By Nicholas Wood

March 2, 2007

PRISTINA, Kosovo: Guilt is not a word that most diplomats would choose to sum up their careers, but Carne Ross uses just that as he looks back at much of his work over 15 years. Guilt, frustration and anger.

Until about two years ago, Ross, 40, had a promising career ahead of him in the most prestigious ministry in the British government, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. By his early 30s, he had done foreign service in Germany and Afghanistan and had held a senior post in the British delegation at the UN Security Council, where he was responsible for Iraq policy.

He seemed to be headed toward an ambassadorship as a member of the elite "fast stream" of the Foreign Office, followed by a comfortable retirement.

But things fell apart in the most public fashion, highly unusual among the tightlipped mandarins of Britain's foreign service.

Unhappy with American and British claims that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction, Ross gave testimony to an official inquiry into the British government's use of intelligence in June 2004, while still in the government. Three months later, he resigned. Since then he has written many articles criticizing the American and British rationale for going to war.

But it is his broad critique of the way international diplomacy is conducted that has ruffled feathers the most.

In a book released in April about his time in the foreign service entitled "Independent Diplomat, Dispatches From an Unaccountable Elite," he takes the foreign service to task. He says it routinely made "bad decisions in closed rooms" and acted "with little or no consultation of the people in whose name they are made."

The Foreign Office scrutinized the book before publication to see if it breached the Official Secrets Act. It did delete some parts and concluded that Ross "risks damaging the credibility and morale of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the relationship of confidence and trust within the government," according to a statement later released to the media.

Ross seems to relish the criticism. Indeed, his current anger at the establishment suggests someone truly not cut out for career diplomacy.

The rupture of his career over Iraq, Ross says, made him realize that much of what he did at the foreign service gave little consideration to the people whose lives he was affecting, especially in poor and neglected areas, and that realization gave rise to his growing sense of anger.

"Diplomacy," Ross said, "is too closed a box," dominated as it is by the big powers on the Security Council. Its permanent members — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — create policies without insight into the impact, Ross argues.

"More often than not, we took decisions with little understanding of the situation," Ross said. "The people we were discussing were not present, whether it was Iraq, Palestine or the Western Sahara."

That prompted him to find a way to help those countries and regions he considered to be excluded from the world of international diplomacy.

The result is a not-for-profit agency called "Independent Diplomat," like his book, offering advice to inexperienced or politically marginalized regions and groups. Its motto is "a diplomatic service for those who need it most," a phrase that some former colleagues derided, Ross said.

But while some of his peers looked at the venture with skepticism, Ross quickly found financial backers, among them George Soros and the Mott Foundation, and a growing list of clients, including Kosovo, Somaliland and the Polisario Front of the Western Sahara — three regions that want recognition as independent states.

The Independent Diplomat tries to ensure that those regions get access to the decision-makers and international forums where policy is made, such the United Nations and European Union.

Ross's concerns about that system were slow to emerge. "I was very loyal to my country," he said. He was known among his colleagues, he said, as "rottweiler," for his determination in the pursuit of British interests, which he defined in terms of commercial and strategic issues.

"But it concealed a much deeper doubt," he said, one dating as far back as the early 1990s when he helped Britain dissuade the international community from intervening militarily in the gruesome conflict in the Balkans. He now considers that policy deeply mistaken and morally wrong.

A sabbatical at the New School in New York in 2003, where he studied the limits of knowledge in decision making, helped crystallize his thoughts. Next he was stationed at the UN mission in Kosovo, where he saw that "the UN was governing without enough consultation of the people," he said. That confirmed his disenchantment and he resigned at the end of his posting there, he said.

Since then he has experienced the other side of the negotiating table, notably in Kosovo, where he has helped the Albanian-dominated government to handle UN-led talks on its future. With no diplomatic service of its own, Kosovo has had an uphill struggle to lobby and consult with European governments and the United States, which control the process.

In 2005, Ross attended a Security Council discussion of Kosovo with Bajram Kosumi, who was then prime minister of the province. "He wasn't allowed to talk. The UN didn't even provide an interpreter for him, and we had to find an Albanian-American student to do the translation." Nor, he said, could Kosumi respond to an attack by the Serbs. "It was very frustrating."

Ross says he feels similarly motivated by the cause of the Polisario Front, whose leaders are based in a camp that is home to 150,000 Sahawari refugees in the south of Algeria. "It is a figurative and literal representation of their isolation," he said.

The front has sought international recognition ever since Moroccan troops invaded the region, a former Spanish colony, and annexed most of it. "Since 1975, the UN has been claiming they would resolve the dispute and has achieved nothing," Ross said.

While his new venture has won praise and recognition — in 2005 he was named by Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust as a "visionary for a just and peaceful world" — many of his former colleagues, UN officials and European diplomats accuse him in undiplomatic language of liking the spotlight too much. None of them, however, would go on the record.

The British government also chips away at Ross, saying he has exaggerated his role on Iraq policy and his access to intelligence about weapons of mass destruction. "I am not sure how important he was," Margaret Beckett, the British foreign minister, recently told the BBC.

Still, he has fans. Richard Whitman, a professor of politics at the University of Bath and a senior fellow at Chatham House, a foreign policy research center, praises the role of the Independent Diplomat.

It is rare for diplomacy to be practiced according to morality and not national self-interest, he said. "What he brings is a moral element to foreign policy; historically we think of diplomats as almost amoral."

"I think they have got the market to themselves," Whitman added.

Surveying his new projects, Ross said, "There are a lot of small countries that have a really tough time because of limited resources. It does not mean their needs are any less legitimate."