The Devil's Chessboard

by David Talbot

  Corporate executives with major stakes in Africa were able to mingle and confer with U.S. national security officials at prestigious organizations like the Manhattan-based Africa-America Institute. The institute, which Harold Hochschild helped launch in 1953, sponsored the American education of future generations of African leaders, a goal the CIA found strategically valuable enough to help fund the group. Years later, after the Africa-America Institute was exposed as a CIA front, Hochschild appeared chagrinned when the subject came up with his son, Adam. The younger Hochschild cofounded Mother Jones magazine and later authored King Leopold’s Ghost, a powerful indictment of the Belgian reign of terror in the Congo. After the CIA ties to the institute were exposed, Hochschild fils later recalled, “[Father] seemed uncomfortable. He defended the link, saying that in its early years there was nowhere else the institute could have gotten enough money for its work. But he was clearly embarrassed that the whole thing had to be kept secret.”

  The Eisenhower administration’s increasingly militant policy toward Lumumba took shape over cocktails in clublike environments such as the Africa-America Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations. The men driving the policy had little feel for the suffering or longing of the Congolese people. Ambassador Burden was a Vanderbilt heir—a big, paunchy, high-society boozer who was stuffed full of the imbecilities and prejudices of his caste; he was not fond of Jews, and he treated his legions of nameless servants as if they were indentured. Not particularly bright, he represented what his granddaughter, Wendy, would later call the “dead end gene pool.” Everything was “marvelous,” in Burden’s world. He said it “the way a character in a Fitzgerald novel would,” Wendy Burden recalled in a family memoir. “Mah-velous. He said it about a hundred times a day, as if it were the only adjective that could aptly describes the talents of a chef, or the plate of Belon oysters before him, or the Chateau Petrus he was drinking, or how he felt about the overthrow of the Libyan government.”

  Burden, who had acquired his ambassadorship by contributing heavily to the 1956 Eisenhower campaign, spent his days in Brussels attending diplomatic receptions, where he soaked up the finest Champagnes along with the racial prejudices of Belgium’s shriveling empire. It was the ambassador who first raised alarms about the rising Patrice Lumumba, whom the Belgians only yesterday were calling “a dirty monkey” but now were labeling “Satan.” Burden began sending agitated cables to Dulles in Washington well before Lumumba’s election, suggesting that the growing aspirations of the Congolese people were Soviet-inspired and urging that strong measures be used to put down African unrest. “Dear Allan [sic],” Burden wrote in a November 1959 cable, misspelling his chum’s name, “Have your organization and [the Department of] Defense done much work recently in studying the type of rioting which is occurring and might occur in the various countries of Africa [and] the degree to which new weapons, such as some of the newer gases, might enable such difficulties to be controlled?” By the following summer, Burden was cabling Washington “to destroy Lumumba government” as a threat to “our vital interests in Congo.”

  Dulles quickly embraced the idea that Lumumba was a diabolical agent of Communist subversion. In truth, Lumumba had less of a connection to Moscow than any other emerging African leader. He explicitly tried to keep his struggling nation out of the superpower vortex, vowing that the Congo would “never be a satellite of Russia or of the United States.”

  “We want no part of the Cold War,” Lumumba declared. “We want Africa to remain African with a policy of neutralism.” But in the Dulles worldview, there was no such thing as neutrality. And anyone who professed such notions belonged to the enemy camp. At a July 22, 1960, National Security Council meeting in the Eisenhower White House—just three weeks after Lumumba’s independence day speech—Dulles denounced the Congolese leader as “a Castro or worse. . . . It is safe to go on the assumption that Lumumba has been bought by the Communists.”

  Doug Dillon strongly backed Dulles’s distraught view of Lumumba as a Soviet accomplice. It was an alarmist view calculated to convince Eisenhower that the African leader had to be terminated. As it turned out, the president required little persuasion. By the summer of 1960, Ike was sick, tired, and cranky—and he had little patience or understanding for Third World freedom struggles. Conferring with the British foreign minister Lord Home, Eisenhower quipped that he hoped “Lumumba would fall into a river full of crocodiles.” At an NSC meeting in August 1960, Eisenhower gave Dulles direct approval to “eliminate” Lumumba. Robert Johnson, the minutes taker at the NSC meeting, later recalled the shock felt in the room: “There was a stunned silence for about 15 seconds and the meeting continued.” Johnson said there was nothing ambiguous about Eisenhower’s lethal order. “I was surprised that I would ever hear a president say anything like this in my presence or the presence of a group of people. I was startled.”

  Over the next several months, the CIA, working with its allies in Belgian intelligence, engineered a military coup led by a cocky, ruthless, twenty-nine-year-old colonel named Joseph Mobutu that forced Lumumba out of office and placed him under house arrest. But that was not enough for the CIA. Lumumba “would remain a grave danger,” Dulles told an NSC meeting on September 21, 1960, “as long as he was not yet disposed of.” Three days later, Dulles made it clear that he wanted Lumumba permanently removed, cabling the CIA’s Leopoldville station, “We wish give [sic] every possible support in eliminating Lumumba from any possibility resuming governmental position.”

  Washington ascribed a kind of witchcraft-like power to Lumumba. Dulles marveled at the man’s political survival skills, and Dillon was amazed at his powers of persuasion. “He had this tremendous ability to stir up a crowd or a group,” said Dillon. “And if he could have gotten out and started to talk to a battalion of the Congolese Army, he probably would have had them in the palm of his hand in five minutes.”

  To prevent that from happening, the CIA recruited two cutthroats from the European criminal underworld, whom they code-named QJ-WIN and WI-ROGUE. These Tweedledum and Tweedledee assassins were such loathsome mercenaries that even their CIA handlers found them “unsavory.” ROGUE was the kind of morally unhinged man “who would try anything once, at least,” said his agency supervisors, untroubled by the “pangs of conscience.” While ROGUE went about trying to organize an “execution squad” to kill Lumumba, WIN focused on penetrating the protective ring of UN troops that encircled the house where the Congolese leader was in custody. QJ-WIN had been supplied with a tube of poison toothpaste, which had been delivered to the CIA station in Leopoldville by Sidney Gottlieb, the agency’s wizard of toxins. Dr. Ewen Cameron, of the notorious Allan Institute, had analyzed Lumumba at the CIA’s request and determined that he must brush his teeth regularly, since they looked gleaming white in photos. Therefore, Ewen assured Dulles, chemically altered dental products were the key to getting rid of Lumumba.

  In the end, the CIA did not go through with the toothpaste plot, apparently deciding that poisoning a popular leader while he was under UN protective custody in his own house would be too flagrant a deed—one that, if traced back to the agency, would lead to unpleasant international repercussions. It would be wiser, the agency decided, to deliver Lumumba to his murderous political rivals in the Congo and let them do the job. And so Lumumba fled house arrest—or was allowed to escape—miraculously slipping past not only the UN troops that were guarding him but Mobutu’s hostile forces, and making his dash for Stanleyville.

  As Lumumba’s convoy made its way along muddy and bumpy roads, he was pursued by Congolese troops, led by Captain Gilbert Pongo, Mobutu’s notorious security chief. Pongo buzzed after Lumumba’s party in a helicopter that had been provided courtesy of Clare Timberlake, the dapper, mustachioed U.S. ambassador who worked closely with the CIA delegation in the Congo. Lumumba’s flight was slowed whenever his convoy drove through villages, where he was thronged by the local people and urged to deliver speeches. When he spoke, he gave voice to their
dreams. “Our program is clear: complete independence, Congo for the Congolese,” he told a group huddled around a fire one night. “Fourteen million Congolese want work, a better future for their children. They want to be citizens with full political rights, they want a new life.”

  When Lumumba’s military pursuers drew too near, villagers delayed their advance by putting up roadblocks and tearing down bridges. On the evening of December 1, Lumumba’s group reached the small village of Lodi, on the west bank of the Sankuru River. This wide, muddy stretch of the river was the last serious obstacle that lay between the group and sanctuary in Stanleyville. The other side of the river was a bastion of pro-Lumumba nationalism. There was only one canoe on the riverbank. Lumumba and a few of his top aides crossed first. As they disembarked from the dugout, they heard a commotion on the other side of the river. Mobutu’s soldiers had caught up with the group left behind, including Lumumba’s wife and toddler.

  Lumumba’s compatriots begged him not to return across the river, telling him “the life of the whole nation is at stake.” But he could not stand to hear the cries of his wife. “When one struggles for one’s country,” he said as he got back into the canoe, “one has to expect a tragic end.” As Lumumba’s canoe glided back to the other side of the river, the soldiers waded into the water and grabbed him. Lumumba tried winning over Mobutu’s men. For a while, his words seemed to work their magic—the soldiers were ready to join the cause of freedom and march with him to Stanleyville. But then Captain Pongo intervened, reminding his soldiers of the dire consequences that would befall them and their families if they did not do their duty. They turned in an instant and began beating Lumumba and even his little son.

  Lumumba was hustled onto Pongo’s helicopter and flown back to Leopoldville, where he emerged in the glare of TV news cameras, only to be subjected to another vicious round of beating by Mobutu’s thugs, while the cameras rolled. Throughout it all, Lumumba maintained the serene dignity of the martyr that he soon would become. “On Lumumba’s dazed face was the look of a man who did not yet believe that fate could be against justice for his people,” remarked Andrée Blouin, the beautiful “Black Pasionaria” of the Congolese independence struggle and chief of protocol in Lumumba’s government. “His white shirt was now spotted with blood, but his head was still erect. He personified the best of the race that would never again be slaves.”

  Over the next several weeks, Lumumba’s fate became the focus of a tumultuous international drama, as the symbol of African freedom languished in a military prison south of Leopoldville. World leaders—including Khrushchev, Nasser, and Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah—issued fervent pleas for his release, with the Soviet leader promising that the “colonialists will be thrown out of the Congo once and for all.” Lumumba’s followers prayed that he could survive until the inauguration of Kennedy, whose election the Congolese leader had praised.

  But in Leopoldville, U.S. and Belgian agents were feverishly maneuvering to ensure that no such release took place. The man at the center of this intrigue was Lawrence R. Devlin, the CIA station chief in the Congo, a Harvard man who had been handpicked for the spy service by his dean, Mac Bundy. Larry Devlin’s aggressive campaign against Lumumba had won him the admiration of the agency’s top command, including Dulles himself. At the end of November, when Mobutu’s troops were in pursuit of Lumumba, Devlin had flown to Rome to meet with Dick Bissell, whom Dulles had put in charge of the Lumumba assassination. The CIA was still determined to carry out Eisenhower’s termination order. But Devlin and his CIA superiors knew that time was running short.

  U.S. intelligence officials continued to fret about the Congo situation, even after Lumumba’s capture. With Mobutu’s rule still shaky and Congolese politics in chaos, Devlin realized that Lumumba’s imprisonment could not be ensured indefinitely. In fact, by the second week of January 1961, when Lumumba’s jailers briefly mutinied and threatened to free him, his captivity seemed less secure than ever.

  Meanwhile, Dulles and his Congo team were acutely aware that the presidential transition under way in Washington also put their Lumumba operation in jeopardy. Kennedy, whose inauguration was scheduled for January 20, had already signaled that he would shift U.S. policy in favor of African nationalists like Lumumba. In late December, after returning from a five-week tour of the Congo and other African countries, a Democratic fact-finding delegation that included JFK’s brother Edward M. Kennedy predicted that the new administration would align itself with the continent’s “movement for freedom and self-determination” and expressed strong sympathy for Lumumba’s plight. Ted Kennedy later went further, calling for the release of Lumumba and suggesting his brother agreed with this position.

  The raging battle over Lumumba’s future broke into the U.S. press, with the CIA’s media assets predicting drastic consequences if the Congolese leader returned to power. As the Congo crisis reached its climax, a new correspondent for The New York Times showed up in Leopoldville with a distinctly anti-Lumumba bias. Paul Hofmann was a diminutive, sophisticated Austrian with a colorful past. During the war, he served in Rome as a top aide to the notorious Nazi general Kurt Malzer, who was later convicted of the mass murder of Italian partisans. At some point, Hofmann became an informer for the Allies, and after the war he became closely associated with Jim Angleton. The Angleton family helped place Hofmann in the Rome bureau of The New York Times, where he continued to be of use to his friends in U.S. intelligence, translating reports from confidential sources inside the Vatican and passing them along to Angleton. Hofmann became one of the Times’s leading foreign correspondents, eventually taking over the newspaper’s Rome bureau and parachuting from time to time into international hot spots like the Congo.

  The New York Times coverage of the Congo crisis had always been slanted against Lumumba, with columns and commentaries labeling him “inexperienced and irresponsible” and a “virtual dictator.” But Hofmann’s Congo coverage was so virulent in its bias that it seemed as if he were acting as a “psywar” conduit for U.S. intelligence. In article after article, during the critical Congo end game, Hofmann portrayed Lumumba as a dangerous bogeyman, a “wily” conspirator in some pieces and a mentally unbalanced buffoon in others (“the weirdest character in a sort of Alice in Tropical Wonderland,” as the Times man wrote). Even behind bars, Lumumba continued to work his dark mischief, Hofmann told his readers, plotting the murders of whites and bringing a flow of Soviet arms into the country, all while living the life of luxury in military prison “with three houseboys at his service.” The message behind Hofmann’s relentless barrage was clear: despite the “crocodile tears” cried by the Soviet Union over Lumumba’s plight, no man as treacherous as this deserved mercy.

  In its explosive 1975 report on CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders, the Church Committee absolved the agency of responsibility for Lumumba’s murder. “It does not appear from the evidence that the United States was in any way involved in the killing,” concluded the Senate panel. This became a convenient myth, one that is still routinely repeated in the press. But the truth is far less comforting.

  As a new wave of historical research has determined, the CIA ensured Lumumba’s violent end by making certain that he was delivered into the hands of his mortal enemies. Among his tormentors in the final hours of his life were CIA-funded goons. Devlin, the CIA’s man in the Congo, later tried to portray himself as a blissfully ignorant player in the Lumumba affair, and indeed as a man who found assassination morally repugnant. But as former congressional aide and scholar Stephen Weissman has observed, “The CIA was not the innocent bystander, and its Congo operatives not the paragons of morally sensitive professionalism they claimed to be. In particular, Devlin was a key participant in the Congo government’s decision to approve Lumumba’s fatal rendition.”

  In fact, Devlin appears to have been more a driver of the action leading to Lumumba’s death than a participant. On January 17, 1961—three days before Kennedy’s inauguration—Lumumba was taken
from his jail cell and hustled onto a Belgian chartered plane. Congolese authorities took this action under strong pressure from Devlin, who was the kingmaker behind the Mobutu regime. With Devlin’s full knowledge, Lumumba was then flown to Katanga, a mineral-rich province that had broken away from the Congo and was run by violent enemies of Lumumba. The CIA station chief later acknowledged that Lumumba’s transfer to Katanga amounted to a death sentence. “I think there was a general assumption, once we learned that he had been sent to Katanga, that his goose was cooked,” Devlin told the Church Committee years later.

  Devlin knew of Lumumba’s imminent transfer by January 14, three days ahead of time. But he did nothing to inform Washington until January 17, when Lumumba was already well on the way to his doom. Devlin knew that cabling Washington risked tipping off Africa policy makers in the incoming Kennedy administration, who likely would have intervened to save Lumumba. By keeping quiet, Devlin sealed Lumumba’s fate.

  Larry Devlin was no rogue agent—he was an up-and-coming intelligence officer whose Congo exploits had won glowing marks back at CIA headquarters. The Congo station chief’s decision to keep Lumumba’s fate quiet until it was too late to do anything about it was clearly made in consultation with his supervisors. Devlin suffered no agency reprimands for his actions in the Congo, and, in fact, his intelligence career continued to thrive after Lumumba’s demise. Before retiring from the CIA in 1974, to pursue a new career in the Congo’s lucrative diamond industry, Devlin rose to become chief of the CIA’s Africa Division.