John Gray (diplomat)

Sir John Walton David Gray KBE CMG (1 October 1936 – 1 September 2003) was a senior British diplomat.

In 1987, as the British ambassador to Beirut, Gray unsuccessfully attempted to dissuade Terry Waite from re-entering Beirut without proper protection, with the result that Waite was kidnapped and held for nearly five years.

Early life

John Gray was born in at Burry Port in Carmarthenshire and educated at Blundell's School. After National Service in Cyprus and Egypt he attended Christ's College, Cambridge and later did postgraduate research in Arab nationalism at the Middle East Centre in Oxford and the American University in Cairo. He joined the diplomatic service in 1962 and retained his link with the Middle East throughout his career.

Diplomatic career

Later career

Gray retired from the Foreign Office in 1996 and on returning to Wales became involved in public and community affairs, including:

Sources

gollark: Allegedly, Discord.
gollark: It randomly breaks for no apparent reason, seems to want to log me out if I open it in multiple tabs (browser version), and seems to just be a bloated monolith with way too many things.
gollark: It's an Electron app, so it ships yet another browser for no good reason.
gollark: Oh yes, MICROSOFT TEAMS.
gollark: Modern computers are *extremely fast*. Billions of instructions per second *per core*. Yet somehow software gets increasingly terrible such that just having a chat app like this open (in a browser) uses a substantial fraction of that, and enough memory to store several hundred *novels*.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.