3

A RIVER FULL OF CROCODILES – MURDER IN THE CONGO

It was only her second week in the Congo but Daphne Park was sure she recognised the thin young African standing in the visa queue outside the British Consulate General. With short hair, glasses and a goatee beard, he carried the air of an intellectual with perhaps a touch of arrogance. As Park struggled to place the scrawny figure, she might have been surprised to know that the future of the country lay in his hands, that through him the Cold War would arrive in Africa and that those she counted as her friends would plan his murder.1

Africa held no fear and few surprises for Daphne Park. She might not be able to blend in, but this was no strange, alien land. Jack Park, her father, had been sent to South Africa as a young man in the hope the climate would improve his health. During one of his many hospital stays, he had advertised in a magazine for a penfriend, and a teenager named Doreen, also living in South Africa, had replied. She hid her gender, signing only with an initial, but eventually Jack, in his late thirties, would marry the eighteen-year-old girl. Their life was far from easy. Daphne Park used to say that her father was ‘a man who could not spot a rogue at six inches’ and he was repeatedly fleeced, his tobacco farm struggling towards bankruptcy in the early 1920s. In a desperate attempt to reverse his fortunes, he headed for Tanganyika, chasing news of a gold strike. Panning the river for alluvial gold, he dreamed of buying out the coffee farm where Doreen toiled. But his luck never quite turned. From the age of six months, their daughter Daphne grew up in a mud-brick house with no running water and no electricity. The nearest white family was a ten-mile walk away. The only time Park was beaten by her father was when she was rude to an African man.²

Park’s mother was going blind and her daughter read Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and John Buchan’s spy stories out loud, plunging the two of them into a world of Empire, adventure and spies, a world which captivated the young girl and from which she never quite emerged. Kim Philby may have despised Kipling’s creed and the novel which provided him with his name, but for Park these stories of the guarding of Britain and its Empire instilled an unstinting belief in spies as the last line of defence. Far away in Africa, this child of Empire had an uncomplicated faith in her country, right or wrong. By the time she reached the age of eleven, it was clear she needed schooling. Doreen sold her last pieces of jewellery to allow her daughter to make a journey which began with a three-day walk through the bush to reach a lorry which in turn took her to Dar es Salaam to catch a boat to take her to England and then eventually to school in South London. Daphne did not see her parents for twelve years and she would never again see a younger brother, David, who died and was buried in Tanganyika (late in life Daphne Park’s unsuccessful search for his grave would weigh heavily on her). The Special Operations Executive, training French fighters, had led to the Field Intelligence Agency Technical in Vienna, hunting Nazi scientists, which in turn had delivered her to MI6. From there she was thrust into Moscow during the Suez Crisis. After a subsequent stint as the London co-ordinating officer for MI6’s German stations, her superiors decided to post Park to the increasingly important intelligence battleground of Africa. Their first thought had been to send her to Guinea. The country had just become independent from the French and the Russians were moving in. But knowledge of Africa was extremely limited in MI6. ‘You must all be mad,’ the Foreign Office’s Consul General in Dhaka said when he was consulted on her appointment. ‘It’s a Muslim country. She will never meet anybody but women behind the veil.’ A hasty look at the map led Park instead to be sent as consul to both the French and Belgian Congo in 1959. The timing could not have been better.

A fourteen-day boat journey took Park into the sweltering heart of Africa past a lush green country of rolling hills, their monotony broken only by the occasional isolated village. Rather than talk to the other, rather dreary colonial Europeans on board, Park made her way down to third class where a group of Africans were returning from a world youth conference in her old hunting ground of Vienna. Down below decks were the bright young men of the future, fired up by the hope of a new Africa free of colonialism. This was a time of rapid change across the continent as white and Western rule was being challenged openly. More than a dozen states would become independent in the coming year. Many of the young men below decks had been enticed by Communism and looked towards Russia as the future. Park, fresh from Moscow, did her best to draw back the veil of Soviet life. The men’s faith may not have been dented but a few would remain in touch with the young English lady who was willing to take them on in debate. On the way, the boat had stopped in Accra and Park bought a local newspaper. In the paper there was a photograph of another group of young Africans who had attended a conference organised by Kwame Nkrumah, who had led Ghana to its independence from Britain two years earlier. He was the leading light of a rising pan-Africanism which aimed to spread anti-colonialism among fellow Africans with a view to uniting them in a ‘United States of Africa’ which would reject economic as well as political exploitation. One of the men in the picture was from the Congo. His name, the paper said, was Patrice Lumumba. Two weeks later, Daphne Park twigged that the man in the visa queue outside the Consulate General was the man in the newspaper photograph.

‘Are you Monsieur Lumumba?’ she asked.

‘Yes, I am.’

‘Well, come with me, we’ll have a cup of coffee and get your visa in due course.’

She asked one of the local Africans employed at the Consulate General to bring two cups. He brought only one and placed it in front of Park with a glare. He disapproved of a young European woman sitting down with an African man to share coffee. Park, who cared little for social conventions that stood in her path, especially relating to gender, gave Lumumba her coffee and asked for another.

Lumumba was a rising star in the chaotic firmament of Congolese politics. Born to a poor family in a small village, he had become a post office clerk, educated himself and quickly became the leading Congolese voice for radical, pan-African nationalism.3 He was a volatile, passionate orator who knew how to whip up a crowd but whose judgement could be erratic. The political party he had founded, the National Congolese Movement (MNC), demanded independence from Belgium.

Park talked politics with Lumumba for a while. She asked how long he would be away for on his visa because she would like to talk more. She happened to be heading for the provincial capital of Stanleyville in ten days’ time. This was the location of Lumumba’s power base. Could she meet the Central Committee of his party? Of course, Lumumba said, offering an introduction to his adviser, a Croatian émigré.

Park called on the Croat during her visit to Stanleyville. After a useful chat, she inquired about meeting the Central Committee.

‘Do you like fishing?’ he said.

‘Yes, I do,’ she said.

‘Would you like to come for some night-fishing?’

‘Of course. When?’

‘Tonight.’

Daphne Park and the Croat sat in a small canoe illuminated by a bright nightlight. At two in the morning, the boat pulled into the bank. Some men were sitting around the fire. She was introduced to them one by one as a sharp knife neatly filleted the fish. She produced a bottle of whisky. After talking for a while, she got back into the boat and headed off.

‘Well, I enjoyed that very much but I still want to meet the Central Committee,’ she told the Croat.

‘You have just met them,’ he replied. ‘They’re under surveillance and you’re under surveillance. But the Belgians don’t go surveilling at night on the river.’

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.4

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.’⁵

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.6

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, originally 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.

The Belgians’ moustaches trembled with rage as they listened to Lumumba. The King turned to Kasavubu halfway through. ‘Mr President, was this planned?’ ‘Of course not, no,’ the new President replied.26 When Lumumba had finished, a band played an upbeat tune known as the ‘Independence Cha-cha-cha’. Across the country, people listened to their radios in wonder. Belgian officials were outraged and humiliated by this young upstart and his lack of respect. A formal lunch was delayed for two hours while the King and the Belgian cabinet deliberated whether to attend or not (they did). Afterwards Lumumba told Scott that he had made the speech to ‘satisfy the people’ and to reflect his own anger at the Belgians’ attempts to prevent him becoming prime minister in the preceding weeks.²⁷ When the British representative from London had a fifteen-minute meeting with the new Prime Minister the following day, he came out saying ‘He is a no-good.’²⁸ Like Nasser, Lumumba was a national liberationist who wanted to assert sovereignty against the West. He warned that he would not allow political colonialism to be replaced by a new form of indirect economic colonialism. This was an unwelcome message for countries which had large investments in the mining business as they extracted the country’s rich deposits of copper, cobalt and diamonds. The Congo held its breath, especially the 20,000 Belgians who remained in the country. For the first few days, the streets were quiet.

Ten days after independence, a sharply dressed American with his thin black hair slicked back in the fashion of the time stepped on board the ferry for Leopoldville. Daphne Park’s newly appointed opposite number from the CIA was heading into town. ‘There are a lot of black-tie dinners,’ a colleague had reassured Larry Devlin before he left. ‘You’ll be on the golf course by two o’clock every afternoon.’29 Reality soon hit him in the face, nearly fatally. As he stepped off the ferry, Devlin was faced with soldiers waving machetes in his face. ‘We will kill you,’ one said to him. Devlin had been recruited into the CIA from Harvard where he had been destined for the academic life. He had been enticed by the idea that the CIA would fight Moscow’s ambitions without the US having to engage in the type of open warfare he had witnessed as a soldier in the Second World War. Africa had been left to the Europeans for many years and the CIA had created its Africa division only in 1959. A cool customer in his dark suit, white shirt and shades and with a cigarette rarely out of his hands, Devlin would relish the chance to take on the Soviets in this important new Cold War arena as he became the arch-puppeteer of Congolese politics.

By the time Devlin arrived, the calm of independence a few days earlier had evaporated and the country had been plunged into chaos. The Force Publique was renamed the Congolese Army, but all of its senior officers were white and, like many Belgians, they believed that independence would not change the way things worked. To make the point, a general scrawled on a blackboard in front of his men, ‘Before independence = After independence’. That – followed by the announcement of a pay rise for civil servants but not for the army – was too much. A mutiny began in Thysville and unrest spread among soldiers throughout the country, including in the capital.

Daphne Park had a lucky escape in the midst of the violence thanks largely to an incident a few weeks earlier. She had been driving at night through the city when she was flagged down by a distressed African member of the Force Publique. She assumed it was some kind of accident. ‘My comrade is in trouble. Please come and help me,’ the man said. The streets were pitch black, bereft of lighting, which made the deep storm drains on either side particularly treacherous. Finally, they reached a group of men fighting on the ground. At the bottom of the pile was a friend of the man who had stopped Park. She halted the car and flashed the lights. She then climbed out and banged on the car until she had got everyone’s attention.

‘I’m very sorry but I’m a very bad driver and if I reverse I shall fall in the ditch, so I have to drive forwards. Would you mind all getting up and getting out of the way?’ she said.

The men roared with laughter at this woman who was not even able to reverse her car. They fell about, slapping each other on the back, crying, ‘She can’t reverse!’

‘And by the way, can I have that soldier?’ she added. ‘I’m going past the barracks.’ And so she drove off with the soldier and took him and his comrade home.

When the mutiny began, Park was driving back into town in the evening with an American. As she passed through the rubbish-strewn streets she turned a corner to be met with a scene of anarchy as drunken troops went on a rampage. People wandered around dazed, with battered and bleeding heads. Park was dragged out of her car.

‘He is American, I’m British,’ she said.

‘No, you lie, you are Flemish,’ they replied, identifying them as their real enemy.

At length, after arguing over their nationality, they were allowed back into their car.

Park eventually returned home to find an array of British nationals, mainly from the colonies, waiting outside her house in hope of some assistance from the British Consul. On 8 July, the British and French embassies had ordered the evacuation of all non-essential personnel. Stories of rape and murder by the Congolese troops had spread through the white community like wildfire. Everyone wanted to be taken to the ferry to get out to Brazzaville, the smaller and scruffier capital of the French Congo which lay just over the river from Leopoldville and acted as a refuge for those fleeing. Park explained that the ferry did not run before six in the morning and said that everyone should return just before then and without any weapons. Some protested that they needed to defend themselves. She pointed out that the troops had machine guns.

As their convoy headed for the ferry in the morning, soldiers high on drugs were stopping people at makeshift checkpoints and roughing them up. But Park navigated her way through. They seemed to be looking for Russians or Belgians, but not for Britons. A queue of abandoned cars a quarter of a mile long led up to the jetty. Once the ferry was in sight Park’s heart sank. Half a dozen cars were burning and there were bloodied people wandering around. Park walked up to the largest soldier, who looked to be in charge.

‘I am the British Consul and these are British subjects,’ she said.

To her astonishment she was embraced by the man, who said, ‘You are my friend. Don’t you remember me? You’re the one who can’t reverse.’

Park could not remember him at all.

He turned and said to all the others, ‘This is my friend – she can’t reverse you know.’ There were roars of laughter. ‘You are my friend when I wasn’t important, so what do you want?’ he asked.

‘I’d just like these people to get on the ferry to Brazzaville. They have all got business there.’

He looked at her. ‘You can’t go.’

‘I don’t want to go. I’ve got work here.’

‘All right. They are all your friends?’

‘They are all my dearest personal friends.’

Park saw them on to the ferry and headed back to the Embassy. A few weeks later, a telegram came from the Foreign Office stating that there had been a question asked in parliament about a British diplomat who had fraternised with the murderous Congolese soldiers. The Ambassador sent back a beautifully crafted but sizzling reply which ended the matter.

Devlin had his own close call. He was picked up by a band of mutinous soldiers in the centre of Leopoldville. Five of them took him to a hot, stuffy room filled with hemp smoke and proceeded to interrogate him, ignoring protests that he was a diplomat. One of the men demanded that Devlin kiss his feet. Devlin refused. He had seen how soldiers had stamped on people’s heads as they leant down.

‘Ever played Russian roulette?’ the soldier asked, putting a gun to his head and spinning the chamber. ‘Kiss my foot.’

‘Merde!’ Devlin replied.

The soldier pulled the trigger. Click. Nothing. He cocked the gun without spinning and demanded again that his foot be kissed.

‘Merde!’ shouted Devlin again.

Another click. The pattern was repeated until the soldier came to pull the trigger for the sixth and – Devlin assumed – the last time.

Again Devlin shouted ‘Merde!’ and then he heard the click.

The gun had been empty. The soldiers laughed and offered him a drink before dropping him back in the centre of town.30

‘The Crisis in the Congo’ was fast becoming the big global news story of its day. Fleet Street’s finest headed into town for the show amid lurid, and almost entirely false, tales of the rape and murder of white women. The only time Park herself was subject to any kind of attack was in the imagination of the visiting British press pack. One day they gathered at the Embassy asking for the truth about the stories.

‘Well, Daphne, you’d better cope with this one,’ Ambassador Scott said playfully.

‘I have not been raped and no, I am not likely to be,’ she told the disappointed hacks.

‘Oh but you must have been,’ they replied. ‘Everyone’s been raped.’

‘I’m very sorry to disappoint you but I haven’t.’

‘Why don’t you tell them your story,’ the Ambassador said with a smile.

Park lived alone in her large house and had woken one morning to the sound of shuffling on the veranda. She had opened her door to find five stark-naked young warriors with spears. She explained that she did not have any work but would get them a drink. Eventually her servants arrived. ‘Who are these people on the veranda?’ she asked.

‘The chief is going to be very angry with us.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you don’t have a gun and you don’t have a dog and don’t have a nightwatchman, we were all afraid that somebody who didn’t know you would come and break in and do things to you. So we have been putting a guard on the house every night. You were not meant to know that it had happened because we knew you wouldn’t like it.’

Anticipation mounted among the ravenous pack as she told the story, and they steeled themselves for a front-page tale of a British female diplomat trapped, and treated who knows how by angry spear-wielding Africans. They listened attentively until she explained they had come only to guard her.

‘Oh. But then they came back and raped you?’ the hacks asked.

‘Don’t you ever listen to anything!’ exclaimed an exasperated Park.

‘There’s no story in that,’ they said, crestfallen. Park certainly made an impression on one of the more serious journalists who covered the crisis. ‘One of the most active and effective figures on the Leopoldville scene at the time,’ recalled Richard Beeston. ‘She was to be seen everywhere, a large bespectacled lady, usually with cigarette ash on her ample bosom.’31

As the mutiny continued, Lumumba’s problems multiplied. On 11 July, the southern province of Katanga seceded. Katanga was not just any province. It was where the bulk of the mineral resources lay and its leader, Moise Tshombe, based in the provincial capital of Elisabethville, hated Lumumba. He was also close to the Belgians, who saw a chance to use their man to build an alternative power base. A nasty breed of white mercenaries, some Belgian, a few British, bearded and wielding knives and guns, aided Tshombe. Stripped of Katanga’s riches, the Congo would not be a viable state. In London, the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan came under strong pressure from the business lobby and from the right of the Conservative Party to recognise the secession and back the Katangans.³² Secret delegations from Katanga had been approaching British officials from the previous year asking if they might be absorbed into the neighbouring British-led Central African Federation, whose leader in 1960 was also pushing Downing Street to help carve Katanga out of the Congo.³³ The final challenge to Lumumba’s authority came when, only two weeks after granting independence, the Belgians responded to the escalating violence by sending in paratroopers to protect ‘Western interests’ and their citizens’ lives. This was a ‘humanitarian’ intervention, they explained, and explicitly modelled their rationale on that used by Britain and France in Suez in 1956.³⁴

The secession of Katanga and the arrival of Belgian troops was beginning to look like a deliberate pincer move on Lumumba, who was now faced with the break-up of his country and its effective recolonisation.³⁵ Lumumba stopped the army mutiny but in doing so took another step on his fateful journey. He asked one of his closest aides to become chief of staff to the army, a man he trusted like a brother. His name was Mobutu. Mobutu had been expelled from school and sent to the Force Publique as punishment. The experience was the making of him as his hard-working, risk-taking style brought him admirers, including Lumumba. What Lumumba did not know was that his friend had also become a friend of Larry Devlin. The beginnings of a long alliance had been forged at the conference in Belgium in January which Mobutu attended as an aide to Lumumba. Devlin had watched the Soviets working the delegations of locals looking for recruits and he had conducted his own inquiries as to who might be worth getting to know. The name of Lumumba’s personal secretary kept coming up. ‘I can remember him as a dynamic, idealistic young man who was determined to have an independent state in the Congo and really seemed to believe in all the things Africa’s leaders then stood for,’ Devlin later recalled.36 He denied that Mobutu became a recruited agent to whom he could give orders. ‘He was a co-operator, not a pussycat,’ he explained.³⁷ Mobutu had an air of almost impossible bravery which was useful when, aged twenty-nine, he walked up to soldiers pointing their guns at him and slowly pulled down the barrels to quell the mutiny. He persuaded the men to return to their barracks, promising them a pay rise and so becoming their hero.

Lumumba needed help to deal with a country that was falling apart. He was also determined to crush his rival, Tshombe. He turned first to the United Nations. They sent in a large international force, but Lumumba was angry that they saw their role as one of strict neutrality and non-intervention and were unwilling to help him bring Katanga to heel (an outcome that was partly the result of British pressure behind the scenes to prevent such a role).³⁸ UN officials found Lumumba increasingly erratic. ‘His dealings with the UN quickly deteriorated into a bewildering series of pleas for assistance, threats and ultimatums,’ recalled a UN official. ‘He issued improbable demands and expected instant results.’³⁹

He began to look elsewhere for help in confronting the secessionists. At one point, members of his cabinet asked the US for 2,000 troops, but President Eisenhower said they could not provide military support unilaterally and Lumumba disavowed the request.⁴⁰ So Lumumba made the next of his ruinous decisions. He first asked the Soviet Union to ‘follow’ the situation, a move designed to put pressure on the UN and the West to persuade the Belgians to get out. But fearing that the Katangan secession was about to become a fait accompli with Belgian help, a few days later he formally asked Khrushchev for assistance. He did not realise what a dangerous game he was playing. It was a time when Cold War tensions were at a high and he was introducing the superpower conflict into the Congo. After those initial fears of tanks rolling through Austria, the confrontation in Eastern and Central Europe had settled into stasis, especially after the crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 had made it clear that roll-back was over. So increasingly East and West had begun to project their struggle further afield, seeking allies and proxies against each other in the Middle East, Asia and now Africa. Khrushchev in Moscow had seen an opportunity to use decolonisation as a means of winning influence and introducing Communism in the developing world, making his overtures with the offer of military and economic assistance to those leaders like Nkrumah who were socialist in orientation and who disliked Western attempts to perpetuate economic dependency. In the summer of 1960, just as the Congo crisis began, the KGB opened up its first department to specialise in sub-Saharan Africa.41

Daphne Park had reported back to MI6 that after independence Lumumba might turn to Moscow.⁴² Now, the Congo crisis rose quickly to the top of the agenda, not just for the spies but for the British cabinet. On 19 July, the Foreign Secretary reported that Lumumba was threatening to accept an offer of military assistance from the Soviet Union unless the UN called on all Belgian forces to withdraw in three days.⁴³ Lumumba made a disastrous visit to the US soon afterwards. One State Department official who met him described him as having an almost ‘“psychotic” personality’. ‘He would never look you in the eye. He looked up at the sky. And a tremendous flow of words came out … And his words didn’t ever have any relation to the particular things that we wanted to discuss … You had a feeling that he was a person that was gripped by this fervour that I can only characterize as messianic … he was just not a rational being.’⁴⁴ Scott in Leopoldville at first cautioned against listening too much to the Americans. ‘Lumumba is not mad,’ he cabled home; ‘we have to deal with Lumumba.’⁴⁵

But the CIA and Washington were becoming alarmed, fearing that the Congo crisis might be the trigger for war. Devlin never trusted Lumumba. He believed that the Prime Minister’s staff included known KGB agents and others under their influence. While he did not think Lumumba himself was a Soviet agent, he did believe he was getting too close to Moscow. ‘The ambassador and I concluded that while Lumumba thought he could use the Soviets, they were, in fact, using him,’ Devlin later recalled.46 If the Soviets intervened in force, then the Americans would go in against them. ‘We would all be in the fight,’ as President Eisenhower put it.⁴⁷ In London, Harold Macmillan mused apocalyptically in his diary: ‘I have felt uneasy about the summer of 1960. It has a terrible similarity to 1914. Now, Congo may play the role of Serbia. Except for the terror of the nuclear power on both sides, we might easily slide into the 1914 situation.’⁴⁸ George Kennedy Young believed that the Congo was the first test for a new Russian strategy of ‘revolution by proxy’. The Joint Intelligence Committee in London began work on a paper on the Russian capabilities for intervention, and military planners undertook ‘preliminary work’ on a response.⁴⁹

Hundreds of KGB men, Devlin believed, were flooding into the country during July and August. His agents at the airport counted anyone white coming off a Russian plane as a citizen of the Soviet Union and quite possibly KGB. The Soviets had backed away from a full-scale military intervention but they were offering extensive support. Devlin was sure that arms and ammunition were also arriving, packed in Red Cross boxes, as part of a Soviet strategy to make Lumumba dependent and ultimately ensure that he was under their control.⁵⁰

The White House was watching closely. When Devlin went back to Washington to brief CIA chief Allen Dulles he told him that the US ‘could not afford to lose the Congo to the Soviet Union’.⁵¹ Devlin said he thought the Soviets were planning to use the anarchy in the country to establish a strategic foothold in Africa. If they controlled Lumumba and the Congo, they could use it as a power base to influence nine neighbouring countries. Devlin painted an incredibly dark picture in which the Soviets would try and outflank NATO by extending their influence from the Congo up through Africa and via Nasser in Egypt to the Mediterranean. The Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon were likewise determined to prevent Soviet control of key airfields and bases.⁵² Control of the Congo could also give the Soviet Union a near monopoly on the production of cobalt, a critical mineral used in missiles and weapons systems, putting the United States’ own weapons and space programmes at a ‘severe disadvantage’.53 Sixty per cent of the world’s cobalt supply came from a single Belgian company in the Katanga. The Soviets did send people to try and obtain uranium ore for their nuclear programme at one point.⁵⁴

Suddenly, the Congo was being drawn into the heart of the Cold War. This was a pattern replicated across Africa and Asia as local struggles were sucked into the battle for influence between the two superpowers. ‘Poor Lumumba. He was no Communist,’ Devlin recalled years later. ‘He was just a poor jerk who thought “I can use these people.” I’d seen that happen in Eastern Europe. It didn’t work very well for them, and it didn’t work for him.’⁵⁵ At the time there was no sympathy, though. This was a man who could not be dealt with. He was ‘a Castro or worse’, said Allen Dulles. ‘It is safe to go on the assumption that Lumumba has been bought by the Communists.’⁵⁶ Only the State Department’s intelligence arm stood against the consensus by saying he was an opportunist not a Communist.⁵⁷

Daphne Park and Larry Devlin knew each other well and became lifelong friends. To Devlin, Park was ‘an absolutely charming young woman and one of the best intelligence officers I have ever encountered’. Britain and America were not always easy allies in the developing world, where America’s distaste for colonialism often clashed with British history and investments. In the Congo, American officials were suspicious that the British were manoeuvring to support the Katanga secession.⁵⁸ Devlin maintained that while he and Park worked separately (formal liaison was supposed to go through the capitals and not be undertaken in the field) and did not carry out joint operations, they ‘had come to similar conclusions’ about Lumumba and the other key players.⁵⁹

Daphne Park had remained in touch with Lumumba despite, or perhaps because of, her suspicions about him. ‘Lumumba got used to finding me useful and he used to send people to see me.’And it was completely cold blooded – he had no illusions. He knew I wanted to know what he was doing and I was perfectly happy that he should know.’ He knew she worked for MI6, but it was never discussed explicitly. ‘I remember one day having a conversation with Lumumba about it and he said more or less “What’s in it for you?” And I said, “Oh knowing the ideas and the thinking of an important man.” And he said, “So you would put my interests first?” and I said, “No, certainly not – I put my country’s interests first, yours next, but if things go well it will be identical.” Months later he said to me that I had impressed him, that I hadn’t attempted to say that I loved him best. I’d said outright what I stood for, what I believed in.’ Like others, Park watched as Lumumba became increasingly autocratic and mercurial under the pressures of office and of being at the epicentre of the Cold War, alienating and frightening some of his closest colleagues, occasionally employing thugs and violence.60

If Devlin was her ally, then Daphne Park’s nemesis was Andrée Blouin, one of Lumumba’s closest advisers. Madame Blouin was Lumumba’s protocol chief and companion to his deputy and she exerted considerable influence. She was half African, half French, and after being abandoned by her parents grew up in a brutal orphanage in the French Congo. The experience turned her into a steely character, fiercely anti-Western, and she became close to a number of African nationalists and to one of the travelling leftists who had gathered around Lumumba. Always well dressed in Parisian haute couture and a touch aloof, she was, Devlin thought (despite working against her), ‘tantalising’ and ‘glamorous’.⁶¹ Those were not words people used about Daphne Park, who had her own views about her opponent. ‘Madame Blouin was a very powerful and rather wicked Guinean who was right in the pocket of the Russians.’

Devlin sat in his office on 18 August 1960 encrypting one of his most important and alarmist cables: ‘EMBASSY AND STATION BELIEVE CONGO EXPERIENCING CLASSIC COMMUNIST EFFORT TAKEOVER GOVERNMENT … WHETHER OR NOT LUMUMBA ACTUALLY COMMIE OR JUST PLAYING COMMIE GAME TO ASSIST HIS SOLIDIFYING POWER – ANTI-WEST FORCES RAPIDLY INCREASING POWER – THERE MAY BE LITTLE TIME LEFT IN WHICH TO TAKE ACTION TO AVOID ANOTHER CUBA.’⁶² The reference to Cuba, where a pro-American regime had fallen to Communist Fidel Castro the previous year, was designed to ring alarm bells in Washington as loudly as possible. The fear was that key strategic states were beginning to fall to nationalist, anti-Western forces, friendly to the Soviets.

Devlin’s cable convinced Washington that action needed to be taken. A National Security meeting at the White House began with a discussion of the ‘grave situation’ and fears were expressed that Soviet officials were now pulling Lumumba’s strings.63 It looked as if he might be trying to force the UN out in order to allow the Soviets to intervene in force, it was said. Officials around the table predicted that Lumumba would use the Force Publique to drive all whites out, apart from Soviet technicians. According to the official note, the President stressed that the UN had to be kept in at all costs, ‘even if such action is used by the Soviets as the basis for starting a fight’.⁶⁴ Something else was said which was never written in the formal note of the meeting. At one point President Eisenhower turned to CIA Director Allen Dulles and said he wanted Lumumba ‘eliminated’.⁶⁵ The man who took the notes at the meeting could not quite believe what he had heard. There was a silence and then the meeting continued. A week later at a meeting of the so-called Special Group which co-ordinated covert action, Dulles presented a plan to bribe parliamentarians to vote out Lumumba. In response, a presidential adviser said that Eisenhower had ‘expressed extremely strong feelings on the necessity for very straightforward action in this situation and he wondered whether the plans as outlined were sufficient to accomplish this’.⁶⁶ Dulles personally cabled Devlin the next day: ‘WE CONCLUDE THAT HIS REMOVAL MUST BE AN URGENT AND PRIME OBJECTIVE AND THAT UNDER EXISTING CONDITIONS THIS WOULD BE A HIGH PRIORITY OF OUR COVERT ACTION. HENCE WE WISH TO GIVE YOU WIDE AUTHORITY.’⁶⁷

Devlin was offered $100,000 in funds for any operation, without anyone back in headquarters signing off. He was told that if need be he could act without referring to either his Ambassador or most of his CIA seniors. Devlin and his team began to work actively against Lumumba, employing the full panoply of political warfare techniques and tapping up the CIA’s network of agents and contacts. Newspapers were used to spread stories attacking Lumumba. Rallies were organised. Opposition members of parliament were ordered to work to get him dismissed in a vote of no-confidence and papers drafted for President Kasavubu on the best way to remove Lumumba from power.68 Eventually in early September, the largely ineffective Kasavubu, encouraged by both Devlin and the Belgians, tried to sack Lumumba. In turn Lumumba tried to remove Kasavubu, creating political deadlock. The city was quiet but the countryside was slipping out of control with murders and refugees spreading anarchy.

One of Park’s most important contacts was Lumumba’s aide de camp, Damian Kandolo. He was from the same tribe as Lumumba and was trusted by him, so his conversations with her were invaluable. He was particularly helpful in explaining what Madame Blouin and the Guineans around Lumumba were up to. But that group had decided they wanted to get rid of Kandolo, possibly because they had learnt of his relationship with Park. One day he was seized under Lumumba’s orders. He was beaten up and his arm broken. He was then put in a car and driven away to be killed. But the people who were driving him were drunk and it was raining and dark. They had an accident and Kandolo managed to roll out of the car into a ditch. They searched for him but after a while simply gave up. Kandolo managed to get himself to a small mission hospital which was not too far away and he went to ground there. He sent a message to Park to ask for help to get his wife and child across the river to Brazzaville because he thought that the thugs would go and look for him at his house and attack his wife if they did not find him. Park went to collect her and put her on the ferry to Brazzaville. Then she went to see Kandolo under cover of night. The hospital was no more than a few small huts and she knew which one he was in. But because it was dark when she entered, Kandolo thought it was the thugs who had come to finish the job, and he attacked Park fiercely. ‘It’s me!’ she cried, bringing a halt to the rain of blows. She explained that she had a plan to get him out stuffed into the rear of her tiny car. ‘The great thing about having a Citroën DC is that people never think you are going to hide anything in it. I mean if I’d had a great big car with a boot I’d have had problems … I was an appalling driver, but I always had the back of my car piled up with blankets and boxes and all sorts of things, so it was quite easy to put him in and pile a few boxes and blankets [on top of him].’ Park was nervous but fired up by adrenalin. She eventually made it to the ferry and placed her grateful passenger on board. Kandolo would not be out of the Congo for long.

During the stand-off between Kasavubu and Lumumba, Mobutu went to see Devlin. The two men were extremely close. Devlin had personally wrestled a gunman to the ground who had been trying to assassinate Mobutu, pulling the pistol back to break the man’s finger. Mobutu was grateful and became a regular dinner guest at Devlin’s expansive villa with its six bathrooms and foyer the size of a hotel lobby.

‘I’m anxious to talk to you,’ Mobutu told Devlin. Mobutu understood better than Lumumba how to play the Cold War game. He knew to whisper quietly into the ear of the Soviet-obsessed CIA man exactly what he wanted to hear. ‘The Soviets are pouring into the country. You must know that, Mr Devlin?’ Devlin nodded. ‘We didn’t fight for independence to have another country re-colonize us.’ Mobutu complained that Lumumba had failed to keep the Soviet influence out of his army.69 He said he was prepared to overthrow Lumumba if the US recognised a temporary government, which in turn would remove the Soviets.

‘And Lumumba and Kasavubu, what happens to them?’ asked Devlin.

‘They’ll both have to be neutralised.’

Devlin, knowing that he had not yet received specific authorisation but had been given wide latitude to act, held out his hand with the words: ‘I can assure you the United States government will recognise a temporary government composed of civilian technocrats.’ Devlin drove to see his Ambassador at 2 a.m. to tell him what had happened. He then cabled back to the CIA to say they could still call it all off if they disagreed with his decision to offer support. In true bureaucratic style, Devlin says he never received a reply, providing Washington with deniability for having backed the coup if something went wrong. UN liaison officers reported seeing Western military attachés visiting Mobutu ‘with bulging briefcases containing thick brown paper packets which they obligingly deposited on his table’.⁷⁰

It was not just Washington that wanted something done. Covert action was London’s preferred option as well. Ambassador Scott had become increasingly concerned after visiting Lumumba in August. He found the Prime Minister’s phone ringing a dozen times in ten minutes and files piled up on his desk. He looked as if he had not slept. ‘It was by then widely known that he could only carry on by taking drugs. There was a kind of glaze in his eyes,’ he recalled, also noting Madame Blouin hanging around the margins.71 In early September, the Foreign Secretary, Alec Douglas-Home, reported to the cabinet that Lumumba had been ‘successful in obtaining considerable support, probably including some military personnel, from the Soviet bloc’. Eleven Soviet military transport aircraft arrived in Stanleyville, heightening fears that a conflict was on the way. London believed they had an African Nasser on their hands. Douglas-Home proposed and the cabinet agreed that ‘open support of Colonel Mobutu or opposition to Mr Lumumba was likely to prove counterproductive, though it would be right to follow this course privately’.⁷² Prime Minister Macmillan at the end of August had ordered MI6 to work with the CIA to remove Lumumba from power. MI6 chief Dick White, never a great proponent of aggressive action, was not overly keen on the idea but passed the order to Daphne Park.⁷³

On 14 September Colonel Mobutu’s voice crackled on to the radio. He announced that the army was ‘neutralising’ politicians until the end of the year and installing a College of Commissioners to run the country. Publicly, the coup was directed at both the President and the Prime Minister, but it was primarily directed at Lumumba. As he heard the news, Devlin was at a party. He watched with some satisfaction as Madame Blouin took a phone call and then rushed away. He reflected that his efforts were at last ‘bearing fruit’, especially once Mobutu set about expelling Soviet officials.⁷⁴ The Russian Ambassador turned up in the middle of the night at UN headquarters asking for protection and saying he feared he might be sent to Siberia by his superiors for having failed.⁷⁵ Devlin personally made sure that the visas of Soviet diplomats were cancelled, forcing them to leave the country. He also took a lead role in advising which politicians Mobutu should appoint. Kandolo, whom Park had smuggled out of the country in her car, ended up as a commissioner running part of the Security Service. An even more powerful figure was the head of intelligence, Victor Nendaka, another former colleague of Lumumba, who had been persuaded to switch sides. ‘He was Larry Devlin’s man,’ recalled Park. ‘But between us we had it sewn up more or less.’ Madame Blouin fled first to Ghana. A few weeks later, Allen Dulles told the National Security Council in Washington that the agency had ‘succeeded’ in ‘neutralising Mme. Blouin, who now wants to come to the US. She is writing her memoirs, which, Mr Dulles observed, should make interesting reading.’76 How they succeeded in ‘neutralising’ her is not discussed.

Lumumba had been trapped with two concentric rings of troops around him. There were Congolese troops who wanted to arrest him on the outer perimeter and closer to him a UN force which said it could guarantee his safety only so long as he remained where he was.

But Lumumba was still dangerous in the eyes of the West. He had the support of a significant section of the country as well as the makings of an alternative government with a small army out in Stanleyville. That made him a threat, especially if he ever got out or if parliament was recalled. Soviet-backed African countries began to pressure Mobutu to return Lumumba to office. The Americans were unsure that Mobutu had the nerve to hold out. They worried he might have a breakdown.⁷⁷ The CIA wanted a permanent solution to the one man whom it saw as the source of all the problems. Lumumba remained ‘a grave danger as long as he was not disposed of’, said Dulles at a National Security Council meeting.⁷⁸

Five days after the coup, Devlin got a cable with the codeword ‘Prop’. It was from Richard Bissell, the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans. Only four people at CIA headquarters had access to Prop messages and Devlin alone in the Congo received them. His orders were to keep the messages hidden from colleagues and give them priority over all other traffic. The cable said a senior officer whom Devlin would recognise would arrive in Leopoldville around 27 September. He would identify himself as ‘Joe from Paris’. Devlin was to carry out his instructions.⁷⁹ A week later as he left the Embassy, Devlin saw a man he recognised get up from a table at a café across the street. They got into Devlin’s car and he turned up the radio. As they drove away, the man turned to Devlin. ‘I’m Joe from Paris,’ he said. ‘I’ve come to give you instructions about a highly sensitive operation.’

The man’s real name was Sidney Gottlieb, known to some as the ‘dark sorcerer’ for his conjuring in the most sinister recesses of the CIA. With his club-foot, he was perhaps too easy to caricature as a cross between a Bond villain and Dr Strangelove, a scientist who always wanted to push further without worrying about the morality of where it all led. He masterminded the sprawling MKULTRA programme which had begun in 1953, without any oversight, to experiment on mind control using an array of medical and scientific experiments on Americans, including the use of electroshock and LSD (which Gottlieb himself claimed to have taken 200 times).80 At least one person involved in his experiments died under suspicious circumstances and others went mad. Gottlieb was also the go-to man when it came to eliminating America’s enemies. These were busy times. He was looking at ways of removing Fidel Castro using exploding cigars and poisoned wet-suits, as well as removing the leader of the Dominican Republic. The two men in the car in Leopoldville remained quiet until they reached a safe house. Then Gottlieb said he had brought Devlin poison to kill Lumumba.⁸¹

‘Isn’t this unusual?’ Devlin said. He had never been asked to kill anyone before. ‘Who authorised this operation?’

‘President Eisenhower,’ Gottlieb said. ‘I wasn’t there when he approved it but Dick Bissell said that Eisenhower wanted Lumumba removed.’ Had Eisenhower meant the phrase ‘elimination’ on 18 August to be an order for assassination? Later some of those present at the meeting said they were not sure that he had. But CIA chief Dulles, as well as others, believed they knew exactly what the President meant even if he had been careful not to say it too directly. Dulles had begun to put a plan into effect through his Deputy, Richard Bissell.

Devlin lit a cigarette and stared down at his shoes.

‘It’s your responsibility to carry out the operation, you alone,’ Gottlieb said ‘The details are up to you, but it’s got to be clean – nothing that can be traced back to the US government.’ There was silence. Then he pulled out a small package. ‘Take this,’ he said, handing it over. ‘With the stuff that’s in there, no one will ever be able to know that Lumumba was assassinated.’

There were several different poisons which had come from the US army biological warfare institution at Fort Detrick. Gottlieb had explored using rabbit fever, undulant fever, anthrax, smallpox and sleeping sickness. One poison was concealed in a tube of toothpaste and was designed to make it look as if Lumumba had died from polio. Grimly Devlin took the poisons and the accessories, including needles, rubber gloves and a mask.

Devlin always says that after accepting the poisons he threw them in the Congo River, neglecting to mention that he only did this months later when their potency had expired. In the meantime he kept them in his safe. When one officer visited Devlin, he mentioned he had a virus in the safe. ‘I knew it wasn’t for somebody to get his polio shot up to date,’ recalled the visitor later.82

Devlin maintained that he had no intention of going ahead with this plan. ‘To me it was murder,’ he said on his deathbed. ‘I’m not a 007 guy.’⁸³ He said he knew that refusing the order outright would lead to his recall and someone else being appointed who would carry out the order, destroying his career in the process. So Devlin says he decided to play it slow. He had only one agent with access to Lumumba’s living quarters, where he was effectively imprisoned, but Devlin said he was not sure the agent could get in. He looked at having another agent take refuge with Lumumba to administer the poison but that did not work. He also had conversations with Congolese contacts interested in killing Lumumba.⁸⁴

Headquarters became impatient. It offered to send out another officer to help in case Devlin was not able to devote enough time to the plans. Devlin replied that, if that were done, the officer should be supplied through the diplomatic pouch with a high-powered hunting rifle which could be kept ‘in office pending opening of hunting season’.⁸⁵ A shady stateless mercenary, willing to do anything, was provided with plastic surgery and a toupee by the CIA and sent off to the Congo to help, but he never got close to Lumumba.⁸⁶ The CIA even suggested using a ‘commando type group’ to abduct Lumumba by assaulting his residence.⁸⁷

On 19 September, Alec Douglas-Home talked to President Eisenhower. ‘Lord Home said the Soviets have lost much by their obvious efforts to disrupt matters in the Congo,’ the minutes recorded. ‘The president expressed his wish that Lumumba would fall into a river full of crocodiles; Lord Home said regretfully that we have lost many of the techniques of old-fashioned diplomacy.’88 A week later Home, along with Prime Minister Macmillan, met President Eisenhower in New York. ‘Lord Home raised the question why we are not getting rid of Lumumba at the present time,’ the American note-taker recorded. ‘He stressed now is the time to get rid of Lumumba.’⁸⁹

Murder was on the minds of some in London. Ian Scott sent a telegram to London, including Downing Street, on 27 September: ‘It seems to me that the best interests of the Congo (and the rest of us) would be served by the departure of Lumumba from the scene either to jail (and sufficient evidence exists to convict him of treason and of complicity in attempted murder of Colonel Mobutu) or abroad,’ he wrote, calling for pressure to be brought on Mobutu, who was looking ‘irresolute’ (‘he has not the makings of a dictator’, Scott wrongly predicted).⁹⁰ One response, in a secret document which could only travel in a locked box, came from H. F. T. Smith, a Foreign Office official who would later be appointed head of MI5. He agreed that pressure should be brought to bear to prevent Lumumba’s return. But Smith doubted Scott’s remedies would solve the problem. Mobutu was too weak and other African leaders would support Lumumba in jail or abroad. There were only two solutions. ‘The first is the simple one of ensuring Lumumba’s removal from the scene by killing him. This should in fact solve the problem, since, so far as we can tell, Lumumba is not a leader of a movement within which there are potential successors of his quality and influence. His supporters are much less dangerous material.’ The other solution offered was a constitutional change to reduce the Prime Minister’s powers so that he could return to office but weakened. ‘Of these two possibilities, my preference (though it might be expressed as a wish rather than a proposal) would be for Lumumba to be removed from the scene altogether, because I fear that as long as he is about his power to do damage can only be slightly modified.’ Comments added to Smith’s memo include ‘There is much to be said for eliminating Lumumba’, although others voiced scepticism.⁹¹

Killing people, Daphne Park maintained, was not on MI6’s agenda. ‘We didn’t have a licence to kill,’ she explained years later. ‘Much as I hated people I don’t think I actually would have felt easy killing them or even having them killed. It was much more important to deal with the people who were alive. And fight the others by any way you can, of course, including destroying their reputation if you can – if that’s going to do the damage.’ Park, who was not told of the CIA plan, always believed that Devlin was too honourable and sensible to carry out his plan.

MI6 did contemplate murder at times – notably against Nasser – but even as it feared Nasser’s hand in the Congo, it also knew that in this case the nastier side of the business could be left to others.92 Daphne Park might not have been given a licence to kill, nor Devlin’s killer toothpaste, but she did have her own gadgets, courtesy of Q, the quartermaster for MI6. ‘Q used to produce the most wonderful gadgets for almost anything you could think of,’ explained Park. ‘Sometimes they didn’t totally succeed.’ Most gadgets supplied to field officers were designed to hide or pass information. These ranged from the typically British – a hollowed-out cricket ball – to the more painful – a bullet-shaped ‘rectal concealing device’. In the Congo there were concerns about crowds storming embassies and attacking cars, and so it had been decided that Park needed some protection. Head Office first of all gave her a gun, which Park put in the office safe fearing it would be stolen from her home. She was then informed that Q had come up with a device that had worked wonders in the Sudan in terms of crowd control and was ‘absolutely infallible’. It was a capsule which when thrown broke apart and emitted a smell guaranteed to send a gathered throng reeling. In other words it was a large stink bomb. A man was sent out to Leopoldville with a box of tricks to demonstrate. Q had clearly spent some time in the joke shop looking for inspiration because with him also came some itching powder (Park duly applied some of this to a Foreign Office official in the Embassy whom she loathed).

Daphne Park’s counterpart from Nairobi happened to be visiting. ‘Now, Daffers, we must test these things,’ he said, volunteering to try out the stink bomb.

‘Oh no you don’t. This is my patch,’ Park replied, unwilling to miss out on the fun. They drove out of town in her car to a quiet spot with a large storm ditch. One person would have to be the guineapig.

‘It has got to be me,’ said her counterpart. In true buccaneering style, both wanted to volunteer for the trenches.

‘We’ll toss for it,’ replied Park. Hugo won.

The capsule was duly opened and thrown in and he went down into the ditch. There was a long silence. It’s knocked him out, thought Park. She crept to the edge of the ditch and peered over and there he was crawling about in the mud.

‘Hugo, what the hell are you doing?’ she said.

‘Looking for that bloody thing – I can’t find it anywhere.’ It must have been a dud, they concluded.

‘Get out. It’s my turn now,’ she said. After they had used four of the stink bombs they faced facts and telegraphed London. ‘One of the things might just have been confused with a little smell of armpit but that was as far as it got. We do not think it would have made much difference to angry Congolese.’93

The Belgian government, like the CIA, was willing to entertain darker ambitions. It had made clear that it wanted Lumumba’s ‘Elimination definitive’, a phrase employed by their Minister for African Affairs. The Belgian codename for Lumumba was ‘Satan’, a reflection of how they worked to portray him in the media and internationally. Their plan to kill him was called ‘Operation Barracuda’.⁹⁴ It is unclear if they co-ordinated with the Americans. Three days after a meeting in the White House on 21 September, Dulles sent a personal cable to Devlin. ‘WE WISH GIVE EVERY POSSIBLE SUPPORT IN ELIMINATING LUMUMBA FROM ANY POSSIBILITY RESUMING GOVERNMENTAL POSITION.’⁹⁵ By November, the CIA had focused on a plan to lure Lumumba out of his refuge and then hand him over to the Congolese authorities who could take care of the rest. Events intervened before they had a chance to try.

An almighty thunderstorm struck Leopoldville on the night of 27 November 1960. Lumumba exploited it as cover to stow himself away in a Chevrolet used to take servants home. He began to make his way to Stanleyville, one of his bastions of support. He managed only slow progress through the driving rain, stopping to speak to supporters en route while Mobutu’s men, aided by the Belgians, pursued him.⁹⁶

Around midnight on 1 December, Lumumba was captured at a river crossing just before he reached friendly territory. The local UN garrison was given orders not to place him in protective custody or to get in the way of his arrest.97 He was taken by aeroplane back to Leopoldville the next day. He emerged with his hands tied behind his back. A soldier lifted his head to show his face to the waiting cameraman, who could see blood on him. He was driven in the back of a truck through town. His hair was dishevelled and his glasses lost. The truck drove right past the UN headquarters.⁹⁸ Images of his mistreatment led to a wave of anger internationally, directed at the UN among others for failing to intervene. As the UN found in later years, maintaining a policy of neutrality and non-interference often meant becoming passive observers to tragic, sometimes violent events.⁹⁹ Although there was a sense that some in the UN had taken sides or at least were willing to play both sides, the Secretary General of the UN had told a British diplomat a few months earlier that Lumumba was ‘already clearly a Communist stooge’ and that he hoped to prevent the Soviet penetration of Africa.¹⁰⁰ Next Lumumba was driven to Mobutu’s house where his old friend paid his respects. He was then taken to a paratrooper camp at Thysville a hundred miles from the city. A soldier read out a statement he had written in which he said he was head of the government and then stuffed the paper into his mouth. But the dilemma remained over how to eliminate him definitively from the political scene. The US and Belgians both realised that it was better to have the Congolese do the dirty work for them now he was in their hands.

Lumumba’s powers of oratory had not deserted him and on 13 January 1961 there was a mutiny at the paratrooper camp. This led to immediate fears that Lumumba might escape again. He had to be dealt with. ‘I assumed, particularly after the Thysville mutiny, that the government would seek a permanent solution to the Lumumba problem,’ said Devlin. ‘But I was never consulted on the matter and never offered advice.’¹⁰¹ He may not have been consulted, but he was told it was going to happen by Victor Nendaka, his man who ran the Security Service, a subtle, largely semantic difference. Devlin would later write a cable to CIA headquarters outlining what would happen next but delayed sending it for reasons that remain unclear.¹⁰² The incoming Kennedy administration in Washington was divided over whether to continue the hard line over African nationalists or to appeal to the newly independent countries. There were fears in the CIA that the new administration was going ‘soft’. Kennedy himself wondered after his election whether or not to ‘save’ Lumumba and to work with him. Devlin had cabled Washington just before the mutiny desperately trying to maintain a firm line by providing the most alarmist possible take on the situation. ‘PRESENT GOVERNMENT MAY FALL WITHIN FEW DAYS,’ Devlin said. ‘RESULT WOULD ALMOST CERTAINLY BE CHAOS AND RETURN LUMUMBA TO POWER … REFUSAL TO TAKE DRASTIC STEPS AT THIS TIME WILL LEAD TO DEFEAT OF UNITED STATES POLICY IN CONGO.’103 The Belgians also made clear that they wanted Lumumba transferred to Katanga and delivered into the hands of his enemies. The job had to be finished quickly.

Just before dawn on 17 January, Lumumba was taken from his cell by Victor Nendaka, his former comrade and now Devlin’s man as head of the Security Service. He was brought to a plane. On board his goatee beard was torn out and he was forced to eat it.¹⁰⁴ A debate had been held within the Congolese Commission on how to end the instability. A collective decision was reached to send Lumumba to Elisabethville, the Katangan capital. Among those taking the decision was Damien Kandolo, a member of the College of Commissioners, Daphne Park’s man, as well as Devlin’s man Nendaka. On arrival, Lumumba was dragged out and thrown on to a jeep under watching Belgian eyes. A small Swedish detail of six UN troops at the airport also witnessed him being driven away. Lumumba was conveyed to a colonial villa, owned by a Belgian, where he was beaten again. The UN knew he had landed but did nothing to intervene. Katangan ministers, including Moise Tshombe, joined in the beatings at the villa.¹⁰⁵

That night he was led to a clearing in the wood. With Katangan ministers and a number of Belgians present, Lumumba was put up against a tree and executed by a firing squad (the squad included Belgians, who were either mercenaries or working for the Katangan gendarmerie). The corpses of Lumumba and two aides were hacked to pieces and plunged into a barrel of acid by two Europeans. ‘We were there two days,’ recalled one of the men years later. ‘We did things an animal wouldn’t do. And that’s why we were drunk, stone drunk.’¹⁰⁶

A few days later it was announced to the world that Lumumba and two aides had escaped from custody and then been killed by villagers. A Katangan minister held a press conference at which he produced a death certificate. It read ‘died in the bush’. ‘There are those people who accuse us of assassination,’ he said. ‘I have only one response – prove it.’107 No one believed the story. Demonstrations erupted in many countries and Belgian embassies were attacked. The crowds may not have known the detail but they understood that Belgian complicity ran deep. Lumumba became a martyr, his death a cause célèbre around the world which Moscow adeptly exploited, even establishing its own university named after him to train and recruit African leaders of the future. ‘It was Belgian advice, Belgian orders and finally Belgian hands that killed Lumumba on that 17 January 1961,’ according to one detailed study of events.¹⁰⁸

Mobutu, once Lumumba’s ally and trusted friend, almost certainly knew of the killing of the comrade he had betrayed. ‘I can’t believe he wasn’t involved,’ confessed Devlin. ‘But it was just one of those questions you didn’t ask at the time.’¹⁰⁹ Did the CIA know? No direct link to Larry Devlin or the CIA was ever proven, although it is clear that those who ordered the killing were close to both the CIA and MI6 in the Congo. Oddly, one disaffected CIA man claimed that during his training in 1965 another officer had described driving around with Lumumba’s body in the boot of his car. When, a decade later, the disaffected officer again encountered the man who had made the claim, that man went to the bathroom twice during dinner to spend fifteen minutes scrubbing and drying his hands, cleaning his fingernails and staring at himself in the mirror. No evidence has emerged to back up the man’s claim and the issue of who pulled the strings remains obscure.¹¹⁰

Mobutu’s rise to power was complete in 1965 as he launched his final coup. Devlin was there in the background, advising him on whom to appoint.¹¹¹ ‘He had shuffled new governments like cards, finally settling on Mobutu as president,’ according to one former CIA officer.¹¹² Colonel Mobutu eventually mutated into Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, ‘the all-powerful warrior who goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake’, a strange leopardskin-clad character who began to retreat from reality. He was the archetypal African ‘big man’. Again the Congolese saw nothing of their country’s wealth, as it ended up in Swiss bank accounts.113 The Congo – or Zaire as it was renamed – was a key US ally, a base for a covert CIA war in Angola, and Mobutu was supported personally with money, guns and intelligence from Devlin’s successors. His regime received something like a billion dollars over three decades.¹¹⁴ When the Cold War ended in the 1990s, Mobutu was quickly abandoned. As in so many other countries, the superpowers came to the Congo, played out their conflict and then left, leaving nothing of value behind.

Devlin says he was haunted by the assassination plan which he never carried out. One of the problems for him was that it became public in the mid-1970s when the US Congress unearthed the CIA’s secret assassination programmes to kill foreign heads of government, including the schemes to poison Lumumba and to use the mafia to kill Fidel Castro at around the same time. The CIA emerged from the process chastened and circumscribed, at least for a few years until President Reagan unleashed it again. Sidney Gottlieb tried to atone for his past by helping young children with speech impediments and volunteering at a hospice.¹¹⁵ For Devlin, the exposure proved difficult. At parties, there would be whispers and people would edge away from him. At one point he was even warned that Carlos the Jackal wanted to kill him to avenge Lumumba. He grew tired of accusations that he was a murderer. But he never really left the Congo. He completed a second tour and then became head of the CIA’s Africa division. In 1974 he retired but went on to work for a financier who was investing in the Congo’s mineral resources, and he remained close to Mobutu.

Daphne Park left the Congo in 1961. On her last night Kandolo came to dinner at her house. He fidgeted throughout the meal before asking her whether she really did not see Africans as different from white people. She did not, she explained. Some she loathed and some she loved. Park, who would always be fascinated by the riddle of power, went on to spend three years as station chief in Lusaka, working closely with Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia. MI6, like Britain, struggled with post-colonial Africa, and among a certain breed of officers, though not Park, there was a sense that they could not quite come to terms with the end of the Empire. Rhodesia proved a particularly painful chapter, with much sympathy among some old-school officers for the white settlers. Africa remained important for MI6 as a place where it found it easier to target Soviet bloc officials than it was on their home turf, and so it became an important testing ground for the best new officers to learn the ropes. It also became a place in which MI6 did much work in countering Soviet ideology by supporting academics, trade union leaders and journalists. While operations in the Soviet bloc would become the dominant strand of MI6 work in the coming years and the field where ambitious officers headed, Africa, like the Middle East, would remain an important sub-culture within the office in which specialists operated and a more buccaneering style, evidenced by Park, persisted just beneath the surface.

As the 1960s progressed, Daphne Park moved across to the next hot spot of the Cold War as consul general in Hanoi, North Vietnam, during the country’s struggle against the United States. Her movements were highly restricted (when told she could not even have a bicycle she offered to ride a tandem with a Vietnamese officer), but the intelligence she supplied on her trips out of the country was almost the only source that the US and UK had on what was happening in the North and her work brought her many friends in Washington.116 Asia was becoming another crucial zone of conflict in the intelligence war. Maurice Oldfield had become Controller for Asia and had taken MI6 into Indonesia and Indo-China in the 1950s to fight Communism, working closely with the Americans. Graham Greene paid the occasional visit to Indo-China during Oldfield’s time, still it seems doing the odd bit of intelligence work while writing. His Europe of The Third Man was now giving way to the Asia of The Quiet American, charting the flow of the Cold War east and with it Greene’s, and Britain’s, unease with American power. Not everyone was convinced by the quality of MI6 work in Asia. A new recruit to cover the region was Gerry Warner. Fresh from St Peter’s College, Oxford, he had been invited to see an admiral at Buckingham Gate who recruited for MI6. He found the service a disappointing place. He had learnt Mandarin and so was able to compare the reports coming in from the service’s top agent in Hong Kong with those available in the local newspapers. The correlation was obvious but the revelation that Our Man in Hong Kong was a fabricator was not well received by the office. Posted to Burma, Warner found an ineffective station chief (with a taste for skinny-dipping parties) who was fighting the last war by burying radio sets in villages and not recruiting agents or collecting intelligence. He decided he wanted to return home and quit.

Daphne Park eventually rose to become a controller at MI6. If it had not been for the sexism that pervaded the organisation, some say, she would have risen to the next level up, to become a director, or perhaps even have reached the summit as Chief or C. It would not be until the next century that a woman would rise to director level. Park retired from MI6 in 1979 but not from public life, as she became principal of Somerville, one of the last all-women colleges at Oxford University, and a member of the House of Lords where she retained the habit of speaking her mind irrespective of what she was supposed to say. She never married. ‘I had four or five love affairs,’ she recalled. ‘But only one that really mattered, and that ended in death, unfortunately.’117 There was a loneliness to Park that her colleagues understood and which was sublimated in her work and in her professional friendships. She remained close to Larry Devlin, talking frequently with him on the phone until they both died within a year of each other.

The Congo crisis also played its part in the ongoing debate within the service over covert action versus intelligence gathering. Chief Dick White disliked the type of political action which involved removing governments and wanted to focus on recruiting agents and collecting information. But one section of officers – particularly those who worked in Africa and the Middle East (the so-called Camel Corps) – argued that the two had to go together. For Daphne Park and those like her, intelligence was about building relationships with people, including top politicians, not spending countless months looking for a disaffected fourth secretary or cipher clerk with a drink problem in an embassy. The former kind of work, which many officers relished, offered a chance to understand the wider strategic direction of a country and to sway or even manipulate it. This in turn, they argued, provided intelligence. Only by supporting activists in their political goals would you learn about a country and what might happen. ‘Unless we show we’re prepared to help influence events, we won’t get intelligence and it is questionable if it is worth operating,’ the first Controller for Africa argued.¹¹⁸ Others in the Secret Service, especially those targeting the Soviet Union and its allies, favoured a more purist approach to intelligence gathering, focusing on the collection of information rather than the influencing of events. Back in London, only three months after Lumumba had been killed, a Russian was to offer the service the opportunity to begin rebuilding its capacity and its confidence for recruiting agents against the hardest target and its main enemy. He would pay with his life.