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”.

In the secret services, Park stood out as a forceful personality and a woman in a man's world

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.



Buy Queen of Spies: Daphne Park, Britain's Cold War Spy Master by Paddy Hayes from the Telegraph Bookshop for £16.99 plus £1.99 p&p

328pp, Duckworth, £20, ebook £13