by Ravi Somaiya
By 1960, Park had recently finished a tour in Moscow. Her superiors had posted her there because they felt that the Russians, hidebound by a pervasive misogyny, would not expect a woman to be a capable spy. Under the cover of her gender, she had identified missile installations that were designed to repel Western nuclear weapons, rendering unimaginable Soviet spending and planning obsolete. And she was rumored to have helped smuggle the novel Dr. Zhivago, banned in Russia, out of the country, to be published first in Italy in 1957.2
Its author, Boris Pasternak, won the Nobel Prize for Literature the next year, a grave and humiliating blow for the Kremlin. (And one of very few things that Park and Hammarskjöld, who was on the Nobel committee, agreed on.)
Her next posting was due to be Guinea, which her superiors feared had tilted to the far left. But SIS had a rule that women were not allowed to serve in majority-Muslim nations—it was felt that their gender not only impeded their attempts to gather information but also needlessly inflamed tensions. As majority-Muslim nations were often proving grounds for high fliers, this policy, and a ban on female spies marrying, made life difficult for women who wanted to climb the ranks.
Park either genuinely did not give it a second thought, or decided not to talk about it. Her attitude, when asked later in life, was that one got on with it, or didn’t bother, and that she had chosen the former.
Before she traveled to the Congo, she first went to Brussels to be briefed by the SIS chief there. Then she took a train to Antwerp, then a two-week journey aboard a grand white steamer boat to Matadi, the main seaport in the Congo, about 150 miles from Leopoldville.
When she finally arrived, she found that Leopoldville was a city divided. The black Congolese lived in the cité, a deprived and makeshift sprawl. The Europeans lived in the highest part of the city—the only area that benefited from cooling breezes. Their large houses were like fortresses. The pristine lawns were floodlit at night, and patrolled by both guards and glossy black Doberman pinschers.
Park was warned by the Belgians that she must select a home there, among her kind. Instead, she took a house between the airport and the center of town, adjacent to the cité. She knew that she would get the information and connections she needed from black Africans, informally, not Europeans at soirees. She had calculated that her new address would make it easy for black Africans to visit without the added pressures of being seen to visit.3
And despite implorations from her superiors, she refused to keep the exquisite, tiny revolver with an inlaid grip that an SIS armorer had made her out of a misplaced sense of chivalry, instead of issuing a standard service gun. “If I have it at home,” she reasoned, “everybody will know I have it at home. They’ll come and steal it, and they’ll hit me on the head in the bargain. It stays in the office.”
SIS assigned Q branch, the section responsible for spy technology, to find an alternative means of defense. It suggested a device that it said had worked brilliantly in controlling crowds in Sudan. A kind of capsule, described as infallible, that she could break to release a smell so foul that it would knock out any intruders, even entire groups.
Filled with trepidation, she and a colleague took turns trying the capsules, two each, only to find that they released a smell so mild that she said “it might, just might, have been confused with a little smell of armpit.”
Shortly after she had moved in, she gave a small party. After her guests had gone for the night, she had kept the music playing, and was walking around the house having a drink when she saw the handle of her front door turning slowly. She had sent the servants home—black Congolese domestic staff had to go home at night, a rule enforced by the Belgians who were afraid their servants would kill them in their sleep.
She was alone.
She picked up her Bakelite telephone and called the Congolese police. “Well, if you go to bed and pretend to be asleep,” they said, she recalled later, “they probably won’t touch you. We’ll come around in the morning and see what’s been taken.”
Park replied that that was not her idea of a police force. They told her they were not stupid enough to go out at night in Leopoldville—it was dangerous—and suggested that she call the United Nations police instead, a unit staffed in the Congo by Nigerians.
She felt that the UN “was dead useless, full of murdering, miserable people.” But she liked the Nigerians. So she called. They said, “Yes. Yes. Don’t worry. We’ll be around.” But there was no sign of them. And she could still hear and sense the intruders, occasionally probing her home for weakness.
Park called a colleague at the embassy, Nigel Gaden, a public information officer. “Nigel, would you mind coming and visiting me and crashing through my garden,” she said, “because I’ve got unwanted visitors, and I think if you come and make noise, they’ll go away.” He agreed.
She put the phone down, and kept watching the doors. About twenty minutes later, noises of smashing, falling, and shouting broke out in her garden. The Nigerians, arriving late, had arrested Nigel.
Park went outside, untangled the angry men, and explained all of their mistakes to them. They responded that they had now dealt with any intruders. “Don’t worry,” said one, with a tone of pity. “It will be quite all right. They won’t come now.”
The men departed, and Park turned out the lights, after a long day, and was climbing into bed when she heard the tinkle of broken glass. It sounded to her like the French windows. A towering rage overtook her. She got up, propelled by fury, threw open the window, and fixed her gaze on a black African who had been in the process of breaking in. In Lingala, the local language, which she spoke fluently along with Swahili, she screamed:
“You there! I am a witch, and if you go on troubling me, first your toes will drop off. Then your feet will drop off, and then other parts of your anatomy, which you would not wish to lose, will drop off. Would you please go away.”
She shut the window, climbed into bed, and fell quickly into a deep sleep. The rumor of her powers spread quickly through the cité, she later heard. Nobody would go near her house.
She had found the only car less glamorous than Devlin’s—a dull-blue Citroën 2CV that sounded, and accelerated, as though it were powered by enthusiasm alone. She said she would have chosen it again over any Aston Martin because it was so agile it could virtually climb trees, and looked so innocent that nobody ever thought to check in the back.
She had a license neither to drive nor to kill, she would joke later. But she realized nobody was enforcing the rules in Leopoldville anyway, so she improvised, terrifying passersby as she pulled up outside the British Chancery on Avenue Beernaert in downtown Leopoldville.4
She began a process vital to spying, the one that separates the spies who re-edit newspaper clippings for their reports, and the ones who deliver the bombshells: She got to know everyone of potential use. Her aim was to put together Leading Personality Reports—profiles of the main players in the Congo, and what they wanted. And then to use them to manipulate events to suit Britain.
Though she could be cold to the point of aloofness with her colleagues, she could switch on an easy charm and engagement if she so chose. And she was genuinely interested in people. Which meant that they generally liked and trusted her, too, and found themselves telling her things that they would never have expected to tell her. Even the cagey members of Lumumba’s inner circle found themselves drawn in.
The Congolese learned that they could drop by her house, to borrow books or for a chat—a novelty in a city where conversations between black and white residents were either formal or hostile. “I never said to them ‘please tell me a secret,’” she told the journalist Gordon Corera later. “I just talked to them until they told me a secret.”
She ingratiated herself with the 250 or so expatriate Brits in the city, and began to use one or two as agents—non-spies who gathered information. She began talking to the border guards, asking them about their families, and bringing them gifts. She volunteered to under
take the arduous three-day journeys to Accra, in Ghana, to collect the embassy’s mail. She could talk to people all the way, and sense what was in the air.
She also traveled to see her MI6 counterparts Hugo Herbert-Jones in Nairobi, Kenya; Theodore “Bunny” Pantcheff in Lagos, Nigeria; Neil Ritchie in Salisbury, Rhodesia; and Michael Oatley in Kampala, Uganda. They’d compare notes, swap info, coordinate, generally help each other out.
Her travels often took her into situations so dangerous that the Americans would have sent an army. But Park didn’t feel fear in the same way other people did. Or, at least, she had the capacity to think with great perception while in its grip.
As she drove down an isolated road one night, a mob surrounded her car at a checkpoint. They demanded she get out. She refused. So they began pulling her through the car’s sunroof. She got stuck, which she found enormously funny. The mob saw the joke, began laughing, too, and let her pass.
On another occasion she saw a different mob approaching from a little distance, casually swinging machetes. So she got out of the 2CV, opened its hood, and affected a look of puzzlement. When the men arrived, confident and hostile, she unmanned them by greeting them warmly and asking them if they knew how to fix the carburetor. They tinkered, eager to help, and moved on.
She had also been badly beaten when her diversionary tactics had failed to work, and thrown into a pit that was to be her grave, before her attackers thought better of it. But she never spoke of the incident.
In fact she never spoke of failure, and thus developed a reputation for never failing. She said she had never experienced prejudice in her career, but she confided to friends later that she understood why, despite being a standout leader and consummate spy, she was never considered for director of MI6. The men, she said, however much they liked her, would have struggled to accommodate a woman in their little coterie.
None of it mattered, weeks away from London by boat geographically, and a world away functionally. Here, Daphne Park was director of whatever she wanted to be. And the situation she encountered was much more complex than the one described to Harold Macmillan in his intelligence briefing.
To the east of the Congo was a region known as the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. It consisted of the British protectorates of Northern and Southern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland.5 What it was, in practice, was a fragment of the recent past—a series of African nations that were entirely ruled by white Europeans, mostly Brits, under a complex arrangement with the British government.
It was run by Sir Roy Welensky, a former boxer and railway engineer, who believed that colonialism had pulled him up from poverty, and that it was an unmitigated force for good.
Welensky and his intelligence chief, a former British intelligence officer named Basil de Quehen, kept in close contact with the forces of white Africa—apartheid security services in South Africa, and the white settlers and business interests in Katanga.
Park came to understand that British American Tobacco, Unilever, and Shell—huge, British corporations—had made major investments in the area. Their trade with Katangese companies formed an intricate and deeply lucrative web of interests that all wanted continued white rule. And all were closely linked to the British government.
The prime of those Katangese companies, Union Minière, was owned in large part—40 percent, at its height—by a British company, Tanganyika Concessions. Its chairman was a conservative former member of Parliament, Charles Waterhouse.
Waterhouse was associated with a nascent group of far-right conservative politicians that would later be known as the Monday Club and would number among its members the vice chief of SIS, Park’s boss, George Kennedy Young.
Young’s personal policy, and a view widely held by his cohort, he later wrote, was that “independent Africa would revert to bush and savagery.” His views were not racist, he explained later, because they were “based on a lifelong interest in anthropology and comparative philology.”
It was Park’s job to balance the un-balance-able. The overt policy from London supported the reunification of the Congo, and Dag Hammarskjöld.
But her priority was described, euphemistically, as promoting “British interests”—and that meant British companies in the country. They were linked closely with the white settlers.
Who despised Hammarskjöld and the UN, and wanted Katanga to join the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.
And it was about to get even more complex.
Footnotes
1 He later joined a ménage à trois with the Baron and Baroness von Mumm in their palace, Schloss Johannisberg, in Germany. Afterward, he restyled himself as an artist, grew a reasonable reputation, and was rumored to have had an affair with Princess Grace of Monaco.
2 Its publisher, an Italian named Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, died in contentious circumstances afterward.
3 The Belgians responded by removing her from the governor-general’s invitation list for formal events, which she treated as a bonus.
4 It was above the Liberian embassy. The unfortunate Liberians often had their windows hit by anti-British protesters who couldn’t quite manage to get the necessary height on their projectiles.
5 To complicate matters further, it was also known as the Central African Federation.
Chapter 6
“Very straightforward action”
In the late summer of 1960, Lumumba remained under house arrest, surrounded by one cordon of Mobutu’s soldiers and another cordon of UN soldiers.
The easiest solution to the problems of the Congo, a senior official with the British Foreign Office’s Africa Department wrote on September 28, 1960, “is the simple one of ensuring Lumumba’s removal from the scene by killing him.” If he survived, another official replied, he would “continue to plague us all.”
By that moment, Park and Devlin were effectively one operation in Leopoldville. They had become fast friends, of necessity if nothing else—sifting information from rumor by oneself was near-impossible. The people who made the decisions often didn’t know themselves what they were going to do until the last moment.1 They became the only two people in town who could reliably sort fact from fiction and weigh probabilities with any accuracy.
Their governments were in lockstep, too. At around the moment that the British memos were circulating, President Eisenhower had informed the CIA that he had “extremely strong feelings on the necessity for very straightforward action in this situation,” and that he “wondered whether the plans as outlined were sufficient to accomplish this.”
The CIA officials decided that Eisenhower was hinting at an assassination. They certainly agreed that Lumumba was still a threat. Indeed, they had imbued him with near-mystical powers.
Devlin suggested arming or supporting Lumumba’s enemies. Headquarters had a different idea. Shortly afterward, a chemist from the Bronx with a clubfoot and a stutter arrived in Leopoldville. Sydney Gottlieb had been named, for his mission, Joseph Braun, or more simply “Joe from Paris.” Devlin first saw him across the street from the embassy, when he was sitting at a café. Gottlieb came over.
“I’m Joe from Paris,” he said. “I’ve come to give you instructions about a highly sensitive operation.” The two traveled to a safe house, where Gottlieb explained that he had concocted, and was carrying, a deadly biological toxin to be injected into something that Lumumba ingested—toothpaste would be perfect.
“Take this,” Gottlieb said, handing over a small package that also contained hypodermic needles, gauzes, masks, and other equipment required for handling the deadly toxin. “With the stuff that’s in there, no one will ever be able to know that Lumumba was assassinated.”
It would appear, Gottlieb told Devlin, that he had died of polio. But ultimately, he said, it didn’t matter if he used the poison or other means, as long as Lumumba ended up dead and nobody suspected the United States.2
The main problem was that their target, Lumumba, was lodged in his house, surrounded by one cordon of Congolese sold
iers and another of UN soldiers. “Target has not left building in several weeks,” the Leopoldville station cabled to headquarters in November. “Concentric rings of defense make establishment of observation post impossible. Attempting to get coverage out of any movement into or out of house by Congolese. Target has dismissed most of servants so entry this means seems remote.”
The CIA, increasingly desperate, began to send dark, mysterious agents—men recruited from the criminal underworld to perform specific tasks that required deniability. The first, a forty-three-year-old named Jose Marie Andre Mankel, arrived in Leopoldville on November 21. He had been working with the agency since 1958, on retainer, and had experience in Corsica, perhaps with mafia figures, and with the Bureau of Narcotics.
He was code-named QJWIN. Among his skills, listed in official memos, were safecracking and “assassin-recruitment” activities. His performance was listed as “excellent” and—though Devlin does not mention it in his memoir—he seems to have been assigned to the Lumumba problem.
But before Mankel could do anything, at about 10 p.m. on November 27, while most of Leopoldville was distracted by a torrential tropical rainstorm, Lumumba simply drove out of the house in a large, black car.
The Americans suspected that the UN had helped him break out. But Hammarskjöld had decided that the UN could not interfere in Congolese politics, and that he could only protect Lumumba under house arrest. The former prime minister was on his own.
Park and Devlin felt he’d head for Stanleyville, a city about a thousand miles away that was a safe harbor for Lumumba. Park was already there, waiting. The same day, Devlin sent a cable to headquarters to say he was “working with Congolese government to get roads blocked and troops alerted.”