by David Talbot
Patrice Lumumba suffered a terrible martyrdom during his final hours on earth. He was beaten bloody during the flight to Katanga, and clumps of hair were torn from his head. When the plane landed, he was seized by armed guards sent by Moise Tshombe, Katanga’s ruler, and subjected to another round of abuse. As he suffered the rain of blows, Lumumba maintained a resigned silence. He was then dragged to a jeep and driven to a remote farmhouse, where a group of men connected to U.S. and Belgian intelligence beat him to death, an orgy of sadism that stretched over several hours. According to one account, even Tshombe and his ministers appeared at one point to contribute to Lumumba’s suffering, kicking and hitting what remained of his nearly lifeless body.
Despite the agency’s evasions, CIA officer John Stockwell, who was stationed in the Congo in the tumultuous aftermath of the Lumumba assassination, had no doubt who was responsible for the African leader’s death. “Eventually he was killed, not by our poisons, but beaten to death, apparently by men who had agency cryptonyms and received agency salaries,” Stockwell concluded. Years after Lumumba’s death, Stockwell fell into conversation with one of his more peculiar CIA colleagues, a “glisteningly bald” man whom Stockwell anointed “Goldfinger.” The man regaled Stockwell with a story of the evening when he had driven around the capital of Katanga, with Lumumba’s battered corpse in the trunk, “trying to decide what to do with it.”
After Kennedy’s inauguration, the CIA continued to keep Lumumba’s death under wraps. On January 26, Dulles briefed the new president on the Congo. The CIA director said nothing about Lumumba’s assassination, though his fate was well known by then within the agency. In early February, Devlin and Ambassador Timberlake were called back to Washington to participate in discussions about Congo policy with the new Kennedy team. The old Congo hands were alarmed by the administration’s new position paper, which envisioned disarming Mobutu and freeing Lumumba. Devlin considered JFK’s admiration for rising African nationalism naïve. Timberlake, meeting with Kennedy in the White House, argued that the Congolese people were too primitive for a functioning democracy. Neither Timberlake nor Devlin took the opportunity to inform Kennedy or his staff that any discussion about Lumumba’s future was a moot point.
The Kennedy White House remained in the dark about Lumumba for a full month after his murder. When JFK finally heard of the leader’s death, the news came not from Dulles but from UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson.
Jacques Lowe, the young photographer who had been unobtrusively documenting the Kennedy story from the earliest days of his presidential run, was in the Oval Office when JFK received the phone call from Stevenson. Lowe, a German Jew who had survived the war as a child by making himself unseen, deftly inserted himself into the ongoing Kennedy family drama, taking black-and-white pictures of John and Robert and their clan that would become iconic in their simple intimacy. After JFK’s victory, the president-elect asked Lowe to “stick around and record my administration. Don’t worry,” he added, “I’ll make it worth your while.”
Kennedy made good on his promise. The photos Lowe was allowed to take during the intense rush of JFK’s brief presidency were windows into its troubled soul. None was more powerful than the picture that the young photographer snapped at the moment when Kennedy was told of Lumumba’s fate. The photo is one of the most searing documents of the Kennedy presidency. In the close-up shot, JFK looks physically stricken as he absorbs the news on the phone, with his eyes squeezed shut and his hand clasped to his face. It was an image of such anguish that it seemed to come from some harrowing time deep in his presidency instead of in its earliest bloom. The picture contains all of the sorrows that were to come.
Lowe later recalled the moment: “I was alone with the president; his hand went to his head in utter despair. ‘Oh, no,’ I heard him groan . . . [Lumumba] was considered a trouble-maker and a leftist by many Americans. But Kennedy’s attitude toward black Africa was that many who were considered leftists were in fact nationalists and patriots. . . . He felt that Africa presented an opportunity for the West, and speaking as an American, unhindered by a colonial heritage, he had made friends in Africa. . . . The call therefore left him heartbroken, for he knew that the murder would be a prelude to chaos . . . it was a poignant moment.”
When the killing of Lumumba was finally announced, furious street protests swept the world, from New Delhi to Warsaw to Tokyo. Lumumba’s fellow leaders in the Third World—including Egypt’s Nasser and Nkrumah of Ghana, who had been a mentor—were particularly outraged by his murder, lashing out at the West and at the UN for failing to protect him. Brazilian delegates to the UN expressed “horror and repulsion” over Lumumba’s slaying. But, as much of the world mourned, the Western press continued its snide coverage of Lumumba, exhuming the martyred leader only to subject him to more abuse. Time magazine snickered at the traditional way his widow, Pauline, chose to mourn her husband, marching bare-breasted through the streets of Leopoldville in a funeral procession. Meanwhile, The New York Times continued to demean Lumumba, sometimes resorting to the most shopworn neocolonial stereotypes of the era. “Lumumba . . . combined the skills of the late Senator McCarthy with the brashness of a ward heeler and the magic touch of an African witch doctor,” wrote Henry Tanner in The New York Times Magazine. “Then there was [his] name—musical, easily pronounced in all languages and yet exotic, African-sounding like the drums in the jungle.”
After her husband’s funeral procession, Pauline Lumumba crumpled to the floor in the dark corner of a friend’s house, too spent to cry anymore. She raised her arms in the air and let them hang there, as if in surrender. Her husband’s murderers did not even have the decency to give her his body, Pauline’s brother told reporters. As little Roland Lumumba hovered anxiously over his mother, the room was filled with the wails of women: “Our strong leader is gone—our great father is no more.”
In his final letter to his wife, Patrice Lumumba vowed, “Neither brutality, nor cruelty nor torture will ever bring me to ask for mercy, for I prefer to die with my head unbowed.” It was an oath that Lumumba had kept throughout his ordeal. Lumumba also told his wife, “History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that is taught in Brussels, Paris, Washington or in the United Nations. . . . Africa will write its own history, and to the north and south of the Sahara, it will be a glorious and dignified history.”
This promise did not come true for the Congo. The mourners at Lumumba’s wake knew how profound a loss it was, and what it meant for their nation. “There is nothing for us to do now,” muttered Lumumba’s brother-in-law. “He is gone. There is no one to take his place.”
With one of Africa’s brightest lights extinguished, the Congo slid into an endless nightmare of tyranny and corruption. Propped up by the United States, Mobutu began a thirty-two-year dictatorship that looted the country of its wealth and left the nation in ruins. In his rampant thievery, Mobutu modeled himself on King Leopold. So smug was the dictator in his ironfisted rule that he declared Lumumba a national hero, a sick joke that only he could afford to enjoy.
The CIA officials responsible for Lumumba’s murder also had a change of heart about the man who had once haunted their days. In 1962, shortly after Dulles’s departure from the CIA, he remarked, “I think we overrated the Soviet danger, let’s say, in the Congo.” And Devlin, for his part, insisted he had never thought Lumumba’s assassination was essential to U.S. security: “I didn’t regard Lumumba as the kind of person who was going to bring on World War III,” he later told the Church Committee. These expressions of remorse—if they can be called that—came far too late for the man who was the hope of the Congo.
Part III
15
Contempt
On Monday April 17, 1961, as over fourteen hundred CIA-trained anti-Castro exiles waded ashore at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs—an operation that would quickly become the biggest debacle of Allen Dulles’s career—the CIA director was sunning himself about a thousand miles away at a Puerto R
ico resort. Dulles, who had flown down to San Juan that weekend, was the featured speaker at a Young Presidents’ Organization conference, a global network of chief executives under age forty that had CIA affiliations. The gathering was held at La Concha, a new oceanfront luxury hotel that epitomized the Caribbean cool of the tropical modernism movement. The hotel’s signature restaurant was shaped like a giant seashell, with wavy gaps to let in the sunshine and ocean breeze. Dulles spent the weekend swimming and playing golf with the young executives.
On Monday morning, when Dulles strode onstage to deliver his remarks, he looked like a man without a worry in the world. The CIA director’s speech—which followed a panel discussion featuring Margaret Mead and Dr. Benjamin Spock on the subject of “Are We Letting Our Children Down?”—was a plea for globe-trotting American businessmen, like those gathered in the conference hall, to join the clandestine war against Communism. Afterward, there was more time to relax by the pool. The spymaster had brought Clover with him on the trip, completing the carefree picture. They seemed to all the world to be just another well-to-do American couple enjoying a long weekend in the Caribbean sun. But by that evening, as Dulles and his wife flew home, the Bay of Pigs operation was on the verge of collapse, and with it, the spymaster’s long, storied career.
Dick Bissell, whom Dulles had put in charge of the invasion, sent one of the top men in the Cuba task force to pick him up at the airport, thinking that the CIA director would want to be briefed immediately on the growing calamity. Richard Drain, chief of operations for the Bay of Pigs expedition, rolled onto the runway at Baltimore’s Friendship Airport in his well-traveled, CIA-issued Chevrolet as Dulles’s small plane taxied to a stop. The CIA chief emerged from the plane with his wife and a young aide, wearing a dinner jacket and the relaxed smile of a man of leisure. Drain stepped forward and offered his hand.
“I’m Dick Drain. I was sent to brief you, sir.”
“Oh yes, Dick, how are you?”
Drain drew Dulles away from the others.
“Well, how is it going?” asked Dulles.
“Not very well, sir.”
“Oh, is that so?” Dulles wore an oddly bemused look, as if the unfolding tragedy was too remote to affect him.
Back at Quarters Eye, the CIA headquarters in downtown Washington, battle-hardened men were on the verge of hysteria. Bissell, who prided himself on his cool performance under pressure, seemed frozen. On the brink of failure, the Cuba operation lacked the kind of muscular leadership that could rescue the men pinned down by Castro’s forces. Drain was hoping that Dulles would save the day. But he found the Old Man’s unflappability disturbing.
Clover and the young aide were bundled into the Chevrolet, and Dulles and Drain drove back to Washington in the director’s Cadillac. “It’s a fast-breaking situation,” Drain told him. “We’re hanging on by our fingernails.”
Dulles puffed quietly on his pipe as his deputy steered the car onto the highway heading to the capital.
“Today’s air strike was killed,” Drain told him—a stunning piece of news, since Dulles knew that the operation was damned unless President Kennedy agreed to escalate the action and provide the embattled anti-Castro brigade with U.S. air cover.
“Why did they do that?” Dulles asked softly. There was no anger or outrage in his voice.
The emotion all belonged to Drain. “If you’re asking my guess, my guess is this thing is all going to hell.”
By the disastrous end of the operation, when Castro’s forces had killed more than a hundred of the invaders and taken the rest prisoner, Drain would be so wrung out that he vomited. Like the rest of the CIA planning team, Drain had worked closely with the exile leaders who were trapped on the desolate stretch of sand and shrubbery, and they took the men’s fate personally. But Dulles’s mind seemed elsewhere as he and Drain drove to the director’s Georgetown residence. They rode in silence for a long time, until Drain let out a final burst of emotion.
“If it isn’t presumptuous of me, sir, I wish your brother was still alive.” Drain had served as the CIA liaison to Foster in the final months of his life. If he thought that invoking the memory of Dulles’s late brother would light a fire under the spymaster, Drain was wrong. Dulles simply nodded and stared ahead at the road. By the time they reached the house on Q Street, Drain was deeply uncomfortable in his boss’s presence and eager to flee back to his CIA command post. But Dulles insisted that he come inside for a drink.
When the two men settled into armchairs in Dulles’s library with tumblers of Scotch in hand, Drain thought the chief would finally grill him on the details of the failing operation. Instead, the evening only became more surreal.
“Dick, you served in Greece, didn’t you?” Dulles inquired. “I have to go to the White House tomorrow to a reception for [Greek Prime Minister Constantine] Karamanlis. Can you refresh my memory about him?”
The stunned CIA officer strung together some kind of reply and made his exit shortly after.
For years after the Bay of Pigs, Washington insiders and scholars tried to unravel the mystery of Dulles’s AWOL behavior during the critical CIA operation. Some explained that his absence was part of his modus operandi—he was in the habit of leaving Washington on the eve of critical missions to make it seem as if nothing significant was about to occur. Dulles himself airily dismissed his strangely timed Puerto Rico trip. He had planned the Young Presidents speaking engagement months before, he explained, and if he had canceled at the last minute, it would have created suspicions. Besides, he added, “I knew I could get back with the speed of aircraft; it was only a question of six or eight hours.” But the CIA’s own official history of the Cuba fiasco, prepared in the late 1970s and early ’80s, concluded that Dulles’s absence was “inexcusable.” Dulles, the report added, “was the one man who might have persuaded the president to permit the D-Day [air] strike.”
Some of the sharpest criticisms of the Bay of Pigs operation, in fact, came from within the CIA itself. Dick Drain was among those who later aimed fire at Dulles, when he spoke with Jack Pfeiffer, the CIA historian who prepared the voluminous report on the Bay of Pigs. Drain was a gung ho officer who fit the agency profile, right down to membership in Yale’s secretive Skull and Bones society (Class of ’43). But years after he picked up Dulles at the Baltimore airport, Drain vented about the agency’s handling of the doomed Cuba enterprise. He was astounded by the poor quality of the staff assigned to the high-stakes Bay of Pigs operation, Drain told Pfeiffer, despite Dulles’s insistence that it would be run by the agency’s best and brightest. “Allen Dulles, always meaning what he said, would say repeatedly, ‘Now I want the very best people assigned to this project. There is nothing more important that we are doing than this. . . . I want people pulled out of tours overseas if necessary, this thing must be manned.’”
But in truth, said Drain, the Bay of Pigs operation drew agency castoffs. “We would tend to get the people that the [CIA] division chiefs found ‘excess’—which normally meant found insufficient. With many notable exceptions, we did not get the very best people available.”
Even he himself, Drain admitted, was not qualified to play a leading role in the operation. “I don’t mean to be unduly immodest [sic], but really I didn’t have any qualifications for this [job] except I was there and unemployed—had no Spanish language whatsoever, and my entire exposure had been punching cows in Arizona in 1940. That doesn’t really bring you up much on Latin America and Latinos, and any of that. I had never been on amphibious operations, and if that was characteristic of my qualifications, it really characterized the whole damn operation—about which, it seemed to me, there was a good deal of well-meaning hypocrisy.”
Drain’s criticisms of the enterprise echoed those in an earlier CIA report, the damning internal investigation carried out by the agency’s inspector general, Lyman Kirkpatrick, in the months immediately following the disaster. The Kirkpatrick Report, one of the most surprisingly honest self-evaluations ever pro
duced within the CIA, found that despite Dulles’s insistence on “high-quality personnel,” the Bay of Pigs operation was staffed largely by the agency’s losers. According to CIA files, seventeen of the forty-two officers assigned to the operation were ranked in the lowest third of the agency, and nine were ranked in the lowest tenth. The IG’s report concluded that Dulles had allowed his division chiefs to dump “their disposal cases” on the Cuba project.
Robert Amory Jr., the CIA’s highly respected chief of analysis, was one of those who was inexplicably kept away from the Bay of Pigs operation, despite his extensive experience with beach landings as an Army Corps of Engineers officer in the South Pacific during World War II. Amory—who had literally written the book on the subject, Surf and Sand, a regimental history of his twenty-six amphibious operations—was stunned by Dulles and Bissell’s decision to keep him on the sidelines. The CIA men sent to Miami to work with the exile leaders and to Guatemala to help train the brigadistas were “a bunch of guys who were otherwise not needed,” Amory later recalled. “They were a strange bunch of people with German experience, Arabic experience, and other things like that. And most of them had no knowledge of Spanish . . . and absolutely no sense or feel about the political sensitivities of these [Cuban exiles]. . . . I think we could have had an A team, instead of being a C-minus team.”
The Kirkpatrick Report detailed a number of other glaring errors made by Dulles, Bissell, and their Bay of Pigs team. When plans for the Cuba invasion grew more ambitious and began leaking to the press as early as November 1960, the report stated, the CIA should have terminated its role in the mission since it had outgrown the agency’s covert capability. “When the project became blown to every newspaper reader,” the report noted acerbically, “the agency should have informed higher authority that it was no longer operating in its charter.” The criticisms went on and on, each one more devastating than the last. “As the project grew, the agency reduced the exiled leaders to the status of puppets. . . . The project was badly organized. . . . The agency became so wrapped up in the military operation that it failed to appraise the chances of success realistically. Furthermore, it failed to keep [the president and his] policymakers adequately and realistically informed of the conditions essential for success.”
