Dirty Diplomacy
The Rough-and-Tumble Adventures of a Scotch-Drinking, Skirt-Chasing, Dictator-Busting and Thoroughly Unrepentant Ambassador Stuck on the Frontline of the War Against Terror
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
With all the pace and drama of a political thriller, Dirty Diplomacy is a riveting account of a young, fast-living ambassador's battle against a ruthless dictatorship in Central Asia and the craven political expediency in Washington and London that eventually cost him his job.
Craig Murray is no ordinary diplomat. He enjoys a drink or three, and if it's in the company of a pretty girl, so much the better. Murray's scant regard for the rules of the game also extends to his job. When, in the first few weeks of his posting to the little-known Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan, he comes across photographs of a political dissident who has literally been boiled to death, he ignores diplomatic nicety and calls it for what it is: torture of the cruelest sort.
Murray soon discovers that this is no one-off incident: fierce abuse of those opposing the government is rife. It's not long before he is tearing around the country in his embassy Land Rover, shaking off Uzbek police tails and crashing through roadblocks to meet with dissidents and expose their persecutors. He even confronts the despotic president, Islom Karimov, face-to-face.
But Murray's bosses in London's Foreign Office, ever mindful of their senior partners in Washington, don't want to upset the applecart. Karimov is an ally in the newly announced Global War on Terror. His country is host to a big American air base. The last thing they need is a battling young diplomat stirring things up. In Craig Murray, that's exactly what they've got...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Although the subject matter is dead serious, the picaresque subtitle reflects the defiant wit at the heart of this highly revealing memoir by the colorful and prominent former British ambassador to Uzbekistan. Murray's brief term (2002 2004) belies his influence as a scrupulous administrator who, whatever his personal failures (and he's refreshingly up-front about them), proved incorruptible in pursuit of social justice in a nation suffering under a sadistic regime. In addition to competence, wit and considerable daring, Murray displayed a rare integrity in Tashkent that stood out among his counterparts, which was precisely what got him into trouble with both dictator Karimov's brutal totalitarian state and with his own government, which eventually resorted to an eye-opening campaign to oust him. A deluge of bureaucratic and personal information occasionally blurs the focus in this book, but Murray uses the full weight of his ambassadorship to hold a key ally of the U.S. accountable for deep-seated economic corruption and human rights abuses including pervasive use of torture and runs headlong into some of the fiercest contradictions in the "war on terror."
