The Envoy & His Navel Liaison

A spokesman for the British Foreign Office said this week that Britain condemns torture and would never use or encourage it. But he stopped short of an absolute ban on using information obtained by torture.

In March 2003, at the dawn of the Iraq invasion, Murray says he received an opinion from the Foreign Office legal staff. It concluded, in essence, that nothing prohibited the British from using what the Uzbeks were learning with their human stewpots and pliers.

That night, Murray says he went to wash away his frustration the way he always did. He wandered down to his favorite strip club to guzzle Chivas Regal and savor the gyrations of half-naked dancers.

'Save Me'

Nadira Alieva was born in a little Uzbek town near Samarkand, the country's second-largest city. Her parents were actors in a state-run theater until the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving her country and her family in tatters.

Her life story is impossible to verify independently. But she says that in the freezing Uzbek winters, her family survived for days at a time on little more than bread. Her father's choice of pain relief progressed from vodka to heroin.

He turned violent, she says, and he beat her with his belt, only to beg forgiveness in the morning. To feed his habit, he took her to Afghanistan to buy heroin, then made her smuggle it back across the border in her underwear.

"I was still too young for the police to molest the way they did the older girls, so they left me alone," she says. By the time she was 14, she was so despondent that she climbed to the roof of her family's apartment building, she says, and only her little brother's tearful pleading kept her from jumping.

She eventually enrolled in a local university to study English, and in time took a job teaching, which paid almost nothing. She took a clerical job but quit when the boss forced her into the bathroom and sexually assaulted her.

In January 2003, at age 21, she answered an ad for dancers in a Tashkent club run by North Koreans. Every night, she stripped to her bra and panties and danced for drunken diplomats and businessmen. She called them "meat." Non-tippers were "dry meat" and big spenders were "wet meat."

She says she earned $300 a month, and flirted with "boyfriends" on the side who splashed her with money and gifts. One, a 19-year-old U.S. soldier named Lee, from Louisiana, wanted to marry her. She says he gave her $300 a month, sang country songs to her over the phone and gave her a teddy bear.

Then one night, she says, an older man walked in. The other dancers told her he was "legendary wet meat, an important man from the British Embassy." He took a seat in a booth with two Russian girls, but he kept looking to the stage, where she was dancing.

Meeting his eyes, she thought, "Who is that old foreigner? Does he have any money?"