Daphne Margaret Sybil Désirée Park, Baroness Park of MonmouthCMG, OBE, FRSA was a British spy. During her career as a clandestine senior controller in MI6 she was stationed in Moscow, Austria, the Congo, Zambia and Hanoi.
Early life and education
Daphne Park was born to John Alexander and Doreen Gwynneth Park. Her father had contracted tuberculosis as a young man and was sent to Africa for rest and recuperation. He moved from South Africa to Nyasaland, and served as an intelligence officer during World War I. Thereafter he worked as a tobacco farmer and as an alluvial gold prospector in Tanganyika. When Daphne was six months old she travelled to Africa with her mother to join him there. Park had a brother, David who died aged 14. When she was 11, Daphne Park returned to England and was educated at Rosa Bassett School in Streatham and at Somerville College, Oxford, where she graduated with a B.A. in modern languages in 1943. She was further educated at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she received a Certificate of Competent Knowledge in Russian in 1952.
Career
On graduating in 1943, Park turned down jobs in the Treasury and the Foreign Office to make a direct contribution to the war effort. She then joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. During the selection process for FANY, she came to the attention of the Special Operations Executive, due to her understanding of ciphers. Park was promoted to the rank of sergeant and trained groups of operatives for Operation Jedburgh, whose task was to support the Resistance in Europe. In 1945 Park went to work as a briefing and dispatching officer in North Africa. On her return in 1946 she was sent to Vienna to establish an office for the Field Intelligence Agency Technical, a unit of the Allied Commission responsible for tracking down former Axis scientists. In 1948, she was attached to the Foreign Office, while actually working for the Secret Intelligence Service, becoming Third Secretary of the United Kingdom's delegation to NATO in 1952. She then became Second Secretary of the British Embassy in Moscow between 1954 and 1956. From 1959 to 1961 she was Consul and First Secretary to Léopoldville now Kinshasa, which in practice meant head of MI6 there. David Lea, Baron Lea of Crondall, wrote that, shortly before she died, she privately acknowledged organising the abduction and murder of Patrice Lumumba during this period. Park said: ‘We did,’ and ‘I organised it.’ Her assertion was that the high-value Katangeseuranium deposits as well as the diamonds and other important minerals largely located in the secessionist eastern state of Katanga were British interests. The Shinkolobwe uranium mine provided the uranium used by the Manhattan Project, including in atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. She rose further through the ranks of the Foreign Office to be High Commissioner to Lusaka from 1964 to 1967 and then Consul-General to Hanoi from 1969 to 1970. In 1972 she was named as Chargé d'Affaires of the British Embassy of Ulan Bator for several months. From 1973 onwards she served in the Foreign Office then retired two years early in 1979 to become Principal of Somerville College, Oxford.
Park was unmarried and had no children. She died after a long illness on 24 March 2010, aged 88. A Service of Thanksgiving for the Life and Work of Baroness Park was held on Tuesday 26 October 2010 and the eulogy was given by fellow ex-spy Sir Mark Allen, CMG.
