Dating his communiqué the 18th July 1967, Sir Anthony Rumbold, the British Ambassador to Thailand, wrote a valedictory summary of his two and a half years in Thailand. The memo is marked "Confidential", listed as being for "Foreign Office and Whitehall Distribution" and noted to be "Property of Her Britannic Majesty's Government".

Either Sir Anthony was a droll after-dinner speaker, or times have changed (and it must be noted that the incumbent British Ambassador, Quinton Quayle, has recently distanced himself from Sir Anthony's views.)

It seems somewhat fortuitous that the CIA memo on Thailand (see earlier post) was dated just one month later than Sir Anthony's, and one cannot help feeling that a copy of this may have been leaked to the Americans, who were then quick to respond in their own more  measured summary.

A few of his succinct "insights" are listed below:

"The general level of intelligence of the Thais is rather low, a good deal lower than ours and much lower than that of the Chinese."

"It is moreover extraordinary how little the average citizen of Bangkok knows at first hand about the rest of his country."

"Thais love money...they call it Vitamin M."

"At the biggest "public school" in Bangkok the boys play fives and sing "forty years on' and at luncheon with the board of the Bank of Thailand the talk is about the country cricket championship.....But we can do more in the field of education than just benevolently encourage old school tie sentiments among the rich and privileged."

"Nobody can deny that gambling and golf are the chief pleasures of the rich and that licentiousness is the main pleasure of them all."

"It does a faded European good to spend some time among such a jolly, extrovert and anti-intellectual people. And if anybody wants to know what their culture consists of the answer is that it consists of themselves, their excellent manners, their fastidious habits, their graceful gestures and their elegant persons. If we are elephant and oxen, they are gazelles and butterflies."

In August 1967, the CIA issued a classified "Intelligence Memorandum" on Northeast Thailand. The paper reviewed the communist threat to the area from Chinese and Vietnamese trained communists aiming to take advantage of the isolation of Isan at the time, the disconnect between the Northeasterners and the central government of Bangkok (and the regions' geographical and linguistic proximity to Laos), and the relative poverty of these rural areas in a precarious agricultural environment.