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: no.
gollark: Anyway, osmarks.tk™ free hosting™ is available for signups, by which I mean you have to ask me it's entirely manual.
gollark: ???
gollark: Ideally, self-driving cars which run neural networks which are not susceptible to weird attacks.
gollark: Because:- if they're not robust against these problems, then a leak of the network means you can meddle with cars- it makes it harder for new companies to enter the self-driving-car space- you would need some sort of really evil DRM scheme to stop people just... reading the neural network out of the car's computer systems- trusting your life to closed-source systems is problematic
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.