How Burns’ cousin was a Victorian James Bond
Murray said: “When I stared writing about Alexander Burnes it was because he had been a diplomat in the same part of the world as me. But it quickly took me to all sorts of discoveries about the myths of the Knights Templar and Scottish Freemasons.”
Alexander’s brother James published these in 1837, in Sketch of the History of the Knights Templar. Murray said: “I’ve tried very hard to find any earlier mention and it is not there. So it seems like James and Alexander invented it.”
On the strength of stories of secret symbols in Afghanistan and Freemasonry documents in the Church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, Murray claims James Burnes rose rapidly through Freemasonry ranks. Alexander was killed in Kabul in 1841.
Other fascinating finds includ- ed hugely details accounts of spy techniques. “Burnes would be disguised as a traveller but counted his paces as he went in order to map,” he said. “The maps were drawn secretly at night in his tent. They would then be crushed down in amulets to be smuggled out and sent back by messengers who were themselves travelling in disguise. There was lots of double dealing – intercepting letters from the Russians, the use of complex codes to foil the other side. His sex life was also interesting. All of the histories repeat claims that it was his active sex life with Afghan women which motivated the Afghan uprising...But I couldn’t find any evidence. What I did find was very definite evidence that he took a harem of women who he had been travelling with for three or four years.” In true James Bond style, Burnes was one of the first agents to be sent to Afghanistan by British Intelligence in 1831
Robert Burns would have been proud of his ancestor, he added. Professor Gerrard Carruthers, director of the Robert Burns Centre at Glasgow University, agreed that there were parallels to be found between the two men. “Burns himself was famously a Freemason and at the time it was associated with being cosmopolitan in outlook, intellectual and adventurous...Perhaps Alexander was imbibing something of the spirit of his uncle in his adventures.”
While Ambassador in Tashkent, Murray accused the Karimov administration of human rights abuses. He was subsequently removed from his ambassadorial post on October 2004. Currently 15,000 people have signed a petition urging the US to reverse the decision to deny Murray the right to enter the country without a visa.