Art of Betrayal (18 page)

‘You know that I wanted you withdrawn.'

‘Yes, I did.'

‘You know I would be happy for you to stay as head of Chancery.'

‘Look, I'm already doing head of Chancery, but that's not what I'm here for. I'm here because I'm an SIS officer.'

‘Yes, but I can't have that. All sorts of things might happen. However, I might consider it if you would engage to tell me the names of all your agents so that I can decide.'

‘I'll go and pack my bags,' replied Park.

‘What do you mean?'

‘We have an agreement when we recruit people. They are not told about to anybody. There is an absolute rule about that and I wouldn't dream of breaking it. So even if I wanted to do what you suggest I couldn't. It's against our entire ethos.'

‘Well, don't you think I'm trustworthy?'

‘No. I don't actually.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘What would happen would be that you would meet one of them – because I don't waste my time recruiting people who are not important – you would meet one of them and you wouldn't be able to resist saying to one of them, “Most interesting idea of yours about such and such,” which you remembered from having read his report and he would instantly know that you knew. And that would be the end of that. That is the rule: we do not give the names to anybody outside the service.'

‘Well, perhaps I could see your reports first?'

‘You do see all my intelligence reports – they are not circulated in Whitehall without being able to say the ambassador agrees or disagrees. So that already happens.'

‘You're quite sure?' Scott asked, probing to see if she would give a little ground.

‘I'm very sorry but I'm quite sure,' Park replied firmly.

‘Oh well. Let's leave things for a bit then.'

In the weeks after that conversation, the Congo was to be thrust on to the front page of the papers and to the top of the diplomatic in-tray. Park would prove herself to be indispensable and the Ambassador would become a close ally.

Seventy years before Daphne Park took her boat to the country, the writer Joseph Conrad had set out on his own journey up the Congo River, fictionalised in his novel
Heart of Darkness
. The darkness was not Africa but the horrors of the colonial mind and its violent outpourings. In 1885, the Congo had become not a Belgian colony but a personal possession of King Leopold II, acquired with the assistance of the British explorer Henry Stanley (two of the largest cities were named after the men). Colonialism in Africa did not have a good record, but Leopold's and Belgium's record in the Congo was
the most wretched. Leopold never set foot in the country, but during the twenty-three years that it was his personal fiefdom an estimated ten million Congolese died from disease or starvation or at the hands of the death squads led by the feared Force Publique. A whip made from thick hippopotamus hide was used to keep the locals in line. Entire villages would be massacred if they did not accede to colonial demands and agree to act as slaves to extract rubber and other resources to feed the King's greed.
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The heads on poles which Conrad wrote about outside the house of the mad colonist Kurtz were a reflection of a culture in which killing was a sport. In 1908, the King sold the colony – eighty times the size of Belgium – to the government in Brussels as if it was a toy he had tired of.

By the mid-1950s, the Belgians could see which way the wind was blowing and started to think about possibly one day granting independence in the distant future, perhaps after a few decades. They did little to prepare the country for that possibility and failed to develop any effective political institutions. There were few ties that bound the six provinces and the myriad tribes together. There were only around twenty African university graduates by the end of the 1950s out of a population of fourteen million, and no doctors or engineers.
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But then in 1959 riots erupted in Leopoldville's broad streets and Belgium lost its nerve (Graham Greene, in the country at the time to research his book on a leper colony, remembered colonial Belgians sleeping with guns beneath their pillows).
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Brussels feared being drawn into the kind of violent struggle that was engulfing France in Algeria and so decided to grant independence in a rush, even though the country was woefully under-prepared. Elections were held in May 1960 with independence scheduled absurdly soon afterwards – at the end of the following month. The man who took the second highest tally of seats, the weak-willed and highly influenceable Joseph Kasavubu, was offered the ceremonial role of president. The man who won most seats and would become prime minister was the man from the visa queue, Daphne Park's friend Patrice Lumumba.

Lumumba had already been singled out as trouble by some Westerners who had taken part in a conference on independence in Belgium in January that year. He had been released from jail especially to attend, having been convicted of making inflammatory speeches
the previous October when he addressed 2,000 people, talking of death for liberty.
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The American Ambassador to Brussels observed him at the conference and reported him as having ‘a highly articulate, sophisticated, subtle and unprincipled intelligence' – someone who told people what they wanted to hear.
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‘He gave the impression that he was not a man who could be dominated,' a friend recalled. ‘And a man who could not be dominated was dangerous.'
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It had been hot and humid as independence approached, the tense atmosphere heightened by the discovery of bodies every morning, the product of tribal or political murder. In June, the British Consul General Ian Scott (who would become an ambassador after independence) threw the traditional Queen's Birthday Party at his house on the banks of the river.
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On an overcast evening, a Salvation Army band played a tune everyone recognised. It was called ‘We are drifting to our doom'. The lights in the garden fused and a fine drizzle began.

The gloom had lifted by the morning of 30 June – independence day – as Patrice Lumumba strode confidently into the imposing Palais de la Nation, originally built to be the residence of the Belgian governor general. An exuberant smile played on his face and he wore a bow tie with a sash across his smart suit. The Prime Minister waved to his supporters. Dignitaries from across Africa and further afield had gathered for the occasion. King Baudouin had come from Belgium and stood before a bronze statue of Leopold II, promising a wonderful future for the former colony – so long as it did not turn its back on those who had looked after it for so long. ‘Don't be afraid to come to us. We will remain by your side,' he told the crowd. The absurdity of the speech reflected the grotesqueness of the colonial experience. Even Ian Scott thought it went just a bit too far.
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‘It's now up to you, gentlemen, to show that you are worthy of our confidence,' the King proclaimed. ‘The independence of the Congo is the culmination of the work conceived by the genius of Leopold II.'
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Kasavubu, the country's new president, pronounced a few words. Scott thought them ‘sensible, moderate and flavoured with a certain humility'. Lumumba had not originally been scheduled to speak. But he had decided he would have his moment. He stepped forward and played to the gallery, speaking directly and angrily to and for
the Congolese people rather than addressing the diplomats. ‘Fighters for independence today victorious, I salute you in the name of the Congolese government', he began. ‘We have known sarcasm and insults, endured blows morning, noon and night, because we were niggers,' he told them. ‘Who can forget the volleys of gunfire in which so many of our brothers perished, the cells where the authorities threw those who would not submit to a rule where justice meant oppression and exploitation?' Scott thought the speech, which was as interrupted eight times by applause, ‘hard, bitter, accusatory and xenophobic, directed against the Belgians'. The man sitting next to Scott leant over and said he thought the King would walk out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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