Reginald Hibbert was educated at Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet, and Worcester College, Oxford, where he took a war-shortened course in modern history.
In 1943 he was seconded to the Special Operations Executive and was parachuted into Albania, where he served as a liaison officer first with the nationalists, and then with the communist partisans.
In that year, before embarking on a more normal career, he had what he subsequently called a 'highly astonishing pupillage' as a note-taker and occasional interpreter in Russian for Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary, in Moscow, Paris, and New York.
Hibbert served in Bucharest, Vienna, Guatemala, Ankara and Brussels before volunteering for the post of Chargé d'Affaires in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, 1964–66.
He then took a sabbatical research fellowship at Leeds University before being appointed in 1967 to the office of the Commissioner-General in South-East Asia in Singapore, first as head of chancery and then as political adviser to the Commander-in-Chief, Far East.