Britain’s Queen of Spies

http://www.theguardian.com/news/defence-and-security-blog/2015/oct/12/britains-queen-of-spies

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Richard Norton-Taylor

Daphne Park was Britain’s top woman spy, the most senior female in MI6. Surprisingly, no biography has been written about her exploits, notably in Africa, but also in Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam war where she was disguised as Britain’s “consul general”.

Queen of Spies, by Paddy Hayes, to be published next week fills a big gap.

Park was a strong, courageous, woman. In his richly entertaining biography, Hayes describes how she once smuggled a man whose life was in danger out of the Congo in the boot of her car. She spent part of the second world war training Special Operations Executive agents before they were dropped by parachute into occupied France.

She was MI6 station chief in the Congo during the violent aftermath of the country’s independence leading to the murder of the country’s first elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, on 17 January 1961. He was the victim of a CIA-orchestrated assassination plot.

One element in the plot, “twice removed”, writes Hayes, “because its direct role was mainly to support the CIA’s undermining campaign of sabotage, bribery, conspiracy, and cajolement, was Britain and its lead executive on the ground, Daphne M D Park.”

As the US began actively to plan Lumumba’s death, “one of the first things the US did”, Hayes adds, “was to ensure that Britain was onside with whatever it was it planned. It didn’t need physical assistance from Britain; it was more that Britain, then as now, was useful in providing political cover, to make whatever it was they were planning look less like American imperialism and more like the concerted actions of a group of ‘responsible countries’ (pace Iraq and Afghanistan...perhaps).”

Hayes adds: “Neither Park nor Devlin (the CIA’s Congo station chief) pulled the trigger gave the order to the firing squad, but they conspired to bring about a situation where the most logical, indeed the only possible, outcome would be the death of Patrice Lumumba”.

It seems that Park had a more uncomfortable time at Oxford, whence she returned, in 1980, after she retired from MI6, to become Principal of her alma mater, Somerville College. She did not get on well with the academics.

When she visited Somerville, where she was also a pupil, Lady Thatcher was confronted by hundreds of demonstrators protesting at her economic policies. Park could not even carry her own college with her in the university vote blocking a proposal to award Britain’s first woman prime minister an honorary degree.

It was “a huge loss of face for Park”, says Hayes. Those events hurt Park deeply, Hayes told me. But Thatcher forgave her.

In his newly-published second volume of his official Thatcher biography, Charles Moore records that she wrote to her friend, Park, saying: “I do assure you that the vote does not detract one jot from the affection I feel for the university...It was such a privilege to be there. Without that, I should never have been here [Downing Street].”

Park was made a peer and became a member of the Thatcher Foundation. She died in 2010.