A Very Civil Servant

By Scott MacLeod Sir Brian Urquhart

Rarely has the description "statesman" seemed so appropriate. In his long career, however, Urquhart represented no single state but rather every nation on the globe. During a 41-year career as a senior U.N. official, rising to the rank of Under Secretary-General for Special Political Affairs, Urquhart, 69, found himself in the middle of virtually every major international crisis. Though he retired 2 1/2 years ago, Urquhart will be in the delegation that will travel to Oslo next week to receive the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the U.N. for its peacekeeping missions in Lebanon, Cyprus, Afghanistan and other volatile places. His efforts over many years not only in promoting the usefulness of the blue-helmeted U.N. soldiers but also in directly supervising their operations earned him the nickname "Mr. Peacekeeper." In 1986 Urquhart became a Scholar-in-Residence at the Ford Foundation, where he spoke with staff writer Scott MacLeod.

Q. Your father was an artist, yet you have had a career in diplomacy.

A. I wasn't a diplomat. I was an international civil servant, which is a completely different thing. I don't like the word diplomat, actually. The ordinary person thinks of people in striped pants at a cocktail party or at a green baize table engaging in circumlocutions about serious matters. I was brought up between the wars, in a very dreary period of European history. I had always wanted to work for the League of Nations, but it went out of business before I got into the game.

Q. When the U.N. was formed, you were the second man recruited. Who got you involved?

A. I left the British army in July 1945 and went to work for Arnold Toynbee at the Foreign Office research department. Gladwyn Jebb, now Lord Gladwyn, the Acting Secretary-General, was looking for a private secretary. Toynbee suggested me. I was 26.

Q. Perhaps it's not too widely known that you were the young intelligence officer portrayed in Cornelius Ryan's A Bridge Too Far. What led you to advise against the ill-fated British attack on Arnhem, in German-occupied Holland?

A. I had come to the conclusion that at all levels the attack would be totally disastrous. It didn't take a great deal of brains to see that. Airborne troops were going to land 60 miles ahead of the ground troops and take three main bridges over three big rivers. Then the relieving ground troops had to go across the low country. We learned that two of the best Panzer divisions in the German army, the 9th and 10th S.S. Panzer Divisions, were refitting right where the 1st Airborne Division was going to land. I couldn't see the strategic point of the operation.

Q. Did Field Marshal Montgomery get the advice?

A. He got it from a lot of people. I merely advised my own general, General Browning, who was in charge of the whole Market Garden operation. I said, "Look here, you've got to rethink this. It's going to be a mess." That was completely overruled. Montgomery wanted to have a British masterstroke to end the war. When you're young, you believe that a good argument will win the day, and of course it doesn't. It was a terrible experience because an immense number of soldiers were killed, 12,000 as I remember. I was greatly & disillusioned because I then realized that people in high positions were not necessarily always motivated by wisdom and concern for the common cause, but in fact could be motivated by other less desirable emotions, like vanity, ambition and a desire to score a point off somebody.

Q. In more than 40 years at the U.N., you must have set some travel records.

A. You know, when the normal way of crossing the Atlantic was in the big liners that took five days, people were more careful about how they organized things. It seems to me that Andrei Gromyko didn't like flying and almost always went on the Queen Mary. Partly it was to have time to have a think and have a rest, which was quite sensible.

Q. How did you view Gromyko? Did his ideology really get in the way of personal relations?

A. To some extent. This was the mistake Dag Hammarskjold made with Khrushchev. He believed if you could establish a personal relationship with leaders, you could actually do a great deal more in times of crisis. That was true with someone like David Ben-Gurion, who after all was a leader in a democracy. It made a huge difference to be able to get Ben-Gurion on the phone and say, "Now look here, my dear old friend, we have to get this straightened out." You can't do that with someone who's representing an ideologically authoritarian regime. They can't afford to take a personal view of politics. We can.

Q. The U.N. seems lately to be involved in a wide range of diplomatic activities and initiatives. Is the U.N. responsible for peace breaking out?

A. I don't think so. I think the change in the international climate, which I suppose started with Mikhail Gorbachev, is of incalculable importance. Of course, if you want to get out of a conflict with honor, the U.N. and the Secretary-General are the best way of doing it.

Q. No doubt you are pleased that U.N. peacekeeping forces won the Nobel Peace Prize.

A. I think this is recognition long overdue, of an extremely important idea with a very big future, which is the nonviolent use of soldiers by the international community, and using soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as an instrument of war. If we're in a state of evolution toward a better international arrangement, I think one can see the peacekeeping forces a little bit like the civil-police forces, which were introduced into nations in the beginning of the last century. They were considered to be completely ridiculous at that time, but it turned out this was a very powerful idea. I think peacekeeping forces could become a very important institution. Most people can't understand what the hell all these chaps in blue helmets are doing all over the place. It sounds very pretentious, but we have now developed the art of war to such a point where you really can't use it. I think you need an alternative, and maybe this is the beginning of the alternative.

Q. What's it like out on the peacekeeping beat?

A. It's not like being an ordinary soldier. You can't open fire except in the extreme case of self-defense. You have to stay above the battle, to talk constantly to both sides and defuse misunderstandings. And even to be on hand when somebody's chicken runs over the line into the other people's territory, so you don't start a battle.

Q. One time things didn't work very well was in 1967, when the U.N. agreed to withdraw peacekeeping troops from the Sinai. A war ensued, which led to Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as other Arab territories.

A. Nasser ordered the U.N. forces out. U Thant was the only person who went to Nasser and said, "This is crazy. You can't do this." U Thant got all the blame for it because he was a very convenient scapegoat. Nobody ever mentioned that he really didn't have any alternative, particularly since there was no international backing to stop either side from getting into the war.

Q. You thought highly of Dag Hammarskjold.

A. He had this slightly visionary quality. He did push, much further than before, the idea of an active practical organization which could in desperate circumstances actually operate in the field and do something to try to calm things down.

Q. Kurt Waldheim has turned out to be the most controversial of the Secretaries-General.

A. I worked with him for ten years. He was not a very original man. He was a very hardworking, extremely ambitious man. I have totally revised my views about him, I have to say, because I find it totally unforgivable that he would have repeatedly given this total misrepresentation of his wartime career. I have never seen any evidence that he was in any normal sense a war criminal. But he was certainly in a particularly tough unit of the German army. To have told lies about this, for a public figure in that position of responsibility, seems to me to be absolutely unforgivable. It's particularly bad in that office because the Secretary-General of the U.N. doesn't have great divisions, or money, or sovereign power. His sole important weapon is his credibility. I had always accepted his own version.

Q. You had discussed his background with him?

A. Yes. It never occurred to me for a single minute that a man in that position would not tell the truth to one of his closest colleagues, particularly someone who was going to defend him. And I deeply resent the idea that I was actually perpetrating a falsehood unknowingly for all that time.

Q. Many Americans came to feel the U.N. had become a forum for Third World radicalism and anti-American actions. How did you see it?

A. I can very well understand American disillusionment and irritation. One must also remember that it was the U.S. that pioneered decolonization, which gave birth to the Third World. There was a kind of adolescent period, I think, in the newly independent developing world where people became, as adolescents often do, extremely radical. The typical example of this trend, the assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism, was a totally counterproductive move.

Q. You worked with Javier Perez de Cuellar.

A. I was delighted when he became Secretary-General. He is a very well- qualified person and extremely intelligent man, who knew the job very well, a very quiet extremely self-effacing man. He spent the sort of wilderness years from 1982 to 1987, pretty bad years in the U.N., as the only negotiator on Afghanistan, Iran-Iraq, Western Sahara, Cyprus and a lot of other things, and he established a position of great respect with all the different antagonists in all these situations. When the international climate changed and the outburst of common sense began to take place, he was in a position to act very quickly.

Q. In 1978 U.N. peacekeepers started patrolling the border between Lebanon and Israel, but then in 1982 another war broke out.

A. The Israelis wanted to strike a blow at the P.L.O. I spent a great deal of time trying to persuade rather skeptical Israelis, including Ariel Sharon, that they were better off without an invasion.

Q. Did you agree with the idea of sending the multinational force, a non-U.N. group that included U.S. Marines, into Beirut to help patch Lebanon back together again?

A. No, I think it was a vast misreading of what Lebanon is really like. They drifted gradually into a very controversial position as the great supporter of the government of Lebanon. Well, to most people in Lebanon, the government is just another faction, and furthermore not a very powerful faction. Amin Gemayel's authority seemed to stop at the gates of the Baabda palace.

The only conceivable way to force them into a union would be by years of negotiation and evolving a whole series of ties of interest, but nobody's been able to do it, not since the French.

Q. You carried a message from Yasser Arafat to Menachem Begin?

A. That was just before the 1982 invasion. I think Arafat is genuinely convinced that he has to find a means of coexistence with Israel. What Arafat was saying was that he was interested in peace, and that if he was disposed of, it was unlikely that anyone else would come along who was as convinced of this as he was. I don't think any of these messages were new or particularly welcome to Begin.

Q. Is the world becoming a safer place?

A. I think at the superpower level one has to believe and hope that the threat has for various reasons decreased. But I think the situation at the intermediate level requires a great deal of attention. There is an enormous arms flow to the developing world.

Q. When you started out at the U.N., it was considered to be a monument to idealism by many people. Did you get discouraged?

A. I don't think you could say that President Roosevelt, Mr. Churchill and Mr. Stalin were starry-eyed idealists. They had been through the fire of war. Did anybody really think in 1945 that every government would renounce the use of force in its relations with every other government, and agree to settle all disputes with peaceful means, and disarm? This was the aim. The U.N. Charter was a great beacon set on a hill, the great light toward which we were supposed to be working. We haven't had World War III. I don't see any reason to be downhearted. One should be frustrated, and certainly working in the U.N. was a great exercise in that. And one should be more determined than ever to keep after the basic objective.

Q. Your idealism is showing.

A. I am an idealist, I have to admit. I think human nature is self- interested. But there is such a thing as enlightened self-interest. The trick is to engage self-interest at the point where it touches other people's self- interest. Why shouldn't it be done on the international level, particularly when we have invented a way of putting an end to the whole experiment, by nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction. That is what the U.N. should be all about. I maintain that my idealism, which is based on some fairly rough experience, is a great deal more realistic than the totally defeatest notion that human beings are born to suffer and kill each other. If one believes that, one should go dig a deep hole and jump into it.