Her Majesty's Man in Tashkent

The Uzbek people seemed shocked that a senior official from the West would take up their cause. People beat a path to my door: victims of torture, their families, relatives of the disappeared, people with more photographic evidence, or letters smuggled out of the gulags. And I began to build up a picture of torture used to subjugate an entire population.

I learned that there was a pattern to the confessions people were signing -- a pattern reminiscent of the testimony I had heard from an old Muslim man at the trial I attended when I first arrived in the country. He had signed a statement, the man said, asserting that two of the defendants -- his nephews -- were members of al-Qaeda and had met Osama bin Laden. Then, suddenly, he drew himself up: "It is not true," he said. "They tortured my children in front of me until I signed this. We are small farmers from Andijan. What do we know of Osama bin Laden?" Few others were able to retract their forced confessions.

A would-be Islamic insurgency had indeed emerged in the country -- the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which had supported the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan. However, the IMU had never become a major political force in Uzbekistan, and government efforts to link the insurgency to bombing attacks in Tashkent in 1999 had met with skepticism from many Western analysts.

At the same time that I was receiving word from Uzbek citizens about the gruesome affronts to their humanity, I was also getting CIA intelligence on Uzbekistan, under the U.S.-U.K. intelligence-sharing agreement. This information -- fed to the CIA by Karimov's security services -- revealed the same pattern of information as those forced confessions.

And it was a pattern that was false, often demonstrably so. One piece of CIA intelligence named a Muslim terrorism suspect with alleged links to al-Qaeda, except I happened to know that the person in question was a Jehovah's Witness, not a Sunni Muslim extremist. Another gave a specific location for a terrorist training camp in the hills above Samarkand, a spot I knew was empty.

The CIA was apparently well aware that it was getting material drawn from torture. At my request, my deputy confirmed this with the U.S. Embassy. She reported back to me that she had been told that the United States did not see a problem "in the context of the war on terror." (I immediately reported this back to Britain in a top-secret telegram.) And both the CIA and the British intelligence service, MI6, were accepting and using this intelligence in their assessments, despite its highly questionable validity.

In November 2002 and again in January 2003, I made formal, written complaints to London, arguing that it was morally, legally and practically wrong to obtain intelligence under torture. The law was embodied in the U.N. Convention Against Torture, and in practical terms, torture pollutes intelligence. I was summoned back in early March 2003 for a meeting with Matthew Kydd, head of liaison with the British security services, and Michael Wood, legal adviser to the Foreign Office. Kydd informed me that the intelligence from Uzbekistan was "operationally useful." Wood later wrote that I was incorrect to believe it was an offense to "receive or possess information [obtained] under torture."

To me, the meaning of all this was simple: U.S. officials were justifying their support for Karimov with the argument that he was a bastion against Islamic militancy. That argument enabled Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to come to Tashkent in February 2004 and say: "Uzbekistan is a key member of the coalition's global war on terror. And I brought the president the good wishes of President Bush." Karimov's record as a dictator, persecuting democratic opposition, simply does not fit the narrative; it was not a story my government intended to let me tell.

During this period, the key challenge facing then- Secretary of State Colin Powell was the need to keep certifying Uzbekistan's human rights record to Congress. By spring 2004, Congress was waking up to a human rights problem, and in July of that year, the Bush administration announced that it would cut $18 million in military and economic aid to Uzbekistan.

However, just before certification was due, the Uzbek government said that al-Qaeda suicide bombers had attacked Tashkent. I visited each of the alleged bomb sites within hours and saw virtually no damage. The evidence on the ground did not fit the official explanation. I knew al-Qaeda was not behind whatever had occurred: The British embassy had received National Security Agency intercepts of senior al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan and the Middle East, phoning each other to find out what was going on in Tashkent. Nevertheless, Powell's subsequent claim that Tashkent was under attack by Islamic extremists helped smooth the path for continuing U.S. aid.

In the meantime, my superiors had new complaints against me. I had gone from "over-focused on human rights" to "unpatriotic," according to my supervisor when he came to meet with me in March 2003. By August of that year, I was recalled from holiday in Canada to London, where I faced 18 reputation-wrecking allegations: I was an alcoholic; I was issuing visas in exchange for sex; I was taking bribes.

I was stunned by the speed of it all, even more when I was told by a junior staff member that under no circumstances could I tell anyone about these allegations. I could not call witnesses; I was banned from my embassy; and I would be told later of the results of the investigation.