Sir John Graham, Bt
Diplomat who was ambassador to Tehran during the tense time when Americans were taken hostage
SIR JOHN GRAHAM, the 4th Baronet, who has died aged 93, was a diplomat whose skills were taxed to the full trying to secure an end to UDI in Rhodesia, and then, as British ambassador in Tehran, attempting to prevent a total breakdown in relations with Iran after the overthrow of the Shah.
As under-secretary for African affairs at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Graham spent 18 months in 1977 and 1978 with Stephen Low, America’s ambassador to Zambia, shuttling between London, Salisbury and the front-line African states. The Labour Foreign Secretary David Owen had tasked him with laying the groundwork for an all-party conference that might bring about a Rhodesian settlement.
This required the patience of Job. The white Rhodesian leader Ian Smith, having held out for 12 years, was doing all he could to secure a ceasefire in the war with black nationalist guerrillas without concluding a constitutional settlement.
Smith’s efforts to head off “one man, one vote” involved regularly going back on points apparently agreed, while trying to drive a wedge between London and Washington. They culminated in his declaring an “internal settlement” with the moderate Bishop Abel Muzorewa.
Graham’s dealings with the Patriotic Front guerrilla leaders, Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe, were no easier. They refused to accept that a British resident commissioner should exert any authority during the handover to majority rule.
By August 1978 Smith was saying that a possible agenda for a conference was being discussed “in broad terms”. But no more progress was made, and Graham moved on to Tehran in January 1979 with the situation still deadlocked.
Within a year, Margaret Thatcher’s Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington would conclude the Lancaster House agreement, which ended UDI on terms similar to those Dr Owen had proposed, with the inclusion of former guerrillas in an independent Zimbabwe’s security forces.
If the Rhodesian negotiations had been nerve-racking, the situation in Tehran was positively dangerous. Graham arrived with the Shah having fled, the Ayatollah Khomeini about to return from exile and rioters having set fire to the embassy Chancery. His immediate priority was to get as many as possible of the 1,000 or so Britons still in Iran safely out of the country; 208 were airlifted out in a day.
On February 13 1979 Britain recognised
Khomeini’s regime. Graham was instructed to tell Iran’s prime minister, Mehdi Bazargan, that Britain looked forward to good relations on a basis of “friendship and mutual respect”.
The next day, a Shiite mob stormed the US embassy; when Graham asked the new government to ensure the protection of British embassy staff, it deployed Revolutionary Guards outside.
Soon after, 1,500 demonstrators arrived, protesting at the “harassment” of Iranian students in Britain. Graham invited a delegation inside – 10 students and two mullahs – to discuss the situation over a cup of tea. He then went on television to promise that genuine complaints would be investigated.
That April, the deputy prime minister told Graham that Iran wanted farm machinery and industrial plant from Britain, rather than 400 Chieftain tanks ordered by the Shah.
He was back in London assisting with the Lancaster House talks when, on 4 November 1979, militants stormed the American embassy in Tehran, taking 52 US diplomats and citizens hostage for 444 days.
Six avoided capture and were concealed in the Canadian embassy residence until they could be smuggled out. The Oscarwinning movie Argo (2012) portrayed the British as having turned them away, but in fact they stayed a night in the embassy compound before moving somewhere safer.
When the film was released Graham fumed: “It is not the truth. We gave them all help at the time. I am very distressed that the film-makers should have got it so wrong.”
With the revolutionary media accusing Graham of “conspiracy with the CIA and the Israeli secret service”, he flew back to Tehran and ordered home as many staff and families as was consistent with keeping the embassy functioning.
By end of March 1980 he was recommending a break in relations in support of President Carter’s efforts to free the hostages. During April he twice flew home for consultations with Carrington as his embassy came under greater threat and London tried to distance itself from Washington.
Graham flew back a third time when dissident Iranian Arabs seized the country’s embassy in London, Britain’s firm handling of the ensuing siege briefly improving relations with Tehran. But this time he did not return.
John Alexander Noble Graham was born on July 15 1926, the only son of Sir Reginald Graham, 3rd Bt, who had won a VC in Mesopotamia aged 19 during the First World War, and the former Rachel Sprot. Graham would inherit the baronetcy in 1980. He was brought up in Edinburgh but sent to Eton, after which he enlisted in the Grenadier Guards, being commissioned a second lieutenant a month before VJ-DAY.
Demobilised in 1947, he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, with a scholarship. Graduating in 1950, he joined the Foreign Service, and after studying at its Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies (Mecas) in Lebanon he was posted to Bahrain (1951), Kuwait (1952) and Amman (1953) – always with a set of bagpipes in his baggage.
Graham returned to Whitehall in 1954 to become assistant private secretary to the Foreign Secretary, Sir Anthony Eden, staying on under Harold Macmillan and then Selwyn Lloyd after Eden became prime minister. Graham, being still very junior, was not privy to the plans to invade Suez. When the operation ended in failure
Graham considered resignation, but felt he was too insignificant to have any effect. Years later he was to sign the open letter by 52 former ambassadors to Tony Blair condemning the invasion of Iraq and the failure to pursue the Arab/israel peace process.
Graham was posted in 1957 to Belgrade as a first secretary, serving further in Benghazi before returning to the Foreign Office in 1961. From 1966 to 1969 he was head of chancery in Kuwait.
In May 1969 he became principal private secretary to the Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart. When, weeks later, demonstrators demanding a resumption of relief flights to war-torn Biafra staged a six-hour sitdown in the entrance hall of the FCO, Graham went out and talked to them.
His style as a private secretary was to convey the Foreign Secretary’s views and wishes to departments, and vice versa, without being bossy or adding his own opinion, and always with charm and good humour. He never fussed. It went down well.
He continued as private secretary to Sir Alec Douglas-home after the Conservatives returned to power in 1970. From 1972 to 1974 he was minister and head of chancery in Washington, then from 1974 to 1977 ambassador to Iraq.
As deputy under-secretary at the FCO from 1980 to 1982, Graham worked to bring the Palestine Liberation Organisation into the Middle East peace process, holding secret talks with Yasser Arafat in Beirut.
His final posting, until 1986, was in Brussels as permanent representative to Nato. The next year he was called out of retirement to head Britain’s delegation to a conference of the International Frequency Registration Board, attempting to block changes to the allocation of radio wavelengths. Ministers feared these could cost the BBC’S external services 40 per cent of their daily output.
Graham was appointed CMG in 1972, KCMG in 1979 and GCMG in 1986. From 1987 to 2001 he was registrar of the Order of St Michael and St George. He was also director of the Ditchley Foundation from 1987 to 1992.
In 1956 John Graham married Marygold Austin, with whom he had two sons and a daughter; she died in 1991. In 1992 he married, secondly, Jane Howells. He is succeeded in the baronetcy by his elder son, Lt Gen Andrew Graham, a former colonel of the Royal Regiment of Scotland.