When she arrived, Park had been determined to be close to the Africans and so rejected the first house she was offered, an elegant air-conditioned villa with a pool, because it was located in the special area reserved for diplomats, patrolled by Dobermans and armed guards. The city was segregated, with Africans needing a pass to get through police cordons at night. ‘I thought to myself no African is ever going to come and see me and have to pass through all that.’ Instead she chose a villa six miles out of town on the road to the airport and not far from the university. No pool. No air conditioning. No guards watched the house at night. Only once did she feel threatened, when she heard robbers at the window. She bellowed out of the window that she was a witch and that their extremities would drop off if they continued to bother her. She slept alone in her house in Africa, as she had often done as a girl when her parents were away. The Belgians thought she was mad. But the Africans came to visit.
The Congolese would drop in on their way to the village or en route to the airport. Mostly they arrived on bicycles or on foot. They would come to gossip or borrow books from her. Few black Congolese had ever had a normal, non-professional conversation with a European and her openness made Park a novelty. Gradually she built a unique network of contacts. She made her first agent recruitment when she provided an individual with what appeared to be sensitive information to strengthen his position (which in fact derived from the BBC summary of world broadcasts, though she did not mention that to him). But this was an exception. None of the other men she got to know were signed up as agents of the Secret Intelligence Service. ‘I never said “Will you work for SIS?” I never needed to say I was an intelligence officer and I never did. And I never recruited anybody in that way. I never sat down and said, “Sign on the dotted line and I’m going to pay you tuppence.” It was understood that I had power … I never said to them, “Please tell me a secret.” I talked to them until they told me a secret.’
Agents come in different shapes and sizes, singles, doubles, occasionally triples, conscious and unconscious, each case unique. In Park’s line of business and in much of MI6’s work in Africa and the Middle East, the classic agent betraying secrets was complemented by a more complex breed, so-called agents of influence or confidential contacts. These are people with whom Secret Service officers like Park will have relationships but who may not necessarily be betraying their own governments, indeed they may often be acting with their knowledge and permission. In some cases they may even be the rulers themselves. These contacts offer the opportunity for back-channel talks and for each side to sound the other out and also, perhaps, persuade each other to go in one direction or another when it comes to policy. In some parts of the world, notably the Middle East and Africa, this was a crucial aspect of MI6 officers’ work and it was the aspect at which Daphne Park would excel throughout her career.
For Park, Secret Service work was about trust, not betrayal. For that reason she had a deep loathing of the bleaker fictional portrayals of her world. ‘John le Carré I would gladly hang, draw and quarter,’ she would say later. ‘He dares to say that it is a world of cold betrayal. It’s not. It’s a world of trust. You can’t run an agent without trust on both sides. Of course it is limited. Of course there are things he won’t tell you, of course there are things I won’t tell him – that’s understandable. But if you are actually considering whether the agent is telling you something of vital interest, you need to know that this is somebody who has worked for you and you have to know that he has been trustworthy in other matters before … And he, for his part, knows that what he tells me I’m not going to go and chat about in the nearest bar and I’m not going to talk about it to anybody. What he says is going to be protected and his identity is going to be protected.’7
Building relationships with men was never a problem for Park. More matron than Mata Hari though, she scoffed at the idea of using feminine charms. ‘I wasn’t a particularly sexy person,’ she explained. ‘It’s been a huge advantage during my professional career that I’ve always looked like a cheerful, fat missionary,’ she once remarked. ‘It wouldn’t be any use if you went around looking sinister, would it?’8 She had never been encouraged by the service to use her femininity to extract information. ‘I’m sad to say they only had to look at me to know there wasn’t much point in that.’9
Sexism pervaded the British Secret Service (as it did the CIA and the KGB). In that sense, at least, James Bond’s attitudes were not too far divorced from reality. ‘A woman’s chief weapon in obtaining information is sex; having once secured an agent or informer by this means, she may easily over-reach herself and fall in love,’ warned one MI6 station chief of the old school, noting that ‘English women as a rule have little knowledge or experience of foreigners and are less capable of handling them than, say, a Frenchwoman.’10 During the war, another officer (later to be Daphne Park’s boss) noted that ‘most of the male officers are fairly pudding-like and are either misogynists or else consider that a woman’s place is the bed and the kitchen, certainly not the mess’.11
Daphne Park subscribed to the idea that the only thing that stood in the way of a woman succeeding was her own determination. She had made it into her beloved Secret Service through sheer force of personality despite the fact that women, on the whole, were not allowed to be officers. They were, however, given real operational responsibilities as secretaries in the overseas stations, particularly in the smaller offices where there was only one male officer. ‘If you were right off in the bush somewhere’, explained Park, ‘and you had to go travelling, you went away knowing that the secretary would run the agents, would pick things up, would look after things, would pretty well do what you would have done provided you had a good one … I think we took it for granted quite a lot, I’m sorry to say.’ One secretary in Africa was considered far superior to her boss, and there were at least three countries where she could not appear without being taken out for dinner by the head of state. Yet she was never made an officer. After the brief post-war window in which Park was recruited, no more women were made full MI6 officers until the 1960s when just one or two were allowed in before the door was once again slammed shut until the late 1970s.
Female spies had to convince the men that just because they could not hand over an envelope in a men’s lavatory, as their male colleagues took such perverse joy in doing, that did not mean they were unable to find some other way of operating. They did occasionally face a different problem. Some men open up more to a female spy, but female MI6 officers also have to be on the lookout for their targets making a pass at them. Occasionally, a recruitment pitch may have to be launched pre-emptively to prevent the target thinking that the friendliness is for a personal rather than professional motive. ‘You must have realised I work for MI6 we would say,’ one female officer recalls. ‘They always say, “Oh yes of course”.’ In some cultures, a woman having lunch with a man may raise suspicions, but not necessarily suspicions of espionage, and this can provide useful cover. In Africa, though, such contact could be difficult. Only once did an African – a close aide to Lumumba – try it on with Park. ‘I pushed him out of the car and I said get out.’
‘All the Belgian women love it,’ he said.
‘Well, I’m not Belgian,’ she replied.
‘I’ll tell Lumumba that you are anti-black,’ he countered.
‘You go ahead and tell him.’
The next time she went to see Lumumba she wondered what would happen. Lumumba gave a broad grin. ‘Your little friend has just put a crate full of the very best eggs in your car and he will not be seeing you again,’ he said.
Park also had occasionally to fight off unwanted attention from the Foreign Office. One problem was that the Foreign Office wanted to keep what it saw as the troublemakers of MI6 off its patch. The Secret Service was already banned from operating in British colonies – that was technically ‘internal security’ and therefore the domain of MI5. And elsewhere on the continent the Africa hands of the Foreign
Office disliked spies interfering (George Kennedy Young called one wheelchair-bound Foreign Office official who tried to keep MI6 away ‘a crippled mind in a crippled body … They don’t understand communist manipulation’.)12 Before Park’s arrival, the Foreign Office and MI6 had squared off over how long the Belgians would remain in control of the Congo.13 It was eventually agreed that MI6 would cultivate relationships rather than aggressively recruit spies.
Daphne Park was not immune from the clashes which often occurred in the field between an ambassador, keen to keep relations ticking over, and a spy, there to steal secrets and generally get up to no good. From its inception, the Secret Service was seen as a grubby relation who had to be tolerated by Britain’s snooty diplomats who liked to keep their distance (‘A diplomatist has as much right to consider himself insulted if he is called a spy as a soldier has if he is called a murderer,’ wrote one Foreign Office man).14 MI6 officers are supposed to seek sign-off from the ambassador for their operations. ‘They would say we’re going to get this wonderful intelligence and, if it goes wrong, we need your advice on what the consequences would be,’ recalls one former ambassador. ‘Well, it is perfectly obvious what the consequences would be – there’s going to be a huge bloody great row.’15 Cultivating a relationship with an ambassador can be nearly as important as doing so with an agent, as Daphne Park discovered. Just as things were beginning to get interesting in the Congo at the start of 1960, Park received a telegram from London asking where she would like to go next. She did not want to go anywhere, she replied. The reply came that a new ambassador, Ian Scott, had been appointed and he had decided he did not want to have a ‘friend’ – the Foreign Office’s occasionally ironic euphemism for a member of MI6.16 The new man thought it risked destroying his relationship of trust with the Congolese to have MI6 going round spying on people. Park was despondent. But when Scott arrived she threw some parties for him to introduce him to all the new ministers whom she had got to know. At the end of that week Scott, known for his direct manner, asked Park to see him.
‘You know that I wanted you withdrawn.’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘You know I would be happy for you to stay as head of Chancery.’
‘Look, I’m already doing head of Chancery, but that’s not what I’m here for. I’m here because I’m an SIS officer.’
‘Yes, but I can’t have that. All sorts of things might happen. However, I might consider it if you would engage to tell me the names of all your agents so that I can decide.’
‘I’ll go and pack my bags,’ replied Park.
‘What do you mean?’
‘We have an agreement when we recruit people. They are not told about to anybody. There is an absolute rule about that and I wouldn’t dream of breaking it. So even if I wanted to do what you suggest I couldn’t. It’s against our entire ethos.’
‘Well, don’t you think I’m trustworthy?’
‘No. I don’t actually.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What would happen would be that you would meet one of them – because I don’t waste my time recruiting people who are not important – you would meet one of them and you wouldn’t be able to resist saying to one of them, “Most interesting idea of yours about such and such,” which you remembered from having read his report and he would instantly know that you knew. And that would be the end of that. That is the rule: we do not give the names to anybody outside the service.’
‘Well, perhaps I could see your reports first?’
‘You do see all my intelligence reports – they are not circulated in Whitehall without being able to say the ambassador agrees or disagrees. So that already happens.’
‘You’re quite sure?’ Scott asked, probing to see if she would give a little ground.
‘I’m very sorry but I’m quite sure,’ Park replied firmly.
‘Oh well. Let’s leave things for a bit then.’
In the weeks after that conversation, the Congo was to be thrust on to the front page of the papers and to the top of the diplomatic in-tray. Park would prove herself to be indispensable and the Ambassador would become a close ally.
Seventy years before Daphne Park took her boat to the country, the writer Joseph Conrad had set out on his own journey up the Congo River, fictionalised in his novel Heart of Darkness. The darkness was not Africa but the horrors of the colonial mind and its violent outpourings. In 1885, the Congo had become not a Belgian colony but a personal possession of King Leopold II, acquired with the assistance of the British explorer Henry Stanley (two of the largest cities were named after the men). Colonialism in Africa did not have a good record, but Leopold’s and Belgium’s record in the Congo was the most wretched. Leopold never set foot in the country, but during the twenty-three years that it was his personal fiefdom an estimated ten million Congolese died from disease or starvation or at the hands of the death squads led by the feared Force Publique. A whip made from thick hippopotamus hide was used to keep the locals in line. Entire villages would be massacred if they did not accede to colonial demands and agree to act as slaves to extract rubber and other resources to feed the King’s greed.17 The heads on poles which Conrad wrote about outside the house of the mad colonist Kurtz were a reflection of a culture in which killing was a sport. In 1908, the King sold the colony – eighty times the size of Belgium – to the government in Brussels as if it was a toy he had tired of.
By the mid-1950s, the Belgians could see which way the wind was blowing and started to think about possibly one day granting independence in the distant future, perhaps after a few decades. They did little to prepare the country for that possibility and failed to develop any effective political institutions. There were few ties that bound the six provinces and the myriad tribes together. There were only around twenty African university graduates by the end of the 1950s out of a population of fourteen million, and no doctors or engineers.18 But then in 1959 riots erupted in Leopoldville’s broad streets and Belgium lost its nerve (Graham Greene, in the country at the time to research his book on a leper colony, remembered colonial Belgians sleeping with guns beneath their pillows).19 Brussels feared being drawn into the kind of violent struggle that was engulfing France in Algeria and so decided to grant independence in a rush, even though the country was woefully under-prepared. Elections were held in May 1960 with independence scheduled absurdly soon afterwards – at the end of the following month. The man who took the second highest tally of seats, the weak-willed and highly influenceable Joseph Kasavubu, was offered the ceremonial role of president. The man who won most seats and would become prime minister was the man from the visa queue, Daphne Park’s friend Patrice Lumumba.
Lumumba had already been singled out as trouble by some Westerners who had taken part in a conference on independence in Belgium in January that year. He had been released from jail especially to attend, having been convicted of making inflammatory speeches the previous October when he addressed 2,000 people, talking of death for liberty.20 The American Ambassador to Brussels observed him at the conference and reported him as having ‘a highly articulate, sophisticated, subtle and unprincipled intelligence’ – someone who told people what they wanted to hear.21 ‘He gave the impression that he was not a man who could be dominated,’ a friend recalled. ‘And a man who could not be dominated was dangerous.’22
It had been hot and humid as independence approached, the tense atmosphere heightened by the discovery of bodies every morning, the product of tribal or political murder. In June, the British Consul General Ian Scott (who would become an ambassador after independence) threw the traditional Queen’s Birthday Party at his house on the banks of the river.23 On an overcast evening, a Salvation Army band played a tune everyone recognised. It was called ‘We are drifting to our doom’. The lights in the garden fused and a fine drizzle began.
The gloom had lifted by the morning of 30 June – independence day – as Patrice Lumumba strode confidently into the imposing Palais de la Nation, orig
inally built to be the residence of the Belgian governor general. An exuberant smile played on his face and he wore a bow tie with a sash across his smart suit. The Prime Minister waved to his supporters. Dignitaries from across Africa and further afield had gathered for the occasion. King Baudouin had come from Belgium and stood before a bronze statue of Leopold II, promising a wonderful future for the former colony – so long as it did not turn its back on those who had looked after it for so long. ‘Don’t be afraid to come to us. We will remain by your side,’ he told the crowd. The absurdity of the speech reflected the grotesqueness of the colonial experience. Even Ian Scott thought it went just a bit too far.24 ‘It’s now up to you, gentlemen, to show that you are worthy of our confidence,’ the King proclaimed. ‘The independence of the Congo is the culmination of the work conceived by the genius of Leopold II.’25
Kasavubu, the country’s new president, pronounced a few words. Scott thought them ‘sensible, moderate and flavoured with a certain humility’. Lumumba had not originally been scheduled to speak. But he had decided he would have his moment. He stepped forward and played to the gallery, speaking directly and angrily to and for the Congolese people rather than addressing the diplomats. ‘Fighters for independence today victorious, I salute you in the name of the Congolese government’, he began. ‘We have known sarcasm and insults, endured blows morning, noon and night, because we were niggers,’ he told them. ‘Who can forget the volleys of gunfire in which so many of our brothers perished, the cells where the authorities threw those who would not submit to a rule where justice meant oppression and exploitation?’ Scott thought the speech, which was as interrupted eight times by applause, ‘hard, bitter, accusatory and xenophobic, directed against the Belgians’. The man sitting next to Scott leant over and said he thought the King would walk out.
Art of Betrayal Page 13