Sir William Goodenough Hayter KCMG (1 August 1906 – 28 March 1995)[1] was a British diplomat, Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1957, later Warden of New College, Oxford, and author.
However, he was awarded a Laming Travelling Fellowship at Queen's College, Oxford, which meant spending nine months learning modern languages overseas.
He went on a trip to the Caucasus with the German ambassador, Count Schulenberg, later executed for taking part in the 20 July plot to kill Hitler.
[2] In May 1944, Hayter returned to the Foreign Office in London; he worked in several political departments, then in February 1948 was promoted an assistant under-secretary of state.
He attended the Potsdam Conference as secretary to the British delegation and for three years chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee of the chiefs of staff.
[2] In October 1953, aged forty-six, and shortly after the death of Stalin, Hayter was appointed ambassador in Moscow, remaining a little over three years until February 1957; this period was later seen as the high point of his career.
He took advantage of the new accessibility of the Soviet leadership and proposed to Anthony Eden that Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev should be invited to visit Britain.
The Soviets threatened the British over Suez, raising the possibility that they might intervene with rockets, and Hayter made a strong reply.
[6] In 1959, the University Grants Committee appointed Hayter Chairman of the Sub-Committee on Oriental, Slavonic, East European and African Studies which it set up to review developments in these fields since the Scarbrough Report was published in 1947.
[2][6] Teresa Hayter, a debutante of legendary stamina in her day, subsequently attracted early attention for her book Aid as Imperialism (1971), which criticized the lending policies of the World Bank while extolling the North Korean approach to development; she has subsequently campaigned in the fields of international development, migration and racism, and has argued for the elimination of immigration controls.
He accused the Soviets of "...alienating brutality; an inability to inspire confidence; and above all an almost total, perhaps incorrigible, lack of understanding of the real character, motives, and feelings of the foreign countries and peoples".
While he considered French diplomats to be of a "high intellectual order", he found their two basic weaknesses to be an excess of formalism over substance and a lack of discipline.