Her Majesty's Man in Tashkent

I should be quite plain: I did not lead a conventional social life; I had a string of mistresses throughout my career; and I also like a drink, as a good Scot should. But none of the allegations was true, and after a four-month investigation I was cleared of all of them due to lack of evidence. My taste for whisky and women wasn't the problem; it was clear to me that I had no place in Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair's endless War on Terror. I found the government's hostility almost intolerable, and was hospitalized after suffering a nervous breakdown. I was forced to retire in February 2005.

Just a few months later, in May 2005, Karimov's troops fired into a crowd of anti-government demonstrators in the city of Andijan. Between 400 and 1,000 people died that spring day in what has become known as the Andijan massacre. The initial U.S. reaction was rather low-key. But when Karimov soon gave notice to the U.S. base, the massacre became a pretext for the Bush administration to announce its departure.

When I tried to tell my story -- Uzbekistan's story -- in a book, I was challenged by my government, which sought to suppress the information. The British government has an illustrious history of censoring books by former civil servants, at times even trying to ban them. In the effort to prevent a ban, I succumbed to censorship of particular passages. Even so, the government refused to clear the book for publication, telling Parliament that it would consider suing me.

I also wanted to publish a large number of documents to corroborate my story -- including my official dispatches from Tashkent and the government's demands that I change the text -- but when the government threatened legal action, I removed the documents from my book. I have continued to receive threatening letters; when Foreign Office lawyers argued that the government still retains copyright over all documents produced by the government (even if obtained through Freedom of Information laws), I had to remove them from my Web site.

These days I write, lecture and broadcast from London, where I live with my Uzbek girlfriend. The British government could no doubt prosecute me under our draconian Official Secrets Act, but I am confident they are too scared to have the facts of the case put before a jury. My book was finally published here this summer in its censored form. And the documents are still accessible on scores of Web sites with a little creative online searching. They support a story I have found as hard to tell in retirement as I found it hard to combat in office.

craigjmurray@tiscali.co.uk

Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, is the author of "Murder in Samarkand" (Mainstream).