The Envoy & His Navel Liaison

"I come from poverty, and I fight not to have this poverty again," she says. "A rich man is not important, but having enough money is important."

Murray is an unemployed man, forced out of his job by the British government, which filed 19 misconduct charges against him -- including drunkenness at work and trading visas for sex. Murray vehemently denies all the allegations, and none was ever proved.

Certain he was about to be fired, Murray ultimately took a severance package from the Foreign Office in 2005. He says it paid him about $400,000 after taxes, most of which he said he gave to his ex-wife, Fiona. They separated in 2004 after he admitted his relationship with Alieva, which he calls the last straw in a long-dying marriage. He says he and Alieva still regularly see his children, now 19 and 13.

Speaking in a soft voice, Murray describes how he faced so much pressure he considered suicide, ending up hospitalized with what he calls a nervous breakdown. Adding to his woes was a doctor's diagnosis in 2004 that he had a heart condition that could kill him in as little as six months; he has since recovered.

Whose Morality?

Murray says he now believes that the fuss he kicked up in Uzbekistan unwittingly touched on something much more sensitive than London's moral standards. He says he stumbled into the U.S. program of "extraordinary rendition," in which terror suspects were shipped for interrogation to countries not squeamish about torture.

That explains, he says, why the response to his complaints was so "ferocious." Uzbekistan was later named, including in a 2006 report by European investigators, as part of the rendition program. But at the time of Murray's agitation, the program was still secret.

Murray says he complained that Britain was receiving the torture-tainted intelligence via the CIA, and a British diplomat questioning the legality of that was "hitting at the foundations" of the transatlantic relationship.

"So much of the strategy of the war on terror was a terrible mistake," he says. "Things like extraordinary rendition created more Islamic militancy. For the last couple of years I haven't met anyone, anywhere who argued that I wasn't right."

But plenty of critics complain that it's a shame that it was Murray making the case. In reviews of his book and stories about his life, critics have argued: How could Murray preach moral purity while spending his nights in boozy strip joints and chucking his wife and kids to run off with a dancer in sparkly underpants?

Murray sighs at this.

"The idea that you can't oppose torture unless you're a teetotal monogamist is ludicrous," he says. "The idea that cheating on your wife is on a par with pulling someone's fingernails out -- it doesn't really bear analysis."

Murray says his "unconventional social life" has always included a hearty appetite for strip clubs, pails of Scotch and "quite a few girlfriends over the years."

"This is a subject on which views in the States are entirely different from views in Europe, and the U.K. sits somewhere in the middle," he says. "I always took the view that whatever I did in my private life, provided it wasn't illegal, was nobody's business as long as I did my job well. And that remains my view.

"I don't consider that I behaved unethically in my private life. But I do accept that's because my views on personal morality are different to quite a few other people's views."

Murray says his employers knew all about the more purple aspects of his colorful life. "It never worried them -- until they decided to get me, and then of course it was a vulnerability."

The Foreign Office spokesman declined to comment about Murray's allegations, saying, "People have to make their own judgments about Craig."

'A Free Woman'

Alieva listens to Murray tell his story, which she recounts nightly onstage, wearing a sequined belly dancer's outfit. Murray mentions that his divorce from his ex-wife will be final soon. Does that mean they are free to marry? Alieva's already using "Nadira Murray" as a stage name -- will they make it official? When asked, Alieva stutters.

"I don't know. Why not? . . . I'm living with him. . . . How can I? I dunno? Um. . . . Marriage, marriage, marriage, marriage. . . . I don't know, I rather prefer being . . ."

Her thought tails off. She looks at him again: "Sorry."

At the close of Alieva's play, her big finish is not a declaration of happily-ever-after love, but a simple observation that she is now "a free woman."

"The lack of the Hollywood ending was a deliberate decision," Murray says. "It isn't a Cinderella story. It isn't a fairy story. And a declaration of true love wouldn't be true. We were very well aware that that would be the ending people would be waiting for --"

"But it wouldn't be right," Alieva says, finishing his sentence. "Because it's just not me."