Reviews...
Queen of Spies? The fascinating life of Daphne Park
Kingston University Review
A new book by author Paddy Hayes lifts the lid on some of the hidden aspects of the life of Daphne Park (1921-2010), who was born in Surrey and became arguably one of Britain's most successful female spies in the post-1945 period.
Entitled Queen of Spies: Daphne Park, Britain's Cold War spy master, the new book is part biography and part history of the role of women in espionage during both the Second World War and the Cold War, a topic in gender history that still remains relatively under-researched by scholars.
Daphne Park, who eventually became Baroness Park of Monmouth and also (in 1980) Principal of Somerville College, Oxford, was – as one reviewer has put it – 'a child of Empire who became a Cold War Warrior'.
Taken to Africa by her mother when only six months old (her father worked as a tobacco farmer there), Daphne was raised in the southern highlands of Tanganyika (now Tanzania), where she lived a notably tough life in a mud-brick house that had no electricity or running water. This made the young Daphne very independent and hardy, ready to grab every opportunity that came her way.
Her mother pawned the last of her jewellery to send the eleven-year old Daphne back to England to attend a state school in south London, and Daphne did so well that she ended up studying at Somerville College, Oxford. During the Second World War, keen to serve her country after graduating in 1943, she joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, but during the selection process she came to the attention of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). The SOE was a secret sabotage and intelligence organisation that worked behind enemy lines. It had been the brain-child of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had instructed SOE to set Nazi-occupied Europe 'ablaze'.
Daphne trained as a briefing officer for SOE, giving instructions to the brave individuals, or sometimes teams of individuals, who were dropped by parachute into Occupied France to organize the resistance and to conduct high-risk sabotage operations.
When SOE disbanded at the end of the War, Daphne decided that she wanted to carry on in the world of intelligence, and set her sights on joining the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), or 'MI6' as it is more commonly known. However, as Hayes points out, in contrast to the relatively egalitarian ethos that had existed in SOE, the Secret Intelligence Service was still a very enclosed male-dominated world of bowler-hatted former Army officers and public schoolboys, who tended to inhabit the same London Clubs on the Mall and viewed women with great suspicion, seeing them as useful only as secretaries or filing-clerks.
Nevertheless, although something of an 'outsider', Daphne Park was stubborn and determined. By 1948, she was 'attached to the Foreign Office', but in reality was working for MI6. And she was so good at the work that she steadily made her way up through the ranks, carving out a highly successful career as an Intelligence Officer.
On the other hand, she had to sacrifice her private life. She was not allowed to marry (it was a rule within MI6 that female officers could not marry, a ruling that apparently remained in place until at least the 1980s).
Hayes describes Daphne Park's MI6 postings to Moscow, Leopoldville, and Hanoi, and in each posting she demonstrated great gifts for playing the dual roles of both diplomat and spy (MI6 officers often operated under diplomatic cover from British Embassies). Some of the other MI6 officers likened her to Agatha Christie's matronly detective Miss Marple, but many of them developed a great respect for her work, while her enemies in this highly secret world noted her 'tough and uncompromising view of life'. It could be highly dangerous work when out in 'the field'. In the Congo in 1959-1960, for example, she came close to losing her life on at least two occasions.
In many ways, Park remained very much a daughter of Empire, with all the attitudes that came with this. She developed a lifelong hatred of the Russians, was suspicious of the French, and placed a great deal of emphasis on loyalty, trust and service to the British nation and its interests. Indeed, she admired the 'Bulldog Drummond' version of the Gentleman Spy, as portrayed in the intensely patriotic novels of Sapper, and she strongly disliked the gritty spy fiction of former MI6 spy-turned-author John le Carre, who she criticised for portraying the spy world as essentially nasty and treacherous.
In 1975 Park became the first woman to be made an Area Controller, which was MI6's most senior operational rank. However, the details of what she actually did during her time in this role remain largely (and frustratingly!) unknown. And this is where Paddy Hayes hits something of a brickwall in his biography of Park, a problem that is often faced by other historians who write about Britain's secret world of spying: in contrast to MI5 (the domestic Security Service), which has slowly opened up and released many of its 'historical' files to public access (via the National Archives at Kew), MI6 files remain unavailable. In fact, the Secret Service has made it very clear that they are unwilling to match MI5 and adopt any kind of 'openness' policy concerning their 'historical' files.
This means that Hayes has had to rely on newspapers or former colleagues or members of Park's family to fill in some of the gaps in her later career. All in all, though, Hayes has still written a fascinating study of an intriguing woman. If you are interested in the secret and shadowy world of spying, and also in how a woman broke down discriminatory and other barriers to carve out a remarkably successful career as a spy-master, then this is the book for you.
By Steve Woodbridge 2016/04/06
Steve Woodbridge is lecturer in History at Kingston University.
https://historyatkingston.wordpress.com
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The Washington Post Review
Daphne Park's career in British intelligence reads like a Cold War travelogue.
Over four decades, Park served in one hot spot after another: In Vienna after World War II, she helped locate Nazi rocket scientists. In Moscow, she helped map a surface-to-air missile defense system as it was being installed around the Soviet capital. In Congo, she became immersed in the postcolonial power struggle that led to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. During the Vietnam War, she became consul general in Hanoi.
Paddy Hayes's fascinating and long-overdue biography of Park is aptly titled "Queen of Spies." Others have referred to Park as 007, though they have also noted that she looked more like Miss Marple.
At the pinnacle of her career, Parks directed British intelligence operations in the Western Hemisphere and advised Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as Britain negotiated an end to the civil war in Rhodesia. Honored later in life with the title of baroness, Park served in the House of Lords — a fitting honor for a woman who defied gender stereotypes and discrimination to rise to the top of the chauvinistic world of British intelligence.
It was an extraordinary career for a woman who spent most of her childhood impoverished in Africa. Park had no formal education until she left home, alone, at age 11 to attend school in Britain. She earned a degree from Oxford in 1943 and then helped prepare special-operations troops dropped behind German lines in France.
Her stint in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa), Congo, may have been Park's most challenging assignment. There, American, Soviet and European interests maneuvered for advantage as the mineral-rich Belgian Congo prepared for independence and the West intensified its efforts to keep the new nation from aligning with the Soviet Union. Although Hayes stops short of accusing Park or her CIA counterpart, Lawrence Devlin, of ordering Lumumba's assassination, he argues that they set in motion the chain of events that made his death inevitable.
Park could not entirely escape the poisonous atmosphere that permeated the transatlantic intelligence community after the spy scandals that shook Britain in the 1950s and '60s. In some quarters, she was briefly suspected of disloyalty. "Whether Park was ever confronted with these accusations we do not yet know," Hayes writes, but if she was, "she remained silent about the confrontation to the grave." Park died in 2010 at age 88.
The drama of Park's life story transcends the leaden and acronym-laden prose of her biographer. The book also suffers from a lack of specific information about Park's role in important events. Hayes tries to fill the gaps by talking to Park's former colleagues, but without Park's full cooperation — she agreed to talk to Hayes on the condition that operational details not be discussed — the book at times feels speculative. Thus there remains an aura of mystery around Park. Perhaps the "queen of spies" wouldn't have it any other way.
By Robert Mitchell March 25, 2016
Robert Mitchell is an editor with the Washington Post-Bloomberg News service.
https://www.washingtonpost.com
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The CIA Review of Books on Intelligence Matters
In April 2008, at a conference on intelligence sponsored by the German Historical Institute, London, former CIA officer James Pavitt and the late NSA director William Odom joined Daphne Park, Baroness of Monmouth and the former MI6 Controller/Western Hemisphere, to discuss the world of contemporary intelligence. At 87, Baroness Park, radiating a "Miss Marple" charm, was both engaging and circumspect-leaving listeners coveting more detail about her career. Queen of Spies answers that call.
Daphne Margaret Sybil Désirée Park was born in Surrey, England, in 1921, home-schooled in Tanganyika under austere circumstances until 11, and then sent back to England to live with relatives and get a proper education. She did a bit more than that: by the time of her retirement, she had graduated from Oxford University with honors, served in WW II as a volunteer with Britain's First Aid Nursing Yeomancy (FANY), and later worked as an officer with the SOE. After the war she joined the Foreign Office, became an SIS officer, and after retiring in 1979, served as president of Somerville College at Oxford. In 1990 she was made a life peer and served as SIS's semi-official spokesperson in the House of Lords. None of these achievements was accomplished without precedent-setting breaks with tradition, so author Paddy Hayes focuses on how she met and overcame her constant career challenges.
Baroness Park's path to her MI6 appointment illustrates her outspoken determination to speak truth to power. As a FANY, she wrote a letter denouncing the performance of her superior and was promptly punished for her efforts while her superior was promoted. But her abilities had been noticed and Hayes tells how her SOE JEDBURGH colleagues came to her rescue and secured her return to duty as an officer. Likewise, after the war, Hayes describes her groundbreaking path into the Foreign Office and eventually SIS. She would learn Russian, subsequently serving in Moscow, Leopoldville, Lusaka, Hanoi, and Ulan Bator.
It was in Moscow in the mid-1950s that Park learned her tradecraft and honed her political skills while enduring the disruptions caused by the exposure of KGB agents in the British ranks, and the fallout from botched British operations against the Soviets. As head of station in Leopoldville, she became embroiled-with her CIA counterpart, Larry Devlin-in the Patrice Lumumba affair. It was there, too, that her ability to deal effectively in male-dominated circumstances was recognized and the likelihood of further advancement enhanced. Hayes's description of her time in Hanoi, a genuine hardship tour, is illuminating.
Daphne Park remained single and Hayes does not dodge the obvious questions. He writes about two serious affairs, one that came to nothing-in part, at least, because of the SIS policy that women in the service who married would have to resign. He also mentions instances when her gender threatened to become an issue when working with agents and how she subtly but forcefully and successfully asserted her command of the situation. (155)
Queen of Spies is documented by the relatively scant official record available, comments from former colleagues, and the few interviews of Park herself-all approved by SIS. And this accounts for the principal shortcoming of the book, since Hayes devotes considerable effort articulating Parks's feelings and views on the situations that confronted her. At one point he admits "being forced into the realm of speculation." (127) Thus the narrative is sprinkled with examples-comments that "she enjoyed the hot sun on her back"; (11) that "she'd have got the low-down on her rival" from her friend Maurice Oldfield; (198) that Oldfield "would have been instrumental in getting her a Controller's position"; (245) and on the issues he "probably influencing her decision" while in Kenya. (199)
There are a few factual items where Hayes's background in international commercial intelligence fails him. Examples include: Oleg Gordievsky was not a "defector-in-place"-he was an MI6 penetration. CIA officer Ted Shackley did not occupy the third most senior position in the agency. The statement that "the Agency was far more WASP than the Bureau and was naturally more sympathetic to Britain's interests" defies explanation. (257)
In spite of these, Queen of Spies is the only biography on Baroness Park and it fills a big gap. Hayes has produced an interesting and informative work.
By Hayden Peake Posted: Mar 29, 2016 07:17 PM
Compiled and reviewed by Hayden Peake
https://www.cia.gov
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Early Birds Book Review
Thrilling, compelling, brilliantly told—and it's all true. Paddy Hayes's Queen of Spies chronicles the bizarre experience of one of Britain's most celebrated spies: Daphne Park, a 1970s-era Area Controller and one of the only women to ever achieve such rank. Told through Park's eyes, Hayes covers her time with the Secret Intelligence Service from WWII to the Cold War.
By DeAnna Janes | February 19, 2016
http://www.earlybirdbooks.com
Read the Early Birds Book Review Here.
www.washingtontimes.com
At the age of 11, Daphne Park was living in a tin-roofed shack with no lights or running water in the British protectorate of Tanganyika when a letter arrived from London that changed her life forever. It was from her aunts, who were offering to provide her with a home and an education and in the end, it would lead to her becoming one of the first women spies.
How successful she was might be measured by a memorial address given after her death at the age of 77 when a former intelligence chief declared that her service in the Moscow station had convinced the Soviets that she was "an asset and not an embarrassment." In the wake of Miss Park's performance, he said, "Our presence in the Embassies, even in the Soviet bloc, was readily accepted."
Miss Park's active life did not end at her retirement from the secret service. She found favor with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who appointed her to the board of the BBC, a precursor to her later elevation to the House of Lords. Yet not everyone liked her. Many compared her to Agatha Christie's Miss Marple for her "deeply suspicious and sour" attitude toward life. But she did love being in the House of Lords and was "moved to tears by the admission ceremony." She was believed to have had two great love affairs but remained characteristically discreet about who and where. And she had strong feelings about her colleagues. She disliked espionage author John le Carre to the point that she once said she would "hang, draw and quarter him" for his belief that intelligence was a "world of cold betrayal."
"It's not," she said, "it's a world of trust. You can't run an agent without trust on both sides."
Paddy Hayes tracks the unusual life and times of "Daffers" as she became nicknamed back to her childhood in Britain in the 1930s "where order prevailed and people knew their place. Where Empire reigned supreme with almost a quarter of the globe still colored pink on school room maps as a sign of ownership." It was not a time when women were sought after in professions, especially that of espionage. Miss Park became one of the first women to rise to prominence in the British Secret Intelligence Service known as SIS.
In a series of vignettes, the author tells a dramatic story that he gathered over five decades of researching the shadowy world of intelligence and those who survived it as an occupation. Miss Park's achievements were remarkable. She became the SIS station commander in Leopoldville and worked closely with her CIA colleagues to bring about the downfall and murder of the tyrant Patrice Lumumba, the first premier of an independent Congo. Her capacity for taking risks was demonstrated in Moscow, where she was posted as an intelligence officer and where she became dangerously involved with fringe groups in Soviet society, which made her a target of the KGB. She also played a risky role in obtaining a copy of Boris Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago."
Mr. Hayes suggests that it was Miss Park who controlled or "ran" a diplomat working undercover for the United States in Hanoi when the Vietnam War was at its height. At one time, Miss Park was suspected by a colleague in SIS of working for the Soviet's KGB. In fact, Miss Park was one of those convinced of the guilt of the notorious spy Kim Philby, who fooled most of his British colleagues by persuading them that he was one of their own. Even when his double-dealing was exposed, Philby escaped to Moscow and was never penalized for being the kind of traitor who brought about the deaths of many British agents.
Her biographer emphasizes that Miss Park's achievements should never be underestimated. "From the moment the eleven year old girl set foot on British soil in 1933 she never once faltered. The Service she joined in 1948 was a chauvinistic, militaristic men's club. The one club that did grant her admission insisted she enter by its side door."
He noted the difficulty of finding out what Miss Park was like, pointing out, "She was a spy and spies are careful." Few photographs exist of Miss Park and she didn't write too many letters even to friends who recalled, she just telephoned when she arrived back in London." Her motto might have been to leave "nothing more than a footprint in the sand" observes Mr. Hayes, yet from those blurred markers he asserts, an extraordinary person had emerged.
By Muriel Dobbin - - Wednesday, February 3, 2016
Muriel Dobbin is a former White House and national political reporter for McClatchy newspapers and the Baltimore Sun.
www.washingtontimes.com
Read the Washington Times Review Here.
www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk
Alan Judd reviews Paddy Hayes's biography of 'Queen of Spies', the remarkable Daphne Park. In 1933, the eleven year old was plucked from poverty in Africa to live with her grand-aunts in London; seven years later she had won two scholarships to Oxford.
Queen of Spies: Daphne Park, Britain's Cold War Spy Master, by Paddy Hayes, Duckwork, £20, 328 pages
By Alan Judd
Daphne Park, Baroness Park of Monmouth, served during the Second World War with SOE and afterwards with MI6 before becoming principal of Somerville College. She spent her early childhood in what was then Southern Tanganyika, 500 hundred miles south-west of Dar-es-Salaam (not north, as stated in the blurb). Like many white settlers then and for decades afterwards, she was brought up under a tin roof without electricity or running water. She was educated via a correspondence course run by the Anglican church until, in 1932, aged 11, she was sent to school in London, living with two great aunts. Her father and brother died and she did not see her mother again until after the Second World War.
She won two scholarships to Oxford, gaining 100% in her history entrance paper, and in 1939 went up to Somerville to read French. She became secretary and president of the OU Liberal Club and was only the second woman to address the Union – 'primarily due to the wartime shortage of men', she later said. In 1943 she contrived to get into SOE, the Special Operations Executive charged with sabotage in occupied Europe. When the war finished SOE was disbanded and she tried to join MI6. She was rejected but refused to take no for an answer (a theme of her life) and was later accepted. During the next thirty years she served in Moscow, the Congo, Hanoi and Zambia, becoming the most senior woman in MI6 and first ever female controller, which in her case meant she was in charge of all operations and liaisons in North and South America and the Caribbean. On leaving she became principal of Somerville 1980-89. Thus nearly a quarter of her working life was spent in Oxford, although that period occupies only five pages of this 328 page account. The greater part is an attempt to describe her career in MI6.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to write about people in the intelligence agencies without recourse to unverifiable gossip, faulty or partial recollection, received opinion or speculation – she/he/could have/must have/would have/might have/known/done/seen/been aware of whatever. The problem is that the meat of their careers, the daily realities, were recorded on paper and without access to files it is not possible to achieve informed judgements about whether, for instance, someone was a good agent recruiter or runner (not always the same thing), an acute intelligence analyst, a watchful operational security officer or a first-class administrator who helped others perform better. In Daphne's case you would need to read the letters, telegrams and contact notes she wrote about cases she was involved in, to read the intelligence she produced and the comments made on it by the Whitehall assessment machinery and to read the annual confidential reports written on her by her bosses (including those comments – which she would not have seen – by her boss's boss). Ditto reports she wrote on those who worked for her. On top of this you would also need to have been a fly on the wall in numerous (often un-minuted) meetings during which casework and wider issues were decided.
That said, Paddy Hayes probably does as good a job as can be done by drawing on the National Archive, on Daphne's public pronouncements (exceptionally, she was licensed by MI6 to talk about aspects of her career), on memorial service addresses, on the recollections of friends and a few named colleagues and on the opinions of un-named former MI6 officers. The result is a book that tells you more about life in rat-infested Hanoi or Cold War Moscow or the disintegrating Belgian Congo than what Daphne actually did in those places, which is largely speculation. However, the many anecdotes – verifiable or not – create an accurate impression of personality which Hayes does well to convey. The description of her disgrace and demotion in SOE for complaining about her incompetent superior, a man called Spooner, is memorable and typical: She was paraded in front of all the instructing staff, where [Spooner] treated her to a diatribe of abuse….During the torrent of invective Park, who had been standing, decided to sit down. When roared at by the RSM to stand to attention, she refused on the grounds that the manner in which Spooner was addressing her was inappropriate for an officer and she would remain seated until he did. She was subsequently reinstated and promoted and her superior removed.
This episode is of a piece with others in her career when she demonstrated courage, bloody-mindedness, integrity and essential rightness, whether it was smuggling people over borders in the boot of her car or standing up to (and winning over) ambassadors, ministers and the occasional head of state. Asked what she wished for her Somerville girls, she unconsciously described herself: 'the qualities I would wish them (which I am not sure I can give) are courage, stamina, intellectual curiosity, the desire for excellence, an adventurous spirit and above all an abiding belief in the decency of human beings.' She was trenchant in her opinions: John le Carre I would gladly hang, draw and quarter. 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. She had equally little time for women who complained of glass ceilings: The only time I experienced sexism is when an African chief gave me a special gift of a hoe, instead of a spear.
Daphne's years at Somerville were difficult at first, partly because she was caring for her ailing mother but also because college culture was as great a shock to her as she to it. She was beloved by students throughout but the dons were initially a different matter. 'They live in a thermos flask. They can behave just like MPs….If confronted by a piece of paper their instinct is to analyse it, to take it to bits, but not to be constructive about it. They want to look at so many sides of the question that it is sometimes difficult to get decisions. Here as head of house you have total responsibility and absolutely no power.' But both sides adjusted and by the time she left Daphne had radically improved the college finances and restored its self-belief and sense of purpose to the extent that the college commissioned a second portrait of her.
Almost everyone who worked with Daphne admired and liked her. The professional verdict of one who knew her well (not quoted in this book) is that 'her forte was intelligence diplomacy at which she was very good and also her ability to inspire younger members of the office.' Wherever she went, whatever she did, she made a contribution that made a difference.
Alan Judd (Keble, 1972) is the authorised biographer of Mansfield Cumming, founder of MI6, and served in the Foreign Office with Daphne Park. In Oxford he was known as Alan Petty. His novels include an espionage trilogy (shortly to become a tetralogy). His latest, 'Out of the Blue', is a Simon&Schuster ebook.
By Alan Judd
oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk
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www.bustle.com
No 13. Queen of Spies: Daphne Park, Britain's Cold War Spy Master by Paddy Hayes (Jan 19; The Overlook Press)
A completely true story about a badass lady spy? Yes please! In this work of nonfiction that reads like a thriller, Paddy Hayes takes you into the world of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), and its transformation from World War II through the Cold War. At the helm of Hayes' book is Daphne Park, one of its most outstanding and unusual operatives. A woman in the male-dominated realm of secret intelligence during a time of dark paranoia, Park busted her way through the ranks, eventually becoming one of the SIS's seven Area Controllers, the most senior operational rank. Move over, James Bond. Daphne Park is here, and she's shaking up more than just martinis.
MELISSA RAGSDALE
www.bustle.com
Read the Bustle review Here.
www.afio.com
The Overlook Press, 1/19/2016, 336pp. The author was all to interview one of England's greatest spies, Daphne Park (1921 - 2010), and peels back Britain's espionage world to show the fortitude of a woman who ascended the ranks of Britain's MI6. Raised in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) by Britih Parents, she was sent to England for school at age 11 and ended up in Oxford. She left Oxford in 1943 and joined the SOE, eventually working with Operation Jedburgh paratroopers until the end of the war. She succeeded in getting a place in the SIS and served in Moscow, Congo, Zambia and Hanoi, as well as three months in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. She rose to the most senior operational SIS rank.
Hayes uncovered information from retired colleagues from Oxford, the British government, SIS, the CIA and even the KGB.
www.afio.com
Source: The Intelligencer; the Journal of US Intelligence Studies.
www.bigissue.com
Paddy Hayes uncovers the extraordinary story of Daphne Park, unveiled as a pivotal part of MI6.
Queen of Spies is the biography of Baroness Daphne Park (1921-2010), who was a senior area controller in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, popularly known as MI6. Park’s entry to the secretive agency came about in World War Two when she served in the Special Operations Executive as a coding instructor and as a briefing and dispatching officer (responsible for dispatching secret agents on their missions behind enemy lines).
She is probably best known for her role in the overthrow and subsequent murder of Patrice LumumbaAfter the war she joined MI6, serving in Paris, Moscow, Léopoldville (now Kinshasa), Lusaka, Hanoi and Ulaanbaatar. She is probably best known for her role in the overthrow and subsequent murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the independent Congo Republic.
From as long ago as I can remember, I have been fascinated by spies. Had I been born in a different country I might even have contemplated joining a spy service but the Ireland in which I grew up did not boast of one. So I remained a close observer of the espionage world and became an entrepreneur instead, safer if not so exciting.
Spying is sometimes described as being the second-oldest profession (prostitution allegedly being the oldest). Either claim may or may not be true, certainly the desire to know – usually in order to forestall – the intentions of one’s enemies is a deeply embedded desire among most rulers and it has led to the creation of what is now a multi-billion pound global activity impacting on the lives of millions.
The fascination I (and much of the public) have with the profession is easy to understand. Spying contains all the elements of drama. It has deception, dissembling, deceit, danger and occasional dollops of sex, though practitioners tend to play down that last aspect.
My interest in writing about Daphne Park stemmed from our meeting in the mid-1990s. With the ending of the Cold War, it was decided by the British government that the SIS/MI6 should be placed on a statutory footing. Human rights legislation, employment law and civil society were combining to make the continuation of its ‘does not officially exist’ status untenable. As part of this process (called ‘avowal’) Park was permitted to provide an interview for the BBC’s Panorama programme on the work MI6 did. It was a heavily censored account but was still a first.
I found her to be tough-minded, quite combative, steadfast in her distrust of the Russians and totally fascinatingI’d been aware of her existence for some time. She had become ‘known’, mainly from her role in the overthrow of the Lumumba administration in the newly independent (Belgian) Congo in 1961 (described in detail in the book). Through a mutual friend I got in touch with her and arranged to meet for afternoon tea in the House of Lords (she was a peer by then) one sunny summer’s day. I found her to be tough-minded, quite combative, steadfast in her distrust of the Russians and totally fascinating.
We did not stay in touch, she was too careful for that, but I followed her through the occasional interviews she gave to selected journalists; The Daily Telegraph was one, The Times another, she was interviewed by Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4 and by Alan Judd (a former SIS colleague) for an address she gave to the Royal Society of Literature. All helped to build the picture.
The work a female intelligence officer (such as Park) and a male one does is essentially the same. When based overseas, both focus on three core things; the first is continuing to run the stable of existing agents (‘sources’) wherever they are based overseas, the second is to look for opportunities to recruit new sources (usually to meet a specific intelligence objective), the third is to seek out opportunities for what MI6 euphemistically refers to as ‘technical attack’ – in other words, places where it can plant listening devices and the like.
Over Park’s career the attitude to its woman officers altered significantly, pretty much in line with social attitudes generally. When she joined in 1948 she was one of only a couple of female officers in the intelligence branch, which numbered about 400/500, and would have been considered an oddity. Nowadays the proportion is close to 50/50.
Daphne Park passed away in 2010. Two years later I decided to write her biography and commenced my detailed research. I had the basic information on file and to this was added material from obituaries written by former colleagues. For the book I interviewed some 20 of her former MI6 colleagues, most on conditions of anonymity. I was helped too by her friends, former academic colleagues and students. The culmination is Queen of Spies – only the second-ever biography published about a Cold War career officer in MI6.
www.bigissue.com
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www.publishersweekly.com
Irish novelist Hayes (The First Secret) turns to nonfiction as he studies the life of Daphne Park, the first woman to join the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), producing a narrative that can be read three ways. The first is the tale an 11-year-old girl who leaves her mud shack in Africa to travel to Great Britain for her education, subsequently rising through the intelligence service to become a baroness and a member of the House of Lords. The second concerns the adventures of a Cold War–era British intelligence agent playing deadly cat and mouse games with the KGB, and serving in Moscow during the Hungarian Revolt of 1956 and in Hanoi during the Vietnam War. The third covers an exceptionally intelligent and strong-willed woman who forces one of the most male-dominated government bureaucracies to recognize her and promote her based on her competence. Park faced immense cultural and institutional obstacles, overcoming many of the challenges that talented professional women still face today. Hayes is open about his own speculations, given the still-classified nature of much of this material, but he successfully conveys the inspiring nature of Park's personal story and achievements, offering an informative account of the Cold War and the workings of the supersecret SIS.
www.publishersweekly.com
Read the review on the publishersweekly.com Here.
Country Life, November 18, 2015.
THE BIGGEST problem faced by those who write about the secret world of espionage is that it's just that-secret. Former spies, by their nature, are hardly the most open of people and besides, even if MI6 agents wanted to reveal how they had personally averted a nuclear war, the Official Secrets Act ensures their traps are kept permanently shut.
In this respect, Daphne Park was an unexceptional member of MI6, or what is more properly known as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Like so many of her fellow officers, she spoke very little, if at all, about her life in the shadows, from being attached to SOE during the war, through to working for SIS in places such as Vienna, Moscow, the Congo, Hanoi and even Mongolia.
Writing a biography of a spy is hard enough, but to write one about a dead spy is harder still - Park died five years ago.
So why does he bother? What is the point of writing a biography of a person about whom one can only know so little? The answer lies in the fact that Park was, indeed, an exceptional woman and that any biography to her is better than none. Despite the obvious lacunae, Mr Hayes deftly manages doc hart her extraordinary life, from growing up 500 miles from Dar-es-Salaam in what was then the British Protectorate of Tanganyika, to moving to south London, aged 11, excelling at school, graduating from Somerville College, Oxford, during the war and her four decades as an intelligence officer.
There are some dramatic episodes, particularly in Moscow, that read like passages from a thriller, but they're infrequent. Ultimately, this book should be seen as good groundworks for any future and fuller accounts of Park's life, which would, of course, require SIS opening its archives. That will only take place after the temperature in Hell drops to below zero.
Unsurprisingly, there are plenty of thrilling passages in Frederick Forsyth's memoirs, which reveal that the old master still has the ability to keep readers hooked. The Outsider can't be considered an autobiography, but rather a collection of anecdotes that attempts to portray the subject as a lone wolf.
Like so many authors, Mr Forsyth seems to regards the information of his own character as a novelistic project and one gets the sense that the thriller writer was determined to become the kind of heroic figure he loves to write about. There's plenty of sex and subterfuge, with close shaves, hairy escapades and hints of involvement with the intelligence services. It's surely no accident that the portrait on the dust jacket, complete with cigarette and chalk-stripe suit is very reminiscent of Ian Fleming.
this is al great fun, but there's an element that feels as if Mr Forsyth is trying a little too hard to lay on the machismo. As a result, the character that emerges seems somewhat dated and most emphatically politically incorrect. Underneath all that bravado and journalistic swagger, one suspects that his true nature is gentler and less confident and, like so many of us, he's trying to become his shell.
This isn't a confessional memoir that exposes demons. There are a few mentions, for example, of family life and his divorce form his first wife is gloss over. The chapters that seem the most heartfelt are those that dwell on his childhood and you get a strong impression of a driven and lonely boy, who falls in love with aeroplanes.
Ultimately, The Outsider is as good a read as any of the thrillers. If you're looking for thrills and spills, you'll find them. But if you want something more self-knowledge and psychological insight, then you'll be disappointed. In a way, Mr Forsyth reveals no more about himself than Daphne Park ever did. Both their lives remain in th shadows.
Guy Walters
countrylife.co.uk
4.5/5 stars
www.telegraph.co.uk
Lunch with Daphne Park was always enjoyable. She would regale me with snapshots of her remarkable life as a spy in dangerous and exotic places, and as the highest-ranking female officer in the Secret Service in her day. Several times I pressed her to write her memoirs or at least record her recollections for posterity, but always she brushed aside the idea because she was sworn to secrecy.
I first met Park (1921-2010) when I was the Africa minister at the Foreign Office and she came to bend my ear in 2003 about government policy on Zimbabwe. She was from the Tory Right, a friend of Mrs Thatcher; as a Labour minister, I treated her warily at first. However, I soon came to respect and admire her. Beneath that Miss Marple exterior there lurked a Miss Marple interior: a first-class mind. "I have always looked like a cheerful fat missionary," she once told an interviewer. "It wouldn't be any use if you went around looking sinister, would it?"
Park's early years were tough and probably made her the self-sufficient, fearless individual that she became. Her father was a coffee farmer, scratching a living in a remote corner of what is now Tanzania. She received no formal education until, aged 11, she left home to live with two great-aunts in south London. She did not see her parents again for 13 years. She spent part of the war training agents who would be parachuted into France. After the war she was sent to Vienna, to seek out German and Austrian scientists before the Russians could kidnap them. Later, and not without difficulty, she became probably the first woman to be admitted to the Secret Intelligence Service, which was at that time, in her biographer's words, "a chauvinistic, militaristic men's club".
Over more than 30 years she saw service in Moscow, Hanoi and Mongolia, among other places. There is an interesting chapter here on what she got up to in the Congo – she was stationed there when the post-independence prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was murdered, a murky business. Tales of her exploits were legendary. She once smuggled a black Rhodesian whose life was at risk out of the Congo in the boot of her battered Citroën Deux Chevaux. In Russia, she is said to have swum the Volga to escape pursuers. Park ended her SIS career as Controller of the Western Hemisphere division. On retirement from the service, she became warden of her old Oxford College, Somerville; later Margaret Thatcher appointed her a governor of the BBC and a life peer.
Writing a biography of Daphne Park was never going to be easy and Paddy Hayes has done a very good job. She had no close relatives and in later life gave only a handful of interviews, and then only after clearing them with her former paymasters. Hayes has had access to her papers (although most of any interest are no doubt locked away securely in the SIS archive) and the cooperation of her closest friends. He has also persuaded several of her former colleagues to reminisce.
To compensate for the shortage of direct evidence about her activities, especially early on, Hayes's biography is as much a portrait of the SIS as it is of Park. Until the mid-Sixties the SIS was a disaster area, compromised by a succession of well-placed Soviet agents of whom Kim Philby and George Blake were the most notorious. So damaged was the agency that the Americans were reluctant to share their secrets, and the Government seriously considered its closure. Only with the defection of KGB officers Oleg Lyalin and Oleg Gordievsky in the Seventies did things look up.
In the secret services, Park stood out as a forceful personality and a woman in a man's world. Until the early Seventies, a woman employed in the foreign service was required to resign if she married. Park solved that problem by never marrying, though she is said to have had a long-running affair. Asked if she had ever experienced sexual discrimination, she replied: "An African chief once gave me a special gift of a hoe, instead of a spear." From what I know of Daphne, she could have handled a spear as well as any man.
Chris Mullin
www.telegraph.co.uk
Read the review on the telegraph.co.uk Here.
4.5/5 stars
Paddy Hayes has created an extensive account of the life and career of an extraordinary female spy. Daphne Park has faced sexism, brutality and betrayal. She has bravely stood against terror, charmed diplomats and navigated her way through the then alien Soviet Russia. Hers is an incredible life, one that brings the nail-biting and seat teetering that we expect from a spy story.
What drew me towards this book immediately was the concept of learning about a female spy. With James Bond embedded in our culture and the mystery that surrounds espionage, the opportunity to gain insight into this elusive side of history appealed greatly. Adding the fact that the central figure of this book was a woman made it seem even more unusual as women are so often overlooked in history and, as I learnt from this book, women in the intelligence service were often reduced to the role of temptress, using their sexuality to extract information from their unknowing prey.
This book begins in a very narrative and fictional style with Daphne gliding through the snowy Russian streets, ensuring that she has shaken off the bad guys as she heads for a top secret meeting. It is interesting to follow Daphne's career path as she travels from Africa to Europe to Asia, undergoing any mission that she has been set. Truly it is inspiring to see her role in the intelligence service grow. Her dedication is not only to her ambitions but also to her morals. She is willingly honest even when it is inconvenient to her goals. On top of this, Parks is adventurous and smart, an idyllic figure that, when her decision to stick to the intelligence service like glue was questioned, said 'I shall have more power, more responsibility and more satisfaction, you wait'.
The author later described her as 'not exceptionally bright', yet I had gotten the idea from the start of the book that she was brimming with wit and knowledge. Perhaps the author had hyperbolised her charisma in the beginning to make her more interesting. It seems impossible that she could be described in this way after she had shown so much intelligence and awareness in her work. Maybe four decades of research into the world of intelligence (an effort that clearly comes across in his writing) has made the author biased to Park. Recording someone else's life will always present the issue of never knowing what truly happens inside their head and while Daphne Park was an excellent character to read about, at times she seemed more like a work of fiction than an actual person.
However, this was a book that I truly enjoyed and it was more informative than I expected. From the title I anticipated the story of Daphne Park's work in the SIS. Of course this was the main aspect of the book but it was also very useful in learning about other aspects of history, like the post imperial era and the role of western powers in governing their old colonies. It was clear to see the corruption as the CIA took up its role of meddling as the Congo was given independence from its colonisers. Here, Hayes played with the three act structure when describing Lumumba’s rise and fall as Prime Minister. It was refreshing to see this in a non-fiction book and it seemed that Hayes had a clear consciousness of style when writing it.
This book was entertaining and thrilling, yet also informative and thought-provoking. It has explored many aspects of history and displays Hayes’ passion for the intelligence service. It has a wide appeal to anyone who enjoys history or simply a good story.
Erin Hull
thebookbag.co.uk
Read the review on thebookbag.co.uk Here.
The Irish Times
Paddy Hayes on Daphne Park, Queen of Spies, best known for her role in Patrice Lumumba's overthrow, and his new insight into the killing of nine Irish UN soldiers.
Daphne Park with MI6 colleague Hugo Herbert-Jones on route to Stanleyville (now Kisangani) in the Congo in 1960/61. Five officers in total took part in the operation, the nature of which remains undisclosed. Photograph: courtesy of Sarah Herbert-Jones.
Queen of Spies is the biography of the late Baroness Daphne Park (1921-2010), a senior controller in Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, popularly known as MI6. Park's entry to the secret world came about in thesecond World War when she served in the Special Operation Executive (SOE) as a coding instructor and as a briefing and dispatching officer (responsible for dispatching secret agents on their missions behind enemy lines). After the war she joined MI6, serving in Paris, Moscow, Léopoldville (now Kinshasa), Lusaka, Hanoi and Ulaanbaatar. She is probably best known for her role in the overthrow and subsequent murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the independent Congo Republic.
From as long ago as I can remember I have been fascinated by spies. Had I been born in a different country I might even have contemplated joining a spy service but the Ireland in which I grew up did not boast of one. So I remained a close observer of the espionage world and became an entrepreneur instead, safer if not so exciting. Spying is sometimes described as being the second-oldest profession (prostitution allegedly being the oldest). Either claim may or may not be true: certainly the desire to know – usually in order to forestall – the intentions of one's enemies is a deeply embedded desire among most rulers and it has led to the creation of what is now a multibillion-dollar global activity impacting on the lives of millions. The fascination that I (and much of the public) have with the profession is easy to understand. Spying contains all the elements of drama. It has deception, dissembling, deceit, danger and occasional dollops of sex, though practitioners will tend to play down that last aspect.
The element of espionage which most excites my passion is human spying (so-called HUMINT). This can be summarised as the recruitment by one country's spy service of citizens of another country who are prepared to provide secret information to that spy service in return for reward. Okay, it's a bit more complicated than that. For a start the motivation of agents can be complex. Some indeed betray for money, others for excitement, for revenge, to feel important or because they are forced to. As a former British SIS (MI6) officer told me once: "My job was to point out to the potential source the benefits of co-operating with us which includes avoiding the consequences of not co-operating."
And it can be about more than simply providing information. An agent (agencies prefer to use the word "source") may choose to collaborate with the intelligence service of a foreign power for a variety of reasons. They may believe that the collaboration will actually advance their own country's interests or more usually the sectional interests of the group of which they are members or affiliates. They may be quite selective in deciding what information they will turn over and what will remain undisclosed. For that reason one of the more important classifications that spy agencies use to categorise their sources is the degree to which the agency controls their actions. "Fully under our control"; "partially under our control"; "not under our control" etc. The category "fully under our control" being by far the most preferable.
My interest in writing about Daphne Park stemmed from our meeting in the mid-1990s. With the ending of the Cold War it was decided by the British government that the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS/MI6) should be placed on a statutory footing. Human rights legislation, employment law and civil society generally were combining to make the continuation of its "does not officially exist" status untenable. As part of this process (called "avowal") Park was permitted to provide an interview for the BBC's Panorama programme on the work that MI6 did. It was a heavily-censored account but was still a first.
I had been aware of her existence for some time. She had become known, mainly from her role in the overthrow of the Patrice Lumumba administration in the newly independent (Belgian) Congo in 1961 (described in detail in the book). Through a mutual friend, Lord Tordoff (she was a peer by then) I got in touch with her and arranged to meet for afternoon tea in the House of Lords one sunny summer's day. I found her to be tough-minded, quite combative, steadfast in her distrust of the Russians and totally fascinating.
We did not stay in touch – she was too careful for that – but I followed her though the occasional interview she gave to selected journalists; the Daily Telegraph was one, The Times another, she was interviewed by Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4 and by Alan Judd (a former SIS colleague) for an address she gave to the Royal Society of Literature. All helped to build the picture.
Park passed away in 2010. Two years later I decided to write her biography and commenced my detailed research. I had the basic information on file and to this was added material from obituaries written by former colleagues and a detailed memorial tribute given by Sir Gerry Warner, an old friend and former deputy-chief of her service. For the book I interviewed some 20 of her former MI6 colleagues, most on condition of anonymity but those who can be named include the (late) Hugo Herbert-Jones CMG and Brian Stewart CMG, recently deceased, Julian Harston, Hugh Bicheno and her former No 2 in Leopoldville, John de St Jorre. I was helped too by her friends, former academic colleagues and students. The culmination is Queen of Spies, only the second ever biography published about a Cold War career officer in MI6.
The Niemba ambush
The Niemba ambush, in which nine Irish soldiers on UN peacekeeping duties were killed by Baluba tribesmen in the breakaway province of Katanga, took place on November 8th, 1960. Documents (JB1015/400) unearthed in the British national archives as part of my research into the overthrow of Lumumba suggest that one reason for the ambush may have been the displeasure felt by (the then) Colonel Joseph Mobutu, the effective ruler of the Congo, at the visit by Jason Sendwe (an opposition leader in Katanga) to the Baluba and which took place under United Nations auspices.
Mobutu was reported by the British ambassador Ian Scott, to have "protested strongly" to the UN over the visit. It may be that he wanted to reassert his authority and ordered the tribesmen to attack the next available UN target, which turned out to be the Irish soldiers. That sort of behaviour would have been in character.
At about the same time (November 3rd, 1960) a Major CG Hunt of the Royal New Zealand Army Engineers submitted a report to London marked "SECRET- UK EYES ONLY" on the military state of the various UN troop country contingents (JB1015/411). About the Irish soldiers he remarked "Good, but their morale is dropping. The troops are not keen on overseas service."
He was more critical of the Swedish contingent, saying "In Congo for a good time rather than to do a job". Interestingly Swedish troops on duty in Elizabethville airport were probably the only UN soldiers in a position to save Lumumba when he was transported to Katanga to be murdered, but they choose not to intervene.
Queen of Spies, The Biography of Daphne Park, Britain's Cold War Spymaster (Duckworth, London; Overlook, New York)
The Irish Times
Read the review on the Irish Times Here.
Queen of Spies is a wonderful new book that would la e great gift for anyone, particularly if you have a strong-minded, independent woman to buy for this Christmas.
It details the extraordinary life of Baroness Daphne Park, who lived from 1921 to 2010 and was acknowledged by the British Intelligence Services as the original 'Queen of Spies'. She was plucked from a mud hut in Africa at 11 years old, only to be sent to grand-aunts in Britain to be raised in dreadful poverty. By 18, though, she had won a scholarship to Oxford University and rose from a nursing auxiliary in the second World War to a star of the post-war intelligence service.
Not only are the twists and turns of her life story amazing, but imagine my delight when I discovered the author was the lovely Paddy hayes, who's been a customer of ours at l'Ecrivain sine we opened. I never knew his first business was intelligence gathering, or how widely travelled and well connected he is. Queen of Spies is available in hardback for €29.50 from Easons.com.
Sallyanne Clarke
The Irish Daily Mail
Max Hastings's Secret War concludes that most secret agents aren't effective; but Paddy Hayes finds a fantastic heroine in Daphne Park, Queen of Spies...
Queen of Spies: Daphne Park, Britain's Cold War Spy Master Paddy Hayes
Duckworth, pp.285, £20, ISBN: 9780715650431
The Secret War Max Hastings Collins pp.558, £30, ISBN: 97800075037442
Spying is a branch of philosophy, although you would never guess it from that expression on Daniel Craig's face. Its adepts interrogate the surface of reality — people, landscapes, texts — knowing that they will discover extraordinary hermetic meanings. They study fragments of documents, whispers of messages, and from these, they summon entire worlds. Possibly one of the reasons Max Hastings cannot pretend to be hugely impressed by the boasts of wartime spies is the philosophical nebulousness of what constitutes 'results' in secret-agent speak. Soldiers fight, shoulder to shoulder; battles are clearly lost and won. But those who work in the shadows — and in The Secret War, Hastings turns the spotlight on spies in every continent — are frequently ungovernable individualists whose efforts are more difficult to quantify.
Not that he has devoted 600 pages to being dismissive of every Special Operations Executive plot to set Europe ablaze, or code-breaking triumph, or brave infiltration, or double-agent deception. He writes of Hugh Trevor-Roper's native cipher skill, of Soviet 007 Richard Sorge, and of unsung Bletchley boffins like Bill Tutte with proper and infectious relish. The brilliance of the D-Day Double Cross deception — making the Germans look the wrong way as Operation Overlord began — is duly acknowledged. But for every formidably brave spy providing 'human intelligence' by scouting out enemy territory and personnel, he also provides a magnificent parade of crooks, alcoholics and fantasists such as Ronald Seth (his codename: 'Blunderhead').
And the agents' controllers are not beyond criticism. Hastings quotes the ninth Duke of Buccleuch, who was fag at Eton to Brigadier Stewart Menzies, wartime head of MI6. The Duke was mystified, he told a friend, 'how so unbelievably stupid a man could have ended up in such a position'.
Yet it was under Menzies that the Bletchley codebreakers were allowed their free-range anarchy; and the barking civilians who brought divine inspiration were gathered together on one estate. Part of the reason their German counterparts flopped was that their geniuses were spread out among too many departments, subject to the vicious in-fighting of a vicious dictatorship. And their failure was as nothing to the Abwehr chief Admiral Canaris, who seems — in all his serial misreading of intelligence — to have been marginally less competent than Herr Flick from 'Allo 'Allo.
What makes a secret agent effective? The courageous exploits of Britain's SOE — parachuting agents into Greece, Yugoslavia, Sicily — did not, Hastings concludes regretfully, make the gigantic impact that their excitable publicity suggested. Yet he shrewdly adds that their work in boosting morale was invaluable — and that was actually far more important.
He has drawn fascinating fresh material from Russian archives; the terrifying business of spying for Stalin is given a rich human depth. Even when Stalin received brilliantly accurate intelligence (for instance, clear indications in 1941 that the Germans were about to attack), his manic paranoia made him mistrustful and unwilling to act. Hastings has also delved deep into the US effort; the exhaustion of genius naval codebreakers in a basement called 'the Dungeon' who broke Japanese ciphers and foresaw the 1942 Battle of Midway. But elsewhere, the Americans were frighteningly lax about security; there was casual blabbing all over Washington. This is a book that pulses along, yet is filled with acute insight into human ingenuity, frailty, and the ironies of evil; the author points out that the German cipher-crackers might have done much better if — like the British — they had used the finest Jewish minds.
And then of course there is the unavoidable matter of the Cambridge spies; this was never a subject to get Daphne Park — the fantastic heroine of postwar MI6 — started on. This extraordinary figure — the daughter of a poor gold-rush family in Tanganyika — had no doubts that the core of the service was loyalty: creatures such as Philby and Burgess simply could not be understood. The intelligence historian Paddy Hayes traces Dame Daphne's mind-boggling career, from tin-shack childhood, to Cambridge, to her efforts to pile in to the second world war, and then MI6; rising via postings to Moscow, the Congo and Vietnam at moments of maximum political tension to the senior MI6 position of Controller (Western Hemisphere) in the 1970s.
Dame Daphne's charisma (she once described herself as a 'cheerful fat missionary') is plain throughout: facing mortal peril in Leopoldville in a Citroen 2CV, surrounded by homicidal militia men and armed only with whisky and a brilliantly deployed giggle; escaping Soviet agents by swimming across an icy Russian river in her underwear; and most remarkably, rising through a clandestine service ill-disposed towards women.
The book is simply not long enough; and Hayes is rather breathless. But like Sir Max, Dame Daphne's story leaves us wondering about reality as seen through the eyes of a spy; and about how far spy work affected that reality.
Sinclair McKay
Both books are available from the Spectator Bookshop,
Tel: 08430 600033.
Sinclair McKay is the author of The Lost World of Bletchley Park and The Secret Listeners.
Former SIS Officer
Britain's Queen of Spies
Daphne Park: from death in the Congo to Thatcher's friend
The Guardian
Daphne Park was Britain's top woman spy, the most senior female in MI6. Surprisingly, no biography has been written about her exploits, notably in Africa, but also in Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam war where she was disguised as Britain's "consul general".
Queen of Spies, by Paddy Hayes, to be published next week fills a big gap.
Park was a strong, courageous, woman. In his richly entertaining biography, Hayes describes how she once smuggled a man whose life was in danger out of the Congo in the boot of her car. She spent part of the second world war training Special Operations Executive agents before they were dropped by parachute into occupied France.
She was MI6 station chief in the Congo during the violent aftermath of the country's independence leading to the murder of the country's first elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, on 17 January 1961. He was the victim of a CIA-orchestrated assassination plot.
One element in the plot, "twice removed", writes Hayes, "because its direct role was mainly to support the CIA's undermining campaign of sabotage, bribery, conspiracy, and cajolement, was Britain and its lead executive on the ground, Daphne M D Park."
As the US began actively to plan Lumumba's death, "one of the first things the US did", Hayes adds, "was to ensure that Britain was onside with whatever it was it planned. It didn't need physical assistance from Britain; it was more that Britain, then as now, was useful in providing political cover, to make whatever it was they were planning look less like American imperialism and more like the concerted actions of a group of 'responsible countries' (pace Iraq and Afghanistan...perhaps)."
Hayes adds: "Neither Park nor Devlin (the CIA's Congo station chief) pulled the trigger gave the order to the firing squad, but they conspired to bring about a situation where the most logical, indeed the only possible, outcome would be the death of Patrice Lumumba".
It seems that Park had a more uncomfortable time at Oxford, whence she returned, in 1980, after she retired from MI6, to become Principal of her alma mater, Somerville College. She did not get on well with the academics.
When she visited Somerville, where she was also a pupil, Lady Thatcher was confronted by hundreds of demonstrators protesting at her economic policies. Park could not even carry her own college with her in the university vote blocking a proposal to award Britain's first woman prime minister an honorary degree.
It was "a huge loss of face for Park", says Hayes. Those events hurt Park deeply, Hayes told me. But Thatcher forgave her.
In his newly-published second volume of his official Thatcher biography, Charles Moore records that she wrote to her friend, Park, saying: "I do assure you that the vote does not detract one jot from the affection I feel for the university...It was such a privilege to be there. Without that, I should never have been here [Downing Street]."
Park was made a peer and became a member of the Thatcher Foundation. She died in 2010.
Richard Norton-Taylor
The Guardian
Read the review on the Guardian.
Kirkus Review
Intelligence researcher Hayes opens the door on the fascinating life of one of England's greatest spies, Daphne Park (1921-2010).
Unlocking that door is an achievement in itself. The author was able to interview her subject after her retirement from the British Secret Intelligence Service after receiving a life peerage to add to her Order of the British Empire award. Of course, given that her life’s work was espionage, the story she told was sparse. Hayes uncovered further information from retired colleagues from Oxford, the British government, SIS, the CIA, and even the KGB. Raised in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) by British parents, she was sent to England for school at age 11 and ended up at Somerville College, Oxford. She left Oxford in 1943 and joined the Special Operations Executive, eventually working with Operation Jedburgh paratroopers until the end of the war. Park had to be patient and extremely persistent in her work, but she succeeded in getting a place in the SIS. She served in Moscow, Congo, Zambia, and Hanoi, as well as three months in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, on an unknown operation. She eventually rose to the most senior operational rank in SIS. That list of her assignments is misleadingly simple, as she was always in the right place at the right time: Moscow during the Suez crisis; Leopoldville for the post-colonial face-off in Africa and the murder of Patrice Lumumba; Lusaka for the Rhodesian declaration of independence. Hayes had access to the recent history of England’s secret service, and she uses it to great effect. This is an excellent biography of a remarkable woman who easily built relationships to safeguard foreign policy objectives. She was forthright and obdurate, and she had an infectious sense of humor. Most importantly, she personified the qualities required: loyalty, respect, tradition, and absolute secrecy.
As exciting as any good spy thriller—but it’s all true.
Kirkus Review
Book reviews and recommendations from the most trusted voice in book discovery.
“Daphne Park was truly the empress of British espionage,. This book is a major contribution to understanding her fascinating career in MI6. Remarkably well-researched, it is required reading for anyone interested in the world of secret service.”
Richard J Aldrich
Professor of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, and author of GCQH, The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency.
“Paddy Hayes has written a remarkable biography of a remarkable woman - providing real insight into MI6 of the Cold War.”
Gordon Corera
– author MI6: Life and Death in the British Secret Service
Kingston University Review
A new book by author Paddy Hayes lifts the lid on some of the hidden aspects of the life of Daphne Park (1921-2010), who was born in Surrey and became arguably one of Britain's most successful female spies in the post-1945 period.
Entitled Queen of Spies: Daphne Park, Britain's Cold War spy master, the new book is part biography and part history of the role of women in espionage during both the Second World War and the Cold War, a topic in gender history that still remains relatively under-researched by scholars.
Daphne Park, who eventually became Baroness Park of Monmouth and also (in 1980) Principal of Somerville College, Oxford, was – as one reviewer has put it – 'a child of Empire who became a Cold War Warrior'.
Taken to Africa by her mother when only six months old (her father worked as a tobacco farmer there), Daphne was raised in the southern highlands of Tanganyika (now Tanzania), where she lived a notably tough life in a mud-brick house that had no electricity or running water. This made the young Daphne very independent and hardy, ready to grab every opportunity that came her way.
Her mother pawned the last of her jewellery to send the eleven-year old Daphne back to England to attend a state school in south London, and Daphne did so well that she ended up studying at Somerville College, Oxford. During the Second World War, keen to serve her country after graduating in 1943, she joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, but during the selection process she came to the attention of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). The SOE was a secret sabotage and intelligence organisation that worked behind enemy lines. It had been the brain-child of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had instructed SOE to set Nazi-occupied Europe 'ablaze'.
Daphne trained as a briefing officer for SOE, giving instructions to the brave individuals, or sometimes teams of individuals, who were dropped by parachute into Occupied France to organize the resistance and to conduct high-risk sabotage operations.
When SOE disbanded at the end of the War, Daphne decided that she wanted to carry on in the world of intelligence, and set her sights on joining the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), or 'MI6' as it is more commonly known. However, as Hayes points out, in contrast to the relatively egalitarian ethos that had existed in SOE, the Secret Intelligence Service was still a very enclosed male-dominated world of bowler-hatted former Army officers and public schoolboys, who tended to inhabit the same London Clubs on the Mall and viewed women with great suspicion, seeing them as useful only as secretaries or filing-clerks.
Nevertheless, although something of an 'outsider', Daphne Park was stubborn and determined. By 1948, she was 'attached to the Foreign Office', but in reality was working for MI6. And she was so good at the work that she steadily made her way up through the ranks, carving out a highly successful career as an Intelligence Officer.
On the other hand, she had to sacrifice her private life. She was not allowed to marry (it was a rule within MI6 that female officers could not marry, a ruling that apparently remained in place until at least the 1980s).
Hayes describes Daphne Park's MI6 postings to Moscow, Leopoldville, and Hanoi, and in each posting she demonstrated great gifts for playing the dual roles of both diplomat and spy (MI6 officers often operated under diplomatic cover from British Embassies). Some of the other MI6 officers likened her to Agatha Christie's matronly detective Miss Marple, but many of them developed a great respect for her work, while her enemies in this highly secret world noted her 'tough and uncompromising view of life'. It could be highly dangerous work when out in 'the field'. In the Congo in 1959-1960, for example, she came close to losing her life on at least two occasions.
In many ways, Park remained very much a daughter of Empire, with all the attitudes that came with this. She developed a lifelong hatred of the Russians, was suspicious of the French, and placed a great deal of emphasis on loyalty, trust and service to the British nation and its interests. Indeed, she admired the 'Bulldog Drummond' version of the Gentleman Spy, as portrayed in the intensely patriotic novels of Sapper, and she strongly disliked the gritty spy fiction of former MI6 spy-turned-author John le Carre, who she criticised for portraying the spy world as essentially nasty and treacherous.
In 1975 Park became the first woman to be made an Area Controller, which was MI6's most senior operational rank. However, the details of what she actually did during her time in this role remain largely (and frustratingly!) unknown. And this is where Paddy Hayes hits something of a brickwall in his biography of Park, a problem that is often faced by other historians who write about Britain's secret world of spying: in contrast to MI5 (the domestic Security Service), which has slowly opened up and released many of its 'historical' files to public access (via the National Archives at Kew), MI6 files remain unavailable. In fact, the Secret Service has made it very clear that they are unwilling to match MI5 and adopt any kind of 'openness' policy concerning their 'historical' files.
This means that Hayes has had to rely on newspapers or former colleagues or members of Park's family to fill in some of the gaps in her later career. All in all, though, Hayes has still written a fascinating study of an intriguing woman. If you are interested in the secret and shadowy world of spying, and also in how a woman broke down discriminatory and other barriers to carve out a remarkably successful career as a spy-master, then this is the book for you.
By Steve Woodbridge 2016/04/06
Steve Woodbridge is lecturer in History at Kingston University.
https://historyatkingston.wordpress.com
Read the Kingston University Review Here.
The Washington Post Review
Daphne Park's career in British intelligence reads like a Cold War travelogue.
Over four decades, Park served in one hot spot after another: In Vienna after World War II, she helped locate Nazi rocket scientists. In Moscow, she helped map a surface-to-air missile defense system as it was being installed around the Soviet capital. In Congo, she became immersed in the postcolonial power struggle that led to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. During the Vietnam War, she became consul general in Hanoi.
Paddy Hayes's fascinating and long-overdue biography of Park is aptly titled "Queen of Spies." Others have referred to Park as 007, though they have also noted that she looked more like Miss Marple.
At the pinnacle of her career, Parks directed British intelligence operations in the Western Hemisphere and advised Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as Britain negotiated an end to the civil war in Rhodesia. Honored later in life with the title of baroness, Park served in the House of Lords — a fitting honor for a woman who defied gender stereotypes and discrimination to rise to the top of the chauvinistic world of British intelligence.
It was an extraordinary career for a woman who spent most of her childhood impoverished in Africa. Park had no formal education until she left home, alone, at age 11 to attend school in Britain. She earned a degree from Oxford in 1943 and then helped prepare special-operations troops dropped behind German lines in France.
Her stint in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa), Congo, may have been Park's most challenging assignment. There, American, Soviet and European interests maneuvered for advantage as the mineral-rich Belgian Congo prepared for independence and the West intensified its efforts to keep the new nation from aligning with the Soviet Union. Although Hayes stops short of accusing Park or her CIA counterpart, Lawrence Devlin, of ordering Lumumba's assassination, he argues that they set in motion the chain of events that made his death inevitable.
Park could not entirely escape the poisonous atmosphere that permeated the transatlantic intelligence community after the spy scandals that shook Britain in the 1950s and '60s. In some quarters, she was briefly suspected of disloyalty. "Whether Park was ever confronted with these accusations we do not yet know," Hayes writes, but if she was, "she remained silent about the confrontation to the grave." Park died in 2010 at age 88.
The drama of Park's life story transcends the leaden and acronym-laden prose of her biographer. The book also suffers from a lack of specific information about Park's role in important events. Hayes tries to fill the gaps by talking to Park's former colleagues, but without Park's full cooperation — she agreed to talk to Hayes on the condition that operational details not be discussed — the book at times feels speculative. Thus there remains an aura of mystery around Park. Perhaps the "queen of spies" wouldn't have it any other way.
By Robert Mitchell March 25, 2016
Robert Mitchell is an editor with the Washington Post-Bloomberg News service.
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The CIA Review of Books on Intelligence Matters
In April 2008, at a conference on intelligence sponsored by the German Historical Institute, London, former CIA officer James Pavitt and the late NSA director William Odom joined Daphne Park, Baroness of Monmouth and the former MI6 Controller/Western Hemisphere, to discuss the world of contemporary intelligence. At 87, Baroness Park, radiating a "Miss Marple" charm, was both engaging and circumspect-leaving listeners coveting more detail about her career. Queen of Spies answers that call.
Daphne Margaret Sybil Désirée Park was born in Surrey, England, in 1921, home-schooled in Tanganyika under austere circumstances until 11, and then sent back to England to live with relatives and get a proper education. She did a bit more than that: by the time of her retirement, she had graduated from Oxford University with honors, served in WW II as a volunteer with Britain's First Aid Nursing Yeomancy (FANY), and later worked as an officer with the SOE. After the war she joined the Foreign Office, became an SIS officer, and after retiring in 1979, served as president of Somerville College at Oxford. In 1990 she was made a life peer and served as SIS's semi-official spokesperson in the House of Lords. None of these achievements was accomplished without precedent-setting breaks with tradition, so author Paddy Hayes focuses on how she met and overcame her constant career challenges.
Baroness Park's path to her MI6 appointment illustrates her outspoken determination to speak truth to power. As a FANY, she wrote a letter denouncing the performance of her superior and was promptly punished for her efforts while her superior was promoted. But her abilities had been noticed and Hayes tells how her SOE JEDBURGH colleagues came to her rescue and secured her return to duty as an officer. Likewise, after the war, Hayes describes her groundbreaking path into the Foreign Office and eventually SIS. She would learn Russian, subsequently serving in Moscow, Leopoldville, Lusaka, Hanoi, and Ulan Bator.
It was in Moscow in the mid-1950s that Park learned her tradecraft and honed her political skills while enduring the disruptions caused by the exposure of KGB agents in the British ranks, and the fallout from botched British operations against the Soviets. As head of station in Leopoldville, she became embroiled-with her CIA counterpart, Larry Devlin-in the Patrice Lumumba affair. It was there, too, that her ability to deal effectively in male-dominated circumstances was recognized and the likelihood of further advancement enhanced. Hayes's description of her time in Hanoi, a genuine hardship tour, is illuminating.
Daphne Park remained single and Hayes does not dodge the obvious questions. He writes about two serious affairs, one that came to nothing-in part, at least, because of the SIS policy that women in the service who married would have to resign. He also mentions instances when her gender threatened to become an issue when working with agents and how she subtly but forcefully and successfully asserted her command of the situation. (155)
Queen of Spies is documented by the relatively scant official record available, comments from former colleagues, and the few interviews of Park herself-all approved by SIS. And this accounts for the principal shortcoming of the book, since Hayes devotes considerable effort articulating Parks's feelings and views on the situations that confronted her. At one point he admits "being forced into the realm of speculation." (127) Thus the narrative is sprinkled with examples-comments that "she enjoyed the hot sun on her back"; (11) that "she'd have got the low-down on her rival" from her friend Maurice Oldfield; (198) that Oldfield "would have been instrumental in getting her a Controller's position"; (245) and on the issues he "probably influencing her decision" while in Kenya. (199)
There are a few factual items where Hayes's background in international commercial intelligence fails him. Examples include: Oleg Gordievsky was not a "defector-in-place"-he was an MI6 penetration. CIA officer Ted Shackley did not occupy the third most senior position in the agency. The statement that "the Agency was far more WASP than the Bureau and was naturally more sympathetic to Britain's interests" defies explanation. (257)
In spite of these, Queen of Spies is the only biography on Baroness Park and it fills a big gap. Hayes has produced an interesting and informative work.
By Hayden Peake Posted: Mar 29, 2016 07:17 PM
Compiled and reviewed by Hayden Peake
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Early Birds Book Review
Thrilling, compelling, brilliantly told—and it's all true. Paddy Hayes's Queen of Spies chronicles the bizarre experience of one of Britain's most celebrated spies: Daphne Park, a 1970s-era Area Controller and one of the only women to ever achieve such rank. Told through Park's eyes, Hayes covers her time with the Secret Intelligence Service from WWII to the Cold War.
By DeAnna Janes | February 19, 2016
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At the age of 11, Daphne Park was living in a tin-roofed shack with no lights or running water in the British protectorate of Tanganyika when a letter arrived from London that changed her life forever. It was from her aunts, who were offering to provide her with a home and an education and in the end, it would lead to her becoming one of the first women spies.
How successful she was might be measured by a memorial address given after her death at the age of 77 when a former intelligence chief declared that her service in the Moscow station had convinced the Soviets that she was "an asset and not an embarrassment." In the wake of Miss Park's performance, he said, "Our presence in the Embassies, even in the Soviet bloc, was readily accepted."
Miss Park's active life did not end at her retirement from the secret service. She found favor with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who appointed her to the board of the BBC, a precursor to her later elevation to the House of Lords. Yet not everyone liked her. Many compared her to Agatha Christie's Miss Marple for her "deeply suspicious and sour" attitude toward life. But she did love being in the House of Lords and was "moved to tears by the admission ceremony." She was believed to have had two great love affairs but remained characteristically discreet about who and where. And she had strong feelings about her colleagues. She disliked espionage author John le Carre to the point that she once said she would "hang, draw and quarter him" for his belief that intelligence was a "world of cold betrayal."
"It's not," she said, "it's a world of trust. You can't run an agent without trust on both sides."
Paddy Hayes tracks the unusual life and times of "Daffers" as she became nicknamed back to her childhood in Britain in the 1930s "where order prevailed and people knew their place. Where Empire reigned supreme with almost a quarter of the globe still colored pink on school room maps as a sign of ownership." It was not a time when women were sought after in professions, especially that of espionage. Miss Park became one of the first women to rise to prominence in the British Secret Intelligence Service known as SIS.
In a series of vignettes, the author tells a dramatic story that he gathered over five decades of researching the shadowy world of intelligence and those who survived it as an occupation. Miss Park's achievements were remarkable. She became the SIS station commander in Leopoldville and worked closely with her CIA colleagues to bring about the downfall and murder of the tyrant Patrice Lumumba, the first premier of an independent Congo. Her capacity for taking risks was demonstrated in Moscow, where she was posted as an intelligence officer and where she became dangerously involved with fringe groups in Soviet society, which made her a target of the KGB. She also played a risky role in obtaining a copy of Boris Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago."
Mr. Hayes suggests that it was Miss Park who controlled or "ran" a diplomat working undercover for the United States in Hanoi when the Vietnam War was at its height. At one time, Miss Park was suspected by a colleague in SIS of working for the Soviet's KGB. In fact, Miss Park was one of those convinced of the guilt of the notorious spy Kim Philby, who fooled most of his British colleagues by persuading them that he was one of their own. Even when his double-dealing was exposed, Philby escaped to Moscow and was never penalized for being the kind of traitor who brought about the deaths of many British agents.
Her biographer emphasizes that Miss Park's achievements should never be underestimated. "From the moment the eleven year old girl set foot on British soil in 1933 she never once faltered. The Service she joined in 1948 was a chauvinistic, militaristic men's club. The one club that did grant her admission insisted she enter by its side door."
He noted the difficulty of finding out what Miss Park was like, pointing out, "She was a spy and spies are careful." Few photographs exist of Miss Park and she didn't write too many letters even to friends who recalled, she just telephoned when she arrived back in London." Her motto might have been to leave "nothing more than a footprint in the sand" observes Mr. Hayes, yet from those blurred markers he asserts, an extraordinary person had emerged.
By Muriel Dobbin - - Wednesday, February 3, 2016
Muriel Dobbin is a former White House and national political reporter for McClatchy newspapers and the Baltimore Sun.
www.washingtontimes.com
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www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk
Alan Judd reviews Paddy Hayes's biography of 'Queen of Spies', the remarkable Daphne Park. In 1933, the eleven year old was plucked from poverty in Africa to live with her grand-aunts in London; seven years later she had won two scholarships to Oxford.
Queen of Spies: Daphne Park, Britain's Cold War Spy Master, by Paddy Hayes, Duckwork, £20, 328 pages
By Alan Judd
Daphne Park, Baroness Park of Monmouth, served during the Second World War with SOE and afterwards with MI6 before becoming principal of Somerville College. She spent her early childhood in what was then Southern Tanganyika, 500 hundred miles south-west of Dar-es-Salaam (not north, as stated in the blurb). Like many white settlers then and for decades afterwards, she was brought up under a tin roof without electricity or running water. She was educated via a correspondence course run by the Anglican church until, in 1932, aged 11, she was sent to school in London, living with two great aunts. Her father and brother died and she did not see her mother again until after the Second World War.
She won two scholarships to Oxford, gaining 100% in her history entrance paper, and in 1939 went up to Somerville to read French. She became secretary and president of the OU Liberal Club and was only the second woman to address the Union – 'primarily due to the wartime shortage of men', she later said. In 1943 she contrived to get into SOE, the Special Operations Executive charged with sabotage in occupied Europe. When the war finished SOE was disbanded and she tried to join MI6. She was rejected but refused to take no for an answer (a theme of her life) and was later accepted. During the next thirty years she served in Moscow, the Congo, Hanoi and Zambia, becoming the most senior woman in MI6 and first ever female controller, which in her case meant she was in charge of all operations and liaisons in North and South America and the Caribbean. On leaving she became principal of Somerville 1980-89. Thus nearly a quarter of her working life was spent in Oxford, although that period occupies only five pages of this 328 page account. The greater part is an attempt to describe her career in MI6.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to write about people in the intelligence agencies without recourse to unverifiable gossip, faulty or partial recollection, received opinion or speculation – she/he/could have/must have/would have/might have/known/done/seen/been aware of whatever. The problem is that the meat of their careers, the daily realities, were recorded on paper and without access to files it is not possible to achieve informed judgements about whether, for instance, someone was a good agent recruiter or runner (not always the same thing), an acute intelligence analyst, a watchful operational security officer or a first-class administrator who helped others perform better. In Daphne's case you would need to read the letters, telegrams and contact notes she wrote about cases she was involved in, to read the intelligence she produced and the comments made on it by the Whitehall assessment machinery and to read the annual confidential reports written on her by her bosses (including those comments – which she would not have seen – by her boss's boss). Ditto reports she wrote on those who worked for her. On top of this you would also need to have been a fly on the wall in numerous (often un-minuted) meetings during which casework and wider issues were decided.
That said, Paddy Hayes probably does as good a job as can be done by drawing on the National Archive, on Daphne's public pronouncements (exceptionally, she was licensed by MI6 to talk about aspects of her career), on memorial service addresses, on the recollections of friends and a few named colleagues and on the opinions of un-named former MI6 officers. The result is a book that tells you more about life in rat-infested Hanoi or Cold War Moscow or the disintegrating Belgian Congo than what Daphne actually did in those places, which is largely speculation. However, the many anecdotes – verifiable or not – create an accurate impression of personality which Hayes does well to convey. The description of her disgrace and demotion in SOE for complaining about her incompetent superior, a man called Spooner, is memorable and typical: She was paraded in front of all the instructing staff, where [Spooner] treated her to a diatribe of abuse….During the torrent of invective Park, who had been standing, decided to sit down. When roared at by the RSM to stand to attention, she refused on the grounds that the manner in which Spooner was addressing her was inappropriate for an officer and she would remain seated until he did. She was subsequently reinstated and promoted and her superior removed.
This episode is of a piece with others in her career when she demonstrated courage, bloody-mindedness, integrity and essential rightness, whether it was smuggling people over borders in the boot of her car or standing up to (and winning over) ambassadors, ministers and the occasional head of state. Asked what she wished for her Somerville girls, she unconsciously described herself: 'the qualities I would wish them (which I am not sure I can give) are courage, stamina, intellectual curiosity, the desire for excellence, an adventurous spirit and above all an abiding belief in the decency of human beings.' She was trenchant in her opinions: John le Carre I would gladly hang, draw and quarter. 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. She had equally little time for women who complained of glass ceilings: The only time I experienced sexism is when an African chief gave me a special gift of a hoe, instead of a spear.
Daphne's years at Somerville were difficult at first, partly because she was caring for her ailing mother but also because college culture was as great a shock to her as she to it. She was beloved by students throughout but the dons were initially a different matter. 'They live in a thermos flask. They can behave just like MPs….If confronted by a piece of paper their instinct is to analyse it, to take it to bits, but not to be constructive about it. They want to look at so many sides of the question that it is sometimes difficult to get decisions. Here as head of house you have total responsibility and absolutely no power.' But both sides adjusted and by the time she left Daphne had radically improved the college finances and restored its self-belief and sense of purpose to the extent that the college commissioned a second portrait of her.
Almost everyone who worked with Daphne admired and liked her. The professional verdict of one who knew her well (not quoted in this book) is that 'her forte was intelligence diplomacy at which she was very good and also her ability to inspire younger members of the office.' Wherever she went, whatever she did, she made a contribution that made a difference.
Alan Judd (Keble, 1972) is the authorised biographer of Mansfield Cumming, founder of MI6, and served in the Foreign Office with Daphne Park. In Oxford he was known as Alan Petty. His novels include an espionage trilogy (shortly to become a tetralogy). His latest, 'Out of the Blue', is a Simon&Schuster ebook.
By Alan Judd
oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk
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www.bustle.com
No 13. Queen of Spies: Daphne Park, Britain's Cold War Spy Master by Paddy Hayes (Jan 19; The Overlook Press)
A completely true story about a badass lady spy? Yes please! In this work of nonfiction that reads like a thriller, Paddy Hayes takes you into the world of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), and its transformation from World War II through the Cold War. At the helm of Hayes' book is Daphne Park, one of its most outstanding and unusual operatives. A woman in the male-dominated realm of secret intelligence during a time of dark paranoia, Park busted her way through the ranks, eventually becoming one of the SIS's seven Area Controllers, the most senior operational rank. Move over, James Bond. Daphne Park is here, and she's shaking up more than just martinis.
MELISSA RAGSDALE
www.bustle.com
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www.afio.com
The Overlook Press, 1/19/2016, 336pp. The author was all to interview one of England's greatest spies, Daphne Park (1921 - 2010), and peels back Britain's espionage world to show the fortitude of a woman who ascended the ranks of Britain's MI6. Raised in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) by Britih Parents, she was sent to England for school at age 11 and ended up in Oxford. She left Oxford in 1943 and joined the SOE, eventually working with Operation Jedburgh paratroopers until the end of the war. She succeeded in getting a place in the SIS and served in Moscow, Congo, Zambia and Hanoi, as well as three months in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. She rose to the most senior operational SIS rank.
Hayes uncovered information from retired colleagues from Oxford, the British government, SIS, the CIA and even the KGB.
www.afio.com
Source: The Intelligencer; the Journal of US Intelligence Studies.
www.bigissue.com
Paddy Hayes uncovers the extraordinary story of Daphne Park, unveiled as a pivotal part of MI6.
Queen of Spies is the biography of Baroness Daphne Park (1921-2010), who was a senior area controller in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, popularly known as MI6. Park’s entry to the secretive agency came about in World War Two when she served in the Special Operations Executive as a coding instructor and as a briefing and dispatching officer (responsible for dispatching secret agents on their missions behind enemy lines).
She is probably best known for her role in the overthrow and subsequent murder of Patrice LumumbaAfter the war she joined MI6, serving in Paris, Moscow, Léopoldville (now Kinshasa), Lusaka, Hanoi and Ulaanbaatar. She is probably best known for her role in the overthrow and subsequent murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the independent Congo Republic.
From as long ago as I can remember, I have been fascinated by spies. Had I been born in a different country I might even have contemplated joining a spy service but the Ireland in which I grew up did not boast of one. So I remained a close observer of the espionage world and became an entrepreneur instead, safer if not so exciting.
Spying is sometimes described as being the second-oldest profession (prostitution allegedly being the oldest). Either claim may or may not be true, certainly the desire to know – usually in order to forestall – the intentions of one’s enemies is a deeply embedded desire among most rulers and it has led to the creation of what is now a multi-billion pound global activity impacting on the lives of millions.
The fascination I (and much of the public) have with the profession is easy to understand. Spying contains all the elements of drama. It has deception, dissembling, deceit, danger and occasional dollops of sex, though practitioners tend to play down that last aspect.
My interest in writing about Daphne Park stemmed from our meeting in the mid-1990s. With the ending of the Cold War, it was decided by the British government that the SIS/MI6 should be placed on a statutory footing. Human rights legislation, employment law and civil society were combining to make the continuation of its ‘does not officially exist’ status untenable. As part of this process (called ‘avowal’) Park was permitted to provide an interview for the BBC’s Panorama programme on the work MI6 did. It was a heavily censored account but was still a first.
I found her to be tough-minded, quite combative, steadfast in her distrust of the Russians and totally fascinatingI’d been aware of her existence for some time. She had become ‘known’, mainly from her role in the overthrow of the Lumumba administration in the newly independent (Belgian) Congo in 1961 (described in detail in the book). Through a mutual friend I got in touch with her and arranged to meet for afternoon tea in the House of Lords (she was a peer by then) one sunny summer’s day. I found her to be tough-minded, quite combative, steadfast in her distrust of the Russians and totally fascinating.
We did not stay in touch, she was too careful for that, but I followed her through the occasional interviews she gave to selected journalists; The Daily Telegraph was one, The Times another, she was interviewed by Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4 and by Alan Judd (a former SIS colleague) for an address she gave to the Royal Society of Literature. All helped to build the picture.
The work a female intelligence officer (such as Park) and a male one does is essentially the same. When based overseas, both focus on three core things; the first is continuing to run the stable of existing agents (‘sources’) wherever they are based overseas, the second is to look for opportunities to recruit new sources (usually to meet a specific intelligence objective), the third is to seek out opportunities for what MI6 euphemistically refers to as ‘technical attack’ – in other words, places where it can plant listening devices and the like.
Over Park’s career the attitude to its woman officers altered significantly, pretty much in line with social attitudes generally. When she joined in 1948 she was one of only a couple of female officers in the intelligence branch, which numbered about 400/500, and would have been considered an oddity. Nowadays the proportion is close to 50/50.
Daphne Park passed away in 2010. Two years later I decided to write her biography and commenced my detailed research. I had the basic information on file and to this was added material from obituaries written by former colleagues. For the book I interviewed some 20 of her former MI6 colleagues, most on conditions of anonymity. I was helped too by her friends, former academic colleagues and students. The culmination is Queen of Spies – only the second-ever biography published about a Cold War career officer in MI6.
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www.publishersweekly.com
Irish novelist Hayes (The First Secret) turns to nonfiction as he studies the life of Daphne Park, the first woman to join the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), producing a narrative that can be read three ways. The first is the tale an 11-year-old girl who leaves her mud shack in Africa to travel to Great Britain for her education, subsequently rising through the intelligence service to become a baroness and a member of the House of Lords. The second concerns the adventures of a Cold War–era British intelligence agent playing deadly cat and mouse games with the KGB, and serving in Moscow during the Hungarian Revolt of 1956 and in Hanoi during the Vietnam War. The third covers an exceptionally intelligent and strong-willed woman who forces one of the most male-dominated government bureaucracies to recognize her and promote her based on her competence. Park faced immense cultural and institutional obstacles, overcoming many of the challenges that talented professional women still face today. Hayes is open about his own speculations, given the still-classified nature of much of this material, but he successfully conveys the inspiring nature of Park's personal story and achievements, offering an informative account of the Cold War and the workings of the supersecret SIS.
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Country Life, November 18, 2015.
THE BIGGEST problem faced by those who write about the secret world of espionage is that it's just that-secret. Former spies, by their nature, are hardly the most open of people and besides, even if MI6 agents wanted to reveal how they had personally averted a nuclear war, the Official Secrets Act ensures their traps are kept permanently shut.
In this respect, Daphne Park was an unexceptional member of MI6, or what is more properly known as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Like so many of her fellow officers, she spoke very little, if at all, about her life in the shadows, from being attached to SOE during the war, through to working for SIS in places such as Vienna, Moscow, the Congo, Hanoi and even Mongolia.
Writing a biography of a spy is hard enough, but to write one about a dead spy is harder still - Park died five years ago.
So why does he bother? What is the point of writing a biography of a person about whom one can only know so little? The answer lies in the fact that Park was, indeed, an exceptional woman and that any biography to her is better than none. Despite the obvious lacunae, Mr Hayes deftly manages doc hart her extraordinary life, from growing up 500 miles from Dar-es-Salaam in what was then the British Protectorate of Tanganyika, to moving to south London, aged 11, excelling at school, graduating from Somerville College, Oxford, during the war and her four decades as an intelligence officer.
There are some dramatic episodes, particularly in Moscow, that read like passages from a thriller, but they're infrequent. Ultimately, this book should be seen as good groundworks for any future and fuller accounts of Park's life, which would, of course, require SIS opening its archives. That will only take place after the temperature in Hell drops to below zero.
Unsurprisingly, there are plenty of thrilling passages in Frederick Forsyth's memoirs, which reveal that the old master still has the ability to keep readers hooked. The Outsider can't be considered an autobiography, but rather a collection of anecdotes that attempts to portray the subject as a lone wolf.
Like so many authors, Mr Forsyth seems to regards the information of his own character as a novelistic project and one gets the sense that the thriller writer was determined to become the kind of heroic figure he loves to write about. There's plenty of sex and subterfuge, with close shaves, hairy escapades and hints of involvement with the intelligence services. It's surely no accident that the portrait on the dust jacket, complete with cigarette and chalk-stripe suit is very reminiscent of Ian Fleming.
this is al great fun, but there's an element that feels as if Mr Forsyth is trying a little too hard to lay on the machismo. As a result, the character that emerges seems somewhat dated and most emphatically politically incorrect. Underneath all that bravado and journalistic swagger, one suspects that his true nature is gentler and less confident and, like so many of us, he's trying to become his shell.
This isn't a confessional memoir that exposes demons. There are a few mentions, for example, of family life and his divorce form his first wife is gloss over. The chapters that seem the most heartfelt are those that dwell on his childhood and you get a strong impression of a driven and lonely boy, who falls in love with aeroplanes.
Ultimately, The Outsider is as good a read as any of the thrillers. If you're looking for thrills and spills, you'll find them. But if you want something more self-knowledge and psychological insight, then you'll be disappointed. In a way, Mr Forsyth reveals no more about himself than Daphne Park ever did. Both their lives remain in th shadows.
Guy Walters
countrylife.co.uk
4.5/5 stars
www.telegraph.co.uk
Lunch with Daphne Park was always enjoyable. She would regale me with snapshots of her remarkable life as a spy in dangerous and exotic places, and as the highest-ranking female officer in the Secret Service in her day. Several times I pressed her to write her memoirs or at least record her recollections for posterity, but always she brushed aside the idea because she was sworn to secrecy.
I first met Park (1921-2010) when I was the Africa minister at the Foreign Office and she came to bend my ear in 2003 about government policy on Zimbabwe. She was from the Tory Right, a friend of Mrs Thatcher; as a Labour minister, I treated her warily at first. However, I soon came to respect and admire her. Beneath that Miss Marple exterior there lurked a Miss Marple interior: a first-class mind. "I have always looked like a cheerful fat missionary," she once told an interviewer. "It wouldn't be any use if you went around looking sinister, would it?"
Park's early years were tough and probably made her the self-sufficient, fearless individual that she became. Her father was a coffee farmer, scratching a living in a remote corner of what is now Tanzania. She received no formal education until, aged 11, she left home to live with two great-aunts in south London. She did not see her parents again for 13 years. She spent part of the war training agents who would be parachuted into France. After the war she was sent to Vienna, to seek out German and Austrian scientists before the Russians could kidnap them. Later, and not without difficulty, she became probably the first woman to be admitted to the Secret Intelligence Service, which was at that time, in her biographer's words, "a chauvinistic, militaristic men's club".
Over more than 30 years she saw service in Moscow, Hanoi and Mongolia, among other places. There is an interesting chapter here on what she got up to in the Congo – she was stationed there when the post-independence prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was murdered, a murky business. Tales of her exploits were legendary. She once smuggled a black Rhodesian whose life was at risk out of the Congo in the boot of her battered Citroën Deux Chevaux. In Russia, she is said to have swum the Volga to escape pursuers. Park ended her SIS career as Controller of the Western Hemisphere division. On retirement from the service, she became warden of her old Oxford College, Somerville; later Margaret Thatcher appointed her a governor of the BBC and a life peer.
Writing a biography of Daphne Park was never going to be easy and Paddy Hayes has done a very good job. She had no close relatives and in later life gave only a handful of interviews, and then only after clearing them with her former paymasters. Hayes has had access to her papers (although most of any interest are no doubt locked away securely in the SIS archive) and the cooperation of her closest friends. He has also persuaded several of her former colleagues to reminisce.
To compensate for the shortage of direct evidence about her activities, especially early on, Hayes's biography is as much a portrait of the SIS as it is of Park. Until the mid-Sixties the SIS was a disaster area, compromised by a succession of well-placed Soviet agents of whom Kim Philby and George Blake were the most notorious. So damaged was the agency that the Americans were reluctant to share their secrets, and the Government seriously considered its closure. Only with the defection of KGB officers Oleg Lyalin and Oleg Gordievsky in the Seventies did things look up.
In the secret services, Park stood out as a forceful personality and a woman in a man's world. Until the early Seventies, a woman employed in the foreign service was required to resign if she married. Park solved that problem by never marrying, though she is said to have had a long-running affair. Asked if she had ever experienced sexual discrimination, she replied: "An African chief once gave me a special gift of a hoe, instead of a spear." From what I know of Daphne, she could have handled a spear as well as any man.
Chris Mullin
www.telegraph.co.uk
Read the review on the telegraph.co.uk Here.
4.5/5 stars
Paddy Hayes has created an extensive account of the life and career of an extraordinary female spy. Daphne Park has faced sexism, brutality and betrayal. She has bravely stood against terror, charmed diplomats and navigated her way through the then alien Soviet Russia. Hers is an incredible life, one that brings the nail-biting and seat teetering that we expect from a spy story.
What drew me towards this book immediately was the concept of learning about a female spy. With James Bond embedded in our culture and the mystery that surrounds espionage, the opportunity to gain insight into this elusive side of history appealed greatly. Adding the fact that the central figure of this book was a woman made it seem even more unusual as women are so often overlooked in history and, as I learnt from this book, women in the intelligence service were often reduced to the role of temptress, using their sexuality to extract information from their unknowing prey.
This book begins in a very narrative and fictional style with Daphne gliding through the snowy Russian streets, ensuring that she has shaken off the bad guys as she heads for a top secret meeting. It is interesting to follow Daphne's career path as she travels from Africa to Europe to Asia, undergoing any mission that she has been set. Truly it is inspiring to see her role in the intelligence service grow. Her dedication is not only to her ambitions but also to her morals. She is willingly honest even when it is inconvenient to her goals. On top of this, Parks is adventurous and smart, an idyllic figure that, when her decision to stick to the intelligence service like glue was questioned, said 'I shall have more power, more responsibility and more satisfaction, you wait'.
The author later described her as 'not exceptionally bright', yet I had gotten the idea from the start of the book that she was brimming with wit and knowledge. Perhaps the author had hyperbolised her charisma in the beginning to make her more interesting. It seems impossible that she could be described in this way after she had shown so much intelligence and awareness in her work. Maybe four decades of research into the world of intelligence (an effort that clearly comes across in his writing) has made the author biased to Park. Recording someone else's life will always present the issue of never knowing what truly happens inside their head and while Daphne Park was an excellent character to read about, at times she seemed more like a work of fiction than an actual person.
However, this was a book that I truly enjoyed and it was more informative than I expected. From the title I anticipated the story of Daphne Park's work in the SIS. Of course this was the main aspect of the book but it was also very useful in learning about other aspects of history, like the post imperial era and the role of western powers in governing their old colonies. It was clear to see the corruption as the CIA took up its role of meddling as the Congo was given independence from its colonisers. Here, Hayes played with the three act structure when describing Lumumba’s rise and fall as Prime Minister. It was refreshing to see this in a non-fiction book and it seemed that Hayes had a clear consciousness of style when writing it.
This book was entertaining and thrilling, yet also informative and thought-provoking. It has explored many aspects of history and displays Hayes’ passion for the intelligence service. It has a wide appeal to anyone who enjoys history or simply a good story.
Erin Hull
thebookbag.co.uk
Read the review on thebookbag.co.uk Here.
The Irish Times
Paddy Hayes on Daphne Park, Queen of Spies, best known for her role in Patrice Lumumba's overthrow, and his new insight into the killing of nine Irish UN soldiers.
Daphne Park with MI6 colleague Hugo Herbert-Jones on route to Stanleyville (now Kisangani) in the Congo in 1960/61. Five officers in total took part in the operation, the nature of which remains undisclosed. Photograph: courtesy of Sarah Herbert-Jones.
Queen of Spies is the biography of the late Baroness Daphne Park (1921-2010), a senior controller in Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, popularly known as MI6. Park's entry to the secret world came about in thesecond World War when she served in the Special Operation Executive (SOE) as a coding instructor and as a briefing and dispatching officer (responsible for dispatching secret agents on their missions behind enemy lines). After the war she joined MI6, serving in Paris, Moscow, Léopoldville (now Kinshasa), Lusaka, Hanoi and Ulaanbaatar. She is probably best known for her role in the overthrow and subsequent murder of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the independent Congo Republic.
From as long ago as I can remember I have been fascinated by spies. Had I been born in a different country I might even have contemplated joining a spy service but the Ireland in which I grew up did not boast of one. So I remained a close observer of the espionage world and became an entrepreneur instead, safer if not so exciting. Spying is sometimes described as being the second-oldest profession (prostitution allegedly being the oldest). Either claim may or may not be true: certainly the desire to know – usually in order to forestall – the intentions of one's enemies is a deeply embedded desire among most rulers and it has led to the creation of what is now a multibillion-dollar global activity impacting on the lives of millions. The fascination that I (and much of the public) have with the profession is easy to understand. Spying contains all the elements of drama. It has deception, dissembling, deceit, danger and occasional dollops of sex, though practitioners will tend to play down that last aspect.
The element of espionage which most excites my passion is human spying (so-called HUMINT). This can be summarised as the recruitment by one country's spy service of citizens of another country who are prepared to provide secret information to that spy service in return for reward. Okay, it's a bit more complicated than that. For a start the motivation of agents can be complex. Some indeed betray for money, others for excitement, for revenge, to feel important or because they are forced to. As a former British SIS (MI6) officer told me once: "My job was to point out to the potential source the benefits of co-operating with us which includes avoiding the consequences of not co-operating."
And it can be about more than simply providing information. An agent (agencies prefer to use the word "source") may choose to collaborate with the intelligence service of a foreign power for a variety of reasons. They may believe that the collaboration will actually advance their own country's interests or more usually the sectional interests of the group of which they are members or affiliates. They may be quite selective in deciding what information they will turn over and what will remain undisclosed. For that reason one of the more important classifications that spy agencies use to categorise their sources is the degree to which the agency controls their actions. "Fully under our control"; "partially under our control"; "not under our control" etc. The category "fully under our control" being by far the most preferable.
My interest in writing about Daphne Park stemmed from our meeting in the mid-1990s. With the ending of the Cold War it was decided by the British government that the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS/MI6) should be placed on a statutory footing. Human rights legislation, employment law and civil society generally were combining to make the continuation of its "does not officially exist" status untenable. As part of this process (called "avowal") Park was permitted to provide an interview for the BBC's Panorama programme on the work that MI6 did. It was a heavily-censored account but was still a first.
I had been aware of her existence for some time. She had become known, mainly from her role in the overthrow of the Patrice Lumumba administration in the newly independent (Belgian) Congo in 1961 (described in detail in the book). Through a mutual friend, Lord Tordoff (she was a peer by then) I got in touch with her and arranged to meet for afternoon tea in the House of Lords one sunny summer's day. I found her to be tough-minded, quite combative, steadfast in her distrust of the Russians and totally fascinating.
We did not stay in touch – she was too careful for that – but I followed her though the occasional interview she gave to selected journalists; the Daily Telegraph was one, The Times another, she was interviewed by Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4 and by Alan Judd (a former SIS colleague) for an address she gave to the Royal Society of Literature. All helped to build the picture.
Park passed away in 2010. Two years later I decided to write her biography and commenced my detailed research. I had the basic information on file and to this was added material from obituaries written by former colleagues and a detailed memorial tribute given by Sir Gerry Warner, an old friend and former deputy-chief of her service. For the book I interviewed some 20 of her former MI6 colleagues, most on condition of anonymity but those who can be named include the (late) Hugo Herbert-Jones CMG and Brian Stewart CMG, recently deceased, Julian Harston, Hugh Bicheno and her former No 2 in Leopoldville, John de St Jorre. I was helped too by her friends, former academic colleagues and students. The culmination is Queen of Spies, only the second ever biography published about a Cold War career officer in MI6.
The Niemba ambush
The Niemba ambush, in which nine Irish soldiers on UN peacekeeping duties were killed by Baluba tribesmen in the breakaway province of Katanga, took place on November 8th, 1960. Documents (JB1015/400) unearthed in the British national archives as part of my research into the overthrow of Lumumba suggest that one reason for the ambush may have been the displeasure felt by (the then) Colonel Joseph Mobutu, the effective ruler of the Congo, at the visit by Jason Sendwe (an opposition leader in Katanga) to the Baluba and which took place under United Nations auspices.
Mobutu was reported by the British ambassador Ian Scott, to have "protested strongly" to the UN over the visit. It may be that he wanted to reassert his authority and ordered the tribesmen to attack the next available UN target, which turned out to be the Irish soldiers. That sort of behaviour would have been in character.
At about the same time (November 3rd, 1960) a Major CG Hunt of the Royal New Zealand Army Engineers submitted a report to London marked "SECRET- UK EYES ONLY" on the military state of the various UN troop country contingents (JB1015/411). About the Irish soldiers he remarked "Good, but their morale is dropping. The troops are not keen on overseas service."
He was more critical of the Swedish contingent, saying "In Congo for a good time rather than to do a job". Interestingly Swedish troops on duty in Elizabethville airport were probably the only UN soldiers in a position to save Lumumba when he was transported to Katanga to be murdered, but they choose not to intervene.
Queen of Spies, The Biography of Daphne Park, Britain's Cold War Spymaster (Duckworth, London; Overlook, New York)
The Irish Times
Read the review on the Irish Times Here.
Queen of Spies is a wonderful new book that would la e great gift for anyone, particularly if you have a strong-minded, independent woman to buy for this Christmas.
It details the extraordinary life of Baroness Daphne Park, who lived from 1921 to 2010 and was acknowledged by the British Intelligence Services as the original 'Queen of Spies'. She was plucked from a mud hut in Africa at 11 years old, only to be sent to grand-aunts in Britain to be raised in dreadful poverty. By 18, though, she had won a scholarship to Oxford University and rose from a nursing auxiliary in the second World War to a star of the post-war intelligence service.
Not only are the twists and turns of her life story amazing, but imagine my delight when I discovered the author was the lovely Paddy hayes, who's been a customer of ours at l'Ecrivain sine we opened. I never knew his first business was intelligence gathering, or how widely travelled and well connected he is. Queen of Spies is available in hardback for €29.50 from Easons.com.
Sallyanne Clarke
The Irish Daily Mail
Max Hastings's Secret War concludes that most secret agents aren't effective; but Paddy Hayes finds a fantastic heroine in Daphne Park, Queen of Spies...
Queen of Spies: Daphne Park, Britain's Cold War Spy Master Paddy Hayes
Duckworth, pp.285, £20, ISBN: 9780715650431
The Secret War Max Hastings Collins pp.558, £30, ISBN: 97800075037442
Spying is a branch of philosophy, although you would never guess it from that expression on Daniel Craig's face. Its adepts interrogate the surface of reality — people, landscapes, texts — knowing that they will discover extraordinary hermetic meanings. They study fragments of documents, whispers of messages, and from these, they summon entire worlds. Possibly one of the reasons Max Hastings cannot pretend to be hugely impressed by the boasts of wartime spies is the philosophical nebulousness of what constitutes 'results' in secret-agent speak. Soldiers fight, shoulder to shoulder; battles are clearly lost and won. But those who work in the shadows — and in The Secret War, Hastings turns the spotlight on spies in every continent — are frequently ungovernable individualists whose efforts are more difficult to quantify.
Not that he has devoted 600 pages to being dismissive of every Special Operations Executive plot to set Europe ablaze, or code-breaking triumph, or brave infiltration, or double-agent deception. He writes of Hugh Trevor-Roper's native cipher skill, of Soviet 007 Richard Sorge, and of unsung Bletchley boffins like Bill Tutte with proper and infectious relish. The brilliance of the D-Day Double Cross deception — making the Germans look the wrong way as Operation Overlord began — is duly acknowledged. But for every formidably brave spy providing 'human intelligence' by scouting out enemy territory and personnel, he also provides a magnificent parade of crooks, alcoholics and fantasists such as Ronald Seth (his codename: 'Blunderhead').
And the agents' controllers are not beyond criticism. Hastings quotes the ninth Duke of Buccleuch, who was fag at Eton to Brigadier Stewart Menzies, wartime head of MI6. The Duke was mystified, he told a friend, 'how so unbelievably stupid a man could have ended up in such a position'.
Yet it was under Menzies that the Bletchley codebreakers were allowed their free-range anarchy; and the barking civilians who brought divine inspiration were gathered together on one estate. Part of the reason their German counterparts flopped was that their geniuses were spread out among too many departments, subject to the vicious in-fighting of a vicious dictatorship. And their failure was as nothing to the Abwehr chief Admiral Canaris, who seems — in all his serial misreading of intelligence — to have been marginally less competent than Herr Flick from 'Allo 'Allo.
What makes a secret agent effective? The courageous exploits of Britain's SOE — parachuting agents into Greece, Yugoslavia, Sicily — did not, Hastings concludes regretfully, make the gigantic impact that their excitable publicity suggested. Yet he shrewdly adds that their work in boosting morale was invaluable — and that was actually far more important.
He has drawn fascinating fresh material from Russian archives; the terrifying business of spying for Stalin is given a rich human depth. Even when Stalin received brilliantly accurate intelligence (for instance, clear indications in 1941 that the Germans were about to attack), his manic paranoia made him mistrustful and unwilling to act. Hastings has also delved deep into the US effort; the exhaustion of genius naval codebreakers in a basement called 'the Dungeon' who broke Japanese ciphers and foresaw the 1942 Battle of Midway. But elsewhere, the Americans were frighteningly lax about security; there was casual blabbing all over Washington. This is a book that pulses along, yet is filled with acute insight into human ingenuity, frailty, and the ironies of evil; the author points out that the German cipher-crackers might have done much better if — like the British — they had used the finest Jewish minds.
And then of course there is the unavoidable matter of the Cambridge spies; this was never a subject to get Daphne Park — the fantastic heroine of postwar MI6 — started on. This extraordinary figure — the daughter of a poor gold-rush family in Tanganyika — had no doubts that the core of the service was loyalty: creatures such as Philby and Burgess simply could not be understood. The intelligence historian Paddy Hayes traces Dame Daphne's mind-boggling career, from tin-shack childhood, to Cambridge, to her efforts to pile in to the second world war, and then MI6; rising via postings to Moscow, the Congo and Vietnam at moments of maximum political tension to the senior MI6 position of Controller (Western Hemisphere) in the 1970s.
Dame Daphne's charisma (she once described herself as a 'cheerful fat missionary') is plain throughout: facing mortal peril in Leopoldville in a Citroen 2CV, surrounded by homicidal militia men and armed only with whisky and a brilliantly deployed giggle; escaping Soviet agents by swimming across an icy Russian river in her underwear; and most remarkably, rising through a clandestine service ill-disposed towards women.
The book is simply not long enough; and Hayes is rather breathless. But like Sir Max, Dame Daphne's story leaves us wondering about reality as seen through the eyes of a spy; and about how far spy work affected that reality.
Sinclair McKay
Both books are available from the Spectator Bookshop,
Tel: 08430 600033.
Sinclair McKay is the author of The Lost World of Bletchley Park and The Secret Listeners.
Former SIS Officer
Britain's Queen of Spies
Daphne Park: from death in the Congo to Thatcher's friend
The Guardian
Daphne Park was Britain's top woman spy, the most senior female in MI6. Surprisingly, no biography has been written about her exploits, notably in Africa, but also in Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam war where she was disguised as Britain's "consul general".
Queen of Spies, by Paddy Hayes, to be published next week fills a big gap.
Park was a strong, courageous, woman. In his richly entertaining biography, Hayes describes how she once smuggled a man whose life was in danger out of the Congo in the boot of her car. She spent part of the second world war training Special Operations Executive agents before they were dropped by parachute into occupied France.
She was MI6 station chief in the Congo during the violent aftermath of the country's independence leading to the murder of the country's first elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, on 17 January 1961. He was the victim of a CIA-orchestrated assassination plot.
One element in the plot, "twice removed", writes Hayes, "because its direct role was mainly to support the CIA's undermining campaign of sabotage, bribery, conspiracy, and cajolement, was Britain and its lead executive on the ground, Daphne M D Park."
As the US began actively to plan Lumumba's death, "one of the first things the US did", Hayes adds, "was to ensure that Britain was onside with whatever it was it planned. It didn't need physical assistance from Britain; it was more that Britain, then as now, was useful in providing political cover, to make whatever it was they were planning look less like American imperialism and more like the concerted actions of a group of 'responsible countries' (pace Iraq and Afghanistan...perhaps)."
Hayes adds: "Neither Park nor Devlin (the CIA's Congo station chief) pulled the trigger gave the order to the firing squad, but they conspired to bring about a situation where the most logical, indeed the only possible, outcome would be the death of Patrice Lumumba".
It seems that Park had a more uncomfortable time at Oxford, whence she returned, in 1980, after she retired from MI6, to become Principal of her alma mater, Somerville College. She did not get on well with the academics.
When she visited Somerville, where she was also a pupil, Lady Thatcher was confronted by hundreds of demonstrators protesting at her economic policies. Park could not even carry her own college with her in the university vote blocking a proposal to award Britain's first woman prime minister an honorary degree.
It was "a huge loss of face for Park", says Hayes. Those events hurt Park deeply, Hayes told me. But Thatcher forgave her.
In his newly-published second volume of his official Thatcher biography, Charles Moore records that she wrote to her friend, Park, saying: "I do assure you that the vote does not detract one jot from the affection I feel for the university...It was such a privilege to be there. Without that, I should never have been here [Downing Street]."
Park was made a peer and became a member of the Thatcher Foundation. She died in 2010.
Richard Norton-Taylor
The Guardian
Read the review on the Guardian.
Kirkus Review
Intelligence researcher Hayes opens the door on the fascinating life of one of England's greatest spies, Daphne Park (1921-2010).
Unlocking that door is an achievement in itself. The author was able to interview her subject after her retirement from the British Secret Intelligence Service after receiving a life peerage to add to her Order of the British Empire award. Of course, given that her life’s work was espionage, the story she told was sparse. Hayes uncovered further information from retired colleagues from Oxford, the British government, SIS, the CIA, and even the KGB. Raised in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) by British parents, she was sent to England for school at age 11 and ended up at Somerville College, Oxford. She left Oxford in 1943 and joined the Special Operations Executive, eventually working with Operation Jedburgh paratroopers until the end of the war. Park had to be patient and extremely persistent in her work, but she succeeded in getting a place in the SIS. She served in Moscow, Congo, Zambia, and Hanoi, as well as three months in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, on an unknown operation. She eventually rose to the most senior operational rank in SIS. That list of her assignments is misleadingly simple, as she was always in the right place at the right time: Moscow during the Suez crisis; Leopoldville for the post-colonial face-off in Africa and the murder of Patrice Lumumba; Lusaka for the Rhodesian declaration of independence. Hayes had access to the recent history of England’s secret service, and she uses it to great effect. This is an excellent biography of a remarkable woman who easily built relationships to safeguard foreign policy objectives. She was forthright and obdurate, and she had an infectious sense of humor. Most importantly, she personified the qualities required: loyalty, respect, tradition, and absolute secrecy.
As exciting as any good spy thriller—but it’s all true.
Kirkus Review
Book reviews and recommendations from the most trusted voice in book discovery.
“Daphne Park was truly the empress of British espionage,. This book is a major contribution to understanding her fascinating career in MI6. Remarkably well-researched, it is required reading for anyone interested in the world of secret service.”
Richard J Aldrich
Professor of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, and author of GCQH, The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency.
“Paddy Hayes has written a remarkable biography of a remarkable woman - providing real insight into MI6 of the Cold War.”
Gordon Corera
– author MI6: Life and Death in the British Secret Service