Major Mark Scrase-dickins
Soldier-turned-diplomat who assisted the Afghans in their struggle against the Russian invaders
MAJOR MARK SCRASEDICKINS, who has died aged 86, had a successful career in the Army before transferring to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO); he subsequently played a crucial part in supporting the Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion.
In 1973 Scrase-dickins, aged 37, joined the FCO. Six years later, on Christmas Day 1979, the Russians invaded Afghanistan, where there was popular unrest in the country and their influence in Kabul was close to zero.
They stormed the palace and killed Hafizullah Amin, the brutal and erratic Communist prime minister. The British and the American governments decided that they would give the Afghans all the help they could short of going to war.
After two posts abroad, Scrasedickins was serving in SIS headquarters in London. His military career well suited him to lead SIS’S response to the Soviet invasion and he flew to Islamabad to consult the SIS station about what might be done. It became clear that while the CIA were deeply involved with the mujahideen in the south of the country, they had fewer contacts elsewhere.
Travelling to Peshawar, the centre of the fledgling Afghan resistance, Scrase-dickins “put his ear to the ground” and came up with the name of Ahmad Shah Massoud, a dynamic young mujahideen commander who was making a name for himself in the Panjshir Valley. The valley, to the north of Kabul, protected by high mountain peaks, stretches for some 75 miles.
Through intermediaries, Scrasedickins offered Massoud British assistance and travelled to the Panjshir Valley to meet him and agree what might be done, short of supplying weaponry. Over the following years Massoud’s forces were supplied with tactical radio, medical supplies and training, both in the Panjshir and in Britain.
Massoud went on to become a legendary resistance leader, “The Lion of the Panjshir”, who won a number of victories against the Russian army. Scrase-dickins’s contribution to that success can hardly be overstated. His whole operation was of crucial importance and brilliantly carried out.
Mark Frederick Hakon Scrasedickins was born in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, on May 31 1936. He grew up at RAF Farnborough, where his father was station commander, and watched the Battle of Britain being fought out in the skies above him.
He left Eton as an accomplished cellist with a lifelong love of opera, ballet and history. He enlisted as a rifleman in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps before being selected for Sandhurst. He was commissioned into the Rifle Brigade and posted to the 1st Battalion (1 RB), which deployed to Malaya during the Emergency. He was Mentioned in Despatches.
He served as ADC, first to Major General Sir Victor Paley, GOC Ghana Armed Forces, and then to Field Marshal Sir Francis Festing, Chief of the Imperial General Staff.
In 1958, 1RB changed its name to 3rd Green Jackets (The Rifle Brigade) and Scrase-dickins took part in several tours in Borneo during the Confrontation with Indonesia. There were long periods spent operating in forward bases and living in Dyak headhunters’ villages, patrolling the jungles and crossing the border to set up ambushes.
On one patrol, on entering a village, a goat was slaughtered in his honour and the still warm liver was presented to him to take the first mouthful. For the rest of his life, he was unable to eat liver.
A posting to India provided opportunities for exploring the jungle and climbing mountains, but a feast with a group of herders high up in the Himalayas left him with a severe attack of jaundice. The only medical help was many miles away. He drove his Land Rover for 24 hours to a hospital in Delhi and collapsed as he arrived.
After a move to Hong Kong followed by a stint in West Germany as a company commander, in 1973, he transferred to the FCO. The following year, he was posted to Laos. The Lao People’s Liberation Army, a communist, political organisation, was close to assuming power, with backing from North Vietnam.
Scrase-dickins – accompanied by his wife, Tina, two young children and a stalwart English nanny – travelled up the Mekong River while large numbers of the population fled down it on their way to the Thai border.
For his 40th birthday party he succeeded in obtaining the last stocks of alcohol in Laos. It tasted, he said, like an ambitious attempt to blend Ribena with high-octane aviation fuel.
In 1975, the king was forced to abdicate and Scrase-dickins was ordered to close the office. He was posted to Oman, where he found time to explore uncharted areas of the mountains and deserts. On a helicopter trip to the top of the Jebel Akhdar, nearly 10,000 feet high, the pilot injured his arm and was only capable of operating the pedals. Scrase-dickins had to take over the manual controls and got the aircraft down in one piece.
A posting to Jakarta as Counsellor followed. In his spare time, there were trips to jungles and mangrove swamps, mountains and volcanoes. The commander in chief of the Indonesian Armed Forces became a great friend and they reminisced cheerfully about the years when they had been doing their best to defeat each other.
After Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Scrase-dickins led the SIS component of the Military Intelligence organisation, coordinating the provision of military and secret intelligence, working with the SAS and organising the Kuwaiti resistance. He shared a house with General Sir Peter de La Billière, C-in-c British Forces. Scrase-dickins’s last post in SIS was Controller UK.
Through his work in Afghanistan, Scrase-dickins had met Sandy Gall, the war reporter, author and television presenter, and he subsequently acted as a senior trustee for the Sandy Gall Afghanistan Appeal. The charity trained Afghan professionals to provide artificial limbs and other mobility aids to many thousands with disabilities.
In the late 1990s, he was involved in protracted and difficult negotiations with the Taliban to enable the provision of this help to be maintained. On September 9 2001 his old friend Ahmad Shah Massoud, then defence secretary and the principal opponent of the Taliban, was assassinated by them.
Scrase-dickins was appointed CMG in 1991. He was a deputy lieutenant for the County of Sussex in 2004, High Sheriff from 2003 to 2004 and president of St John Ambulance, Sussex, from 2005 to 2011.
He was a strong supporter of his Regimental Association, took an active part in his local community and was climbing and exploring well into his seventies.
Mark Scrase-dickins married, in 1969, Martina (Tina) Viviane Bayley, who survives him with their son and daughter.
Mark Scrase-dickins, born May 31 1936, died November 10 2022