Fatal Neutrality: Lumumba, the CIA, and the Cold War

In 1960, the Congo gained independence from Belgium. Patrice Lumumba was elected prime minister and Joseph Kasavubu president. Within a year, Lumumba was deposed and assassinated. This week on Deconstructed, executive editor of Foreign Affairs and author Stuart Reid joins Ryan Grim to discuss U.S. Cold War paranoia and the plot to assassinate Lumumba. “The great tragedy of these events,” says Reid, who has read the American cables, “the Americans are seeing Soviet ghosts everywhere and every possible move Lumumba makes is interpreted as he’s under Communist influence and from the flimsiest evidence.” Reid’s new book is titled, “The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination.”

[Deconstructed theme music.]

Ryan Grim: I’m Ryan Grim. Welcome to Deconstructed.

Today we’re going to be talking with Stuart Reid, who’s an executive editor at Foreign Affairs but, more importantly, for the context of this conversation, the author of the new book you may have heard of, “The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination.”

We’re going to talk a lot about this new book, but also fit it into the context of what we’ve been talking about on this show recently. That’s the U.S. relationship today with countries that either attempt some form of neutrality, like Pakistan, or have histories of that, but are veering in other directions, like we talked about recently with Indonesia. I think our history of this really informs how we ought to understand what we’re up to today.

I think there’s, really, no better place to start than Lumumba and the Congo. And so, Stuart, thank you so much for joining me here on Deconstructed. 

Stuart Reid: It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks, Ryan.

RG: And so, let’s set this up a little bit. This is the U.S. and its Western allies because, importantly, Belgium is kind of the main character when it comes to colonialism and imperialism in Congo here. Set the stage for us. By the time Congo finally gets its independence in 1960, Belgium by that point had, well, almost, what? Three quarters of a century of colonization in the area.

Set up for us what type of a colonizer Belgium was, because that turns out to basically drive how independence unfolds.

SR: Right. So, Belgium first became involved in the Congo in the 1880s, when King Leopold II of Belgium founded it, or declared his rule over the Congo River Basin. And what was different about the Congo compared to other European colonies in Africa is that it wasn’t a part of the European state in question; it was actually King Leopold II’s personal fiefdom.

RG: I found that part fascinating. It’s like, this is my thing, not even Belgium’s thing.

SR: And even more bizarre, he never, in his entire life, set foot in the Congo, the place he cared so much about and ruled terribly. As those of your listeners who’ve read the book “King Leopold’s Ghost” will know, his rule over the Congo Free State — as it was misleadingly called — earned him a place in the pantheon of human atrocities, and that there was forced rubber collection, there were famous photographs of people whose hands were chopped off for failing to collect enough rubber, and so on.

So, that was a period of extreme abuse, and it ended, sort of, in 1908, when the colony was transferred to the Belgian state, after an international outcry and early human rights campaign.

RG: You have to be a rather brutal colonizer to have early 20th century Europeans and Americans saying, this has to stop.

SR: Right.

RG: And what was the Congolese role in pressuring the global powers to make that change, that reform?

SR: I mean, it’s not an era I’m an expert on, but my understanding is that, even then, the Congolese voice was not really considered in other powers’ views of what was going on there. So, it was seen as a human rights scandal, but it was informed by, often, missionaries and other white Westerners visiting the Congo.

But in 1908, when it was transferred to the Belgian state, a lot of the same abuses continued. You still had conscription into the colonial army, all sorts of rapacious rule going on. So, it wasn’t as if everything was fixed in 1908, obviously.

RG: So, you have Lumumba born—

SR: In 1925.

RG: OK, 1925. So, Lumumba was born. Talk about his upbringing and education, because that becomes quite relevant to how Independent Congo is able to govern.

SR: So, Lumumba’s personal story is a remarkable rise, especially given the context, which was that the Belgian colonial administration really wanted to prevent the emergence of any sort of Congolese elite. They had this expression, “no elites, no problems.” The idea being that, if you prevented Congolese from attaining the higher rungs of various professions, if you banned certain literature from reaching them, if you prevented them from accessing higher education, then you could forestall the independence movements that were breaking out in other European colonies in Africa. So, that was the context.

But Lumumba, to a remarkable degree, got around that by being a self-taught man who took correspondence courses in French. He was very active in all sorts of societies for various Congolese.

So, backing up: he’s born in 1925. He then moves to the city of Stanleyville, a provincial capital now called Kisangani. And it’s there that he does all that self-education. He meets other Congolese elites, he becomes a postal clerk; so, joining the colonial administration, rising up the rungs. And then he’s caught embezzling money from the post office.

He admitted to it. His excuse was that he was running out of money trying to live life as a quote-unquote “Europeanized African.” I should also point out that he was making less than a fifth of what a white colleague would make for the same work.

RG: He actually did need the money to live a decent lifestyle. Like, that part wasn’t wrong.

SR: Correct. He was sending his children to the good school in town, he wanted them to eat proper food, etc. And the thing to understand about Lumumba is, he was tireless. So, he was always organizing, he was the secretary of many different associations of elite Congolese in Stanleyville. He had magazine subscriptions to pay for, etc.

And so, he was caught embezzling, thrown in jail. And then I think that’s where his political awakening began.

RG: And the way that the Congolese independence movement unfolded was so much different than Algeria and other places. In the sense that, when you think of some of these independence fights, you think of guerrilla fighters, national movements, sometimes sectarian ones. Maybe national fronts come together and win either guerrilla campaigns or actually take over territory. But this was quite different.

How does Congo end up winning its independence in the face of this strategy — “no elites, no problem” — and seemingly overnight?

SR: Yeah. So, for a long time, the “no elites, no problems” strategy works, and you can search hard for and basically not find evidence of any Congolese independence movements until the late 1950s, let’s say; ‘57, ‘58. There had been anticolonial revolts before, but nothing akin to the movements in other colonies for national independence.

And so, what happens, you mentioned those colonial wars going on. That was the great fear in the Belgian’s mind. They looked around and saw what had happened to the French in Indochina, the Dutch in Indonesia, what was going on in Algeria with the war against the French there. And they became fearful of having a Congolese version of that.

Everything really changed in 1959 when, in January of that year, there was an anticolonial riot in Leopoldville, the capital of the Belgian Congo. And that, unlike previous ones, people were openly calling for independence, there was no question about what the Congolese were demanding. And, at that point, the Belgians realized they needed to offload this colony relatively quickly, and they had done basically zero preparation for that.

One detail that sticks out to me is, in 1955, a Belgian academic wrote a pamphlet called the 30-Year plan for the independence of the Belgian Congo. 30-year. The idea being that, only by 1985 would the colony be ready for independence. He almost lost his job because that was seen as heretical and way too fast a timeline. 

Then, in the rest of the 50s, things changed extremely quickly and, by early 1960, in January and February of that year, the Belgians caved and held a roundtable where they negotiated the details of independence with the Congolese. And it was there that they agreed the independence would be on June 30, 1960.

RG: It’s just quite incredible how it goes from completely unthinkable to actually happening. And you’ve got Lumumba himself campaigning around the country in ’59 or ’60, and winds up getting arrested. He gives a speech somewhere way outside of Leopoldville. The next day, people riot, and he gets charged with basically inciting the riot and thrown in prison.

You mentioned that roundtable that’s going on in Belgium. Their main demand is, Lumumba needs to be freed. And I thought it was interesting how you laid out the politics that his supporters obviously wanted him to be freed, for obvious reasons. They support him and they want him there as their leader. But his opponents also wanted him there, because they didn’t want him to be able to sit on the outside and throw stones at the inevitable compromises that they were going to have to make with the Belgians to reach an agreement on independence. So, they say, OK, fine, Lumumba can come up.

He gets let out of prison, and he’s negotiating for independence the next day. He winds up as the prime minister very, very quickly after that. But that’s where that “no elites, no problem” arises for the Congolese.

I thought it was amazing the way that you detailed just how unprepared the Belgians had left the entire country to govern itself. How many college degrees were in the government in that first government? I think two?

SR: Yeah. Two of the 23 ministers had university degrees. And, in fact, there were only about 20 Congolese university graduates in the entire world, because the Belgians had prevented this until very, very late in their rule, when they finally allowed Congolese to attend university. 

RG: And Lumumba, a brilliant autodidact but, himself, hadn’t gone beyond what grade?

SR: Some form of primary school. The education thing, you don’t want to make too much of it because, as you mentioned, Lumumba was brilliant and self-taught. I think the other two characteristics to note about him were [that] he was incredibly charismatic; even his bitterest foes conceded that. He was also an effective what you might call today community organizer, in that he really could rally people, get pamphlets printed, hold meetings. He knew the nuts and bolts of how to organize a movement. 

RG: Right. There’s no question that there were enormous amounts of intelligence and talent. And for a group of people to throw off one of the greatest powers in the world, barely firing a shot, takes a lot of skill, too.

But there’s also value in having not just a college education. Like, that’s the bare minimum. That just, to me, stands in as a proxy for how little experience there was operating in elite circles. Because running a country is not intuitive, necessarily.

SR: Even the contact with outsiders had been so prohibited, so Lumumba and his fellow ministers had very little experience dealing with any Westerners besides Belgian colonial officials.

The other thing is, there were no sort of quasi-democratic institutions. In other European colonies in Africa, you had legislatures. In French West Africa, you had Black Africans serving in the National Assembly in Paris.

You had none of that in the Congo. And so, there were no real institutions to pass on when the country became independent. Not even fake institutions.

RG: Right. And then you’re expected to play cold war power politics at the highest existential level, without any of that experience with institutions, which I want to get to in one second.

But, before we get to that, the problem that kind of blows up that the Belgians had left as a ticking time bomb is the military. So, you had the Belgian-run Congolese military as this institution that had all white officers; I think the highest might have been a staff sergeant, you might have said. And so, this presents obvious problems and contradictions, because Belgium offers independence, but clearly wants to remain influential, wants to extract resources, and still wants to play a significant role.

So, their intent is that they’re going to leave. You know, the entire officer corps has these white Belgians; probably, they would love to do it indefinitely, but certainly for the short and medium term. Lumumba kind of agrees to that out of the gate, but then it leads to this mutiny that basically leads to the unraveling of a smooth transition.

Do you think that there was any way that you could have done a smooth transition without this type of mutiny, given the fact that the Belgians had left them with zero Black officers?

SR: The answer is, basically, no. Because if you think about the timing, Lumumba only took charge on June 30th and, really, on July 1st.

So, the mutiny happens on July 5th. I don’t think there’s really much Lumumba could have done in those four days to prevent the mutiny; that was all sorts of foretold, because of the decisions made earlier. 

RG: Like, if he would have announced we’re going to get rid of the white officer corps and replace it with a purely Congolese Africanized Officer Corps, it wouldn’t have been done, probably, by July 5th.

SR: That would have been hard, to affect that quickly.

The other thing, as you alluded to, is Lumumba himself supported the idea of a white officer corps. I don’t think he was particularly enthusiastic about it but, at a practical level, he came to accept the Belgian argument, which was that, we need to maintain order, the officers are qualified and experienced, and they will be able to discipline the rank and file. That obviously proved completely incorrect, so the soldiers not entirely surprisingly rose up against their all-white officer corps. And that was the spark that lit the fire of the entire chaos to come.

RG: And then the mutiny leads to riots. And what’s the white population at the time? Like 80,000?

SR: Yeah.

RG: And almost all of them, in a matter of months, roll out.

SR: Yeah. I think even faster than that. And that instantly drained the new country of so much expertise. Again, because the Belgian approach had been to have the whites in charge and running things, and you then were lacking in air traffic control officers, doctors, dentists. All sorts of people who are running the administration and making the country work on a day-to-day level fled with their families, mostly across the river into the French Congo.

And so, the country was instantly bereft of the mechanics of working on a day-to-day level. 

RG: And so, this is where Lumumba turns to the U.N., and the U.N. tries to send in administrators, like air traffic controllers, doctors. Like, these are things that a country needs. And, obviously, you want to have Congolese people in those positions, but you can’t build a medical school and graduate a class of doctors in time for the surgery that’s needed that afternoon.

So, the U.N. does try to surge those types of technocrats and experts in. But then — interestingly and more importantly for our purposes here — they start sending in troops.

So, talk a little bit about how the U.N. for the first time starts sending in these armed blue helmets,

SR: Right. Well, I should add one more, actually, two more elements to the crisis.

One is that, as the white population was being terrorized by the mutinous soldiers, the Belgian government sent in the Belgian military, with paratroopers dropping across the country. In effect invading a sovereign country; they did it without Congolese permission. And then you have the mineral-rich province of Katanga announcing that it’s breaking free from Congo. So, you have those added elements.

The country’s falling apart with these various crises, and Lumumba turns in desperation to the United Nations, sending a telegram to Dag Hammarskjöld, the Secretary General, asking for some sort of help.

RG: Before you move to that, I did want to underline one thing: you pointed out that a lot of the Belgian support for this military invasion — because now it’s an invasion, they’re a different country at this point — was propped up by extraordinary atrocity propaganda, about Belgian women being raped by Congolese. And there certainly was violence, and there certainly was some level of rape and sexual assault, when there’s widespread violence around the country. It seems like it was exaggerated to an absolutely extraordinary degree that relied on a lot of racist tropes about Africans, but without which they may not have been able to kind of galvanize as much public support for that. Is that right?

SR: Correct. That played a huge role. The other thing to note is that the Belgian military was ostensibly protecting its population, but if you look at what they actually did, especially in the province of Katanga, it went beyond that, where they were occupying all sorts of places that had no violence or mutiny going on. This was seen widely and correctly as an attempt by the Belgians to sort of claw back independence.

They had a very different conception of independence from what the Congolese had demanded, and what they had assumed they were getting.

RG: Which helps explain why they were so quick to grant it.

SR: Yeah. To give one more example, there was a thought — this died away eventually — but there was a thinking that the King of Belgium would remain the head of state of independent Congo. There was even the idea that the Congo’s ambassadors to foreign countries would be filled, those posts would be filled by Belgians, so that gives you a sense of what sort of independence the Belgians were thinking of. 

RG: Which would be crazy because, very quickly, the Congolese diplomats are before the U.N. doing battle with the Belgian diplomats. One of the two with college education became a U.N. permanent representative for Congo. So, he goes, making the case for this U.N. intervention.

So, how does that unfold?

SR: So, Lumumba appeals to the U.N. The U.N. impressively reacts with this very fast and large peacekeeping operation, and that was really the first of its kind. Before that, the U.N. had sort of monitored truces and ceasefires, mostly in the Middle East. For the first time, it was being asked to restore order to an entire country.

And so, within a week of the appeal going out to the United Nations, you had thousands of troops drawn mostly from other African countries, other independent African countries, landing in Congo, fanning out and the idea was that they would replace the Belgian troops who had intervened illegally. And so, they start to restore order.

It’s also a moment amid the Cold War, it’s initially seen as this great act of international cooperation. You have the Soviets and the Americans helping with the airlift to get troops to Congo. But there’s a major sticking point, which is that secessionist province of Katanga. The U.N. troops do not enter into that, and Lumumba wants them to help him bring that secessionist province back into the nationalist fold. Dag Hammarskjöld decides that that is not a possibility, and that he doesn’t want the U.N. troops to have to fight their way in and be involved in a secessionist war, which he sees as an internal manner.

And so, Lumumba and the U.N. really clash over what to do about Katanga.

RG: And so, the Katanga separatist situation feels extremely familiar around the world. Because you have these separatist movements that are organized around genuine feelings of kind of local pride among the people who live there. Some of it xenophobic and tribal, some of it just pride in the place where they’ve lived for hundreds or maybe thousands of years. That’s all real.

But then you get the outside actors who see this as useful for their own ends. And so, it didn’t seem surprising to me that the Katangan elite there were the ones that were the tightest with the Belgians. And, as they are kind of these champions of the most radical independence — you know, every region of Congo ought to be independent — they’re also the ones allying with the Belgians, because the Belgian interest is in maintaining access to the this resource-rich area of Congo, and undermining the rest of the project.

So, Belgium takes this L at the U.N., but it’s still able to fend him off from coming in there. So, what options do you think the U.N. genuinely had there?

SR: It’s a fair point. And Lumumba was unrealistic to assume that the U.N. troops would do his bidding; they answered to the security council, not him, even though he invited them in.

Basically, in August, 1960 — so independence in June 30th, mutinies in early July — in August of 1960, Ralph Bunche, the American who was a high-ranking diplomat at the United Nations, he leads this mission to try and introduce U.N. troops into Katanga to negotiate with the secessionist leader there. And he’s scared out of doing so, basically. The secessionists tell him, if you send a single U.N. troop here, there will be a massive war.

He bought into that argument. He had doubts about it, but didn’t want to take a risk. In retrospect, that would have been the time to send in the U.N.. The Katangan secessionist forces were very weak, everything was still up in the air. There’s a good argument to be made that, had the U.N. in early August, 1960, just decisively acted and sent in a bunch of U.N. troops — who, again were fellow Black Africans, would not be seen as so much of an invading force — that this could have stabilized the situation quickly.

Bunche decides, no way. And so, then it takes until much later for the U.N. to enter Katanga. But, even then, it wasn’t until 1963 that the Katanga secession finally ended and it joined the rest of Congo. So, this was sort of always going to be a problem, but I think the U.N. acted late and was overly skittish. And then it allowed the secession to really consolidate, and became more of a fact on the ground that couldn’t be changed.

RG: So, the context of this U.N. decision making, as I hinted at it at the top, is the Cold War.

And so, from the one perspective, the only connection between Lumumba and the Soviet Union seems to be the Belgian Communist Party which is anticolonial, you know, good old lefties, who were always supportive of efforts at independence. And it seems like they may have tried to bribe Lumumba and his party, and were a conduit for information to the Soviet Union.

It appears, though, that the Soviet Union had zero interest. And, actually, kind of zero ability, even if they did have interest, to do anything remotely serious on the ground and in Congo. Whereas, from the perspective of the United States, Lumumba was seen either as an actual secret crypto-communist, or a kind a Fidel Castro, who started out as an anticolonial left-leaning, and then, over time, winds up allying with the communist bloc out of pragmatism, and then becomes an ideologue down the road; there were some in the State Department who thought Lumumba might go that direction.

But there were others that seemed to have more of a finger on the pulse, who were like, no, Lumumba is actually exactly what he says. He is a nationalist and he’s anticommunist. He rejects the entire notion of this secular communism, even rejects nationalizing companies.

So, what was the U.S. perspective on Lumumba, what was the Soviet perspective on Lumumba? And how much do you think the U.S. is serious about its claims that they were worried that Lumumba was a secret communist, and how much of that is just cover for wanting a compliantly pliant dictator there?

SR: The great tragedy of these events, the great irony, is that, if you read the American cables, as I’ve done, the Americans are seeing Soviet ghosts everywhere. And every possible move Lumumba makes is interpreted as, you know, because he’s under communist influence. And from the flimsiest evidence, most of the American officials spun this elaborate conspiracy theory, basically about how Lumumba was going to hand his country over to Soviet domination.

When the Cold War ended and the Soviet archives opened up, it turns out that there wasn’t much about Congo in them, because the Soviets didn’t care all that much about Congo. This is 1960. The Soviet Union was not as powerful as it would later become. Its ability to project power far away from its borders was limited. The Soviets, by all evidence, viewed the Congo as good propaganda, because you had this colonial power backed by the Americans, strangling third world nationalism in the cradle, so you could score some nice political points on the floor of the U.N. But it wasn’t a place where the Soviets ever thought they were going to have serious influence.

The United States and the Soviet Union sort of agreed about Lumumba; they both viewed him as unreliable, and not someone who could firmly be on your side. But, from the American perspective, it was the Cold War, and the paranoia pervaded every act of interpretation.

RG: And it also seemed like sometimes they wanted to push things in that direction just to make it easier for them.

One great example you mentioned is, Lumumba decides overnight that he wants to go visit the U.N., which is a really funny, funny chapter. Like, normally these things take months or years to set up and he just, with pieces of paper, comes down to the embassy and gets visas, and says, we’re coming to the U.N., because we’re clearly not making our case well, we want to be heard in person. And Ralph Bunche, the U.N. guy says, it’d be a nice gesture, he wants to come to the United States. If you sent him on it on a U.S. plane, he’s asked for a U.S. plane. And Bunche points out that that’s another indication, that maybe you should take seriously his claims that he’s not anti-Western, and he’s actually quite pro-Western in general.

And the response from the State Department is incredible. They say, no. Force him to take a Soviet plane, because that’ll show his true colors. I feel like talking about that as kind of naïve or paranoid is almost giving them too much credit. It’s so dumb, it feels orchestrated. Like, even if he’s not an enemy, you have to turn him into one for your own purposes. And so, we’ll force him on a Soviet plane. Which he ends up not taking a Soviet plane, by the way, you mention he just goes down to the airport and commandeers some British plane and just flies it over there.

SR: Yeah. In that particular instant, there’s also a sort of bureaucratic explanation, which is what happens in Washington; official opinion about Lumumba changed before it changed in the Congo. So, that’s why you have Ralph Bunche and the U.S. ambassador to Congo, Claire Timberlake, saying, let’s put him on an American plane. And the response from headquarters comes back: no way, let him go on a Soviet plane.

The officials in Congo quickly got in line with the new mood in Washington, but the crazy thing — and it does it seems so puzzling in retrospect, but here I think you just have to put on your Cold War glasses, and imagine the extreme paranoia and the recency of World War II, and all that — but Lumumba was, as you mentioned, he was so much more pro-American.

To give you a few examples: he signed over the entire mineral wealth of the Congo to an American entrepreneur. He talked about educating Congolese children in American schools, not Russian schools. Even when he was visiting the United States, [he] called on the United States to send American troops to the Congo. So, that is hardly the action of someone who is pro-Soviet, and yet you see it again and again, the Americans just can’t really update their priors, and update their view of Lumumba, which was heavily influenced by their Belgian ally, and see him for what he really was.

With the exception of — you mentioned this earlier — there’s a State Department memo that lays out exactly who Lumumba was, saying, no, he’s not a communist, he’s a nationalist, he wouldn’t submit his country to foreign influence. That memo gets entirely ignored, but it was so refreshing and tragic to read it in retrospect, because you think, OK, someone understood what was really going on here, but it got ignored.

RG: The thing the state department leaders really seized on was, as he’s under intense pressure, and he’s unable to convince the U.N. to do what he thinks they ought to be doing, he says, basically, if you don’t do it, I’m going to call in the Soviets, and I’m going to have them do it. Now, we now know that, even if he begged them to do it, they weren’t going to do it. Like, that wasn’t going to happen. But that kind of hung like a sword over his neck for the rest of his short life.

So, how do we go from there to the plotting that leads to his assassination?

SR: Yeah. So, Lumumba had first tried the U.N., was frustrated with their response, then knocks on the United States’ door. [He] gets rebuffed, isn’t able to meet with Eisenhower, who’s not in Washington.

And so, it is then and only then that he turns to the Soviets, and he asks the Soviet for specific military aid, which he hopes to use so that he can invade the province of Katanga and bring it back to the national fold. The Soviets agree, and send some token aid, basically, but either none or only a very little amount of that aid ends up reaching the Congo because, in the meantime a lot had happened.

So, his appeal to the Soviets set off alarm bells in Washington, the CIA puts in motion this bizarre assassination plot involving poisons that are delivered to Congo, and that the CIA station chief in Congo — a man named Larry Devlin — is told to inject in Lumumba’s food or toothpaste, and it’ll kill him fairly quickly, and make it look like he died of natural causes.

So, there are all these plots in the works, but what happens is, that poisoning plot sort of fizzles because, in the meantime, Lumumba’s been ousted in a CIA-backed coup led by a military officer named Joseph Mobutu, who — spoiler alert — would go on to run the Congo for more than three decades, and become this American client.

RG: What I didn’t realize is that they had been good friends almost their entire adult life, it seemed like. Mobutu was a journalist who was sort of like Lumumba’s, I don’t know about “best friend,” but a close, close lieutenant and ally, all the way through, including suppressing the mutiny. It sounds like they had a falling out around that time.

But, yes. How does Mabuto wind up as such a satisfying alternative to the Americans than Lumumba?

SR: At the heart of this story is this personal betrayal between friends and allies. Mobutu eventually turns on Lumumba, replaces him, and has a hand in his death.

So, Mobutu was very much a background character for a while. He was 29 at the time. And when Lumumba’s government formed and Congo became independent, Mobutu was a junior minister. And then, when the mutiny happens, Mobutu receives this extremely important promotion — which he would later profess to be ungrateful for — and he becomes head of the military, de facto head of the military, and he’s in charge of Africanizing the officer corps. That put him in a very key position.

Lumumba ended up sort of sowing the seeds for his own demise, because in Congo in 1960, amid the chaos, being in charge of the military forces, however tenuous that command was, was the most important position you could have. Just, literally, to be able to move troops from this location to that location, to protect this house and not that house, that became of utmost importance.

And so, to move through some complicated events fairly quickly, as Lumumba’s flailing and trying to put his country back together, the president of the Congo — a man named Joseph Kasavubu, who held the ceremonial position of president — engages in this legally dubious maneuver of claiming that he’s firing Lumumba according to the powers in Congo’s provisional constitution.

And so, the president announces that Lumumba has been fired. Lumumba says, you can’t fire me, I fire you. And so, the two top political leaders of the Congo have announced their mutual dismissal. And into the void steps Mobutu, who had been meeting with the CIA Station Chief, and previewed his plan with him, and received $5,000 in cash, as a sort of incentive to go ahead with this.

Mobutu steps into the void and says, I’m, “neutralizing both politicians.” He begins his announcement by saying, this is not a military coup; it was exactly that. And then, eventually, after he dispenses with the fiction that he’s remaining sort of above the fray and neutral, and puts Lumumba under house arrest. And that’s sort of the beginning of the end for Lumumba. 

RG: The other poignant part was that Lumumba himself had chosen Kasavubu. Kind of a more radical politician than him, different than him in a lot of different ways. And it sounded like Lumumba felt like the two of them together would help to bring Congo together as one nation. And maybe also a little bit about, you know, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. But everyone who knew Kasavubu at all warned Lumumba, do not do this. Like, he will turn on you, you will deeply regret this, you’re being arrogant and not listening to us.

What was your sense of why he made that fatal blunder?

SR: It was sort of the obvious move to do, in a way.

So, Lumumba and Kasavubu were the two big pro-independence figures in the Congo. And, as you mentioned, Kasavubu was actually the more radical one; he had started earlier, called for independence earlier, stuck his neck out earlier, and Lumumba was sort of behind him for a while. Kasavubu was older — I mean, in his forties, I think, because everyone was so young here, but that counted as old in Congolese politics in 1960. And he was sort of distant, and regal, and so, it made sense, in a way, for him to be president of the Congo.

And I think, as you mentioned, also, the idea was, have him as part of the government, inclusion was the name of the game, that’s why Lumumba had so many ministers, 23 ministers from all sorts of ethnic groups and regions and political parties. And, indeed, after the mutiny, there was this brief moment of unity, where Lumumba and Kasavubu are flying across the country in a small plane.

Interestingly, for being relatively quote-unquote, “radical” pre-independence, after independence, Kasavubu becomes very much pro-Belgian, under the spell of Belgian advisers, listening to their advice, and hardly the pro-independence activist he had been known as.

And so, the Americans are also leaning on Kasavubu. One of the things I found in my research was a document that no one else to my knowledge had seen before in decades, which was the outgoing CIA Station Chief in Leopoldville meeting with the president early in August, 1960, saying, by the way, Mr. President, you should consider firing Lumumba, you have the power to do this.

And so, that may have been where the idea was planted in his head, because he ended up following that advice not long after, and escalating the crisis to a new level, and leading to Lumumba’s demise. 

RG: I thought that that was so interesting, how you had this radical who took so many risks when he was without power but, once he had power, he became this establishment figure and stooge for these imperial powers.

And so, why then does Lumumba need to be eliminated? And what do we know about how he was killed?

SR: So, the timing here is important. OK, he’s under house arrest in late November, 1960. He escapes house arrest. He hides in the back of a car with his servants, and slips past the rings of troops guarding his house. And he tries to make it back to his political stronghold in the east of the country, but he’s caught — with CIA help, I should mention — and he’s thrown into military prison. The idea being, OK, now he can’t escape from here. So, that’s December, 1960, is when he’s caught and put in the military prison.

And, as you know, Kennedy had won the U.S. election, was coming into office in late January, the Eisenhower administration was on its way out. And there was a well-founded belief that Kennedy might have a more pro-Lumumba policy.

The Congo was still in chaos despite Lumumba no longer being in power, and there was a real movement among some of Kennedy’s advisors to figure out some sort of solution where Lumumba would be freed from prison; parliament, which had been shut down, would spring back to life; and Lumumba could return as prime minister. This was a legitimate strain of thinking among certain Kennedy advisors who focused on the Congo.

And Larry Devlin, the CIA Station Chief in Congo, knew about this, and so did Mobutu. He was also worried. Both of them were worried that Lumumba could come to power, even though he was in prison.

And then, at a more practical level, there were stirrings among the guards guarding Lumumba that thought that they might rise up and spring their prisoner. He was so popular, and so charismatic, and there were gripes. And so, this real fear develops both in Washington and in Congo that Lumumba might come to power.

And so Mobutu, who’s in charge, or someone from his circle, tells Devlin, hey, we’re going to send Lumumba to his death, to another province where he will almost certainly be killed; there were two secessionist provinces at that point. Devlin hears this explosive news, and he does two things— Or, rather, he doesn’t do two things.

One, he does not try and talk Mobutu out of this plan, even though he had enormous influence with him, he was handing over briefcases of cash regularly, giving advice on every single question. So, he doesn’t tell Mobutu to put the brakes on the operation to kill Lumumba.

And then, quite deviously, he doesn’t tell headquarters in Washington about what’s about to happen. Even as he’s updating them about other twists and turns, he sits on the most important news.

Why does he do this? Because he understood correctly that if he did keep Washington abreast, he would almost certainly be told to intervene and save Lumumba’s life, because at that point, official thinking in Washington had changed. The assassination operation was no more, Lumumba was out of power, and also — to the Eisenhower administration’s credit — they thought that you had to wait until the Kennedy administration took power, took office, and so you couldn’t have big decisions on the ground. 

RG: You can’t assassinate any other foreign leaders during a transition. Good old establishment process norms.

SR: Exactly. And so, Devlin sits on this news. And then, on January 17, 1961, Lumumba is put on a plane, a series of planes bound for Katanga, the secessionist province. He’s tortured the whole flight through, and he’s killed by a firing squad just hours after his arrival in Katanga. And then, three days later, Kennedy is inaugurated.

The mechanics of it have a lot to do with the U.S. power transition, and that explains the timing of Lumumba’s death.

RG: Talk a little bit about Mobutu, who holds power for more than three decades.

SR: So, Mobutu was seen as this pro-American military leader and, at every turn, the United States decided to back him rather than not back him. That begins in 1960, with him taking power in that coup, and it continues throughout the early part of the 60s, where after Lumumba’s death there’s this massive uprising across the Congo, where Lumumba’s followers are fighting the central government. Mobutu requires enormous CIA help to help put down those rebellions.

And then, in 1965, Mobutu, you know, dispenses with the fiction that he’s not technically in charge, and appoints himself president. The United States approves of that coup and recognizes the new government quickly.

And then, throughout the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, the United States is lavishing his regime with aid. The great irony here is that Americans thought they were getting this pro-American dictator; in fact, Mobutu did things that Lumumba would never have been forgiven for. Nationalizing large swaths of the economy, kicking out two U.S. ambassadors for displaying insufficient respect, inviting in North Korean communist military advisers. So, the United States barely got what it paid for.

And then, the Cold War ends, and Mobutu’s outlived his usefulness. He’s become an embarrassment in Washington, the U.S. pulls the plug eventually, and then, not long after, his regime implodes in ’96, ’97, kicking off a devastating civil war.

RG: Well done, U.S.A. and Belgium. Impressive work all around.

SR: You really can draw a straight line from the decisions taken in 1960 by the United States to what ended up happening 30-plus years later in Congo. And what is happening today; so much of the current dysfunction and violence dates to that collapse of the Mobutu regime.

RG: What became of Devlin? Any accountability?

SR: No. He was promoted for his work in the Congo, to Laos, of all places. And then, interestingly, he’s pulled back into the Congo, because no other U.S. official has the type of rapport with Mobutu that Devlin does. And so, he comes back to the Congo as Station Chief, serving two nonconsecutive terms there, which is unusual. And then becomes head of the East Africa branch of the CIA. And, eventually, retires, when he realizes there’s no further path upward.

And where does he go after retirement, of all places? Congo, which was then known as Zaire, and he works for Maurice Tempelsman, the Belgian-American diamond merchant, as Tempelsman’s man in Kinshasa, the capital. And his actions in Congo would define the rest of his career and life.

RG: Well, Stuart, I really appreciate this. Thank you so much for joining me again.

SR: Thanks so much for having me, Ryan.

RG: You got it.

That was Stuart Reid, and that’s our show. Check out his new book, “The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination.”

Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept. José Olivares is our lead producer. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. Legal review by David Bralow. Leonardo Faierman transcribed this episode. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. And I’m Ryan Grim, D.C. Bureau Chief of The Intercept.

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