06 September 2018

Diplomats in Danger

Summer palaces and microwaves.

By Neil Tidmarsh

In August 1860, an army of 20,000 British and French troops disembarked from a fleet of 206 ships anchored in China’s Pehtang River, and began to march on Beijing.  Their mission was to coerce the Emperor Hsien Feng into ratifying the Treaty of Tientsin, which his commissioners had signed two years before but which imperial officials had since proved reluctant to honour.  The treaty was an attempt to open China up to trade (including opium from British India) and diplomatic communication with Europe.

The army arrived a few miles outside the Chinese capital a month later.  Two British envoys were permitted to come forwards under a flag of truce to meet with Chinese military officials and members of the Imperial family.  The negotiations, however, were never completed; the two envoys were seized, beaten and imprisoned.  The whole delegation – the two diplomats and their military escort of 35 British and Indian troops, plus a French abbé and a British journalist – were incarcerated in chains, interrogated, tortured and threatened with execution.  Another party was sent forwards the next day under a flag of truce to demand the prisoners’ release, but it was fired upon.  With the truce collapsing, the army resumed its march on Beijing and armed conflict broke out.  When a Chinese general was wounded twice during an allied attack on a bridge over a canal outside the city, he retaliated by having two of the prisoners – the French abbé and a British staff officer – brought forward and beheaded on the bridge itself, presumably in full view of the attackers.

The allied forces were outraged by such brutal disregard of protocol – diplomatic immunity shredded, the flag of truce ignored, envoys and innocent civilians seized, prisoners executed.  To the north west of Beijing, they had come across the emperor’s legendary Summer Palace – an exquisite enclosed complex consisting of eighty square miles of beautifully landscaped gardens and lakes and hundreds of pavilions and mansions full of priceless treasures and wonderful objects d’art.  It was in itself a treasure and an object of art, which the imperial family forbad anyone else from entering.  The allied commanders had initially decided to leave it inviolate, even though the emperor himself had fled to the safety of the fortified city.  But now, following the seizure of the diplomatic mission, the French General Montauban let his men loose on a looting spree, and British officers soon joined them in stripping the place of its fabulous treasures.

By October, the French and British had reached the gates of Beijing.  Their commanders deployed heavy siege guns and demanded the release of the captives and the surrender of the city; in return, they promised to keep their troops out of the city and to respect the lives and property of its inhabitants.  Faced with the destruction of their capital, the defeated Imperial power had no option but to concede.  Three of the prisoners – including the two diplomats – were released the next day.  Another sixteen were released a week later.  The remaining twenty were no longer alive.  Eighteen bodies were eventually returned – many of them so tortured and mistreated that they were barely recognisable.  The bodies of the French abbé and the British staff officer – which had been dumped headless in the canal – were never recovered.

The allies were horrified.  Some response was called for, some kind of retribution which ideally would target the Imperial family precisely without harming the general populace.  And so the decision was taken to burn the emperor’s Summer Palace to the ground.  This punishment was carried out by thousands of troops over two days.

Times change for the better.  These days Europe is generally contrite about its bullying imperial past.  Britain takes no pride at all in the history of these Opium Wars.  The production and sale of addictive narcotics is deplored as a disgusting criminal activity.  Most of the world now agrees that free trade is a good thing – but nobody believes that anyone should be forced to sign a free trade treaty at the point of a rifled, breech-loaded, 12-pounder Armstrong cannon.  The looting and burning of the Summer Palace is lamented for the long shadow it casts over international relations to this day, and is seen as a barbaric act of vandalism which deprived humanity of many of its most excellent works.  (Many Europeans regarded it as such at the time: Victor Hugo condemned it, and the British commander who gave the order for it – and many of those who followed that order or merely witnessed its execution – did so with great reluctance and deep regret).

And of course the principle of diplomatic immunity and the humane protocols protecting peaceful envoys are now recognised around the world.

Or are they?

Soon after the re-opening of the US embassy in Havana in 2015, many of the USA’s diplomatic community in Cuba began to fall victim to a mysterious ailment.  More than thirty members of staff and their families reported suffering headaches, dizziness, deafness and nausea after hearing strange, high-pitched noises in their homes and hotel rooms.  They were found to have suffered mild brain damage.

The Cuban government denied any involvement and suggested that the chirping of crickets had provoked the symptoms.  The US withdrew 21 staff from the embassy and expelled 15 Cuban diplomats from Washington.

The ailment’s cause remained unknown.  There were theories, ranging from some sort of mass psychosomatic delusion to hidden bugging devices interfering with each other because of faulty installation by the Cuban secret service or some other nefarious organisation.  Some kind of new and unknown weapon was suspected, like the deadly machine firing invisible rays which ex-GRU officer and Russian security expert Boris Volodarsky claimed has been developed by Russia, when interviewed in The Times earlier this year.  Perhaps Russia, not Cuba, was responsible, in an attempt to sabotage the new détente between the USA and Cuba?

And then, earlier this year, American diplomats began to report the same symptoms and suffer the same damage in the city of Guangzhou, China.

Last week, it was reported that ‘Jason’ (“a secretive group of scientists who advise the US defence department on national security” – The Times) has concluded that the diplomats had probably been bombarded with microwaves.  It was known that someone within the Soviet Union bombarded the US embassy in Moscow with microwaves fifty years ago, but no harm to staff was reported at the time, and today it’s still not known whether microwave weapons actually exist.

So questions remain.  Who exactly is bombarding American diplomats and their families, and how, and why?  And precisely what damage is it causing?

Times change, but not always for the better.  It seems that Western diplomatic missions are in almost as much danger in certain parts of the world as they were one hundred and fifty years ago – but that danger is all the more alarming now for being mysterious, hidden and unknown.