Brian Stewart: the key British diplomat in Hanoi during the Vietnam War

Brian Stewart was Britain’s sole man in Hanoi during a crucial phase of the Vietnam War, a position held later, in more restricted circumstances, by the MI6 agent Daphne Park (Independent obituary, 27 March 2010).

As Consul-General from 1967-68, Stewart cultivated enough local contacts to teach himself Vietnamese, something that Park, in the same post in the following two years, by then forbidden even to talk to most officials, was not allowed to do. Stewart sent many reports home of the high morale and determination to prevail of the North Vietnamese over the Americans and the South Vietnam government.

“It was daunting to remember that my one-man band was competing with an army of analysts in Saigon, but on the face of it I was right and they were wrong,” Stewart recalled. “Morale was more important than military power in Vietnam, where the Vietcong were fighting on home ground and the invaders were thousands of miles from home.” Stewart wrote his final despatches from Hanoi in 1968, the year in which the Tet Offensive of January and February demonstrated to the US the impossibility of beating the Vietcong, who penetrated Saigon and entered the US Embassy.

In his lonely posting in Hanoi Stewart had no British citizens to look after, and spent his time “reading his way” around the city, testing how much he could learn from non-secret sources. Life was austere and the place shabby, but he became better informed than his counterparts in the French, Indonesian, Egyptian and Indian contingents. All were kept in the city as the Vietnamese hoped this would deter US bombing. Stewart would put whisky in his fellow envoys’ soup to promote calm under the strain of air-raids. He was once arrested and briefly imprisoned.

A small aircraft chartered by the British government would fly him every six weeks to Laos, and on to Saigon, where he conferred with the C-in-C US Pacific Command, John Sidney “Jack” McCain Jnr, commander of US forces in Vietnam. McCain’s son John (later a US Senator), a naval aviator, was in Hanoi as a prisoner of war, and Stewart sought at the admiral’s request to visit him, but in vain.

Hanoi was Stewart’s last diplomatic posting before he became Secretary of the Joint Intelligence Committee in the Cabinet Office, in the rank of Assistant Secretary, from 1968 until 1972. A long-standing expert on Chinese affairs, he was Political Adviser in Hong Kong from 1973 until 1974, returning to London for five years before retiring in 1979.

Stewart had learned Chinese in 1947 soon after joining the Military Administration in Malaya as a District Officer. He arrived in autumn 1945 to disorder after the Japanese departure, and helped police intelligence combat criminal gangs. In Singapore secret societies preying on civilians had to be overcome.

He was sent to Macau to study, and on returning set up a Chinese language school to produce officers capable of handling agents and debriefing captured members of the Chinese Malayan Communist Party (MCP), who were known as “CTs” – Communist-Terrorists”, the foe in the 1948-1960 Malayan Emergency.

With civilian government from 1946, Stewart served under Sir Edward Gent and Sir Henry Gurney before implementing the “hearts and minds” strategy of High Commissioner Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer that from 1952 overcame the CTs and made possible Malayan independence in 1957.

Stewart attended meetings of Templer’s instrument of swift government, the State War Executive Committees, at which police, soldiers and administrators could pool their ideas. “British parliamentarians were critical of General Templer’s dictatorial ways, and would have been more critical had they known of the speed with which the colonial administrators… could make decisions,” Stewart observed.

His last Malayan posting was as Secretary for Chinese Affairs at Penang. He then joined the Diplomatic Service, working in Rangoon, Beijing, Shanghai, Manila, and Kuala Lumpur, rising to Consul General, then Counsellor.

Among the exploits his job demanded was to contact agents in Borneo during the 1962-66 Indonesian Confrontation. An exercise off Malaya for the assignment, in which he was submerged in a man-sized metal-tube submarine, convinced him the vessel was too dangerous, so he went in by helicopter instead. On another occasion, in the Philippines, he travelled armed with a pistol and carrying gold to seek and rescue a woman said to be the hostage of Muslim separatists. She was never found, and he concluded that the alarm was a hoax.

Notable women in his working life included the author Han Suyin (Independent obituary, 8 November 2012), whom he met at the bar at Beijing’s Qianmen Hotel in 1960. “I did not tell her that I had been responsible for banning her book about Malaya,” he recalled. A valued woman contact in Shanghai in 1961 was Nien Cheng: under the Cultural Revolution from 1966, she would be imprisoned.

Stewart came from a Scots family whose fortunes were dictated by the Empire’s needs. Past generations included a ship’s captain and a forebear in Cuba, before his own father became a jute merchant in Calcutta and Madras. He was educated at Trinity College, Glenalmond, and once did not see his father for eight years.

After Worcester College, Oxford, he joined the Black Watch, and in 1944, with the 1st Battalion Tyneside Scottish, led an anti-tank platoon at the battle of Rauray, near Caen in Normandy, destroying 12 enemy panzers before a shrapnel wound forced his evacuation and a stay of nearly four months in hospital, leaving a lifelong notch, the size of a finger, in his side.

Stewart always denied that the name “Rauray” had anything to do with the name he gave his best-known child, the author and MP Rory Stewart. Mindful of his own bleak childhood, he was an attentive and affectionate father, and would play out the Napoleonic encounter at Quatre Bras before Waterloo with model soldiers on the floor.

This year, he revealed his observational skills in a book written with Samantha Newbery: Why Spy? The Art of Intelligence.

Brian Thomas Webster Stewart, diplomat: born Edinburgh 27 April 1922; CMG 1969; married 1946 Millicent Peggy Pollock (divorced 1970; deceased; two daughters), 1972 Sally Rose (one daughter, one son); died Crieff 16 August 2015.