Art of Betrayal Page 12

  Suez had revealed to Britain what it had become – a once great power in decline increasingly incapable of changing the world on its own terms – but Philby had compounded the problem by sowing distrust between Britain and the now dominant United States. When his successor took over as liaison to Washington he found the relationship virtually paralysed.148 The same officer thought the impact on relations with Whitehall and the Foreign Office was even worse, ‘cataclysmic’ he thought, with a general perception of incompetence hanging over the service.149 Philby’s betrayal revealed that, for all the myths spun around MI6 by its own members as well as in the fictional world of Bond, its clubby amateurishness had been outwitted by its enemy. Philby tore the service’s guts out and then held up the messy entrails he had exposed. A classified damage assessment of the Philby affair was carried out by an MI6 officer. Some officers when interviewed continued to resist the truth and lashed out at the Americans. The full extent of the carnage he wreaked, the agents blown, the operations compromised was truly shocking, according to those who read the report.150 But it was his introduction of the cancer of betrayal and suspicion into an organisation and its relationships which was hardest to assess but perhaps most lasting in its effect.

  The depth of the pain was largely hidden from public view. It would be years before the public at large began to understand that the ‘mid-ranking civil servant’ who was described as having defected was something far more. Some like Sir Stewart Menzies, the wartime head of MI6 on whose watch Philby had been recruited, knew all too well what had happened and felt haunted. When his son-in-law briefly moved in to stay with Menzies, the thin walls revealed that Menzies was ‘suffering from the most appalling nightmares. There was one recurrent theme in these nightmares, which were awful to hear. That was there was a Russian defector who was taken up in a helicopter over the English Channel and given the choice – talk about Philby or be chucked out without a parachute. They chucked him out.’151 Philby knocked the self-confidence of MI6. Even in the mid-1970s, new recruits remember wondering why certain operations and capabilities were not employed against the Soviets and they slowly realised that it was the legacy of Philby’s betrayal and the fear of its being repeated.

  As the 1960s got under way, old social conventions were breaking down and the establishment was increasingly being satirised in popular culture. This made Philby an anti-hero to some for exposing its failings. When George Blake was uncovered as a spy in 1961 there was anguish in the service over the secrets lost, but not the sense of personal betrayal associated with Philby. Blake was not one of ‘us’. He was virtually a foreigner. ‘But Philby, an aggressive, upper-class enemy, was of our blood and hunted with our pack,’ wrote John le Carré.152 Philby became the benchmark for treachery and his story would inspire le Carré to write his own study of betrayal, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Philby would be transformed into Bill Haydon, motivated initially to betray even his closest friend by anti-Americanism and a belief that ‘the political posture of the United Kingdom is without relevance or moral viability in world affairs’, the latter being a sentiment with which his pursuer Smiley half agreed. Haydon too became caught up in the game, unwilling or unable to leave.153 Where Bond was depoliticised fantasy, le Carré rooted his vision in the mundane, sometimes brutal, realities he had observed from the inside.

  Many individuals exert a fascination over the public, but rarely has one individual held such a fascination for so many years for a country that they betrayed. The obsession with Philby is a very British brand of masochism. If a country gets the spies it deserves, then perhaps its spies also get the traitors they deserve. Philby himself always denied being a traitor to anything. ‘To betray, you must first belong,’ he told a British journalist who confronted him in Moscow. ‘I never belonged.’154

  In the spy’s world, patriotism allied to loyalty is the only insurance against treachery. It is a world in which deceit is part of everyday life, whether in protecting one’s own cover or in encouraging someone else to betray their country. For a service which encourages betrayal by others, patriotism to country and loyalty to friends is the only guarantee against those skills being turned inwards. While spies trade in treachery, they find it utterly unconscionable among their own. Like the police who need to guard against an understanding of crime turning into a temptation to pursue it, the spies need to draw stark lines to deter subversion from within.

  Probe deeper and there is a hint of admiration, though, for the way in which Philby managed to remain consistently loyal to an ideal and carried off his deceit so coolly. ‘I differ from my British colleagues who hated him,’ CIA man Miles Copeland later said. ‘How could I hate him for being a double agent when we were doing the same thing to the other side … He was one of the best intelligence officers this century. The way he kept one step ahead of the hounds was masterful. I wish we had some like him operating for us.’155 One former MI6 officer turned writer also thought Philby ‘may be regarded as a real-life James Bond. His boozy amours, his tough postures, his intelligence expertise, are directly related to the same characteristics in Fleming’s hero.’156 For Cavendish, Philby was simply doing a job. Young too retained a grudging professional respect.

  It is said that new recruits who have arrived at MI6 in recent years, fresh-faced and eager to spy for Britain, have been sat down as part of their training and shown a film of a man many have barely heard of from the distant past. They watch his performance in front of the TV cameras at his mother’s flat in 1955. They watch him lie and try to spot the signs that he is lying. Perhaps this is training them in how to get away with it. But it is also a warning of what betrayal looks like. The film runs to the end and there is silence in the room.

  3

  A RIVER FULL OF CROCODILES – MURDER IN THE CONGO

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

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

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

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

  ‘Are you Monsieur Lumumba?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, I am.’

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Do you like fishing?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ she said.

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

  ‘Of course. When?’

  ‘Tonight.’

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

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

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

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

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

  The same year Park arrived a senior MI6 officer had gone on a tour of what had been a neglected continent for the British Secret Service. Inside MI6 there had been limited interest in Africans or in what they thought. Africa did not even merit its own controller, instead being lumped in with the strategically more important Middle East. But in the summer of 1956, as Britain and France were mired in Suez and the Hungarians were being crushed, the first real stirrings of nationalism were evident in the Congo as a group of Africans launched a manifesto calling for independence. The following year after Ghana had become independent under Kwame Nkrumah, the Russians were glimpsed lurking in the background. A Foreign Office memo from May 1959 warned of a Soviet strategic objective to remove Western influence from Africa. Under Khrushchev the USSR was taking on a more active role, exploiting anti-Western sentiment and racial tension.4

  The MI6 officer who traversed the continent in 1959 wrote a detailed report which was passed up to the Prime Minister. The report warned of a kaleidoscope of local struggles, particularly against colonial powers, each of which could fuel the others. Thanks to Britain’s imperial past and legacy, MI6 always had more of a global interest than many other intelligence services, and what happened in Africa mattered directly to London. The MI6 officer found the situation in the Belgian Congo among the most worrying. ‘One cannot help being struck by the apparent abdication of the will to govern by the Belgian authorities. The country is now wide open to subversion from every quarter and it may well be that the Belgian Congo in its present geographical form will not survive much longer.’5

  On his last day, the Belgian Director General for Security in the Congo approached the MI6 man with a message. ‘I shoul
d know that the majority of senior officials in the Belgian Congo believed that the British government had a long-term Machiavellian plan for West Africa,’ he was told. ‘They believed that, when the dust from their present nationalist troubles in Africa had settled, the world would find the French and Belgian Empires disappeared and the British still in position, having taken over all the valuable trade concessions.’ The MI6 officer contested the view but was met with a wry smile. The Soviets were watching closely, the officer warned London, knowing that ‘they have a very good chance of filling to a considerable extent the power vacuum being created by the withdrawal of the Western powers’. They were looking for bases from which to operate and trying to gain control of pan-African nationalist movements. The Congo was likely to be a major target, he warned presciently.6