the Embargo Surveillance Centre as the head of the FCO section. This job entailed monitoring the Iraqi government's attempts at smuggling weapons and circumventing sanctions. His group gave daily reports to Margaret Thatcher and John Major. In Murder in Samarkand, he describes how this experience led him to disbelieve the claims of the UK and US governments in 2002 about Iraqi WMDs.

Uzbekistan

Murray was appointed as the British ambassador to Uzbekistan, at the age of 43, where he was formally in office from August 2002 to October 2004, when he was dismissed. He told Nick Paton Walsh, then with The Guardian, in July 2004 that "there is no point in having cocktail-party relationships with a fascist regime". About a fortnight after his arrival, Murray recounted in a 2005 York University speech, he observed a court trial at which an elderly defendant said his statement about two of the other accused, nephews of his, had been made as he watched his children being tortured and the claim the two men were associates of Osama Bin Laden was entirely false.

Human rights

"In the middle of October" 2002, Nick Cohen wrote in The Observer, Murray "delivered a speech which broke with all the established principles of Foreign Office diplomacy". "The brave and honest ambassador", Cohen commented, spoke at a human rights conference hosted by Freedom House in Tashkent, although David Stern reported in January 2003 for EurasiaNet that other western officials had made similar comments. In the speech, Murray said that:

Uzbekistan is not a functioning democracy, nor does it appear to be moving in the direction of democracy. The major political parties are banned; Parliament is not subject to democratic election and checks and balances on the authority of the electorate are lacking. There is worse: we believe there to be between 7,000 and 10,000 thousand people in detention who we would consider as political and/or religious prisoners. In many cases they have been falsely convicted of crimes with which there appears to be no credible evidence they had any connection."

According to Nick Paton Walsh for a Guardian article: "The Foreign Office cleared the speech, but not without an acrimonious struggle over its content". Murray also said in his speech that the boiling to death of two men (reportedly members of Hizb ut-Tahrir) was "not an isolated incident." A photograph of one of the men showed that his fingernails had been pulled out. The American ambassador John Herbst was present at the event and reportedly "livid" at Murray's speech. According to a report in The Sunday Times, he was advised by Whitehall not to antagonise the government in Tashkent any further. The Americans were said to have put pressure on the British government for Murray to tone down his comments. The then Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan confronted Uzbek President Islam Karimov with Murray's assertions.

Murray was summoned to the FCO in London and, on 8 March 2003, was reprimanded for writing to his employers, in response to a speech by President of the United States George W. Bush criticising human rights violations by Saddam Hussein, that "when it comes to the Karimov regime, systematic torture and rape appear to be treated as peccadilloes, not to affect the relationship and to be downplayed in the international fora. Double standards? Yes." The human rights abuses were worse in Uzbekistan than in Iraq, thought Murray in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, but the latter was being invaded while the government of the former was being supported. In an internal document by Murray, later leaked to the Financial Times, he commented that Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) used intelligence provided by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from the Uzbek authorities gained through torture. "Torture dupes are forced to sign up to confessions showing what the Uzbek government wants the US and UK to believe", he wrote. "It is morally, legally and practically wrong to continue to receive this material. It is hypocritical and fatally undermines our moral standing," he wrote in a July 2004 dispatch. Murray denied being responsible for the leaks.

According to Murray, the Uzbek government overstated the activities of local militants and their connections to Al-Qaeda and, he wrote in The Washington Post later, the material from the CIA "revealed the same pattern of information" as the "forced confessions" of which he had become aware. The British government in October 2004 said neither it, nor the intelligence agencies, had ever used torture or encouraged others to so on its behalf. A later enquiry by The Washington Post, in connection with an interview with Murray, did not indicate the British had instituted an "absolute ban" on using information gained via torture. The Foreign Office legal team in March 2003, according to Murray, told him there was nothing to prevent their use of information gained by the Uzbeks using these methods.

Disciplinary charges

Some of the embassy staff were sacked in July 2003 while Murray was away on holiday. They were reinstated after he expressed his outrage to the FCO. Later during the same holiday he was recalled to London for disciplinary reasons. He was confronted with 18 charges on 21 August 2003. These included "hiring dolly birds [pretty young women] for above the usual rate" for the visa department, although Murray said that the department had an all-male staff, and Murray was accused of granting British visas to Uzbek women in exchange for sex in his office. The FCO gave him a week to resign and told him that discussing the charges would be a violation of the Official Secrets Act 1989. Representatives of the US embassy in Tashkent and the British Foreign Office later denied the American government had any involvement in Murray being recalled to London. However, a "local analyst" in Tashkent told Nick Paton Walsh, Murray and the American ambassador John Herbst (who left his Uzbekistan post in 2003) were regularly in heated disagreement.

Murray collapsed during a medical check in Tashkent on 2 September 2003 and was airlifted to St Thomas' Hospital in London. He was treated in hospital for depression having seriously considered taking his own life. After an FCO internal inquiry conducted by Tony Crombie, Head of the FCO's Overseas Territories Department, all but two of the charges (being drunk at work and misusing the embassy's Land Rover) were dropped. The charges were leaked to the press in October 2003. Murray returned to work in mid-November 2003. Only a few days after his return to Uzbekistan, Murray suffered another health crisis and was again flown back to London for medical treatment. It turned out to have been a near-fatal pulmonary embolism on a lung.

Around the same time, a group of more than a dozen British expatriates in Tashkent, including businessmen, wrote to the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw defending Murray as an advocate for inward British trade. One of the co-signers of the letter said there was a "common belief that Mr Murray is being sacrificed to the Americans". Members of Ozod Ovoz (Free Voice), a free speech group in the country pleaded with Blair and Bush for Murray to remain in his post as he was "an example for other ambassadors". Murray's stance was also supported by Clare Short, by then a former Secretary of State for International Development, and Daniel Hannan, the Conservative Member of the European Parliament (MEP).

The FCO exonerated him of all 18 charges in January 2004 after a four-month investigation but reprimanded him for speaking about them. Speaking in the Commons, the Foreign Office Minister Bill Rammell said the government "endorse his comments about the human rights situation in Uzbekistan".

Removal from post

Murray was removed from his post in October 2004, shortly after the Financial Times leak, which Murray later told Amy Goodman, he thought had been leaked by the British government to incriminate him.

The FCO denied any direct connection and stated that Murray had been removed for "operational" reasons, later a "disciplinary" explanation after Murray gave interviews to the media. He was suspended, amid claims that he had lost the confidence of senior officials and colleagues. The following day, in an interview on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Murray countered that he was a "victim of conscience", although he did not then believe the Americans were involved. A week later he was accused of "gross misconduct" by the FCO. A spokesman said "He is suspended on full pay pending an investigation into his conduct. I think it is more what he said than giving interviews" to the media. Murray was sacked in 2004. and given a severance package by the FCO in February 2005, which was mostly used for paying tax and his divorce.

A later report by European investigators found that Uzbekistan was used as a base in the American programme of Extraordinary rendition during the Wars in Afghanistan (the neighbouring country) and Iraq, which remained secret during Murray's time in the country, because such countries were tolerant of the use of torture. He gave this as a reason to Kevin Sullivan of The Washington Post in January 2008 to explain why the response to his revelations were so "ferocious".

Murder in Samarkand

Murray's book Murder in Samarkand - A British Ambassador's Controversial Defiance of Tyranny in the War on Terror (2006) is a memoir about his time as an ambassador.

In December 2005, Murray published confidential memos on his website, which had been officially removed from the text when Murder in Samarkand was submitted for checking. He initially acceded to these cuts. According to Murray, the British government "refused to clear it". The Foreign Office, after publication was announced, "said that they wouldn't seek to prevent publication but that they may act against it later".

The British government, in a letter to Murray from the Treasury Solicitor in July 2006, later claimed copyright over the documents, said they were "damaging to the national interest" and demanded they be removed, threatening legal action if they were not. The Treasury Solicitor's letter said: "Even if a document is released under the Freedom of Information Act or the Data Protection Act, that does not entitle you to make further reproductions of that document by, for example, putting them on your website". David Leigh in The Guardian, citing legal opinion, wrote that Murray could claim a "public interest" defence in the event of litigation as his disclosures were entirely non-commercial making the government's claim of copyright void. Murray did delete some of the material. Murray told Anne Simpson, writing for Glasgow's Herald newspaper, that because his legal defence would be exorbitantly expensive "the better course" is "to compromise. But even if I took all the stuff down, it's now out on other websites. So they (the authorities) will either slap me behind bars or they won't".

A radio play Murder in Samarkand, written by Sir David Hare, and based on Murray's book was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on 20 February 2010 with David Tennant as Murray.

Subsequent career

Murray was elected to the position of Rector of the University of Dundee, his alma mater, on 16 February 2007. The other nominee was former British Lion and Scotland rugby captain Andy Nicol. Murray opposed the cuts to University departments and services which were proposed. He was required to be present on campus during Freshers' week when his responsibilities included handing condoms to new undergraduates.

Murray is Executive Chairman of Atholl Energy Ltd and Chairman of Westminster Development Ltd, a gold mining company, both operating in Accra, Ghana.

Legal problems in 2007

In September 2007, shortly after Alisher Usmanov's investment in Arsenal Football Club, Murray blogged about the character of Usmanov, a Russian multi-billionaire Forbes magazine had identified as the 142nd wealthiest person in the world. He said he named Usmanov, alleging corruption, in two of his "quite highly classified" telegrams to the Foreign Office London in 2002 and 2004 written while Murray was ambassador in Uzbekistan. "I hope Usmanov's expensive lawyers sue me for libel", Murray told The Independent as "I would like to question him in a British court".

A takedown notice was issued against Murray's ISP to remove his web site following an intervention from Usmanov's solicitors, Schillings, who said Murray had "made a number of grossly defamatory and completely unsubstantiated allegations about our client" in Murder in Samarkand and on his blog. Schillings said they were unwilling to sue Murray because they did not want him to publicly air his opinions. Murray, however, said he continued to maintain his allegations, but did not possess evidence in the form of documents. Over several weeks, Schillings warned journalists and bloggers about the legal risk of repeating Murray's claims. However, multiple bloggers mirrored Murray's blog entry and links to the disputed claims proliferated from the Google search engine.

Schillings threatened the hosting company Fasthosts who, after repeatedly asking Murray to delete the material, decided to permanently close the server for his web site on 20 September 2007, an action which had the effect of deleting other sites as well as Murray's, including the blog by Boris Johnson. Murray told The New York Times he still wished the legal issues would be "tested in court".

An attempt to release the documents was made by Jeremy Corbyn, then a backbench Labour MP, in whose constituency Arsenal is based. In late October 2007, Jim Murphy, then minister for Europe said the documents could only be released with Usmanov's permission on data protection grounds.

Political activity

Murray remained a member of the Liberal Democrats until 2005. He has continued his opposition to the War on Terror since his employment in the HM Diplomatic Service ended, twice standing for election to the House of Commons. The first occasion was at the May 2005 general election when he stood as an independent, in Blackburn, Lancashire, against his former boss, Jack Straw, then the MP for the constituency. He polled 2,082 votes (5.0%), and came fifth out of seven candidates. Following the United Kingdom parliamentary expenses scandal, Murray stood for election in the July 2009 Norwich North by-election under the slogan "Put an honest man into Parliament". He polled 953 votes (2.77%) placing him sixth out of the twelve candidates.

Murray rejoined the Liberal Democrats, according to his blog entry on 22 March 2010. He voted in favour of the Cameron–Clegg coalition at the Liberal Democrats special conference in Birmingham established to approve the agreement. By September 2011, he had left the Lib Dems again, as he objected to policies pursued by the coalition government, including the rise in tuition fees and privatisation within the education system and the National Health Service (NHS). He joined the Scottish National Party at this time.

Murray supported the 'Yes' campaign in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. He was selected as the SNP candidate by the local party in the Airdrie and Shotts constituency for the 2015 general election, but his candidacy was blocked by national party officials because of a "lack of a commitment to group discipline". “They were probably right”, Murray later told The Times. On his blog, Murray warned the SNP of "false flag events" by the security forces to attempt to discredit the party. Concerning an incident during the election, in which both the Aberdeen Conservative and Labour offices were vandalised, including both being sprayed with the letter "Q" in a prominent place, he speculated: "There is something delightfully old-fashioned about MI5. Is spraying Q for quisling not rather an obscure reference to today’s generation?"

According to his blog, Murray resigned from the SNP in March 2016 "to campaign for Scottish Independence".

Wikileaks and Assange

On 19 August 2012, Julian Assange spoke from the balcony of the London Ecuadorian embassy with such supporters as Tariq Ali and Murray also present. Before he appeared, Murray spoke in support of Assange and said "neo-conservative juntas" were now governing Western Europe. Assange had been "fitted up with criminal offenses" in order for him to be prosecuted in the United States. Earlier in the day, he had asserted on his blog, based on leaked alleged plans, and "private information", that the British were about to enter the Ecuadorian embassy to take Assange. He was critical of the stance of William Hague, then Foreign Secretary, in his speech. Hague said there was no plan to "storm" the building.

Murray was criticised soon afterwards by a fellow interviewee, the feminist writer Joan Smith, on an edition of Newsnight for identifying one of Assange's alleged rape victims. Subsequently, Swedish prosecutors and campaigners opposing violence against women also objected. In naming her, he did not break any laws, as the alleged victim in Swedish. Jonathan Freedland wrote in The Guardian that Murray had indulged in "violating the British legal scruple that holds that a woman who may have suffered the trauma of rape should at least be granted basic privacy". Murray saw no reason to apologise for his comments, he told The Daily Telegraph, the criticism he received was a "fake campaign of indignation".

Murray claimed in December 2016 that reports the Russian government had provided WikiLeaks with thousands of private emails from the Democratic National Committee were wrong. "I know who leaked them," Murray said. "I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things". The Snopes website said Murray's assertions were in contradiction of news reports indicating the American security services believed the Russian authorities had hacked DNC and Clinton campaign emails before the 2016 presidential election.

Personal life and awards

Murray separated from his first wife, Fiona, with whom he has two children in 2004. "I've always enjoyed wine, woman and song," he told Gillian Bowditch of The Times in 2008. "It was always part of my unconventional style. At heart I am just a fun-loving person. I always worked on the basis that if everybody knew about it, nobody could blackmail me". One individual who remained largely unaware of his mistresses was his wife.

The separation followed Murray beginning a relationship with Nadira Alieva, an Uzbek woman whom he met while she was working as a belly dancer in a nightclub in Tashkent. "I astonished her by saying that I wanted her to give up the club and be my mistress. I explained that I could not marry her, as I was married, but I would keep her. I gave her my card and urged her to phone me", he recounted in his memoir Murder in Samarkand. When he left Uzbekistan in October 2004, Alieva joined him in London. The couple married on 6 May 2009; they have a son.

Murray's life featured in a show by Alieva, The British Ambassador's Bellydancer, initially presented in 2007 at the Arcola Theatre in Hackney, later moving to London's West End. She invited him to perform in it, but he declined, citing lack of acting ability.

In recognition of his campaigning work on torture and human rights, he was awarded the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence in January 2006. In November 2006, he was awarded the Premio Alta Qualità della Città di Bologna. Murray has turned down three honours from the Queen as titles are "not his thing" and because of his commitment to Scottish republicanism.

Works

• Murray, Craig (2006). Murder in Samarkand. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing. ISBN 1-84596-194-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  • Murray, Craig (2007a). Murder in Samarkand (paperback ed.). Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing. ISBN 1-84596-221-4. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  • Murray, Craig (2007b). Dirty Diplomacy. New York: Scribner. ISBN 1-4165-4801-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help) (US edition of Murder in Samarkand)
• Murray, Craig (2009). The Catholic Orangemen of Togo and Other Conflicts I Have Known. London: Atholl Publishing. ISBN 978-0956129901. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Murray, Craig (2016). Sikunder Burnes: Master of the Great Game. Edinburgh: Birlinn. ISBN 978-1910900079. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Murray, Craig (2017). MacDonald, Kirsten (ed.). Zionism is Bullshit. Selected Speeches, Interviews and Writings. Vol. Volume 1 (2005–2007). London: Atholl Publishing. ISBN 978-1548026370. {{cite book}}: |volume= has extra text (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)

External links

• Official website