6 February 2005, Baghdad

I will bring al-Sadr into government, says the man tipped to be Iraq's new PM

Al-Jaafari offers to accommodate radical cleric whose Mahdi army has killed coalition troops

A LEADING contender to become Iraq's new prime minister has offered to welcome Moqtadr al-Sadr, the demagogic Shia cleric behind bloody uprisings against coalition forces, into a new government expanded to include those who boycotted the election.

Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a moderate Shia whose United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) list is certain to top last weekend's poll, told The Sunday Telegraph that Sadr, wanted for alleged involvement in the hacking to death of a fellow cleric, was "a good person" who could play a constructive role in the new Iraq. "Moqtadr Sadr's father was killed by Saddam Hussein," he said. "He has a large number of followers. We can involve them. If they are not killers, and if we have no evidence against them, then we can give them a chance to share in the political process."

His comments show the lengths to which Iraq's likely new leaders are prepared to go in order to divide the insurgency and marginalise its most fanatical elements. Last spring, American spokesmen were insisting that of Sadr, whose Mahdi army killed soldiers but generally refrained from targeting civilians, and will please Sunni politicians. Adnan Pachachi, the octogenarian elder statesman Sadr, whose rebel Mahdi army has killed British and American troops, be "killed or captured". Sadr, who on Friday called for all coalition troops to be withdrawn, also has ties with figures in Iran who might welcome failure in Iraq.

As he staked his claim for the premiership, Dr Jaafari, who lived in exile in Britain before the US-led invasion of Iraq and still maintains a family home in Wembley, north London, also said there could be a role for leaders of Iraq's Sunni minority who boycotted the poll. "It's not necessary that all those who are going to share in the government should have participated in the election," he said. "We have Sunni brothers who do not believe in elections and we respect them. We think they are very honest and talk frankly."

Dr Jaafari, 57, sipped lemon tea in his office in a mansion that overlooks an ornamental lake in the heavily protected Green Zone, as he set out his ambitious agenda for drawing both Sunni rejectionists and disaffected Shia into government.

He lives under constant threat of assassination and, although the notion initially offended his sensibilities, American guards use sniffer dogs to check all electronic items brought into the building, while a US Army Humvee is stationed outside.

The new assembly, which will draw up Iraq's constitution, is supposed to have 275 members, but Dr Jaafari, a physician who advocates a moderate Islamic state, said more seats could be added: "In politics, nothing is fixed. We are dealing with something new."

Even former members of the Ba'ath Party, which forced him into exile, could take part so long as they did not have blood on their hands. "We have to be open to all those within our country, with the exception of those who have killed our people," he said.

That formulation would open the door to followers of Iraq who was foreign minister before the Ba'athists seized power in 1968, said former insurgents, particularly disaffected supporters of Saddam's regime, could be accommodated. "If they have committed terrible crimes, that's another matter, they have to be tried in a court of law," he said. "But others... there is a possibility of involving them."

Dr Jaafari's name was second on the UIA list, which had the blessing of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Shia Islam's most revered religious leader. It is believed that Abdel Aziz Hakim, the cleric who headed the list, is not interested in becoming prime minister, but Adel Abdel Mahdi, now finance minister and also on it, is a strong contender.

Early results from some mostly Shia provinces last week suggest that the UIA has won a wide victory over the rival and secular "Iraqi list", headed by Ayad Allawi, the interim prime minister, whom many Shia leaders regard as unacceptable. Polls last year found Dr Jaafari to be Iraq's most popular politician and its most recognised leader after Mr Sistani.

Dr Jaafari is stressing secular values, in an attempt to reassure potential partners in what may be a multi-party government. Limiting the rights of women was unacceptable, he said. "This would cause a problem between me and my wife because she is a surgeon. She can open an abdomen but not drive a car? It is not logical."

Asked if Dr Allawi could remain prime minister, Dr Jaafari suggested it would be undemocratic to give the job to a man who finished a distant second: "We have to respect the choice of the voters and prove we are really taking into consideration the process of election." He was ready, he confirmed, to lead Iraq. "My goal was the election and I have no larger ambition. But suppose my people choose me, probably I'm going to agree."

Mr Pachachi said: "The horse trading has already begun."

30 September 2004
'I'll come back to Iraq on holiday'

His father, once Britain's ambassador to Iraq, lambasted Tony Blair's Middle East policy, but Major General Andrew Graham, former deputy commander of multi-national forces, has no such qualms. He tells Toby Harnden why ousting Saddam was worthwhile, and why he followed in the family footsteps

'I've had the most bloody awful morning," exclaims Major General Andrew Graham CBE, plonking his briefing folder down on a conference table. The roar of a Black Hawk helicopter rising outside the blast-proofed window of his cavernous office, once occupied by an apparatchik of Saddam Hussein, almost drowns him out.

But, within moments, the cloud has lifted and the countenance of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlander - educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, and considered one of the shooting stars of the British Army - is bright and cheery once again. He eyes his lunch, a frigid cheeseburger on a plastic plate, with unabashed enthusiasm. "Much nicer cold," he says.

We are sitting downstairs in the Al-Faw Palace in Baghdad - a mix of kitsch and ostentation on a monumental scale - now a military headquarters at the centre of a vast American base called Camp Victory. The thoroughfares have been given names such as Eisenhower Road and Vigilant Road, while troops are billeted in a caravan park called Dodge City. "It's been rather other-worldly living in this place," says Gen Graham, who could often be heard playing the bagpipes outside the palace in the evenings.

Yet even in this sea of incongruity, he stands out as an unusual figure among the steely-eyed American generals with their buzz-cuts and talk of "kinetic operations". A youthful, spare-framed 48, his manner is gentle, almost donnish. "I'm waffling, aren't I?" he says, apologetically, at one point. "Do you want another cup of tea?"

But as the Deputy Commander (Operations) of Multi-National Forces for the past six months, Gen Graham - who, last week, returned to Britain - has been a central figure in directing the continuing Iraq war, with authority over American troops fighting in places such as Fallujah, Najaf and Samarra. He is remembered from his days in Northern Ireland, when he carried a shepherd's crook around with him; he may speak softly, but he still carries a big stick. And Britain's presence in Iraq is still a cause he believes in.

"Yes, I do," he says, emphatically, when I ask if he thinks the project to oust Saddam was worthwhile. "Whatever he intended elsewhere in the region, whether he had WMD or not, what he was doing to these wonderful people could only have got worse. I think they needed saving from that. And that makes it all something worth doing."

His passionate conviction is that eventual victory in Iraq will be achieved not just by fighting. "In a counter- insurgency, the political, economic, military, social infrastructure and information are all the levers. This isn't a war of a linear type."

He seems to have an instinctive distrust of the grand schemes favoured by some in Washington before the war. "In the first three years, this place probably needs a lot of Elastoplast rather than enormous projects designed to bring in massive amounts of aid to fill in the gaps. It comes back to not expecting too much and not promising too much."

Rather unfashionably, amid all the American talk of eliminating the "bad guys", he believes in the innate goodness of man. "That's my greatest weakness - seeing the good in almost everyone. I get desperately disappointed when, occasionally, someone lets me down."

Finding the good that resides in the vast majority of Iraqis, he says, is the key to success. "The real point is that Hitler was one of the 10 per cent who were bad. He achieved something because the 80 per cent, the moderates, by and large, didn't have the guts to turn against him. But they were actually the quite good but malleable people who made Germany the society it became when they swung their weight the other way."

Gen Graham's appointment to Iraq, his first job as a general, was perhaps his destiny, for his is the third generation of his family to play a distinguished role in the land of the Tigris and Euphrates.

On April 22 this year, he travelled to a spot 10 miles south of the battle-torn Sunni bastion of Samarra. There, he stood on a railway embankment and gazed over the battlefield at Istabulat where, 87 years earlier to the day, his grandfather, Lieutenant Reg Graham, then 24, won the Victoria Cross.

The London Gazette citation records that the award was for "conspicuous bravery, coolness and resource when in command of a Machine Gun Section"; he counter-attacked Turkish positions under heavy fire, despite being wounded, saving the regiment to which he was attached and possibly the brigade.

Like many of his generation, Lt Col Sir Reginald Graham Bt scarcely spoke of his war exploits. "Never said anything about it at all," says Gen Graham. "I think he just thought it was a piece of the past, that he should just leave it. What was done was done. Maybe it stirred up memories he didn't want to stir up."

But he did leave a diary, letters and beautiful watercolours of what was then Mesopotamia. These were lovingly transcribed and assembled into one volume by Sir John Graham, now 78, Gen Graham's father, who was British ambassador to Iraq from 1974 to 1977 and, subsequently, Our Man in Teheran.

In a letter to his mother, written from his hospital bed a few days after the attack, the wounded hero recalled: "We came under terrific rifle and machine-gun crossfire. Nine out of 14 of my two teams were hit, and myself as well - my servant, Rennie, was killed, poor wee devil."

He continued: "So here I am, about as lucky as I could be: six wounds and not a bone touched, not a bullet in me. My field glasses are lost and 70 rupees in cash through gross carelessness on part of RAMC [Royal Army Medical Corps]. Well, Muth, best love: don't worry. I will be quite all right in a comparatively short time."

A letter from a friend recalled that some time before the battle, Lt Graham had confided: "Harry, I feel I shall be a coward when it comes to the bit."

In the preface to the volume, Sir John noted that his father had often used archaic language, such as "seedy", "cheery", "a good sort" and "a three-letter man". There are unconscious echoes of it in Gen Graham's fondness for phrases such as "pootled up", "buggers throwing grenades" and "grubbing together in a trench".

Sir John was involved in controversy in April when he was one of 52 former ambassadors - mainly Arabists - who lambasted Tony Blair's Middle East policy in a letter to The Times. It concluded: "However much Iraqis may yearn for a democratic society, the belief that one could now be created by the coalition is naive."

His son begs to differ: "The only fault of the letter - the logic is impeccable - is that it didn't come up with a solution. It just said what's wrong, and that's an easy letter to write."

He ventures: "The secret weapon in this whole thing is the people, the famous moderate people." He hopes that the Iraqi people might, one day, take to the streets to make their views about the insurgents known. "I may be naive and it may be totally alien to have a mass walk that in Britain we only manage for blood sports."

A military career was not Gen Graham's first ambition. He wanted to be a gamekeeper. But the Army was "always there in the background" during his childhood. "I'd never thought of being a stockbroker or a chartered accountant or anything like that and both grandfathers had been soldiers, so I thought that's perhaps what I should do.

"I'd recommend it to anybody. In these days of crazy life and materialism, there can be no greater privilege than when your country says to you, 'I put you in authority over your fellow citizens'."

The Army's focus on the "greatest good of the greatest number" and "be all you can be" is also in tune with the modern world, he adds. "It's a classic New Labour organisation. You learn the balance between duty, obligation, responsibility, rights. You work in less than perfect situations and discover that, actually, there are very few shysters in this world."

Even journalists, whose negative coverage of Iraq he finds infuriating, are "not malevolent, but misguided" in their doom-mongering.

"It's a pity because it fuels the potential view that bad news is good news and good news is no news. When Iraq has a silent day and there are no attacks, will there be a headline in the world press saying 'Baghdad Quiet'? Not a chance."

Several days after our meeting, Gen Graham left Iraq to return home to his wife and four children and a new job as head of Army training and recruiting. He has packed his optimism in his kit bag. " Iraq is an awesome country, just fantastic," he tells me, recalling visits to Samarra and Najaf - now virtually no-go areas for coalition troops - with his father as a teenager.

"I'm a complete 'phile. Unfortunately, there are just a few hurdles for us to get through. But I'll come back in eight or nine - no, three or four - years' time with my family, and we'll be on holiday here. There's a date tree I've got my eye on to climb. And I'd love to go the way my grandfather did and come up the Tigris on a paddle steamer."

19 th February 2004
'I hope my captors have done well...'

Former hostage Terry Waite has returned to Lebanon for the first time since his release in 1991.
Toby Harnden joined him on this emotional journey

TERRY WAITE is sitting back in a chair at an octagon conference table on the fifth floor of the YMCA office building in Beirut. The sounds of the hubbub of traffic drift up from the streets of the city where he spent 1,763 agonising days in captivity, most of them blindfolded, chained and in solitary confinement.

There is a lull as we wait for a presentation about charity programmes in Lebanon. “That’s a nice watch,” the former hostage pipes up cheerily, pointing at the handsome Breitling on the wrist of Ghassan Sayah, Beirut’s YMCA director. “It’s big, isn’t it?”

Watches, he explains to me over breakfast, have a certain significance for the former special envoy to the Archbishop of Canterbury who was seized by Islamic terrorists in January 1987 as he sought to negotiate the release of John McCarthy, Brian Keenan and others.

“Every time I went on a hostage mission, whether it was to Tehran or to Libya or to here I always took with me a clockwork wind up watch because I reckoned that if I was captured and I was wearing a battery watch for a number of months it would run down.”

But the old timepiece from his days in Africa was taken from him as soon as he lost his freedom. When he was released, he demanded it back from his captors. “They looked a bit sheepish and said, ‘Oh we don’t know where it is’.

“Given their code of honour as good Muslims, they felt they must have restitution so they gave me a new one. I’ve still got it but it’s pretty crap. I should have brought it back here with me.”

Terry Waite, now 64, is back in Beirut for the first time since his release in December 1991 after nearly five years in its cellars and outhouses. As the watch story testifies, he almost expected to disappear when he arrived at that fateful rendezvous. So what made him do it?

“I was in a sense caught in the midst of that amazing political scandal which I had nothing to do with, you know, Iran-Contra,” he says. Colonel Oliver North of the US Marines Corps, his main contact in the White House, had been exposed as helping deliver arms to Iran in return for payment to Nicaraguan rebels and the release of American hostages.

“I came back here because it was my belief that it did look as though I’d been compromised,” Waite says. He wanted to show the captors that he was an honest broker and let the prisoners know they were not forgotten.”

For the next year, he was beaten and interrogated about what he knew about Iran-Contra. The soles of his bare feet were whipped with cable so badly that he still hobbles around as a result. Nearly 13 years on, he is just about to complete the dental work he needs afterwards.

Although this week’s visit is centred around the Palestinian refugee camps in northern Lebanon on behalf of Y Care International, the development arm of the YMCA that he helped found two decades ago, Waite has also been tying up some loose ends in Beirut.

Officials with links to Hezbollah, the group believed to have kidnapped him, made contact with him on Tuesday night. “They told me, ‘If you had been implicated [in Iran-Contra] then you would definitely have been killed

“If I’d been guilty or made mistakes I’d have been dead. But I could survive it because I knew I had truth on my side.”

When Waite considered joining the Royal Navy, before he was discharged early from the Coldstream Guards at the age of 19 because of an allergic reaction to khaki uniforms, an officer told him: “Be careful of your friends. They can let you down badly.” As a one-time darling of the media who suddenly found himself being pilloried, he had reason to remember the advice years later.

What happened when he regained his freedom, he says, was worse than the torture and interrogation. “I came out and had to face the same accusations from the British press. Now that really was bad. It still hurts me. It was a clear attack, not just on my identity but on my life really.”

Before groups of people, Waite’s stentorian voice and Basil Brush laugh fit well with his massive 6 feet 7 inch frame.

Even one to one, he tends to address his companion, as Disraeli once remarked of Gladstone, as if they were a public meeting, embarking on slightly ponderous monologues divided into numbered points and prefaced by phrases like “let me say this” or “I will answer in this way”.

In private, however, his voice is soothing, the blunt Northern vowels almost mellifluous. And what is more striking, and endearing, about him is not pomposity or self-absorption – as he is so often accused of – but his vulnerability, his need for reassurance and validation.

A big man, he has always been concerned about his weight and chooses at mango and orange for breakfast. “Those things are so full of fat,” he warns me as I pick up a croissant. “I’ve trying to lose weight you see.”

I have an open-neck shirt on and he even apologises for wearing a blazer and tie. “I’m only dressed up today because I’m having lunch with the ambassador.” Paradoxically, he is at once both childlike and pedagogic.

Many of his prominent traits, he says, are either inherited from his father, a distant man who beat him as a child and was too apprehensive about unfamiliar surroundings to attend his own son’s wedding in Belfast, or developed because of his wish to please him.

His account of his captivity was “Taken on Trust” was full of self-doubt and self-criticism. “Waite, you don’t now the first thing about humility, or love, or compassion,” he wrote of his thoughts after four years in the dark. “Inwardly you are a small, frightened child, anxious to impress people.”

During his imprisonment, he says, self-examination was the only way he found he could survive. “In order to preserve your identity you maintain an inner dialogue with yourself. And I took an inner journey where you discover yourself more completely, warts and all, the dark side, light side.

“But when I was moved to be with others [with McCarthy and the Americans Tom Sutherland and Terry Anderson, after four years] of course I was still in that interior conversation.”

Waite’s relationship with the others was difficult, reminding him that he had once heard that rats kept together for long periods would eventually destroy each other. Sutherland has described the lay preacher as “the most egotistical bastard I have ever had the misfortune to meet”.

Each person, Waite explains carefully, had his own way of coping with where they found themselves. “John McCarthy says in his book that when Terry Waite came in he was constantly talking about the people he’d met .

“Now, interpreted one way you could say, ‘Oh here comes that great egoist going on about the day he had tea with Winston Churchill. Whereas in fact it was a survival mechanism for solitary confinement.”

So has Waite’s inner journey continued? “That’s an interesting question,” he says. “It’s certainly a lifelong journey. It certainly enabled me to be more centred and renewed my commitment to work for those who might be called the underdog.”

It also led to adjustments within his family. Returning from captivity, he says, was like emerging from the sea bed – rise too quickly and you will get the bends.

At first, he lived in Cambridge for the week, writing his book and only going home to Blackheath to see his wife Frances and four children at the weekend. “Everybody thought, ‘Oh crumbs, that’s the beginning of the end’ but it wasn’t - it was actually the best thing I could have done.

“We’ve been married 40 years this year. You hear this damn nonsense about people who say we’ve never spent a night apart in 40 years. I think it’s a sure way to disaster. I have all my books and papers in Suffolk and I often spend several days up there by myself.

“There’s absolutely no problem in that because we’re not threatened by it. Both she and I need time where we can be alone and do our own thing and then we can be together. We’ve learned that that pattern works for us and suits us very well.”

One of the strangest and most uplifting moments of his captivity was when he received a postcard depicting John Bunyan in confinement. It was sent by a British woman called Joy Brodier and was the only piece of mail that reached him in five years.

The address had been scratched out and after his release Waite asked Mrs Brodier who she had sent it to when the thousands of other letters had been stcking up at Red Cross buildings and British embassies.

“She sent it to ‘Terry Waite, c/o Hezbollah, Party of God, Lebanon,” he says before booming with laughter. “No postcode. That’s absolutely true. Well done, very enterprising - you got the right name.”

Now, he is ready to meet his captors and intends to do so if possible later this year. “I hope they’ve done well. What’s happened is that like many of these movements they’ve moved from a stage of adopting cert extreme measures into growing up and into a more political force.

“And when I look back I don’t look back in anger, I say, ‘Right I was caught up in that hat process, they were caught up in that process and everybody suffered as a result. Let’s put it behind us and look positively to the future.”

Mr Sayah is cagey about the possible meeting but confirms that contact has been made. “We don’t know who the actual captors are but we know who’s inviting him.” Hezbollah? He nods quickly.

Waite, however, seems more preoccupied with other matters. He was an vigorous opponent of the Iraq war.

“You cannot stick democracy onto a country as you might stick a postage stamp on a letter,” he says. “It doesn’t work like that. You have to be much cleverer and much more subtle. I fear this type of activity, gives fuel to the extremist movements and eventually it creates more terrorists.”

His terrible experience, he says, has helped him understand the nature of suffering around the world.

“It’s been very valuable. I take the viewpoint that life is still of ups and downs and but trauma need not be totally negative. It’s up to you. You can turn it around and use it constructively. Which I believe I’ve done.”

9th July 2003
'That's it, I thought. Death is on its way'

Mike Durant became the face of modern warfare after his helicopter was shot down in Somalia. He tells Toby Harnden how he survived

For nearly a decade, American pilot Mike Durant has kept a terrible secret. After his Special Forces helicopter was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade in Mogadishu, his right eye socket and cheekbone were broken when a mob of Somalis surrounded him and a man began to club his face with a long, heavy object.

In Mark Bowden's best-selling book Black Hawk Down, and Ridley Scott's blockbuster film of the same name, Durant was beaten with a rifle. Now, he reveals that the object, briefly haloed by the sun before it came smashing down on him, was the severed arm of one of his murdered comrades.

Preparing to be beaten to death with the limb of a friend who had been dismembered moments earlier, Durant fixed his eyes on his attacker. "This guy had grey hair and he was holding it up for another strike," he recalls.

"I just stared at him with a mixture of disgust and shock and disbelief, and then he dropped it and ran. I cannot imagine, as a person, being that angry, bitter, aggressive, brutal - whatever word you want to use - to do that."

The families of the five American soldiers who were killed at the crash site, some of whose bodies were dragged through the streets of the Somali capital, were told what had happened to their loved ones, so Durant has decided that it is time the truth about the level of depravity should be known publicly, and has just published a new book, In the Company of Heroes.

"Nobody ever came to the conclusion that if you're hit with a rifle butt, there's going to be a big welt," he says, matter-of-factly, as he sits in his office in Huntsville, Alabama. "But if you look at the picture of me, there's no welt."

What Durant refers to as "the picture" is a still from his interrogation video, after he was captured. It instantly became one of the most dramatic images of modern warfare and was shown all over the world.

Bloodied and bruised, the badly injured chief warrant officer gazes into the camera, knowing he could be killed at any moment, his eyes betraying fear, but also an intense determination to weigh up every possible option that could help him survive.

Durant, now retired from the US Army and working for a defence technology company, is 41 and his hair is flecked with silver. The eyes, steady and unblinking, are those of a man who is secure in the knowledge he can face anything life throws at him because he has already travelled to hell and back. That week in October 1993, as America reeled from the loss of 18 elite servicemen in a single day after two of its Black Hawks were downed, "the picture" ran simultaneously on the covers of Time and Newsweek.

At first, Durant says, the horror of his ordeal, which ended when he was released by the Somali warlord Mohammed Aideed after 11 days in captivity, left him with a feeling of senselessness. "I thought, there's no way God could ever do this to his children. So I thought that He can't be.

"And then, a few years went by and I began to realise, well, there's some mystery to it all that I'll never figure out."

The US military learnt tough lessons on the streets of Mogadishu. Ninety-nine elite soldiers were trapped in a hostile city as an operation to arrest two aides to renegade warlords became the most intense and bloody firefight America had engaged in since the Vietnam War. Their role with the UN in Somalia is now seen as having been fatally hampered by political mistakes - the failure to act on requests by commanders for tanks and C130 gunships and the decision to withdraw American forces early in 1994.

"You can't send soldiers into harm's way and not give them the tools they need to do the job because you're worried about the headlines," Durant says. "Once we did suffer losses, we turned around and ran - to me, those things are tragic mistakes."

Ten years on, Durant can still scarcely hide his contempt for President Bill Clinton. "I went beyond just not wanting to talk to him. I was summoned to the White House on a couple of occasions, but I refused to go."

Clinton, he believes, "didn't like the military - he just plain didn't like us", and what happened in Somalia sent a signal to the world that America lacked resolve. It was later cited by Osama bin Laden as an example of American weakness, while Saddam Hussein's troops were told it showed that America could be beaten.

"We're suffering for it today," says Durant. "You can argue that it has given the terrorists more motivation to take us on, because people thought, 'They don't have the stomach for it', which is not true at all."

Rather than dwell on his country's political leadership in 1993, Durant prefers to concentrate on the valour of those who died alongside him. In "a league of their own" were the Delta Force radio operators Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart who arrived on the scene 10 minutes after Durant hit the ground. They insisted on being dropped by helicopter to rescue Durant and his crew, even though they knew they would probably be killed.

"They knew that the odds were stacked against them, but they also knew that if they didn't do anything, our chances were zero," says Durant.

"I know that everybody there that day would have done pretty much anything they could to help their comrades, but when you are thinking, 'This truly will likely get me killed if I do this', and you still go in to get somebody you don't really know, that is a hell of a sacrifice."

Gordon and Shughart were each awarded a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honour, the American equivalent of the Victoria Cross. After killing dozens and holding off the Somali hordes, they were both overwhelmed.

Certain that he was about to be shot or torn apart, Durant placed his empty rifle on his chest. "I just kind of laid back and looked straight up at the sky," he says. "I still remember that image, the blue sky with a white cloud going by. That's it, I thought. Death is on its way. I compared it to being on top of the World Trade Centre when the fire's coming up. You know you're going to die."

He thought of his son, Joey, whose first birthday he had just missed. And then, somehow, he was spared. One of Aideed's men decided that a live American pilot was a more valuable bargaining chip than a dead one. So Durant lived to tell his tale.

Before his ordeal, he had known Gordon and Shughart only by sight, but afterwards he came to discover what kind of men they were. Shortly after her husband was killed, Stephanie Shughart wrote to Durant. It made him weep, but also inspired him to recover and fly again with his Night Stalker helicopter unit. "Your refusal to be defeated and give up was as brave an act as Randy's," the letter said. "Had you given up, I would never have known exactly what happened to him. I don't want you to question why you lived and Randy and the others with you did not."

The following year, Durant visited Gordon's home town in Maine and stopped at the local library to prepare for a talk about the men who had laid down their lives for him.

He took out a book about the Medal of Honour and found that the card showed the last person to have done so previously had been a young teenager called Gary Gordon, nearly 20 years earlier.

He was never a superstitious man, but Durant now believes in omens. In 2001, he married his second wife, Lisa desRoches, the widow of a Chinook pilot killed in a training accident. After her first husband's death, Lisa had found a note inside his desk that said: "Call Mike Durant."

The two men had been discussing some training issues, but Pierre desRoches had never had the chance to act on the message. "She was pregnant with her third child when he died," says Durant.

On reflection, he believes that the experience of Somalia did have some purpose. "Maybe this urban combat in Somalia gave us a more healthy respect for Baghdad and Basra. We prepared for it better and maybe thousands of lives were saved because we understood how hard it is to fight in places like that. And we had to lose 18 people to prove it."

Mostly, however, he thinks of the comrades he lost and just tries to live his life, as Mrs Shughart suggested, to give some sort of meaning to the 18 deaths.

One of his greatest friends was Donovan Briley, an irrepressible, barrel-chested fellow pilot, who was killed that day in Mogadishu after the other Black Hawk was shot down.

As Durant was lying in his cell, not knowing Briley's fate and listening to the Armed Forces Network on the radio, he heard a dedication "to Mike Durant from Donovan Briley". The song was John Anderson's haunting Seminole Wind, about the loss of American Indian lands. It had been Briley's favourite and the other soldiers had chosen it on his behalf.

"So blow, blow Seminole wind." The words floated into the cell. "Blow like you're never going to blow again; I'm calling to you like a long-lost friend. But I don't know who you are."

Durant smiles. "Donovan was part Cherokee and proud of it," he says. "He never let you forget it. We were tight, we were closer than brothers in some cases, and" - he pauses, briefly - "they're just great guys. I think about the good times. I think about the fun we had."

In the Company of Heroes by Michael J Durant (Bantam Press) is available from Telegraph Books Direct for £10.00 plus £2.25 p&p. To order, call 0870 155 7222.

12th May 2003 
'We found out a lot about each other'

Gracia Burnham and her husband spent 376 days at the mercy of Islamist kidnappers - then came a rescue attempt. She talks to Toby Harnden

Underneath a magnet on Gracia Burnham's fridge, beside a hand-written recipe for lasagne and a list of her son's high school baseball fixtures, is an FBI photograph of one of the Islamist terrorists who held her in the jungles of the Philippines for more than a year.

Umbran, a member of Abu Sayyaf, which has links with al-Qa'eda, is now in jail in Manila and she and her three children are praying for him each day. "We called him the gentle giant," she says. "He was always kind to us."

The "we" refers to Mrs Burnham and her husband, Martin, a pilot who was shot dead during a gun battle on the 376th and final day of their captivity.

The missionary couple had lived in the Philippines for 15 years. They had been celebrating their 18th wedding anniversary at a resort on the island of Palawan when they were kidnapped in May 2001.

Nearly a year after the botched rescue operation, in which she was wounded, Mrs Burnham is remarkably free of rancour. The Abu Sayyaf [father of the swordsman] leaders were evil, she says, but many of the foot soldiers thought they were doing what was right. "They were trying to please Allah and doing what God wanted them to. They were just misguided kids who joined jihad because they wanted to make sure they went to paradise when they died."

A year after her release, Mrs Burnham, 44, has written a book about her ordeal, In the Presence of My Enemies (Tyndale House), but is still grappling with the meaning of what happened to her. "I came out of there with a lot more questions than I have answers," she says, as she sits on the back porch of the home in Rose Hill, Kansas, built for the family by friends and well wishers.

As the Burnhams were ordered out of their beach hut at gunpoint and loaded on to a boat with 18 other hostages, they knew they were embarking on a journey into darkness from which they might never return. "We had a very bad feeling about it," Mrs Burnham recalls. "We knew we were in big trouble."

Immediately, they clicked into survival mode, co-operating and making sure they did not antagonise the Abu Sayyaf. Guillermo Sobero, 40, a native of Peru and the third American in the group, adopted a different approach.

"Guillermo was very American and Americans offend Muslims," recalls Mrs Burnham. "Martin and I had grown up in a culture that wasn't our own and we'd learnt that when you're in a situation, you try to be culturally aware.

"But Guillermo didn't know anything about that. It's like he just kept being American and kept being brash. He would say to his captors: 'You figure something out for me because I don't have time for this. I've got a business back home I've got to run.'

"He would just challenge them. They told us their standards of modesty, but it didn't translate in Guillermo's mind. He would take everything off but his underwear and it would just freak them out. They just thought he was a bad guy."

Two weeks into their captivity on Basilan Island, it was announced that "one of the whites" would be killed if the Abu Sayyaf demands were not met within 72 hours. At the end of the three days, Mr Sobero, who had been chained to Mr Burnham, was led away with his hands behind his back. Later that day, Mrs Burnham heard one of the guards crying out in a mocking tone: "Ooh, ooh, don't kill me. I want to see my sons."

These turned out to be Mr Sobero's last words. He had been decapitated with a bolo knife, a type of machete, and his head stuck on a bamboo pole in the jungle.

The leader of the terrorists at this time was Abu Solaiman, who is still at large. "He hates the West with a passion and sees it as the root of all evil," says Mrs Burnham. "But he spoke good English and he loves his Levi's and his Ray-Bans.

"Osama bin Laden was mentioned, way back at the very beginning. I didn't know who he was but Martin paid more attention to the news and he knew he had something to do with Afghanistan."

The Filipino women had to face the horror of sexual degradation. One by one, they were "sabayaed" - treated as the booty of war - and forced to sleep with their captors. Reina, a young nurse, fell pregnant.

Mrs Burnham fights back tears as she recalls what they went through. Reina was eventually released and had her baby aborted, an act the American does not condemn. "That's her business," she says. "I'm not going to judge her. Good grief. She went through a lot."

The weeks and months dragged on for the Burnhams. Although Mr Burnham, 42, became weak and painfully thin, he remained mentally strong. He even memorised the serial numbers of the Abu Sayyaf weapons so they could be traced.

He learnt what an emotional wreck I am," his wife says. "Poor guy! Yeah, we found out a lot about each other. He just stayed steady. I became miserable and I cried all the time."

The humiliation of having to squat in the jungle and being unable to wash was particularly distressing for her. She also worried about their children - Jeff, Mindy and Zach, now 16, 13 and 12 respectively - who had returned to America to be with their grandparents in Kansas. "Their home was ripped away from them."

Other hostages were released after ransoms were paid but the New Tribes mission, which employed the Burnhams, had a policy of not making payments to terrorists. On September 12, 2001, Abu Solaiman Sayyaf summoned Mr Burnham over to listen to his radio. When his wife eventually went to find out what was happening, he whispered: "Something awful has happened in America."

The World Trade Centre and the Pentagon had been attacked by al-Qa'eda. "Solaiman was so happy," Mrs Burnham remembers. "He was bragging: '50,000 people. We did that. We pulled that off.' He was rejoicing and we were sick in our hearts." That night, the Burnhams quietly sang The Star-Spangled Banner together and prayed for the victims in New York and Washington.

Some of the "sabayaed" Filipino women began to display signs of Stockholm Syndrome, parroting justifications for what the Abu Sayyaf were doing.

Mrs Burnham says that a degree of identification with one's captors was unavoidable. "I'm sure I have repeated things that they told me because you really do start believing what they tell you." But she and her husband would keep reminding themselves throughout "who the good guys were".

There were times of despair, including a few days when Mrs Burnham briefly questioned her faith, as the group moved through the jungle to evade detection and food ran low. But there were also moments of happiness. One night, the hostages gathered together in a hut and briefly forgot their situation. "We just sang at the top of our lungs every song we knew - Carpenters' songs and Beatles' songs and hymns - and told jokes," Mrs Burnham says. The next day, their captors said it sounded like a wedding celebration.

There were periodic firefights between the Abu Sayyaf and the Philippine army and the Burnhams came to feel that the biggest danger to them was their would-be rescuers. "We never wanted to be found, unless it was by Americans. We knew the Philippine army would not come in soundlessly at night and slit some throats and spray some mace."

President Gloria Arroyo cited the Philippine constitution in ruling out the use of US Special Forces in combat against the Abu Sayyaf, but Mrs Burnham views this as an excuse. "She's a very proud woman and I think that it would have been a blow to her pride to let the Americans in."

On June 7 last year, their fears proved justified. "Even the day Martin was killed, he was so optimistic," says Mrs Burnham. "We'd come upon a farm and had just gorged ourselves with unripe fruit and then we were carrying everything we could, because we knew this could be our food for however long. We were really burdened down at one of the stops. And I said to Martin: 'I don't know how much longer I can do this.' And he said: 'You know what, I think we're going to get out of there. I just don't know when.'

"And then we prayed. It was just a normal day. We'd just lain down and got settled and a gun battle started. Before I even got out of the hammock, I was shot. We were on such an incline that I slid and I came to rest by Martin. He was bleeding from his chest.

"I don't know if he felt anything because I never said anything to him. I just lay there quietly trying to look dead because I certainly didn't want them dragging me off into the jungle. He just breathed heavy against me like he was falling asleep, a deep sleep.

"I didn't even know then that he was dead - I thought that maybe he'd passed out. I'd never watched anyone die before. Then, when the gun battle was over and the soldiers were dragging me back up the hill, I looked down and he was white, so I knew that was death."

Back in America, Mrs Burnham could not help feeling guilty. There was guilt that the wedding anniversary break had been her idea, guilt that she had not spoken to her husband as he died or tried to turn him over, guilt that she had survived and he had not. She now finds comfort, however, by reflecting how well they came to love each other in that last, terrible year of their marriage.

"Probably, I got to know Martin about as well as these little old ladies and these little old men who've been together for ever," she says, tears welling. "I don't just sit around missing Martin, because I feel we had our time together."

Her wound has now healed. "The bullet entered here," she says, touching her right thigh. "See this dip? That's where it exited. I'd got a big long exit wound. I assume it's a Philippine army bullet but it doesn't really matter, does it? A bullet's a bullet."

She has given much thought to the problem of radical Islam but cannot offer an easy solution. "In my heart, I don't think there's a way to change Islam. It is what it is and it may not be politically correct to say but it's a violent religion. I guess you don't fight Islam, you just present what you believe to be true. You present Christianity and Christ's love and hope it can change their hearts."

The other day, Mrs Burnham says, her son Zach was laying the table and realised that he had put down cutlery for his father. "He said: 'Momma, how could I forget something so important, that Dad's not here?'

"And I said: 'Our minds are weird.' The kids are doing good and they're not bitter towards God. They don't try to second guess what happened. They just go on."

5th April 2003
Man who set out to get Iraq's mafioso

Pentagon chief charged with rebuilding the country speaks to Toby Harnden in his first British newspaper interview since the war began

WHAT happens after Saddam Hussein is toppled? Critics of the man overseeing post-war plans have already accused him of trying to turn Iraq into an American fiefdom - complete with colonial-style viceroy - and mocked him for imagining that he can transplant "Jeffersonian democracy".

Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy head of the Pentagon, shrugs off these contradictory charges. As the first senior government official to advise that "regime change" in Iraq had to be a primary aim of the new war against terrorism (four days after the September 11 attacks), he is used to being a convenient target.

In his first British newspaper interview since the war began, he explains that he envisages a swift hand-over from Jay Garner, the retired general in charge of reconstruction, to an Interim Iraqi Authority that could be formed even before the fall of Baghdad.

"We view Jay Garner's role as being, above all, to make sure that the basic services that the Iraqi people depend on for their daily lives are functioning in whatever interim period it takes before the government can take over and do it," he says. "So it's much more of a technocratic role than a political role."

Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi exile widely seen within the Pentagon as the most likely interim Iraqi leader, has complained that there has been no "Iraqi face" to the American military action. But Mr Wolfowitz believes that a US attempt to install an Iraqi administration could be misconstrued and breed resentment.

"It's very important, also, that we do not send a message to the people who aren't free to speak that their future has been determined for them," he says.

"We don't want it to be an occupation - we also don't want it to be something that the coalition imposes on Iraqis.

"I can't tell you the exact timing, but the reservation about leaping in with something right away is precisely that we prefer it to be something that we don't declare but that, in some way, can be an expression of genuine Iraqi views."

Mr Wolfowitz has found Iraqi-Americans who want to return to their country "inspiring" in their commitment to move on from Saddam. "The phenomenon we've seen in central and eastern Europe, including Russia, has been that people who have experienced life under a totalitarian regime have a certain antibody against people who come along and say: 'I have a strong militia - follow me'.

"I might be a little guilty of predictions based on my hopes, but I do think it's more realistic to think that this talented population can produce something reasonably good than to say, as so often seems to be the case: 'The situation's so hopeless - it's better to leave Saddam Hussein there'. That's just a completely absurd argument."

The United Nations, he believes, should not have an executive role in administering Iraq, as Tony Blair has advocated. Far better that it should have "a facilitating role, a monitoring role, an advisory role", he suggests.

But a prolonged period of tutelage by Mr Garner, he warns, could be counter-productive. "There is a certain analogy to the notion that if you never take the training wheels off a kid's bicycle, he'll never learn to ride without them."

European diplomats usually view Mr Wolfowitz as a unilateralist hawk and a neo-conservative ideologue driven by a dangerous faith in a new American imperialism. It is an image that is hard to reconcile with the slightly diffident man who sits down with me for dinner at the Watergate Hotel in Washington.

He has spent the day helping to direct the war, briefing senators on Capitol Hill and discussing strategy with Mr Bush in the Oval Office. Yet rather than flagging, he becomes more and more animated as he talks.

No one can lay a greater claim to being the architect of this war; Saddam has been in his sights since 1979, when he was a junior Pentagon analyst.

The bete noir of the more traditionalist and pessimistic State Department, Mr Wolfowitz, 59, has long been a conservative revolutionary determined to challenge diplomatic orthodoxies.

The essence of his philosophy is that the world is a dangerous place that can be made safer and better if American power is used to dismantle the machinery of terror and plant the seeds of freedom and democracy in its place.

A democratic Iraq, he says, would be a "huge inspiration" to Muslims in the Middle East. "I'm a little shocked at how many well-meaning people, many of them great friends of the Arabs, who seem in one way or another to accept the notion that Arabs are incapable of democracy or it's too risky."

By implication, one of these is Colin Powell, the Secretary of State and the most powerful advocate of the State Department diplomats who have ridiculed Mr Wolfowitz and his ilk for wanting to impose "Jeffersonian democracy" on Iraq.

"That's used to put the whole thing down," he says of the phrase. "Of course, it's worth pausing for just a moment to point out that Japanese democracy is different from western democracy and our system is different from Westminster.

"So I'm very sympathetic to the people who are a little reluctant to use the term democracy because it implies one size fits all and it implies an American solution for other people."

A democratic Iraq, says Mr Wolfowitz, could have "an exemplary effect" on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as knock-on effects in Arab countries that America considers a potential threat.

"I've heard people refer to it disparagingly as a democratic domino theory, as though Iraq will collapse on Iran, and so on."

So, could victory in Iraq spark regime change in Iran, Syria and Libya? "I'm not going there," he says, laughing.

In 1991, Mr Wolfowitz - unlike his boss, Vice President Dick Cheney, then the defence secretary, and Mr Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - believed that the war aim should be extended to removing Saddam.

"Increasingly, as we got towards the end, the more I thought about this man and studied him, I began to realise we were dealing with a mafioso on a global scale.

"He probably would never forgive and forget. He might never be able to invade Kuwait again, but he would find other ways of attacking us."

From 1991 onwards, Mr Wolfowitz forcefully argued that the United States should attempt to remove Saddam by backing the Iraqi opposition. But it was only on September 11 2001 that he was convinced that America had to act more decisively.

"For me, the thing that transitioned from saying: 'He's dangerous, but it's the responsibility of Iraqis to remove the danger' to saying that 'if necessary, it's worth risking American lives to remove the danger' was September 11.

"That brought home just how colossally dangerous that kind of combination is, of a dictator who is determined to get weapons of mass terror and who uses terror as an instrument of policy."

Would President George W Bush have gone to war against Saddam if September 11 had not happened? "It's hard to say. We were debating it back and forth."

He believes that Tony Blair's role in the war is pivotal. "He's a really stand-up guy, and I've heard the president many times privately express how pleased and appreciative he is."

The SAS, Mr Wolfowitz ventures, was instrumental in preventing oil wells from being torched in southern Iraq and in stopping the firing of Scud missiles at Israel from the west.

Nicknamed "Wolfie" by Mr Bush, Mr Wolfowitz holds the distinction of being the only member of the US administration to have been the model for a character in a Saul Bellow novel.

In Ravelstein, Bellow's protagonist Abe Ravelstein - based on Mr Wolfowitz's former tutor Allan Bloom - receives titbits about the conduct of the Gulf War from a former student called Philip Gorman.

The ex-student reports that Mr Powell and others "advised the President not to send troops all the way to Baghdad" because they were "afraid of a few casualties".

Mr Wolfowitz, noting approvingly that at least Gorman did not pass on any classified information, chuckles at mention of his literary counterpart.

"It sort of appears he [Allan Bloom] was in daily contact with me, getting the latest poop out of the Pentagon. It probably happened once or twice."

Belying his image as an ascetic policy wonk, Mr Wolfowitz can find humour in even the darkest subject. His favourite joke of the moment concerns Saddam's barber, who keeps asking the dictator about Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian tyrant who was executed after a popular uprising in 1989.

An irritated Saddam asks why the barber insists on bringing this subject up all the time. "Because every time I do, the hair goes up on the back of your neck and it's easier to cut it," comes the reply. "I love it," says Mr Wolfowitz, laughing again.

Now, he says, Saddam could be on the brink of going the way of Ceausescu.

"There's got to be a point at which all the rats leave the sinking ship. But it's a powerful system of terror. Someone told me that Stalin once said that the Red Army was more dangerous in retreat than in advance."

Saddam, he cautions, could still use chemical weapons or erect a "fortress Baghdad" as a last stand. "We don't know how this is all going to end. Except, we do know it's going to end with the end of this regime. That's a certainty."

12th March 2003
Giving George Bush a cutting edge

How did tailor Georges de Paris go from sleeping rough on the streets of Washington to dressing presidents? Toby Harnden meets him

WHITE House aides are seething about Gallic perfidy over Iraq, but there is one native Frenchman who is still most welcome in the Oval Office. He is Georges de Paris, proud American citizen and tailor to every United States President since Lyndon Johnson.

With his flowing white hair - he grew it long because of an allergy and then liked it that way - and diminutive stature, the 68-year-old cuts something of a dash at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He is a familiar figure there and, during his last visit, even bumped into Tony Blair.

The work of the "First Tailor" has been seen by hundreds of millions of people around the world. For his recent State of the Union address, Mr Bush wore a midnight blue - de Paris calls it "bleue nuit" - suit made from English Scabal material that had been finished just hours before in the de Paris workshop.

De Paris trained as a master tailor in France, Germany and, for two years, on Savile Row, and helps bring a bit of European style to the man so often branded as an uncultured cowboy. Mr Bush was named by Esquire magazine as one of the 10 Best Dressed Men in America, but de Paris modestly refuses to take any of the credit. "He's very elegant, he knows the quality," de Paris says, in an accent that could have been perfected on the set of 'Allo 'Allo. "His style is conservative, modern classic and four seasons - all the year around suits. He is also in very, very good shape and that makes it easier for me. It helps the tailor."

De Paris (he insists it is his real name and pulls out his American passport to prove it) is in his store, which is stuffed with fabrics, suits and accessories, just a block from the White House. He elects to stand by the door while we talk, because he fears he might miss a customer.

It is this dedication that lifted him almost from the gutter to his position as the most accomplished tailor in the most powerful city in the world. De Paris, who was born in Marseilles, arrived in Washington in 1960 after striking up a correspondence with a local woman, but soon found himself alone.

"I was corresponding with a young lady who invited me here to America," he says. "She said she was a tailor, but later on, I found out she was a salesperson in a clothing store. Her father said: 'You have to marry my daughter', but I said no, and she kicked me out."

She wore glasses "this thick", he says, holding his fingers two inches from his eyes. "The picture she sent me looked good, but she was the ugliest lady I met in my life. And she was married already, divorced."

The $4,000 he had brought with him and kept in his sock, he says, was pocketed by his putative fiancee as a gift. "I tried to sue her, but I didn't have enough proof."

With no money and no roof over his head, he began sleeping rough in Franklin Park, near the White House. Every year, he says, he places two red roses by the bronze statue of Commodore John Barry, father of the US Navy, as a gesture of thanks for protecting him.

He struggled to find work and, eventually, one person took pity on him. "I met a nice lady in the store over there," he says, but there was one problem. Pointing his nose in the air, he places his thumb and forefinger over his nostrils before letting out a loud guffaw. "I smelled!"

Before she offered him a job, the woman handed him a bottle of disinfectant and told him to clean himself up. "The Potomac river became black," he explains. "For six months I had not taken a shower."

After working on alterations in a department store, he earned enough money to buy a good pair of scissors and his own sewing machine - the one he still uses - and set up on his own. An early customer was Congressman Otto Passman of Louisiana, whom he met on the street; soon after, his business began to grow. "It was word of mouth and one day, he introduced me to the vice-president."

It was 1963 and a few months before the assassination of President John F Kennedy. Soon after, Lyndon Johnson was elevated to the White House and Georges de Paris was tailor to the President of the United States. The first suit he made for Johnson was a brown pinstripe; the only difficulty was the new president's height. "He was big - about six feet four or five inches. I am only five feet six inches, so I stood on a stool."

With such a prominent name on his books, the work poured in and, before long, de Paris was fitting out White House aides, senators, lobbyists and diplomats from all over Washington.

By the time Richard Nixon arrived in the White House in 1968, de Paris was as much part of the retinue as the presidential butler. For all Nixon's difficulties during the Watergate scandal, de Paris found him to be a gentleman. "He was also short, so he said to me that we are both tall, from here to here," says de Paris, pointing to the distance between the bridge of his nose and the top of his forehead. "We talked a lot about the United States and how I like living here."

President Gerald Ford joked that the tailor was "too short to be a football player", while President Jimmy Carter - more famous for the cardigans he wore during the Seventies energy crisis than for his suits - was silent and aloof.

Before the current incumbent, the tailor's favourite president was Ronald Reagan. "He was a fantastic person, always talking, always joking. We talked about the submarine movie he made with the First Lady [Hellcats of the Navy in 1957, which co-starred Reagan's future wife, Nancy Davis].

"I said: 'You look nice, Mr President, only much younger,' and he laughed. He gave me some red, white and blue jellybeans - I still have them in my apartment in a small bottle."

President Reagan also knew how to "appreciate good fabrics" and, although he was criticised for his brown suits at the time, de Paris believes that Reagan and George W Bush share a Western style that makes them special. "The other presidents dress well, but not as good as those two."

Perhaps cutting his cloth to fit the times, de Paris will not repeat a previous criticism of President George Bush Snr as being "not the most agreeable", but he holds Bill Clinton in particular disdain. "He was a different mentality. It was as if I was not there. For some people, the tailor is nothing."

Bush the Younger, however, is happy to engage in banter. "He knew I came to America for a lady," says de Paris. "Maybe he found out from the FBI. I say I never married because I could not find a shorter lady. And now, the way I look my age I never will.

"Mr Bush makes me feel very comfortable. Some people can make you feel nervous and then you make a mistake. But even with the President, he has to be like any customer. You cannot be scared when he says: 'Please tell me how this looks in the crotch.' I have to say."

De Paris has become a Bush family favourite, doing some alterations for Laura Bush, and the President has even acted as an informal agent. Last year, he told Congressman Jim Ramstad of Minnesota that he "should see my tailor, who works around the corner". The result was an order for a dark blue cashmere suit. Another customer whom Bush may have put Georges' way was Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations, who came in to look at hats recently, and was accompanied by his Swedish wife and a phalanx of Secret Service agents in ill-fitting suits.

Although de Paris professes to shun politics - "I am not Democrat, not Republican: I am a tailor" - he is backing Bush over President Jacques Chirac in the dispute over Iraq. "Chirac should be with the US," he says. "He said France was in solidarite totale with America against the terror, but now he has changed his mind. If he say totale, then it should be totale."

De Paris sometimes finds himself on the end of anti-French jibes. "A lot of people criticise me. Because I am from Marseilles, I have a heavy accent, nearly as heavy as Henry Kissinger. A couple of people have called me names and said: 'What are you doing in the US?' but I say, 'I was here before you are born'." In 42 years, he has been back to France only twice.

Being First Tailor has its perks, including some fan mail after de Paris was featured in the French magazine Femme Actuelle. He recently received a letter from a 40-year-old schoolteacher and part-time exotic dancer who has a weakness for much older men.

The photographs she enclosed (one with her girls' class, one in her scanty dance costume) look appealing enough and de Paris says he will probably reply. After all, it was answering another letter more than four decades ago that led him to embark on the whole adventure in the first place.

3rd March 2003
The man who bridges the Atlantic

Toby Harnden talks to the outgoing British ambassador in Washington about Britain's relationship with President George W Bush

FROM the panelled walls of his Lutyens study, Field Marshal Lord Montgomery and Sir Winston Churchill gaze down austerely on Sir Christopher Meyer as he contemplates his last day as British ambassador to the United States.

He has cast off his tie and leans back on the sofa, flashing a pair of his trademark bright red socks. As well as departing from Washington, he is also leaving the Diplomatic Service after 36 years.

As he begins to talk, there is a bang and a clunk as Lady Meyer, universally known simply as Catherine and one of the most chic hostesses in Washington, tries to manoeuvre a large cardboard computer box out on to the marbled landing.

"Can you manage?" he asks, leaping up to help her. "There will now be a short intermission." They were married the week before Sir Christopher, 59, took up his final diplomatic post in October 1997 and still have the flirtatious, ribbing manner of newlyweds.

The presence of portraits of Britain's two great wartime leaders was an early decision of Sir Christopher. "We thought great heroes ought to be brought out," he says.

For President George W Bush, the present-day British hero is Tony Blair and it was Sir Christopher's early groundwork that laid the foundation for the unexpectedly close bond that has developed between the two leaders.

Sir Christopher concedes that after Mr Blair's staunch support for President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal he was "bothered" by the possibility that the links between New Labour and the Democratic Party would present difficulties.

"I remember sitting here in this room - after we knew for sure Bush was going to be president - with Condi [Condoleezza Rice, Mr Bush's national security adviser] and with Karl Rove [senior political strategist at the White House] and saying, 'Level with me - is this going to be a problem?'

"Both of them were absolutely clear. They said they were pleased they were inheriting a relationship which was in good nick. And then they said as far as Tony Blair's relationship with President Bush went, they hadn't met so it was 'by your works shall ye be known'."

Sir Christopher had first called on Mr Bush in Texas in early 1998, more than a year before he declared himself as a candidate. "He had those personal characteristics which are still very much on view: extraordinarily personable, informal, self-deprecating, humorous. Also, he was extraordinarily open about what he did not know."

A year later, he found Mr Bush had developed a "much harder edge" and was placing "strong emphasis on being true to your friends around the world . . . he was signalling that 'the people I get on with are going to be extremely important to me' ".

When Mr Bush defeated Al Gore after the Florida recount, to the dismay of Downing Street aides, Sir Christopher was already confident there was enough of a shared outlook to enable the similarly practical and pragmatic Mr Blair to develop a personal chemistry with the new man in the White House.

Then came September 11. "The real accelerator to the relationship, which all through 2001 you could see warming up through each of the meetings, was 9/11, which moved it up instantly on to a much higher plane," he recalls.

He observed the "click" nine days later when Mr Bush forsook a final run through of his speech to both houses of Congress for a one-on-one talk with Mr Blair. "Flunkies were coming in and whispering into Condi's ear and Bush was just completely imperturbable.

"He said, 'Come on, Tony, let's go upstairs.' And they disappeared into the White House flat."

And so it was that Mr Blair became one of the very few "Friends of Bill" to morph into a Friend of Dubya. As a former press secretary to John Major who secured the top diplomatic job under New Labour, Sir Christopher knew a thing or two about working across the political spectrum.

He dismisses out of hand the notion that Mr Bush is a fool and cites the contrast with the smooth-tongued Mr Clinton as part of the reason most of Europe fails to understand the American president. "Very few people have been as lucky as I have to see him close up in small settings where he is very impressive."

A smoothly affable man who manages to combine traditional English sang froid with a dash of Cool Britannia, Sir Christopher says soothingly that neither anti-Americanism in Europe nor its reverse version in America is terminal. "These things wax and wane."

But rhetoric on both sides of the Atlantic in recent weeks has not helped, he says. "Things have been said which have made the situation worse and not better and we can do without this."

He singles out Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, and Dominique de Villepin, France's foreign minister as the worst offenders. "Rumsfeld has said some things that were unnecessarily abrasive for a European audience just as I think people were extremely irritated over here by what de Villepin said in the notorious so-called 'ambush' press conference in New York on January 20.

"That really steamed people up here just as they were getting steamed up in some parts of Europe over the 'Old Europe' thing. And we can do without Europeans being slapped down as if they ought to know their place and keep quiet and all that sort of stuff. It doesn't help anybody."

Sir Christopher maintains that Britain has been able to moderate American policy over dealing with Iraq through the United Nations. "I have no doubt at all that our argument for making every last possible effort to get the second Security Council resolution has influenced the Americans in coming fully on board for this."

There have been some disappointments. "Tony Blair has always pushed for investing greater energy in trying to unwind the cycle of violence between Israel and the Palestinians and I guess we've made less progress there than we would have wished."

On rare occasions, Sir Christopher says, he has been forced to use "vivid language" with the Bush administration to point out the error of its ways. One such case was the imposition of 100 per cent tariffs on all steel imports, a major blow to British industry.

"We made - how can I put it - a fuss about it. I got very angry. To be honest, I got bloody angry. I thought this was an outrage." His controlled explosion helped to win a series of exemptions for British exporters. "We actually clawed back a lot."

The Meyers are returning to London, where Sir Christopher will become chairman of the Press Complaints Commission while his wife - an author and campaigner against parental child abduction - is contemplating dipping her toe into politics, perhaps even running for Parliament.

Half French and half Russian by blood and British by citizenship, Lady Meyer, 50, has been a striking and forthright presence on the Washington social scene.

"I just got accused of being anti-French by some woman," she fumed. "I got so annoyed. I said that Chirac's attitude was ridiculous and I think that it's actually detrimental to France."

The Meyers were given a private farewell dinner by the Bushes, the first time in Embassy Row memory that any British ambassador has been accorded such an honour.

"It was a mixture of talking about life, personal experiences and some talk about foreign policy, gossip, jokes, more serious things," says Sir Christopher.

"This is exactly the moment to go because right now a lot of the action has now gone up to the United Nations in New York.

"And then probably we're going to have a war. And I can tell you from my experience that when the bombs fall and the planes fly, embassies tend to fall silent."