Stuart Reid on the CIA-backed Destabilization of the Congo

Transcript:

REID: Lumumba had made the unforgivable sin of reaching out to the Soviets for help.

REID: Being as powerful as the United States was gave it a sense that, well, of course it had to direct events in this or that country

HANNAH: Welcome to None of the Above, a podcast of the Institute for Global Affairs. My name is Mark Hannah.

HANNAH: Over the past few months you’ve likely heard about the instability plaguing the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

SKY NEWS: Although one of the poorest countries on Earth, DRC is rich in minerals. But a brutal history of colonial exploitation looks like being repeated now.

BBC: President Felix Tshisekedi is up for re-election after a first term focused on fighting the M23 rebel group.

AL JAZEERA: There are reports of extrajudicial killings, and torture, and rape.

BBC: Seven million people have been internally displaced.

REUTERS: Democratic Republic of Congo President Felix Tshisekedi has asked his government to fast track the withdrawal of a United Nations peacekeeping mission.

HANNAH: Since the fall of Mobuto Sese Seko’s 30 year dictatorship in 1997, the Congo has faced renewed conflict over issues such as ethnic tensions, territorial disputes, and the integrity of its elections. In the 63 years since Congolese independence, the Democratic Republic of the Congo has only seen one peaceful transition of power.

But tomorrow, nearly 40 million Congolese voters will head to the polls in an attempt to change that.

WORLD OF AFRICA: When Felix Tshisekedi took office as president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, following a disputed election in 2018, he promised to end decades of political repression and corruption. But as he prepares for a re-election bid in December, rights groups, international allies, and rivals accuse his administration of stifling dissent, just as previous governments did when he was in opposition.

HANNAH: What you might NOT know is that Mobutu’s power grab was made possible by US intervention, and a CIA backed assassination plot to take down his predecessor -- Patrice Lumumba: who was the first prime minister of the independent Democratic Republic of the Congo.

We sat down with Stuart Reid, the executive editor of Foreign Affairs magazine and the author of The Lumumba Plot, to talk about the story of Patrice Lumumba and the lessons his story holds for the US today.

HANNAH: So Stuart, who was Patrice Lumumba, and how did you come to his story? What kind of motivated you to tell his story?

And where did you hear of him first?

REID: So, Patrice Lumumba was the first prime minister of, The Congo, the former Belgian colony, and I first got interested in this story when I had the chance to go to Congo, now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in, back in 2014, to write something that was more present day focused,

I was actually writing about Russ Feingold, the U. S. Senator, Wisconsin Senator, who lost his Senate seat to a Tea Party guy and then somewhat improbably became the Obama administration's special envoy to the Great Lakes region of Africa.

So I was writing this sort of political story about what is Russ Feingold up to in Africa, and as part of that I traveled with him and his team to Congo and just was really taken with the country and started reading up on its history. And the more I read, the more I realized there was this moment in 1960 when the country became Independent from Belgium, and it was front page news of the New York Times every day.

It was the big Cold War crisis of its era. But I knew basically nothing about it. I had barely heard of Patrice Lumumba. And so that was sort of the initial question that sent me down this path.

HANNAH: And His story is not just that of a flashpoint in the Cold War, but also a transition to independence from Belgian colonization, just refresh our memory about that colonization, about the history of Belgium, Belgium's essentially creation of what is the modern day, democratic Republic of Congo.

REID: So in 1885, king Leopold II of Belgium declares the creation of the Congo Free state, as he called it. And what was different about this colony compared to other European colonies in Africa was that it didn't belong to the state. It belonged to King Leopold himself.

It was his personal fiefdom and so that as people who have read King Leopold's Ghost would know his reign was extremely brutal and he's earned a place in the pantheon of human atrocities and the population of the Congo River Basin, which was the area that was colonized, is thought to have dropped in half because of the disruption of the colonial project.

HANNAH: So despite the brutality of the Belgian colonial project, there were a couple promising young Congolese that emerge as hueing close to European values, educating, learning the language, and the culture and one of the most consequential of these is an extremely captivating and at times erratic figure in Patrice Lumumba.

I mean, he has, he is a [00:03:00] fantastic protagonist you have in your story. So talk to us about him. Paint a portrait of him. What kind of leader was he and how is he perceived in the Congo and by foreign governments when he gets to power?

REID: Yeah, so first off, he has this remarkable rise within the colonial system. He is a postal clerk, rising through the ranks of the administration, then gets caught embezzling money from the post office, is thrown in jail, writes a book manuscript, which in retrospect is remarkable just for how moderate his desires are at that time. And then after being released from prison, becomes a beer promoter of all things in the capital, Leopoldville.

And it's there that he really rises. And at that point we're talking late 1950s, the Congolese independence movement is finally gaining steam after being long delayed and arriving far later than independence movements and other African colonies did. And so Lumumba becomes prime minister upon independence on June 30th, 1960.

And, as you said, one characteristic of him was that he was extremely charismatic. I mean, even his deepest enemies admitted that he was, he had a remarkable way with words. But he was also, as you also said, uh, arguably quite erratic, in that he switched Positions very quickly. The important point there though is that he was dealing with an almost impossible crisis.

To run through a bit of quick history,, upon independence, everything goes to hell in a handbasket almost immediately in the Congo. The army mutinies, the Belgian military intervenes without Congolese permission, sending Belgian paratroopers across the country.

The mineral rich province of Katanga announces its secession. And so, literally within two weeks of being an independent country, Lumumba's country is destroyed. Utterly falling apart. And he's desperate.

HANNAH: And so when the Belgians passed the baton, as it were, to the Congolese to govern themselves There wasn't a lot of mentorship.

There were some stories of the French when they were leaving some of their colonies, like unscrewing the light bulbs and really abandoning the people they had sought to quote unquote civilize and benefit. So, how lost was Lumumba at this point when there was this upheaval within weeks of him becoming the leader of the country?

REID: Yeah, so I think one important factor here is the whole process of independence was extremely rushed at the beginning of 1960. It wasn't clear that the Congo was going to become independent that year and then it ends up becoming independent on June 30th. So in a matter of really weeks and months they decided on all these important questions of what the constitution would be, how the system of government would be structured things, that usually take years. And also there was very little Congolese expertise.

Everything was still run by the Belgians. Essentially, you had Congolese ministers, but the functionaries actually making the country work, the air traffic controllers, et cetera, were all Belgian. And so when you have this massive crisis after independence with the mutiny and so on, there's a quick white flight.

From the Congo, essentially, and that drains the country of expertise, which, again, had been nearly all Belgian by design. So that's the emergency that Lumumba faces upon independence. His country's falling apart, the Belgian population that is running many of the aspects of daily life has fled, and it's in that context that he turns to the United Nations first for help.

HANNAH: And talk about that. Because he was, he was really sort of just at that point, hustling for, on behalf of his country for, financial support. Right. And he approached the Soviets. They didn't trust him as sufficiently ideologically. Why did the UN, and to what extent did the [00:08:00] UN help him or not? And, then let's get eventually to the question of the U. S. decision, to try to oust him.

REID: Right. So before independence, Lumumba had been meeting with the Soviets and the Americans, and both sides sort of agreed, in a funny way, that Lumumba was unreliable and not someone to, you know, count as a true steadfast partner for either side.

So he goes to the U.N.

HANNAH: Well, let me just say that, I mean, he kind of embodies, we were talking about this earlier, he kind of embodies Realpolitik, right? Like he's trying to look out for the interest of his country. He doesn't have really strong ideological commitments in either direction. You point to some of the cultural aspects of American life that he was attracted to.

But for the most part, he finds himself in the middle of this Cold War, which is, among other things, driven by ideological commitments to a certain system of government and doesn't have any [00:09:00] genuine or authentic allegiances. So, that makes him, sort of, even though he's doing the work of just trying to benefit his citizens, like, suspicious in the eyes of these two great power rivals, right?

REID: Yeah, very quickly, he really had no chance to implement any sort of governing agenda or show his true colors. He had to focus on survival from nearly the get go. And so he was realistic and pragmatic in his own way. And his goal was purely to get help to put his country back together again, specifically to reintegrate the breakaway province of Katanga.

So when he went to the UN, that was what he wanted the UN to do to sort of stabilize the country and allow this breakaway province to come back into the fold. He gets frustrated with the UN, which refuses to do that on his behalf, saying essentially we work for the security council, not you. And then he turns to the United States.

And so he flies to New York and then Washington D.C. tries to meet with president Eisenhower, who is out of town, instead goes to the State Department, meets with Secretary of State Christian Herder, and gets rebuffed essentially. And so he's asking for military help, for direct economic aid, for a plane so that he can do something as simple as fly to various countries across the city because the Belgian pilots had prevented him from doing that.

And so he returns to Congo utterly frustrated that no one's giving him the help he needs. And that's when he really reaches out to the Soviets. And the Soviet ambassador, right? And, right, and sends a cable to Khrushchev asking for various military, um, help.

HANNAH: Given the real trepidation the United States had of Soviet influence at the time, that's what sent up a red flag and informed the U. S. decision to try to oust him,

REID: Right. So the key moment in the American decision making process here happens at the White House on August 18th, 1960.

President Eisenhower at the time, right? And Eisenhower's meeting with his National Security Council. And at some point in the meeting, He says something to the effect that Lumumba has to be eliminated physically. And we know this for a few reasons. One, the National Security Council note taker at the meeting would testify to that effect to the Church Committee, which was investigating CIA excesses.

Two, I was in the Eisenhower Library and found handwritten notes from the meeting where someone wrote Lumumba and then a big black X to his name, which isn't proof on its own, but is suggestive. And then most important,

We know what happens next, which is that the CIA sets in motion this bizarre assassination plot, where poisons are flown to the Congo, handed to the CIA station chief. Who is told to put them in Lumumba's food or toothpaste and that they will kill Lumumba within a relatively short amount of time.

So, that really, I think, shows the paranoia operating in the heads of the US officials that, in this Cold War context, Lumumba had made the unforgivable sin of reaching out to the Soviets for help. The irony quickly is that, after the Cold War ended and the Soviet archives opened up, it turns out there wasn't that much on the Congo in them because they didn't care that much about the Congo.

They viewed it as a faraway place that wasn't particularly amenable to communism, a heavily Catholic population. And in 1960, the Soviet Union was not particularly powerful compared to what it would become. And so it was a country where they could talk about the crisis and score some political points by pointing out what the evil imperialists were doing. But it was not a place where the Soviets had any real influence.

HANNAH: So the amount of resources that the CIA spent trying to take down Lumumba was basically not proportional to the threat of Soviet influence, is the conclusion you're making, right? [00:13:00]

REID: Yes, and the very fact that they decided they had to take down Lumumba was, in my view, an overreaction to events on the ground.

HANNAH: If Lumumba ever had to pick a victor of the Cold War, if he was given that power, right? You studied the guy, you've talked to his family, what's your take? You wouldn't go so far as to call him pro-American, but he was…

REID: I think I might even. That's one of the things that really surprised me while researching was that if you look at the man's actions and words, he's far more pro American than he's often portrayed to be.

He himself was at pains to say while he was making outreach, making overtures to the Soviets that this was not indicative of any change in Congo's orientation. He wanted the country to be neutral in the Cold War as many other countries in the third world were attempting to do as well, but he was fundamentally misunderstood in Washington.

HANNAH: Let's talk about the moment that President Eisenhower gives this order in that meeting, you know, that shortly after he gave the order, what did he do?

REID: So , Eisenhower that day went to play golf at the Burning Tree Country Club, a whites-only golf course. And so, as I write in the book, having been the first president to issue an order for the assassination of a foreign leader, that Watershed moment did not seem to weigh heavily on him.

At one point, he joked to the British Foreign Secretary that he hoped Lumumba would fall into a river of crocodiles.

HANNAH: I mean aside from racist depictions of Africans

I mean, it gets at a real real foible of trying to intervene in places where you know very little and you have so much condescension toward right?

REID: Yeah, I think another thing that really stood out doing the research on this book was the racism operating behind the scenes. So to give one example, the U. S. Ambassador to Congo joked that Lumumba was a cannibal. To give another example in a White House meeting Eisenhower, this is before independence and they're talking about how there are 80 Congolese political parties, and Eisenhower jokes that he didn't know that there were that many Congolese who could read.

So I think this was operating behind the surface, and there's no way it could not have affected American decision-making. And specifically, I think it allowed… The Congolese were painted as sort of political children. There was this paternalistic idea, which the Belgians certainly had, but which the Americans also had. And therefore, they required supervision and intervention and meddling.

HANNAH: Talk to us about the assassination itself, because he wasn't poisoned, right?

And you had the experience, which I think must have been somewhat surreal, of speaking to somebody who witnessed it. What was…so what were the mechanics of that, and to what extent was the CIA involved?

REID: So the poisoning plot fizzles out because things on the ground have changed.

Lumumba is ousted from power with CIA help. Mobutu the head of the Army,

HANNAH: Who is a longtime friend and political ally–

REID: Long time protege and mentee of Lumumba. He takes power in a coup arranged and funded by the CIA. And then, Lumumba is thrown under house arrest in the Prime Minister's residence. Deposed, out of power, but trapped in his home.

He decides to escape. He's caught. He makes it out of the house, but is then caught, en route, driving to his stronghold.

And he is then put in a military prison. And here the timing is important. This is December 1960. The Eisenhower administration is coming to a close. JFK has been elected. He's going to take power in January.

And so there's a real fear that develops in the Congo on the ground, that Kennedy might have a more pro-Lumumba policy, and that Lumumba might be freed from prison, and even worse, [00:18:00] brought back to power as Prime Minister.

HANNAH: Right.

REID: So, there were certain Kennedy advisors who were pushing a policy of bringing Congo back to having a constitutional government because Mobutu had taken power in a coup and is now an illegal military regime. And yet the chaos continued and the Congolese army was running wild. And so even with Lumumba out of power, the problems continued.

And therefore, hey, maybe we need to have a constitutional government back in power. And if we did that, well, the most powerful, popular politician was Patrice Lumumba. And so he would be the logical person to come back to power. This was a real strain of policy. There was also a more practical worry, which is that the guards guarding Lumumba were threatening to revolt and free their prisoner.

So there was a real legitimate fear that Lumumba was about to come back to power. So Mobutu, who's in charge at this point, hatches a plan to send Lumumba away to his death. And he tells Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief in the Congo, about this plan. Devlin at that point does two things. And here's where the CIA's role in Lumumba's assassination really comes in.

One, he does not tell Mobutu to stop this plan, to put the brakes on it, and save Lumumba's life. And two, Devlin deliberately keeps headquarters in D.C. out of the loop, because he fears, rightly, that if he tells Washington what's about to happen, he'll be told to put the brakes on it, because Kennedy's about to come in, there's a transition, we can't have big decisions being made.

And this had just come up with another decision that Devlin tried to make, and he was told to wait until the Kennedy administration took power. So then, now we're in January 1961 on the 17th, Lumumba's flown to Katanga province, tortured the whole way, taken off the plane, tortured more, and then driven into a remote clearing in the forest.

And I visited that forest clearing during my research, and it was there that I met a man, or I was told there was a man the village over who had witnessed Lumumba's murder and then I arranged for him to come visit me and I interviewed him and he had been hunting with his father that night, late at night.

And he watched a car turn off the road with its headlights and out was dragged Lumumba, who was then put in front of a firing squad of Congolese soldiers and shot dead. And that firing squad was commanded by Belgian officers who in turn were answering to the secessionist leaders of that province.

So three days before Kennedy takes office, Lumumba's dead.

HANNAH: Wow.

How did this assassination destabilize the DRC?

REID: The key outcome was that Mobutu was in power. And that you can really lay at the feet of the United States. They funded and supported his taking power in a coup, and continued to fund and support him while he was in power.

HANNAH: For 30 years.

REID: For 30 plus years. So he is the power behind the throne in 1960, then fully claims official power in 1965 and stays in power until 1997. And he really runs the country into the ground, extraordinarily kleptocratic, corrupt, repressive, and in 1996-1997, his regime collapses outright, kicking off a brutal civil war that killed literally millions of people, and leaving behind instability that lasts to this day.

Congo was sort of tilted off its natural political axis. All the dysfunction that is going on in Congo today, or not necessarily all of it, but a great deal of it, one can make a very strong argument dates back to most recently that collapse in 96-97. So many of those issues are unresolved.

So many of the political structures – the Congolese army, for instance, is a mess, and that dates back to Mobutu. So in the case of Congo, yes, its current leaders have a choice, but so did the United States and its policies had a huge effect. I would also say those policies haven't come to an end.

The current president, Felix Chisakedi, took power, took office in 2019, after not winning an election that was held in 2018, where another candidate got more votes, almost everyone agrees, but there was a fraudulent result announced, and Chisakedi was declared the winner and then endorsed essentially by an American statement from the Trump administration congratulating him.

And so that was a choice, to pick stability and the leader who was not representative but was seen as the easiest thing to do at that moment instead of supporting Congolese democracy. And that's the same error America made back in 1960.

HANNAH: To what extent did the CIA involvement in Lumumba's assassination normalize assassination plots for the United States and the CIA?

REID: So, the CIA did not invent covert action in the Congo, obviously. There was Iran, Guatemala. But the assassination plot against Lumumba was the very first time that the US President had set in motion an assassination plot that got, in fact, quite far. And so the Church Committee in 1975 releases a report on these assassination plots.

And interestingly, the Lumumba case is different in a number of ways. One, it was the only one that they could tie to President Eisenhower, because they had that NSC notetaker testifying about Eisenhower's order, they had Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief, testifying that when he was handed the poisons, he was told that the order had come from Eisenhower.

And so that was the only one where they were able to prove presidential authorization. But it was also the one where they really let the CIA off the hook the most, because they examined this narrow question of the poisoning plot, and because that plot, nothing came of it, the church committee essentially said, well, the CIA tried to assassinate Lumumba, but his ultimate death was at the hands of Congolese, not American, so nothing to see here.

They glossed over the fact, which we talked about earlier, that the CIA played a very direct role in green lighting Lumumba's transfer to Katanga, where he ever knew he was going to get killed. So that, though, the anti-Lumumba operations were viewed within the CIA as a success. Larry Devlin was promoted for his work.

He won at least one award for his operation in the Congo. And so this was seen as a great victory, and in narrow Cold War terms, it was. You had gotten rid of a potentially pro-Soviet leader and put in place a nice, pliant, pro-American military dictator. Of course, if you widen the aperture a bit to include, uh, you know, not just weeks and months but decades of effects, and if you widen it to include the Congolese people themselves, it's of course a failure.

But it really, I would argue, encouraged further meddling in the third world over the rest of the Cold War because this was seen as a success. You can't prove the cause and effect directly, but it was certainly a victory that was to be emulated and copied rather than a failure to be learned from

HANNAH: So, you also mentioned this, this phrase, the arrogance of power in the epilogue of your book. Talk about that because the United States did wield outsized influence in that country. It wasn't the only power that was trying to vie for influence.

Talk about that mentality, or the sort of lessons learned, or the ramifications are for foreign policy today.

REID: Well, it starts with this puzzle I had, which was why did the United States care about who led the Congo? And the answer to that was less obvious than one might expect.

The answer is not minerals. Um, at that point, the Congo was not exporting significant amounts to the United States. The US. could get all the minerals that Congo had from other places.

So, what is it? I think there are two reasons. One was just the domino theory of the cold war that it mattered how many countries were on one side versus the other. And if the Congolese domino quote unquote fell, then there's no telling what other dominoes in Africa could fall.

And then the other thing, as you mentioned, is what Senator Fulbright, William Fulbright, called the arrogance of power. And this is the idea being as powerful as the United States was gave it a sense that, well, of course it had to direct events in this or that country, and so, because you could influence what was happening on the ground, you had the diplomatic heft, the money, and so on, that therefore you sort of had a responsibility to do so.

And so, on the ground in Congo, you just see, you know, the cables going back and forth to Washington and the debates in the White House. There's this real sense that the Congolese are not– their politicians cannot be trusted to make their own decisions. Everything has to have American intervention and management.

And so there was just a huge amount of bribery of Congolese politicians supporting Mobutu as a military dictator. And it really can be explained by that arrogance, I think.

HANNAH: Patrice Lumumba's 1961 assassination, a casualty of Cold War tensions, continues to cast a long shadow on the Congo's current crisis. As the nation grapples with renewed instability, it's a stark reminder of the lasting repercussions of reckless interventions. The tragic past prompts us to consider the potential impact of uninformed foreign policies.

HANNAH: I'm Mark Hannah, and this has been another episode of “None of the Above,” a podcast of the Institute for Global Affairs.

Special thanks to Stuart Reid for joining us. Thank you to our None Of The Above team: Olivia Chilkoti and Lucas Robinson.

If you enjoyed what you heard, we’d appreciate you subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Please rate and review us, and if there is a topic you want us to cover, send us an email at info@noneoftheabovepodcast.org. Thanks for joining us. Stay safe out there, and see you next time.

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