The Envoy & His Navel Liaison
The Ambassador Fell For a Dancer. He Thinks He Took the Fall for London, Too.

By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, February 1, 2008

LONDON

Surely, after all they've been through, the belly dancer must love the British ambassador.

He saved her from her life, from Uzbekistan, a thugocracy where she grew up a hungry and beaten child. At age 11, she was forced by her drug-addled father to smuggle heroin from Afghanistan in her underwear. Much later, as an adult, she was raped by police.

British Ambassador Craig Murray found her when she was 21, dancing for tips in a sleazy club in Tashkent, the capital. He tucked $20 into her embroidered panties, walked away from his wife and two children and brought his belly dancer to London to start a new life together.

Their liaison, now recounted nightly in her autobiographical London stage play, ultimately cost him his career -- that, and the small matter of accusing Uzbek President Islam Karimov of running a torture state, and accusing Britain and the United States of using intelligence that Karimov's men tortured out of suspects in the name of the "war on terror."

After all of that, Nadira Alieva, you must love him, right? He must be your hero, your savior, this older British man who is sipping a latte across the table from you. Tell us, are you in love?

"I don't know," she begins, leaning forward on the couch, her dark eyes cast toward the floor, turning down the volume of her striking, angular face. She is speaking slowly, struggling to find a comfortable way to sit. She laughs. Stops. Plays for time with a couple of short breaths.

"I don't know how to put this, because this is really difficult for me," she says, looking at the carpet. "I don't think I've ever believed in being in love, honestly."

Her ambassador, 23 years her senior, is looking at her tenderly through wire-rimmed glasses. He is a slightly sad-looking man with a flop of sandy-gray hair, wearing a bulky cable-knit sweater that only emphasizes the generation that separates him from his stylish, hyper-fit lover.

"I'm sorry," she says, raising her eyes to his.

He meets her gaze. It is an accepting look. It is adoration.

"No," he says, reassuring her with a touch of his hand. But what follows is not sugary, since nothing about these two survivors is soft and sweet, except perhaps for the pillowy contours of his face.

"I think it's undoubtedly true that some of the things that you've been through have damaged your ability to form emotional attachments," he says. "Other than your blood family, you don't really feel that close to anybody."

They are still holding hands.

A Raging Scot

Uzbekistan sits in the cold, rough heart of Central Asia, shaped like a jagged bit of shrapnel from the explosion of the Soviet Union. Landlocked and poor, it is surrounded by Stans: Kyrgyz-, Turkmeni-, Tajiki-, Kazakh- and, just to the south, Afghanistan.

Karimov has run the place with an iron heart and Soviet gentility since 1991, with a human rights record so hideous that Amnesty International and others, apparently fresh out of adjectives, simply call it "disastrous."

But global politics were different when Murray rode into town in 2002. The wounds of Sept. 11 were still open and raw, U.S. and British soldiers were pounding Afghanistan, and Iraq was in the cross hairs. President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair needed all the friends they could get in Central Asia.

Karimov signed on to the "war on terror" team, and, as Murray recalls it, his human rights record was suddenly much less important to London and Washington than his willingness to let the Americans park warplanes in Uzbekistan.

Murray, at 42, was the youngest British ambassador at the time, and he set out to be its most outspoken -- a raging Scot in a kilt, as he once appeared in a meeting with Karimov.

Shortly after his arrival, he said, photos of a man who died in Uzbek police custody landed on his desk. Pathology reports showed that he had been boiled to death, after having had his fingernails ripped out.

The British ambassador became a crusader, attending trials, giving speeches, blowing the whistle on systemic rights abuses. And evidence of something else began emerging: Karimov's men were torturing suspected terrorists, and passing the resulting intelligence on to the Americans and the British.

In the fall of 2002, Murray says he sent a cable to London. It remains classified, but he says it argued that it was morally wrong and illegal to accept information gained from torture.

He says he sent similar cables in early 2003 and in July 2004. In the last one, which was not classified, he wrote: "It is morally, legally and practically wrong to continue to receive this material. It is hypocritical and fatally undermines our moral standing."

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?"

Murray's thoughts were more lyrical.

"As I caught her glance, I felt she was drawing me into her very soul," he writes in his 2006 memoir, "Murder in Samarkand" (called "Dirty Diplomacy" in the 2007 U.S. edition). "She looked lost and anxious, like she really didn't want to be there. She defied the impossible by exuding, at the same time, such ripe sexual attraction and such innocent vulnerability. Her body invited sex while her eyes screamed, 'Save me.' "

The ambassador slipped a $20 bill in her panties and gave her his business card. He told her he was married, but he wanted her to quit the club and be his mistress.

She didn't call.

But he knew where to find her.

'Money Is Important'

Now, four years later, they are sitting in a Hilton hotel in London, close to the apartment they share in the city's funky Shepherd's Bush section.

She is wearing a tight sweater and camouflage pants, high lace-up boots and no jewelry. Her English is nearly perfect, like her posture. She wants to be an actress, and Murray, who paid her father a $9,000 dowry to take her out of Uzbekistan, has also paid for drama classes.

"My dream is to play the part of one of Oscar Wilde's women," she says. "My screen ambition is to play one of those James Bond girls."

In a few hours, she will be back onstage in a small London theater, performing her one-woman show, "The British Ambassador's Belly Dancer," which she and Murray wrote with a friend. The show is booked to move to London's West End, opening Feb. 4. Murray also has sold the movie rights to his book to British director Michael Winterbottom, whose most recent film was "A Mighty Heart," about slain journalist Daniel Pearl.

Despite those successes, Murray says the couple still has a net worth of less than $30,000, half of which is an antique Bible he owns. Alieva says she is still surprised that Murray, an important ambassador in his Uzbekistan days, is now nearly broke.

"I really thought he had some savings as an ambassador," she says, turning to him with a sharp laugh that says she's only half-kidding: "I still can't understand. How could you have no savings?"

"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."