Sir Edward Peck spent the last seven years of a distinguished career in the Diplomatic Service in two appointments of particular importance in the Cold War struggle between East and West.

From 1968 to 1970 he was chairman of Whitehall’s Joint Intelligence Committee and from 1970 to 1975 his country’s representative on the North Atlantic Council in Brussels.

In the first appointment he took particular care to ensure that intelligence was not exaggerated or skewed to advance a particular vested interest of one Armed Service against another: “All axes to be ground were to be left at the door,” he said.

In the second appointment he found himself cast for a time opposite a new United States representative to Nato, a young Donald Rumsfeld starting out on his political career.

Edward Heywood Peck was born in Hove in 1915, the son of a doctor in the Indian Medical Service. In his childhood the family spent some years in Switzerland, where Peck, then aged 8, was introduced on an Alpine peak to the leader the Everest expedition of 1922, Charles G. Bruce.

It was a precocious start to a love of high places that found expression in climbing and skiing wherever he found himself in later life, and that led him and his wife to set up house in retirement in the wilds of northern Scotland.

At 14 Peck was sent away to Clifton College, Bristol, and in 1934 went up to The Queen’s College, Oxford, where he won a first in German and French. He won too a travelling fellowship that took him to Vienna. He was there at the time of the Anschluss and saw Adolf Hitler drive in triumph down the Mariahilfestrasse. In that same year he joined the Consular Service and was posted to Spain, where he watched Franco’s troops march into Barcelona.

By the age of 25, therefore, he had been twice inoculated against fascism, whose influence he was to spend the war years combating. He fought his diplomatic battles in a short consular posting in Bulgaria and in long ones in Turkey, where he served as private secretary to an ambassador who won notoriety as the incautious employer of the German spy “Cicero”.

At the end of the war, however, Peck was transferred to Salonika in Greece, and soon engaged in combating another totalitarian menace. He served with distinction on a United Nations committee reporting on guerrilla infiltration into the country from its communist neighbours. By 1948 he was due for a move, and the Foreign Office in its wisdom destined him for Moscow.

The KGB, which had found him a doughty opponent in the Greek mountains, thought otherwise, accused him of playing a leading role in “falsified elections” in Greece, and blocked the appointment. After a tour in the Foreign Office, Peck was despatched to Delhi instead.

The Consular Service which Peck had joined in 1938 had been considered a poor relation by the prewar Foreign Service, and when the services were merged some expressed snooty fears of lowered standards. But men like Peck could hold their own in any intellectual or social company, and throughout his middle years he continued to build his reputation and a well-rounded career. By the time he was 40 he was the civilian deputy to the British general commanding in Berlin, and six years later he had become, via a posting to the staff of the British Commissioner General in South-East Asia, the assistant under-secretary in the Foreign Office in London dealing with that area.

He stayed in that job from 1960 to 1965, preoccupied on the one hand with developments in Vietnam (over which relations with the US were often embittered) and on the other with Malaysia’s confrontation with Indonesia.