BDOHP Biographical Details and Interview Index BEAMISH, Sir Adrian John (born 21 January 1939) KCMG 1999 (CMG 1988) Career (with, on right, relevant pages in interview) Persian language training, 1962 pp 3-4 Third, later Second Secretary, Tehran, 1963–66 pp 4-9 Eastern Department, Foreign Office, 1966–69 pp 9-13 Treasury Centre for Administrative Studies, 1969 pp 13-14 First Secretary, UK Delegation, OECD, Paris, 1970–73 pp 14-23 British High Commission, New Delhi, 1973–76 pp 23-35 Personnel Operations Department, FCO, 1976–80 pp 35-43 Temporary duty, Political Counsellor at UKDel (NATO), 1980 pp 43-47 Counsellor (Economic), Bonn, 1981–85 pp 47-58 Head, Falkland Islands Department, FCO, 1985–87 pp 58-70 Ambassador to Peru, 1987–89 pp 70-82 Assistant Under-Secretary of State (Americas), FCO, 1989–94 pp 82-93 Ambassador to Mexico, 1994–99 pp 93-106 1 BRITISH DIPLOMATIC ORAL HISTORY PROGRAMME RECOLLECTIONS OF SIR ADRIAN BEAMISH KCMG, RECORDED AND TRANSCRIBED BY SUZANNE RICKETTS SR: This is Suzanne Ricketts recording Adrian Beamish on 5 February 2019. Adrian, tell me why did you join the Foreign Office? AB: It’s a question I’ve asked myself several times! I think I’d start by going back to 50s London, over which lay the shadow of the Cold War. We lived not far from the junction of Cromwell Road with Gloucester Road. The buses, big and red, went to Shepherd’s Bush, Victoria, Baker Street, Clapham Junction. But there were other buses, low, grey single- deckers with a section at the back above the luggage hold. Bearing the livery of British European Airways (BEA), they were bound for the airport - the front indicator panels marked variously for Cologne, Berlin, Vienna, Warsaw, Budapest, Moscow names suggestive of rubble, ruin and defeat but intriguing nonetheless. Some evenings, my brother and I would surf the radio waves and listen, uncomprehending, to all sorts of voices fluent and full of energy, angry, soothing, confident, reasonable coming from the zone; a confusing picture. On the one hand, Radio Moscow in English, on the other Radio Free Europe in Russian but what were they really saying? The Voice of America was a great comfort. On both sides there was fear and anxiety. It was an anxious time, made all the more so by episodes of high drama, most notably the Berlin Airlift, immense relief when it was over. Other alarms, stories of treachery and deceit made a big impact -the Burgess and Maclean affair - wall-to- wall coverage for days, possibly weeks; - Nunn-May, Pontecorvo, Kroeger were the names of other traitors and spies and there was the Budapest uprising in 1956. The BBC had a programme to teach Russian. My brother and I wrote off and got the book published in Moscow by the Foreign Languages Publishing House, which was, as we subsequently learnt, a huge enterprise with worldwide reach. We stumbled about, listening to the programme and trying to pronounce the Russian words, to conjugate the verbs and so on. We didn’t get very far and all that slipped into the background. I was only a teenager and not thinking about anything very much. It was only later, when the question of what I was going to do after getting my degree arose that I began to focus. Because I was studying English, I was aware that a lot of our great, and not so great, poets had been, not in the Diplomatic 2 Service, but had gone abroad on missions of one sort or another. That seemed to me an interesting thing to do: it was the lure of the exotic, I suppose. So, I felt I wanted something that was a good job and that involved being abroad. Then, one day, one of my friends with whom I’d been discussing what to do said, “If you get into the Foreign Office, I’ll buy you a meal at the “White Tower” at that time a top London restaurant, way beyond my, and as it turned out, his means. So, with that spur … that’s how I joined! Persian language training, then British Embassy, Tehran, 1962–66 While I was learning Persian, I went to see Lawrence of Arabia. An electric moment was when a road sign appeared with some Arabic on top and below ‘Damas’, on which my eye automatically focussed, but not understanding, switched to the Arabic which I saw at once meant Damascus. That was encouraging. The Arabic script had taught me the French word for Damascus. This was real not just a course text book. SR: So how were you selected to do Persian language training? Did they give you an aptitude test? AB: No, they didn’t do that. But you were invited to offer a language. I didn’t really have any languages. I had O-level French, but it was really low level French. Our English master at school made us read a bit of Dante. It sounded very melodious. I began to study it in my own time. So, at the Civil Service competition, I offered Italian. They gave me a test and must have concluded that I was enthusiastic. SR: You went to SOAS. What was that like? AB: It was quite an unglamorous place, in the lee of Senate House. A very utilitarian building, I think from the 1930s. It may even have had steel window frames, very characteristic of that period. Our teacher was the redoubtable Professor Lambton. She was a remarkable woman. She must have been in her 50s and looked a bit like Katharine Hepburn: fine bones, erect carriage. A very handsome woman. My memory of her is in a dark tweed suit, a skirt and jacket and I think they’re called Lisle stockings and sensible shoes. I cannot picture her in anything else. She was a ferocious squash player and taught Persian as though it were Latin, which wasn’t very efficient actually. Persian is a living language. There was a programme every year to which the Foreign Office sent one or two people. Alternately they would go on either to Tehran or to Kabul. In that way, the Office wanted to 3 build up a cadre of Persian-speaking officers because one of the conditions when relations were reopened in 1953, after the Mossadeq affair, was that no one who had served in Iran before could come back. The Iranians were so suspicious of us because we had played such a heavy role in their history. They didn’t want any ‘experts’ who’d be nosing around in the bazaars and finding out what was going on. We had to build up our expertise from scratch. SR: Did you get up to a very proficient level after a year? Was it very intense? AB: What happened was that we had an introductory course to the Service and then, to my disappointment, instead of getting a job, they told me that I wouldn’t be needed until October before going to SOAS for a full academic year, which only took us to intermediate standard. We were aiming at advanced standard. When I got to Tehran the following August, the programme was to spend half my time in Chancery, shadowing my predecessor and to do some more language training, including immersion. The exams were the following spring and took us to advanced standard. SR: What was Tehran like for your first job? It must have been quite exciting. AB: Well, it was. When I arrived in August 1963 there was a curfew. Only a week or two before, the Ayatollah Khomeini had led some riots, protests about the Shah’s so-called White Revolution which had been launched in March, I think. Among other things, the programme included votes for women and agricultural land reform. That united the clerics who were against votes for women and the huge landowners. Some of the estates were colossal in terms of acreage. Some of it was desert, of course, but there was immense wealth in very few hands. So there was an unholy alliance between the landowners and the clerics and this resulted in considerable violence. In the holy city of Qom, which is where Khomeini had his presence, a lot of the clerical students who’d been the most eager supporters of this uprising were just liquidated, really, by the Shah’s police, army. Khomeini himself was exiled to Baghdad, well to Karbala actually, where he spent the next fifteen years or so, inveighing against the Shah. Every Friday he would preach in the mosque in Karbala and that would then filter into Iran in audio cassettes. In that way people learnt of all the insults that were heaped on the Shah, all the accusations of despotism and corruption and lack of freedom etc. For us, our business was to keep the Shah on the throne and part of the method for doing that was the CENTO alliance (a mutual defence pact, cf. NATO) which had been constructed some years earlier to embrace Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan and the UK. However, there’d 4 been a revolution in Iraq so they’d come out, but CENTO still existed and that was linking with NATO and then with SEATO in South East Asia to restrain Soviet Communist expansionism. In return for that political support via CENTO, one of the things the Shah gave us was the CENTO route to the Far East. At the time we had, as you know, troops in Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Brunei. And we had our position in the Persian Gulf.