Lady Park of Monmouth obituary

The veteran former MI6 executive Daphne Park, Baroness Park of Monmouth, who has died aged 88, looked more like Miss Marple than Mata Hari. She laughed when asked whether, like James Bond, she had a "licence to kill". What she acquired was, as she put it, a "licence to blab" when MI6 needed someone trustworthy to defend it on Panorama and in the Lords. She was tagged "Queen of Spies" after her four decades as one of those tough top British female intelligence agents admired by the KGB and other opponents. "I must have been arrested and condemned to be shot several times," she admitted. "It was a hazard that I got used to."

A Tory peer and member of the Thatcher Foundation from 1992, her hardline anti-communist and anti-IRA attitudes persisted after the fall of the Berlin Wall or the erection of the Good Friday Agreement "because leopards do not change their spots overnight". As a Russian-speaker, she followed developments there with a cynical eye. She tried hard to stop the defence secretary Michael Portillo's sell-off of service housing, fearing it would drive service wives to press their husbands to leave the forces. She was just as critical when threats to British fighting capacity came from domestic contractors such as Airwork Ltd, which repaired Tornadoes bound for Bosnia with "huge quantities of aircraft Polyfilla known as Thiokol" to cover up their own damage.

The area in which she lined up against Tory hardliners was on human problems such as divorce. As a former chairman of the Legal Aid Advisory Board, in 1996 she opposed the anti-divorce views of Lady Young and opted for mediation, as urged by Labour's Lord Irvine of Lairg.

Before she became principal of Somerville College, Oxford (1980-89), and a life peer from 1990, she spent her whole adult life in foreign intelligence, initially in the wartime Special Operations Executive (SOE) 1943-47 and, thereafter, in MI6. She was forced to conceal these in Who's Who, for example, as Fany (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) and the Foreign Office, because those were the terms on which intelligence agents were employed. They risked their pensions if they disclosed anything. Only after the foreign secretary Douglas Hurd permitted her to did she disclose her background for a BBC programme; she did so again speaking on the intelligence and security services bill in March 1996, as a "former member" of the Secret Intelligence Service (the other name of MI6), and on the security service (or MI5) bill in May the same year.

Park was one of the generation of women enabled by the second world war to take posts previously denied them. In 1943, when she finished her degree at Somerville College she volunteered for Fany, having been tipped off that it had developed into more than a nursing corps. She was picked out, probably because of her East African background and interest in coding, assigned to SOE and spent most of the war on North African operations.

After the war, she transferred to MI6, which operated under the control of the Foreign Office's permanent under-secretary. She went from the Allied Commission for Austria to the British delegation to Nato, to Moscow (after a Cambridge course in Russian), to Leopoldville, to Lusaka, to Hanoi, to Ulan Bator. In all these posts she was disguised as a diplomat: in Moscow, for example, as second secretary, and had interim appointments back at home base in the MI6 part of the Foreign Office.

Her posts abroad gave her opportunities to display her fearlessness. In Moscow, in 1956, when an officially organised mob invaded the British Embassy to display "popular resentment" against Britain's Suez invasion, she harangued them in Russian: "Do you want to know what's happening in Hungary?" and translated what the world press was saying about the Soviet invasion there.

She showed this again in Leopoldville in 1959 when the "disgraceful" Belgians were on the point of being ousted from the Congo. Refusing to live among the beleaguered Belgians, guarding themselves with Doberman Pinschers and grenades against the Congolese, she located herself on the airport road, where she had many African visitors daily. As a result, she was struck off the governor general's invitation list, but met Patrice Lumumba, the African leader who was to become the short-lived prime minister of an independent Congo. After Lumumba's successor took power, she was arrested and beaten by his supporters. She managed to brazen her way out and sought local UN intervention, securing the release of Britons and other foreigners, for which she was appointed OBE in 1960.

She served in Zambia for four years, at the time when, next door, white Rhodesians declared their independence. "I also made many friends in both the Zanu and Zapu group in exile, and was several times denounced on [Ian Smith's] Salisbury radio as a friend of terrorists."

She had a frustrating time as "consul general" in Hanoi (1969-70). Britain did not recognise Ho Chi Minh's regime, and she was forbidden to speak to any official except the chief of police or the head of immigration. She was not allowed to learn Vietnamese. She met members of the Viet Minh politburo only at diplomatic receptions such as Polish Military Day. It was symptomatic of her strongly anti-communist attitude and her belief in the domino theory that she resented the Americans giving up their war against the Vietnamese because of domestic protests, which she saw as "a campaign orchestrated by the Russians". She was appointed CMG in 1971 for her Hanoi services.

Her final posting, as chargée d'affaires in Ulan Bator, the capital of Outer Mongolia, was a radical change. Instead of a heavily populated steamy jungle, she was reporting on a vast, communist-run, but semi-independent, country of a million people and 20m sheep. She sympathised with the Hungarians and others from then communist states who were trying to persuade the Mongols to run factories set up for them. In the way the establishment has, it was decided to cap her MI6 career, just before she had to resign at 60, with a final honour: a decade as principal of her old college, Somerville. This was despite its eight-fold expansion in her more than 30 years away from Oxford.

The time she gave herself to catch up on the ethos of her old college was dissipated by the terminal illness of her mother. So she began her reign not knowing Somerville's unwritten procedural codes and taboos – including communicating with a member of the Senior Common Room "by putting a note in her pigeonhole. You do not pick up the phone ..." She was more successful in repairing the damage done to the Oxbridge colleges by the government's cutbacks in subsidies. These hit Somerville particularly hard as a comparatively young college without large wealth in land. In 1983, she launched the Margaret Thatcher Fund for Somerville, hoping to attract funds from the US, where Somerville's most famous graduate was most popular. She also sought to make Somerville more business-orientated. In 1990, Thatcher's final year as prime minister, she elevated Park to a life peerage, as Baroness Park of Monmouth. Two years later, she made her a member of the Thatcher Foundation.

Undoubtedly, the fearless way in which she handled her constant challenges stemmed from her incredible upbringing, disguised by her birth in Surrey. In fact, she was the product of the turn-of-the-century British adventurers in southern Africa. Her father, John Park, had been shipped to South Africa in 1894 to "cure" his tuberculosis. He walked north through Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), settling in Nyasaland (now Malawi) and was wounded as an intelligence officer in the Nyasaland Frontier Force at the outbreak of the first world war. When his wife, Doreen Creswell-George, the daughter of a pen-pal, became pregnant, they left their tobacco farm and came to England. Her parents returned with the young Daphne to Africa where they found the tobacco plantation ruined.

Her parents moved to Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and the family lived in a mud hut until Daphne was three. Because conditions were not salubrious, her mother took Daphne to the highlands to raise coffee, while her father remained behind mining gold, joining his family every three or four months. Her mother taught Daphne to read; the rest of her education was based on a correspondence course.

At 11, Daphne was sent to her maternal grandmother in south London. To get there, she travelled through a cloud of locusts to Dar es Salaam, where "I switched on my first electric light and pulled my first loo chain."

She did well at the challenging Rosa Bassett school in London. But, when university beckoned, there was no family money. She had a £150 state scholarship, and would have been entitled to one from the LCC had her grandmother not moved to Surrey just six weeks before she was due to go to Oxford. Surrey offered £75 if she pledged to become a teacher. She refused to promise because she lacked the vocation and wanted to become a diplomat. Surrey bureaucrats had never heard of a lady diplomat, but gave her a scholarship nevertheless.

"The very month that I went up, the docks were set ablaze and the Battle of Britain took place. One was thinking about something much, much bigger than oneself." She wore secondhand clothes all through Oxford and was always short of money, but the wartime absence of young men gave her extra chances. She became president of the Liberal Club and was only the second woman to speak at the Oxford Union. She never really looked back.

Chris Mullin writes: I first came across Daphne Park as a Foreign Office minister, when she came to lobby me about Zimbabwe. I treated her cautiously at first, suspecting that like many of the Tory old guard in the House of Lords she was primarily interested in the fate of white farmers, but I quickly discovered that her interest was much wider than that and soon came to admire and respect her.

Beneath that Miss Marple exterior was a Rolls-Royce mind and a steely resolve which no doubt served her well in her chosen profession. "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?"

We had occasional lunches at which she regaled me with snapshots of her remarkable life. 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 war training agents who were parachuted into France. I asked if she had known Violette Szabo, the young Brixton shop assistant who was executed in the last month of the war. "No," she said, "but I knew Odette."

After the war she was sent to Vienna seeking out German and Austrian scientists before the Russians could kidnap them. In the late 60s, she was one of only a handful of western diplomats based in Hanoi. The Vietnamese, well aware that she was a spy, restricted her movements severely. She described how one morning a senior member of the politburo turned up unannounced at her house, and spent six hours chatting on her veranda. "We have agents in every ministry and every village in the south," he boasted. "In that case," inquired Daphne, "why do you find it necessary to hang village headmen?" "Because we are Leninists and Lenin believed in revolutionary terror," was the chilling reply.

In 1970, she was staying at the British embassy in Beijing, on leave from her lonely posting in Mongolia. She wanted to offer a token of appreciation to the staff who had looked after her, but this was in the days just after the Cultural Revolution, when tipping was absolutely forbidden. She asked the ambassador, John Addis, if he thought they might each be persuaded to accept a gift of a miniature flowering tree that she had seen on sale in the market.

Addis duly summoned the chief steward who did not reject the suggestion out of hand, but said gravely that he would need to take soundings. In due course he reported back that the flowering trees would be acceptable, but on one condition, "that the size of each tree reflects the status of the recipient". She promptly went out and bought 13 trees, ranging in size from the tallest for the major domo and the smallest, less than a foot high, for the lowly garden boy.

Asked if she had ever been discriminated against on the grounds that she was a woman, she replied: "The only time I ever experienced sexism is when an African chief gave me a special gift of a hoe, instead of a spear."

Despite failing health she remained active almost to the end of her life, whizzing round the House of Lords in her electric wheelchair. One of her last acts was to set up a small charity, Phoenix Fund for Zimbabwe, which awards small bursaries to enable Zimbabwean refugees in the UK to study and gain skills that will help them re-establish themselves in their country when the time comes to go home.

Daphne Margaret Sybil Desirée Park, Baroness Park of Monmouth, diplomat and intelligence executive, born 1 September 1921; died 24 March 2010

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