Sir James Craig
Brilliant Arabist and diplomat who strove to heal the rift with the Saudis over Death of a Princess
SIR JAMES CRAIG, who has died aged 93, was the Foreign Office’s finest Arabist of his time and an accomplished troubleshooter; he ended a Palestinian aircraft hijacking in Tunis with minimal casualties, and smoothed relations with Saudi Arabia after the near rupture over the 1980 ITV drama-documentary Death of a Princess.
No respecter of persons, Craig – a miner’s son – had a two-hour stand-up row with the Israeli premier Golda Meir over who started the 1967 Six-day War, and as ambassador in Jeddah was equally blunt in private with the Saudis. Despite some embarrassment when his farewell dispatch deploring the hypocrisy of Saudi high society was leaked, the kingdom’s rulers reckoned Craig a stalwart friend.
Robert Lacey recalled in The Kingdom how, meeting the elderly King Khaled for the first time, Craig “spoke not only in perfect Arabic but in the Bedouin dialect spoken by the King. The King loved it.” When, after his retirement, campaigners called for democracy in Saudi Arabia and an end to capital punishment, Craig observed that if Britain had more democracy, there would almost certainly be public executions.
Albert James Macqueen Craig was born on July 13 1924, the son of James Craig and the former Florence Morris. From Liverpool Institute High School he won an exhibition to Queen’s College, Oxford. Taking a First in Classics Mods in 1943 he joined the Army, but returned after a year, graduating with a First in Arabic and Persian in 1947.
After a year’s postgraduate study at Magdalen College, Craig became lecturer in Arabic at Durham University. He took a year out at Cairo University, and in 1955 was seconded to be senior instructor at the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies, Britain’s “spy school” in the Lebanon whose history he would publish in 1988.
Formally joining the foreign service in 1956, he came home two years later, then in 1961 was posted to the thenundeveloped Dubai as political agent for the Trucial States. After spells in Beirut and Jeddah, he spent a year at St Antony’s College, Oxford, before taking charge in 1971 of the FCO’S Near East and Africa department.
When in November 1974 four Palestinians hijacked a British Airways VC-10 from Dubai to Tunis with 39 hostages, Craig was sent to take charge of negotiations. Calling the pilot, Capt Jim Futcher, from the control tower, he was urged to “get things moving, otherwise there could be dire consequences”.
The hijackers demanded the release of 13 terrorists held in Egypt and two in Holland. After 24 hours they shot a German bank manager and threw him on to the tarmac, threatening to kill another hostage every two hours.
Over 84 suspenseful hours for those aboard – Futcher, who had reboarded the aircraft after the hijack, plus nine crew, 27 passengers and eight airport cleaners – Craig played the situation “by ear”. Blurring somewhat the Heath government’s policy of not negotiating with terrorists, he talked with the hijackers, the crew, the FCO and Downing Street, and coordinated efforts among Arab leaders.
When the freed prisoners arrived from Egypt, 13 hostages were released. The rest were let go when those from Holland appeared, leaving just Futcher and his flight engineer aboard, their cockpit wired with explosives. After Tunisia, at Craig’s urging, rejected the hijackers’ request for asylum, they surrendered.
After a year as deputy high commissioner to Malaysia, Craig in 1976 was appointed ambassador to Syria. Here he was the first British diplomat publicly to meet the PLO, and was summoned to Damascus airport to deal with the less fraught hijacking of a British Midland airliner.
In 1979 he moved to his final and most sensitive posting, in Jeddah. He was soon making representations over Penelope Arnot, wife of an expatriate surgeon, who had been sentenced to 80 lashes for serving alcohol at a party at which a British nurse, Helen Smith, and a Dutchman fell from a balcony to their deaths.
In April 1980 Craig was ordered to curtail a holiday in France and report to the Foreign Office. The furore over Death of a Princess was about to erupt, and the government had belatedly realised that there was a real prospect of the Saudis severing diplomatic relations and – even more seriously – economic ties.
The programme dramatised with a degree of licence events three years before, when a westernised Saudi princess had been executed by shooting for adultery, and her lover beheaded. It also claimed that hundreds of Saudi officers had been pushed out of transport aeroplanes after an abortive coup in 1969. It particularly offended Saudi sensibilities by depicting life in an upper stratum of society where only lip service was paid to Islam.
The Saudis and the FCO urged ITV to pull the programme, but Death of a
Princess went out. Craig flew back to Jeddah with a personal letter from Sir Ian Gilmour, Minister of State, to the foreign minister Prince Saud Al Faisal. His reception was frigid, and two meetings with Prince Saud downright icy. At a third, he was ordered to leave the country.
The Saudis froze the appointment of a new ambassador to London and put economic relations with Britain under review – as close to severance as was possible. Next day, a Cypriot company registered in the Channel Islands lost a £80 million Saudi housing contract; overall, British firms would lose £250 million in orders.
It took five months before Craig was allowed back. Three apologies from the Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington – who said Death of a Princess was a bad film that should never have been shown – did little to clear the air. Hardliners in the Saudi royal family blocked a visit by Carrington for talks with Saud. It was July before Douglas Hurd was able to make the journey, paving the way for Craig’s return the following month.
Craig’s rebuilding of relations was complicated by a row over Britain’s refusal to accept an Arab League delegation because it included a representative of the PLO. Nevertheless, by his retirement in 1984 he had re-established trust to the point where he could rate Britain’s standing in the Kingdom as “top of the second division after the US”. Great affection for Britain was, he said, offset only by “a little disappointment at our relative decline in economic power”.
The New Statesman got hold of Craig’s confidential farewell dispatch, with wounding views on Saudi competence, honesty and morality. The government, anxious not to offend the Saudis further, tried to keep its contents secret. But by the time the Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, secured an injunction against the
Statesman, it had already been printed in the Glasgow Herald.
The leak was traced to a former Bank of England employee who had joined the Statesman. Craig was assured that the Saudis were not troubled, but felt it best to pass up the chair of a new Saudi-british Society (later becoming vice-chairman), and to be diplomatically absent when King Fahd visited Britain.
In retirement Craig returned to academia, becoming visiting professor of Arabic at Oxford and investigating whether university cuts jeopardised minority subjects like Oriental and African languages. He became president of the British Society for Middle East Studies, and raised £175,000 to continue Persian studies at Cambridge.
In 1985 he became director-general of the Middle East Association, advancing trading links; from 1993 he was its president. He was also chairman of the Anglo-arab Association and a director of the Saudi-british Bank.
Craig was appointed CMG in 1975, KCMG in 1981 and GCMG in 1984. Appointed to the Order of St John in 1985, he served on its council.
James Craig married first, in 1952, Margaret Hutchinson; they had three sons and a daughter. She died in 2001, and in 2002 he married, secondly, Bernadette Lane.