Foreign embassies have long been held in the public imagination as places of glamour and excess, with cocktail parties and chauffeured cars. This was, until the Cold War, a not entirely inaccurate picture; but as diplomatic missions expanded behind the Iron Curtain and Latin American countries experienced a sharp rise in drug-related crime, embassies became theatres of resistance and the threat of being taken hostage was a dominant feature of the diplomat’s life.
Between 1970 and 1980, terrorist groups seized embassies on 43 occasions in 27 countries. In 1971 Geoffrey Jackson, the British ambassador to Uruguay, was bundled into the back of a guerrilla’s car, battered with a club, and held captive for eight months in a windowless cell. It was into this fraught context that Kenneth Uffen, by this point a well- seasoned diplomat, landed as British ambassador to Colombia. The country was in a fragile state of civil war as far-left guerrilla groups battled the government. Diplomats became useful bargaining chips.
On the afternoon of February 27, 1980, as ambassadors gathered at the Dominican embassy in Bogota to celebrate 136 years of independence from Haiti, one of the worst diplomatic hostage crises of the 20th century took place. Across the road from the embassy 12 youths kicked a football in the university grounds. Unbeknown to the guards and guests, they were members of the Movimiento 19 de Abril (M-19), an urban guerrilla group described by the government as the “most volatile” of the militias. As waiters served flutes of champagne, 25 of these lagartos, or “lizards” (who made a habit of crashing parties for political protest), led by Rosemberg Pabón, a 33-year-old political scientist, stormed the embassy and opened fire. The guards were quickly overpowered and 57 hostages, including 15 ambassadors, were captured.
The shooting finished three hours later, when guerrillas dangled the US ambassador out of a window and demanded a ceasefire. The Colombian authorities started to listen when the guerrillas warned they would kill a hostage every ten minutes, but it would take 40 days for all the hostages to be released, with a $50 million ransom and in exchange for 311 political prisoners. The Uruguayan ambassador had already escaped by hauling himself out of a window.
Meanwhile, Uffen was running late to the cocktail party, having been delayed by a phone call to his wife. When his car pulled into the embassy he heard the muffled sound of gunfire and a shout of warning from someone on the street. He escaped captivity by the skin of his teeth.
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It was just as well; Uffen was already tied up in a hostage crisis of his own. He had been working to release a mother and son who had been captured by a different guerrilla group 1,000 miles north of Bogota. Welsh-born Telery Jones and her 16-year-old son Owen were taken from their farm by the “National Liberation Army” and held prisoner in the jungle. Though the Foreign Office insisted that Uffen refuse to pay the £180,000 ransom fee, as per the policy at the time, Uffen worked meticulously for the mother and son’s release in the months before and after the embassy siege. They were eventually released in December 1980, after seven and a half months in captivity.
Kenneth James Uffen was born in 1925 in Chiswick, west London, to Percival James Uffen, a senior executive officer at the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance, and Gladys Ethel James. After leaving Latymer Upper School he joined the RAF as a flight lieutenant and was posted to the Soviet Union to interrogate defectors from the Soviet forces. He was, for a brief period, assistant air attaché in Moscow. At St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, he read French and Russian and coxed the college rowing team.
He joined the Foreign Office in 1950. After three years in Paris he was sent to Buenos Aires as second secretary between 1955 and 1958. He had met Nancy (née Winbolt) who was personal assistant to Sir Patrick Reilly, Britain’s minister in Paris, in an embassy canteen. After whisking her around Paris on a moped and enjoying picnics in the French countryside, he proclaimed his love by serenading her in Russian. They were married in 1954. Nancy survives him, with their children Mark, who worked for Shell, Catherine, a former school teacher, and Rosemary, a university lecturer in accountancy and finance.
Uffen’s experience of the brittle Soviet landscape made him an ideal candidate to become commercial secretary at the British embassy in Moscow in 1961. There he set about nursing Soviet-Anglo relations through soft power: he brought British expertise in industrial design to the 1961 Design Exhibition in Moscow, and as commercial counsellor to Moscow 15 years later helped to salvage Rolls-Royce from economic ruin by securing it a contract to supply gas compressors to the USSR. For this he was appointed CMG. Rolls-Royce thanked him with the gift of a gold-rimmed crystal bowl, which his family used to serve trifle.
Uffen enjoyed diplomatic stints in Mexico City and Washington, and after a year at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, made his more tangible mark in Latin America, serving as ambassador to Colombia from 1977 to 1982. His final post was as ambassador and permanent representative to the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development in Paris.
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After he narrowly escaped the siege at the Dominican embassy, Uffen used the soft power he had harnessed through a lifetime of diplomatic service to bolster relations with Colombia. On November 17 of that year, a month before ensuring the release of Telery Jones and Owen, he worked with the Colombian foreign minister to renew the 1866 Treaty of Friendship with Britain.
Kenneth Uffen, CMG, diplomat, was born on September 29, 1925. He died on March 4, 2022, aged 96