John Pedler is a former British diplomat and now a diplomatic consultant based in France. He was partly educated in the United States during World War II and then at the London School of Economics, where he took a subsidiary course in Comparative Religion. He joined the British Diplomatic Service in 1951 offering Russian as a foreign language. He served in Vienna, Paris and the three countries that comprised French Indochina: Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. During a year's leave of absence he went to Vietnam in 1968 as a war correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph. He is the author of “A Valedictory Despatch,” which deals at some length with the imperative need, in today's world, for close EU-Russia relations.