Audio and Transcript: Craig Murray on Demystifying Diplomacy and Espionage

A Conversation with Stella Assange. Part One.

Last Wednesday, we released the video of the first part of my conversation with Craig Murray.

Below is the audio podcast and transcript.

In this episode of my podcast, “A Conversation with Stella Assange”, I sit down with author and human rights activist Craig Murray. In part one of this two part conversation, we discuss how greater awareness around Julian’s case has led to a better understanding of its urgency and relevance. We also discuss Craig’s career as a British diplomat and the series of events that led him to blow the whistle on UK complicity in torture and the ‘War on Terror’.

Craig Murray is a British former diplomat, human rights activist, and author known for his outspoken support of Julian Assange. Born on October 17, 1958, Murray served as the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004.

For more about Craig and to read his work, click here.

Follow him on socials:

Facebook: Craig Murray
X: @CraigMurrayOrg

Look out for part two of our conversation. Out on Wednesday!

Transcipt below:

Stella

So when talking about Julian's case, I find that people who are have never been exposed to WikiLeaks or have just a very passing reference to Julian, maybe they've heard reports about him, but really don't know the story. They're really passionate and interested. Once they hear the story and they hear the stakes and they understand what it's about. But in general, I find that not only is it that Julian is not in the news enough, but there's a whole context that's difficult to overcome quickly, because for me, I started university in 2002.

I marched, you know, in the Iraq War marches of the time I experienced all that shift with the war on terror, the dismantling of the international system, basically over time. And I see a progression. But for people, say, under the age of 30, they don't have these reference points. How? I don't know. Do you find that?

Craig

Yes, I do. And it's it's kind of difficult as you get older to put yourself in the place of younger people. And the truth is, of course. But the the Chelsea Manning revelations for which Julian is being charged and for which he's being extradited referred to events that happened, you know, between 2002 and 2006, 2007. And most of the people now at university weren't well, they were born, but they were toddlers.

You know, if you go into a university now, the majority of people who are students at university were not yet born when 911 happened. And that means there's a huge amount of of context and background that they simply don't have or they've learned as history for which they have no feel. And for our generations, the Iraq war was a massive traumatic event, you know, a war which everybody knew to be based on lies the public understood that all the way through. But it was an aggressive war based on lies. Millions and millions of people marched against it and we couldn't stop it. That opened so many eyes as to the reality of politics and the world and the place of the people, as opposed to those holding power and our inability to hold them to account. Which are lessons which in a sense are now being learned again with what's happening in Palestine. You know, we in many ways have a repeat of the Iraq war situation, but Julian's role in that and in, you know, exposing the lies and exposing the that the horrors of war, the crimes of war that is now history as opposed to current affairs.

And partly, of course, this is a fact of just how terribly long Julian's effectively been incarcerated. This has been dragging on now for over a decade of of incarceration and it's just going to get worse. And that sense that the events for which he is incarcerated will get more and more remote. So in the sense the campaign has a constant struggle to keep things current, but it does involve a terrific amount of explanation.

It's also, of course, it's not just a problem that, you know, young adults didn't live through the events which are but the cause of the injustice.

We also, I think, need to remind ourselves that the majority of people don't pay enormous attention to these matters. Know most people are preoccupied with the struggles of their own lives, bluntly and increasingly, the struggle to solve people's own lives. We've got more and more desperate in the UK. You know, this has been the period in which the poor have got steadily poorer.

More and more children have slipped into poverty work. Security has become a thing of the past for an entire generation. And so the amount of attention people have really paid to the issue is not always that great. And we do. We have to continually remind ourselves of that and of the need to explain the issues at a fundamental level.

I think that's very important.

Stella

I think that's true. But the way I see Julian's case, well, initially he exposed the criminality and the corruption of Western powers, but the reaction and persecution of Julian and the backlash against WikiLeaks has itself become an exposure. So even though the reference point for many about what WikiLeaks published and and how this came about is less important than his as a symbol of Western, brutality, abuse, hypocrisy, decline.

And so I think I see it as a two part thing where sometimes it's an uphill battle to explain all the context. Actually, people keep coming back to Julian's incarceration as a reference point. I don't see people forgetting about Julian, but rather his relevance as a persecuted Western dissident becoming more and more relevant over time. And this, of course, again, is the effect of of the passage of time every day that he is incarcerated again without conviction.

Now, 1703 days, I think is further evidence of the abuse. Right. So there's kind of a two part exposure. First, he exposed them and then they exposed themselves.

Craig

I think that's about true. And that the flagrant abuse of the you know, the persecution of Julian as an individual makes him an extremely powerful symbol of freedom in the same way Nelson Mandela was a symbol of freedom throughout his in his imprisonment. And I think there's a genuine parallel to be to be drawn there and be and of course, you know, a blatant hypocrisy of the of the West when something happens, like the imprisonment of Evan Dershowitz and by Russia, which quite rightly is strongly protested by the West.

But the Russians, of course, can turn around and say, well, you're you're holding Julian Assange for exactly the same thing. You know, once you set a precedent of accusing journalists of espionage for publishing things you don't want them to publish? Then, of course, that that precedence is going to be taken up and used by by other countries around the world and you've lost your moral standing to complain.

So I think Julian, as a symbol of liberty is important. And I'd also like to extend that in a way, because the Internet has changed radically. There's much less freedom on the Internet than than there was 20 or ten years ago. The Internet has become dominated by corporate gatekeepers, you know, where nearly all traffic is channelled through either Facebook or Twitter or TikTok or Instagram or, you know, these corporate identities that have managed to essentially seize on channel, huge amounts of Internet traffic, particularly anything to do with social interaction and exchange of ideas between citizens.

And that the Internet wasn't like that. It was much, much, much more open years ago. And I think this is one area and this is in, you know, in many ways the area of Julian's expertise. This is what he is brilliant at, which is the use of the Internet and his explosive use of the Internet with WikiLeaks to disseminate true information to the people in the face of governments who didn't want that information disseminated.

You know, that was absolutely fantastic. And I think he would be an enormous influence now in trying to find ways to free the Internet from his corporate gatekeepers. We always used to say rather complacently, that the Internet would always find a way around. We used to believe that somehow Internet freedom would always get around, any blockage, But it's not really able to get around corporate gatekeepers.

Even on my own website, 90% of the traffic comes from Facebook or Twitter. You know it. These are issues which need to be tackled. It's not. But we need Julian to be freed because of what he's done in the past. We need Julian to be freed because of the contribution he can make in the future. That's a direction I'm anxious to move the campaign in.

If you if you like. Of course, it's great that people want to see him because of the great things he's done, because of sympathy, frankly, sympathy not just for him, but for yourself and the children, that those are all true. But I also want him to be free because I believe he still has great work in front of him. And I think we shouldn't forget that.

Stella

I think I do emphasize that when I'm doing talks and so on. And it's very interesting that people come across Julian's writings from literally ten years ago, for example. So “Cypherpunk: Freedom and the Future of the Internet”. I think that's from 2012 before Edward Snowden blew the whistle. And it lays out basically what Edward Snowden then went on to expose in detail.

But the general trend of what was going on. So there's a lot of people rediscovering things that Julian said. For example, around the war. There's a very famous video from a rally, a protest where Julian was speaking out in 2011 about the Afghan war, where he lays out the you know, the goal in Afghanistan is not a successful war, it's an endless war. And the idea that actually the the war industry profits and that there's a transfer of wealth from the tax base of Western countries to the arms industry, basically, and that, of course, the major Western countries are major arms exporters and involved in the arms industry. And all this kind of big picture analysis that I think has seeped into the politically engaged Internet generation. And these things resonate.

So it's a big picture of deep understanding that people share and and, you know, have taken a life of their own. So I see Julian's influences as growing actually over time, even though these videos and these books are ten, twelve years old.

Craig

I think that's that's true. And it is if if we're looking for reasons to hope and we need to look for reasons to hope, because so much of what's happening in the world is awful. But I've when I give talks and in my writings, I've always emphasized, you know, this question, which of course has been been known about ever since Eisenhower and the military industrial complex, and you go before that to Lenin, to Jay Hobson and other who've analyzed it.

But when I talk about the use of overseas policy, the use of war to channel profits to the arms industry, and the fact that the arms industry, of course, has politicians and civil servants in their pocket because it pays them loads of money to the politicians and it and it gives the civil servants jobs when they retire as a revolving door to go between the civil service and the arms industry. And that it's a vast corrupt system despite having a, you know, a long history and for theoretical thought, it certainly wasn't accepted. You know, it was viewed as a rather outrageous thing to say by polite society. And it wasn't something which you could easily say to a you know, even to a lecture hall full of international relations students without arising cognitive dissonance, you could see them looking at it, thinking, “My God, there's some sort of lunatic Marxist here”, and starting to switch off.

And I don't get that anymore. I find those kind of things are much more understood by the younger generation and in particular, they do tend to think they've discovered it by themselves. But, they, but I do find there is a broader understanding of society in some ways among young people, and that is a result of the Internet.

That definitely is. That is a result of various forms of horizontal sharing, of knowledge, interacting via social media in different ways. And so there are many reasons to be to be hopeful. And there's so much more to be done.

Stella

I'm really interested in your perspective as a kind of insider/outsider because you spent how many years working inside the Foreign and Commonwealth Wealth Office, a top diplomat and I'm really interested in the psychology of the institution. How much groupthink is there? How much groupthink did you absorb while you were there? What made you become a whistle-blower? How how much internal dissent is there?

Craig

This is a very large question which you may have to break down a bit, but I was in the office for twenty two years and six years of those I was in what's called the senior management structure of the Foreign Office. But, I should say I left 20 years ago now. And so I think many things have have changed since I left, but much still continues.

But what I'm going to say, I believe, relates to my own experience of the Foreign Office, which is now slightly out of date. And I think that we have to bear that in mind, though it hasn't changed in any fundamental way. Yeah, the Foreign Office recruited when I joined and again, this really hasn't changed much, I think, from quite a narrow social strata.

It has, and this also hasn’t changed, it has a sort of fast entry stream, a normal interesting move like in the clerical entry stream. When I joined the office, the fast stream, the normal stream was called the executive stream. The fast stream is called the administrative stream. Those were both graduate entry streams. The clerical entry stream was a non graduate entry. It's now all graduate entry. For anything you would now need to be a graduate.

The first stream was very small, which was where I got in my intake year on my induction course. We were 22 people. Of those 22 people, only two of us hadn't been to Oxbridge. 20 out of 22 were in Oxbridge. Overwhelmingly Oxford, not Cambridge, I would say, but Oxbridge 20 out of 22, and I was the only one who didn't go to private school.

And as somebody who was both (not from) private school and under university, that made me, you know, an extremely strange creature in the in the Foreign Office. And people were very kind. And nobody ever was openly prejudiced towards me because I came from a different class background or anything along those lines. But it was different. No, just you just came from a different place.

I remember in my first week, somebody had said, “Yes, he’s from Dundee, what's a high table like at Dundee”, and I had no idea what he was talking about…we don’t have high tables, our tables are sort of normal, normal height in Dundee. So that, that was strange.

I recall this lovely lady who was head of recruitment when I joined. She called me up about two weeks before I started saying she's finally opened up just to see if I wanted to come down for a chat. And I thought, you know, this is your future employer. You're about to be employed by these people. So it's kind of compulsory. I thought it was not really voluntary in those circumstances and I, I flew down to see her from my parents home where I was living at the time, which was in Inverness.

And I wandered in to see her and she did just want -She said, “Well, how you thinking? How you feeling?”, and that was kind of it. And I said to her, “Is that it?”, she said “Yeah, I was just wondering how you were doing?” I said to her, “You do realize I've just flown in from Inverness?” I said, “You do understand Inverness is the same distance from London as Vienna? You do understand that?” And of course she didn't understand that Inverness is the same distance, probably never met anyone from Inverness. Probably met a lot more people from Vienna than she had from Inverness. So it was a bit strange. I felt an outsider in that way, but it in no way was exemplified by prejudice or unkindness. And in those days the Foreign Office was very intellectually open.

I mean, it it prided itself on being extremely intellectual, you know, and having only the very clever people in the country there. And you could write a document or a paper, that dissented as wildly as you wanted and you wouldn't get in trouble for it.

I remember the time I, I used that most, I would guess prior to my becoming a whistleblower was just before the first Iraq war when I was working in a unit with the Navy. And I was actually based literally in an underground bomb shelter that used to be Bomber Command. It was an under ground NATO headquarters. And I was sleeping there seven days a week. And on a daily basis, we were reporting to Margaret Thatcher and I was seeing her personally most days of the week before breakfast. I used to go in an underground tunnel into Downing Street.

And Margaret Thatcher sent us and we knew the war was about to start the build up of troops was happening and stuff. Margaret Thatcher sent to us a message which went to the Navy in general, I think, and to our unit saying basically, “We're about to go to war. Don't worry, God is with us. It's Christmas, let's have a war.” Basically, was what the message said. It was just very shortly before her resignation. And I've applied to her, quoting the colonel, “It came upon a midnight clear,” where I said to her, “On the other hand, there is this moment,” I said, and I can’t remember the whole verse, but part of it is, “Beneath the angel strain have rolled two thousand and man, at war with man, hears not the love-song which they bring; hush for noise you men of strife and hear the angels sing.” So I replied to her sort of Christian Christmas message with a peace Christian message. And even people who I worked with particularly the people from the Navy I was working with said “You can't send that to the Prime Minister, you're going to get sacked, we'll all get in trouble.” And I got no trouble about it at all. And in fact, she told me she thought it was charming, but so it was open in that way. It really was in those days.

My first desk was the South Africa desk, and at that time we didn't talk to the ANC, who we viewed as a terrorist organization. In fact, the official line was, this was 1984, the official line was Nelson Mandela is a terrorist and should be in prison. That was the British government line. And I wrote a paper on why this was wrong and why it was doing us no good, and because it was a paper designed to win the support of the government who were Conservatives, what my paper basically said was, “Look, apartheid is going to end. It's unsustainable. It is going to end at the moment. The black people in South Africa hate us because we are supporting apartheid, and we know we're supporting apartheid, unless we start to change our policy now, we're going to be in a very poor position and British businesses will lose out once apartheid ends.” And that was the way I phrased it. And again, this was completely contrary to policy and completely contrary to Thatcher's known opinions and largely contrary to Geoffrey Howe, who was foreign minister, to his known opinion. And I, I wrote that and sent it up the chain. It went all the way through and as it went up and up to more senior people, they all commented on how wrong I was that apartheid certainly wasn't unsustainable, could go on for a long while and that South Africa, you know, it was a model for the rest of Africa that showed basically if you put white people in charge, Africa can be economically successful.

All kinds of nonsense people would write . And part of the reason for that is that as you got to senior and senior officials, by the time you get to quite senior officials, the way to promotion is to be promoted by ministers. The ministers really decide. I was made an ambassador eventually by Robin Cook because he happened to agree with me on such things.

And the civil service at senior levels is intensely political and people who are more interested in their careers and anything else, of course, are going to write what ministers want to hear because that's how you get promoted. But again I didn’t get in trouble about it and people rather liked me they thought it was quite nice to have this kind of eccentric left winger walking around. I was like some sort of pet, you know, “His take is frightfully left wing and he didn't go to public school”, they are thought it was quite hilarious.

Stella

You’re like the red team.

Craig

Yeah, it was quite a, it was quite strange. But I always felt an outsider. I never felt quite part of the club and the place was like a club. It was like a like a gentleman's club. I haven't spoken of a sort of male female balance, which was very heavily male in the opposition. There were more senior women, but they were kind of token more senior women, if you like.

It really was, it was frightfully and, you know, it was all leather settees and mahogany desks and little old ladies bringing cups of tea round and stuff. When I first joined, we had people light coal fires, which disappeared shortly after I joined, but it was very clubable and it was very nice to be inside.

You know, you were in a position of extreme privilege and you sort of knew it. Then when you were overseas, of course, you were diplomats and you didn't pay any taxes and you had everything duty and you had servants and drivers. And I mean, even before I was an ambassador, when I was Deputy High Commissioner in Ghana, I had, I think five indoor servants. I had two gardeners and two drivers and you know, the lifestyle. Yeah.

And partly for that reason and again, I think this is less true now, but it was very true at the time. An extraordinary number of my friends in the Foreign Office were aristocrats, you know, were from the aristocracy, to be honest, to say they were, I knew several members of the basically the Asquith Bonham Carter family.

There were several of those wandering around. One of my first bosses was a chap called David Gall Booth, who would be the son, I think, of Churchill's cabinet secretary. And of course, one of his aunts was the famous countess Markievicz. I think the Irish Republican Marxist aristocrat. But and there was, I knew, the McLaren of McLaren who Lord McLaren, who was a you know, who's a diplomat.

There were lots of members of the aristocracy. How they managed to get in when entry was meant to be by competitive examinations. Great mystery. I genuinely don't know the answer of. You know, you have this extremely difficult process. You had a first written exam, that lasts hours and hours and hours, and is very hard. Then if you passed that you have a second written exam, then if be passed that you had two days of exams and interviews in London.

So how do you go through that kind of process and managed to come out with a bunch of aristocrats at the end of it. It's a little difficult to believe that the honest accounts are just naturally the best people in examinations. And you have 60,000 people entering and you're taking 22. I've never quite understood how it works, how the bias in recruitment crept in, but, you know, plenty was there, and I don't think that's changed that much.

But it was the only one of the very few places where if you were from an aristocratic background, you could maintain an aristocratic demeanor and you could have servants and drivers and gardeners and everything provided for you without paying for it, which is what being aristocratic is. It's one of the very few places you could still do it all on the taxpayer.

So I thought it was a wonderful club to be in in that sense, and it was quite difficult to leave. That made the act of whistleblowing, knowing you're giving all that up.

While I was ambassador in Uzbekistan, I had one chap who, as far as I could tell, his only job was that he sat on the porch and he waited until I came home from work. And then he picked up my briefcase and carried it inside for me. And in the morning when I was leaving, he would pick up my briefcase from the big office table and carry it out to the car. And he didn't seem to do anything else as far as I could tell. You know, it was that kind of- and when I went to bed at night, I would just as I went up to the bedroom, I would just take off my clothes, leave them lying on the floor, literally. And before I woke up, they had been washed and dried and pressed and were back back in the cupboard. So, it was just it was an extraordinary lifestyle. And giving it up, you know, is difficult. It sucks you in. There's no doubt about that.

Stella

And did you realize that you were putting it all in jeopardy by blowing the whistle?

Craig

Absolutely. And I mean, definitely when I learned that people were being tortured and the MI6 and the CIA were receiving the intelligence and the torture, and I should say that that was compounded by the fact that I knew for certain just because I was there on the ground and investigating things that much of the so-called intelligence from the torture sessions was lies. You know, it wasn't true. It exaggerated the strength of Al Qaeda in Central Asia enormously, because that's what the CIA and MI6 wanted to hear. I thought, I've got to stop this.

And so I sent to first-when I first complained to London, I did so in the naïve belief, that London didn't know it was happening, you know, but I will tell them this. They don't realize people are being tortured in this Pakistan. They don't realize that the intelligence resulting from it is untrue.

Stella

It's bad intelligence.

Craig

It's bad intelligence. But the thing is, for them, it was good intelligence because it's what they wanted to hear.

Stella

It was serving a different goal.

Craig

It was serving a different goal. It was what they wanted for their propaganda purposes in the war on terror. They wanted to hear that Al Qaeda's massive and strong and all over Central Asia. And in fact, it wasn't. It was more or less non-existent in Uzbekistan. And there were long lists of people from the torture sessions named as being as part of Al Qaeda who I knew for certain weren't in Al Qaeda, including the number one guy who I knew for certain was a Jehovah's Witness which made him an unlikely member of Al Qaeda.

But, I thought, London…Exactly. But I thought London doesn't want bad intelligence. And I thought that we are going to- you know, they don't realize that it's coming from torture, but of course, they did, in fact, know both those things and they didn't care.

So, I was terribly naïve when I sent the first and you must remember, I knew people like Peter Hain, for example, was a Foreign Office minister at that time. I'd known Peter Hain from the Young Liberals in the anti-apartheid movement when I was 15, 16 years old. We played football together, you know, and I thought, Peter Hain is not going to support torture as some of the Foreign Office ministers, you know, this is the Labour Party. And I thought Tony Lloyd and they are decent people, I thought, well, they're not going to support torture.

And of course I was terribly wrong. They've all been convinced by Blair, convinced by the war on terror that this was a war of good against evil. The gloves were off, as Tony Blair said. And, you know, torturing people was a necessary evil. When I first sent a report reporting it was happening back to London, I did think it would work.

I thought, well, they'll see when I tell them this is happening, they will stop it. I was incredibly naïve. That didn't happen. And it became plain that London were angry with me and I received a letter telling me I was over focused on human rights. That's a quote I was “over focused” on human rights to the detriment of British interests.

And that's exactly what the letter said. And and then when, you know, more evidence of the torture on a massive scale was coming to me and I thought, I've got to try and stop this. I knew I was going to be in trouble even before I blew the whistle, I knew even protesting any further internally about states was going to damage my career because be Tony Blair, Jack Straw operation in the war on terror was unquestionable, you know, and they were absolutely intolerant of any of the opposition.

At that stage, I had a conversation with my my then wife, Fiona. I had a conversation with her, and I said to her, “Look, I, I can't live with this. I can't, I just can't have it on my conscience. I can't I can't go along with it. But it does mean, you know, I think I'll probably lose my job over this and will lose this lifestyle.”

And another fact of the lifestyle is that, you know, our children went to very expensive boarding schools, which was all in the UK, extremely expensive schools, which was all paid for by the taxpayer. So, you know, we would also lose that. And I didn't have any other income or prospects particularly. So it was quite a, it was quite a tricky thing, but I had that conversation with them. If I persist in this. I am going to lose my job. But I had no, I had no doubt at all. You know, I never I didn't have a second or a millisecond where I thought, well it's okay I can go along with this, you know, it never occurred to me that I had a choice in that way. And to be fair to my former wife, she was entirely supportive and completely agreed.

No, I knew that was the end of my career. That either I had to quit or had to shut up and go along with torture. And at that stage, it was later I discovered the extraordinary rendition part. Up until that stage I only thought it was Uzbeks who had been tortured. It was only a little later I discovered that the CIA were actually flying people there in order to be tortured.

And that, of course, became even more of an issue. And eventually, I, I blew the whistle. And I should say when I blew the whistle, I didn't expect only to be sacked. You know, I expected to go to jail. I expected to be tried under the Official Secrets Act. That was what I thought would naturally be a consequence.

But, it is interesting because and I've wondered about it. Well, it changed my whole life and in a material sense it, it changed my whole life for the worse in terms of, you know, finance and circumstances of living and things. In fact, it led to me being a much happier person, which is often nice. But, I've never understood and I still don't understand why it was I had no doubt whatsoever that that was the right thing to do and that my material circumstances really were nowhere in this when other people didn't see it that way, because there were hundreds, literally, of other senior officials or other officials in the Foreign Office who knew what was going on and nobody else resigned.

And… that's not quite, quite true. One one, Carne Ross resigned. Elizabeth Wilmshurst has resigned over the legality of the war. So two or three people resigned, but almost nobody resigned.

Stella

So you became a whistleblower and lost your very privileged lifestyle. But the would you say you're happier?

Phone rings

Phone audio: Don’t hang up. You are hearing this. Because the prison estate have introduced a message to warn you that prison calls are recorded. If you hang up before the end of -

Stella

Hi, Julian. I'm just speaking to Craig… I will. Yeah. Good. Very interesting conversation about his time in the Foreign Office and the culture around it. And Thatcher. Yeah.

Stella

Right. So. But you're much happier now?

Craig

Yeah, I, I think things worked out for me strangely, and in a way that gives me happiness. I have the important things in life that give me happiness. I have a pretty clean conscience, you know, there's not a great deal where I feel I have to reproach myself. I've tried to do good in the world and I've achieved, you know, real happiness in my in my personal life.

I'm very fortunate with Nadir and two more wonderful children. So I now have four, four children who are all very close to me and my old family and my new family get on extremely well, which, you know, I'm blessed in that that's not always the case. So, no, I mean, nobody has to feel sorry for me. I'm a happy person.

Stella

Nadir is wonderful.

Craig

Nadir is great.