Art of Betrayal (17 page)

Three of the men seated around the fire that night eventually became ministers in the future Congolese government.

The British Consulate General in which Park worked was a tiny building in the untidy hotchpotch of the capital, Leopoldville. Here a model Belgian colonial city with wide boulevards and tall residential buildings struggled forlornly to assert itself against the Africa in which it had been implanted. There were perhaps only 250 Britons in the country, and traditionally the Consulate General's job had been as much to serve the interests of British big business which had invested in the Congo including BP, Unilever and British American Tobacco. There was a particular British interest in the mineral-rich
southern province of Katanga which the colonial adventurer Cecil Rhodes had tried to capture for Britain in the late nineteenth century until he had been outmanoeuvred by the Belgians. Katanga bordered British Rhodesia, and the Belgians were always convinced that the British were playing their games down there to try and steal it back.

The same year Park arrived a senior MI6 officer had gone on a tour of what had been a neglected continent for the British Secret Service. Inside MI6 there had been limited interest in Africans or in what they thought. Africa did not even merit its own controller, instead being lumped in with the strategically more important Middle East. But in the summer of 1956, as Britain and France were mired in Suez and the Hungarians were being crushed, the first real stirrings of nationalism were evident in the Congo as a group of Africans launched a manifesto calling for independence. The following year after Ghana had become independent under Kwame Nkrumah, the Russians were glimpsed lurking in the background. A Foreign Office memo from May 1959 warned of a Soviet strategic objective to remove Western influence from Africa. Under Khrushchev the USSR was taking on a more active role, exploiting anti-Western sentiment and racial tension.
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The MI6 officer who traversed the continent in 1959 wrote a detailed report which was passed up to the Prime Minister. The report warned of a kaleidoscope of local struggles, particularly against colonial powers, each of which could fuel the others. Thanks to Britain's imperial past and legacy, MI6 always had more of a global interest than many other intelligence services, and what happened in Africa mattered directly to London. The MI6 officer found the situation in the Belgian Congo among the most worrying. ‘One cannot help being struck by the apparent abdication of the will to govern by the Belgian authorities. The country is now wide open to subversion from every quarter and it may well be that the Belgian Congo in its present geographical form will not survive much longer.'
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On his last day, the Belgian Director General for Security in the Congo approached the MI6 man with a message. ‘I should know that the majority of senior officials in the Belgian Congo believed that the British government had a long-term Machiavellian plan for West
Africa,' he was told. ‘They believed that, when the dust from their present nationalist troubles in Africa had settled, the world would find the French and Belgian Empires disappeared and the British still in position, having taken over all the valuable trade concessions.' The MI6 officer contested the view but was met with a wry smile. The Soviets were watching closely, the officer warned London, knowing that ‘they have a very good chance of filling to a considerable extent the power vacuum being created by the withdrawal of the Western powers'. They were looking for bases from which to operate and trying to gain control of pan-African nationalist movements. The Congo was likely to be a major target, he warned presciently.
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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.'
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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?'
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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.'
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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.'
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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'.
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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'.)
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Before Park's arrival, the Foreign Office and MI6 had squared off over how long the Belgians would remain in control of the Congo.
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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).
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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.'
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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.
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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.