Craig Murray

Craig John Murray (born 17 October 1958) is a Scottish author, human rights campaigner, journalist, and former diplomat.

Instead he "read voraciously" to teach himself, and graduated in 1982 with an MA (Hons) first class.

He remained active in Liberal then Liberal Democrat politics, serving on the Students' Representative Council as an avowed liberal.

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.

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.

While he was the British ambassador to Uzbekistan (2002–2004), he exposed the violations of human rights in that country by the Karimov administration.

This led to conflict with his superiors in the Foreign Office until finally he was removed from the post.

Specifically, Murray lodged formal written complaints to his superiors stating that it was morally and legally wrong to obtain intelligence under torture and that intelligence received by the Secret Intelligence Service (and the US Central Intelligence Agency) from the Uzbek government was unreliable because it had been obtained through torture.

Subsequently he became a political activist, campaigning for human rights and for transparency in global politics as well as for the independence of Scotland.

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.

Murray was appointed ambassador to Uzbekistan, at the age of 43, where he was formally in office from August 2002 to October 2004, when he was dismissed.

"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 people in detention whom 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."

Nick Paton Walsh wrote in The Guardian that "[t]he 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 US ambassador John Herbst was present at the event and reportedly "livid" at Murray's speech.

According to a report in The Sunday Times, Murray 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.

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".

In a 2005 University of York speech, Murray recounted that, about a fortnight after his arrival, 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.

His books include two memoirs, first about his time in Central Asia, Murder in Samarkand (2006), and then The Catholic Orangemen of Togo: and other Conflicts I Have Known (2009), about his early career years in West Africa; and a historical biography, Sikunder Burnes: Master of the Great Game (2016), about Alexander Burnes and the rivalry between the 19th century British and Russian Empires over influence in Asia.

Murray was born in West Runton, Norfolk, to Robert Cameron Brunton Murray and Poppy Katherine Murray (Grice) 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.

Murray was educated at Sheringham Primary and then at Paston School, an all-boys state grammar school in North Walsham in Norfolk, which he greatly disliked.

Between 2007 and 2010 he was the elected Rector of the University of Dundee.

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.

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, he "made a policy decision not to attend any lectures".