While the US administration seemed to be playing with a straight bat through the UN, darker operations were afoot. Lumumba remained in the Prime Minister’s residence, guarded by Ghanaian UN troops under the orders of his friend Kwame Nkrumah. On 19 September Devlin was informed that a colleague known as ‘Joe from Paris’ would be arriving in Léopoldville later that month. ‘Joe from Paris’ introduced himself outside a café: he was Sidney Gottlieb, head of the CIA medical division and an authority on lethal toxins. He handed Devlin a package of tubes of toothpaste containing cobra venom, and surgical gloves to handle them. Unimpressed, Devlin put in a request for a rifle with a telescopic sight to be sent by diplomatic bag.
The standoff around Lumumba continued and he even ventured out, protected by his UN bodyguards, into the capital’s bars where people vied to touch their saviour. When Devlin suggested that Kasavubu should have Lumumba arrested, they discovered another obstacle in Hammarskjöld’s personal representative, the Indian Rajeshwar Dayal, a personal favourite of Prime Minister Nehru. Dayal detested Americans and as a high-caste Brahmin viewed the Congolese as Untouchables. His wife went to Brazzaville in a UN helicopter to do her shopping. He oozed the condescension he had learned from the British. ‘Mr Devlin, I so admire America and Americans,’ he sneered on one occasion. ‘You make the very best air-conditioners, the best refrigerators, so many fine machines. If only you would concentrate on making your machines, and let us ponder for you.’ Dayal insisted that the Commissioners lacked the legitimacy to issue arrest warrants, and Hammerskjöld backed him.30
Since Devlin had many tasks, the CIA despatched another senior agent, Justin O’Donnell, to resume covert action against Lumumba. Devlin showed O’Donnell the package of toxins stored in his safe, which O’Donnell remarked ‘wasn’t for somebody to get his polio shot up to date’. Since O’Donnell himself had problems about personally killing Lumumba, the obvious solution was to deliver him into the hands of his local enemies. To that end the CIA set up an observation post outside Lumumba’s residence, and recruited an agent within. A key breakthrough was the intelligence that Lumumba would forsake his UN guards if he knew he could make it to his power base in Stanleyville, the capital of Orientale Province ruled by his protégé Antoine Gizenga, a move which the UN was refusing to sanction.31
When, after prolonged debate, the UN General Assembly finally accredited the Kasavubu regime in the teeth of Soviet opposition, Lumumba knew it was time to flee. Realizing his UN guards would soon be withdrawn, on 27 November 1960 he slipped out of his residence during a thunderstorm and headed for Stanleyville 1,300 miles away. He never made it. Devlin was flying back from briefing his bosses in Rome when he saw the headline ‘LUMUMBA CAPTURED’ of a fellow passenger’s newspaper.
Lumumba was flown back to Léopoldville in early December, where he was severely beaten at the airport by ANC troops who were oblivious of the TV cameras recording the incident. Transferred to the sinister ANC base called Camp Hardy at Thysville, at the narrow western end of the Congo, his prospects briefly improved when the garrison came close to mutiny against Mobutu. After that his only hope lay with the fact that John F. Kennedy was to be sworn in as president on 20 January 1961. In case the new President should intervene to prevent it, on 17 January Lumumba and two of his supporters were bundled on a plane to Kasai, which was ruled by one of his most implacable enemies. Learning that UN troops were at the airport, the plane diverted to Elisabethville in Katanga. While in the air Lumumba was so badly beaten that the Belgian radio operator vomited and the terrified Australian flight crew locked themselves in the cockpit. Lumumba was taken to a villa about eight miles outside Elisabethville, where he was foully tortured before being shot by executioners commanded by the Belgian Captain Julien Gat. His corpse was dissolved in acid.32
There were tearful demonstrations in Moscow outside the Belgian embassy, while the new Friendship University was renamed Patrice Lumumba University. The adverse reaction to Lumumba’s death would help shape future US policy, which was carefully calibrated to woo moderate African leaders. In the short term, US policy in the Congo was clarified by Under Secretary of State George Ball, who brought order into the clamour of competing voices of the Africanists, Europeanists and international-organization experts. Although it made economic sense to back the Katanga secession, it would alienate both the African states and the UN. In the worst scenario, it might result in the Balkanization of the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover it would allow Gizenga to pose as the champion of national unity from his Lumumbist base in Orientale Province, from where he was bombarding Khrushchev with requests for military assistance. On all these grounds Ball decided to back the central Congolese government and the UN peacekeeping effort, even though Washington was intensely suspicious that the UN was pursuing its own foreign policy. The optimum solution was to force Tshombe into negotiations with Kasavubu, who in turn would be encouraged to find a federal solution to Congo’s regional and tribal problems. Since the Africans had withdrawn their forces from the UN mission in protest at Lumumba’s murder, they were replaced by around 5,000 tough Gurkhas and Sikhs.33
The squeaky-voiced Kasavubu was neither dynamic nor charismatic, so the US had to find a more plausible figurehead. They identified Cyrille Adoula, the head of the Congolese labour movement, as the most convincing candidate for prime minister. Together with the UN, US diplomats organized a conference of Congolese parliamentarians at Lovanium University, fifteen miles outside the capital, to legitimize the new regime. Alcohol and women were banished until proceedings concluded. When it became clear that the absent Gizenga might emerge triumphant despite all their best efforts, the CIA was ordered to swing the votes in Adoula’s favour. The US outbid Adoula’s Soviet-backed rival with bribes including cars as well as cash coupled with threats of a military coup if Gizenga won.34
The next task was to reunify the country. While the Belgians secretly supported Tshombe in Katanga, they also urged other Western nations not to recognize his government in order to prevent a dilution of their influence. The main supporters of the breakaway state were highly conservative chiefs such as Tshombe’s sinister Interior Minister, Godefroid Munongo, who believed that Lumumba was a modernizing Satan, and the large European community, which in the new dawn of Katanga embraced blacks whom its members despised. Since Tshombe had reason to mistrust his own forces, he recruited 400 more reliable white mercenaries, notably the French soldier of fortune Robert ‘Bob’ Denard and the South African ‘Mad Mike’ Hoare, to lead them. The spirit of the Algerian OAS had come to the Congo.35 There was no love lost between the mercenaries and the UN. At one diplomatic cocktail party, a Swedish UN colonel felt something pressed into his back. Turning round, he saw that a French mercenary had jabbed him with part of a human face: ‘You are betraying the last bastion of the white man in Central Africa. You will get a knife in your back one of these days,’ he warned the Swede.36
There was general lawlessness in Katanga, where the two top UN civilian officials were kidnapped and assaulted by Tshombe’s drugged thugs just as they arrived at a dinner to honour US Senator Thomas Dodd, ironically a figure nicknamed ‘the Senator from Katanga’ in his own country. Urquhart, one of these officials, was head-butted, kicked and then repeatedly hit with rifle butts in the back of a truck. The wife of the US Consul exclaimed, ‘Why, if it isn’t that nice Mr Smith!’ as her husband’s car passed the truck in which a UN representative of that name was being beaten up alongside Urquhart. While Smith was freed, Urquhart was detained until a UN Gurkha colonel threatened to blow up Tshombe’s palace if he was not released. Urquhart had the satisfaction of bleeding all over the seats of the fancy white convertible sent by Tshombe.37
The UN sent Brigadier K. A. S. Raja, commander of the 99th Infantry Brigade, the Indian component of the UN peacekeeping force, and the Irish envoy Conor Cruise O’Brien to compel both shadowy Belgian civilian advisers and the mercenaries to leave, and to negotiate an end to the Kata
ngan secession. ‘Who is Conor O’Brien?’ Prime Minister Macmillan once asked in rhetorical exasperation at being obliged to contemplate the Congo. His own reply was ‘an unimportant, expendable man’. It was not the least of Macmillan’s errors of judgement.
O’Brien was born in 1917 in a Dublin suburb, to a journalist and teacher with sufficiently independent views in this clerical state to send him to a non-denominational school. From there he went to Trinity College, Dublin, that residual redoubt of Anglo-Irish Protestantism.38 O’Brien grew up knowing that while one uncle had been killed by the British during the Easter Rising, another had perished in British uniform on the Western Front. His identity became further blurred when in 1939 he married into a liberal Presbyterian family from Belfast, where he was working as a supply teacher. The Irish exemplar was not to prove the key to remoter problems, though many have entertained this delusion since in other times and contexts.39
In 1942 O’Brien joined the Irish Department of Finance, transferring after a couple of years to the Department of External Affairs. For an Irishman with an anti-colonial background, the newly founded United Nations beckoned, a forum in which a very small nation could punch above its weight by striking moral poses. By this route O’Brien arrived at the breakaway province of Katanga as Hammarskjöld’s delegate in June 1961.
O’Brien met Munongo, who always wore dark glasses, and Tshombe, who had gone into politics as a more lucrative alternative to grocery. Dealing with the latter was as easy as trying to squeeze an eel into a bottle.40 O’Brien’s remit was to remove the European mercenaries as the prelude to a political settlement of the Katanga secession. He confidently announced that Operation Rumpunch, which began in August 1961, had been successful because he had got the Belgian civilian advisers out, but he failed to realize that the expelled mercenaries were simply returning via Rhodesia. He was horrified when Irish UN troops at Jadotville were compelled to surrender by a combined force of Belgian settlers and Katangese gendarmes led by mercenaries and supported by a Fouga Magister jet. O’Brien took it on himself to launch a second operation, codenamed Morthur (the Hindi word for ‘smash’), which imposed UN control on many parts of Katanga by dispensing with the concept of minimal force by employing heavy weapons. Morthur could not prevent Tshombe’s mercenary-officered gendarmes from burning down many villages loyal to the central government, which in turn triggered a refugee crisis with 75,000 people ending up in UN-administered camps. It also failed to capture Tshombe, who fled to Northern Rhodesia.
Chastened by the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba, on which more later, Kennedy refused to help the UN force with air support, notwithstanding the fact that the US was largely paying for Hammarskjöld’s increasingly autonomous Congolese operation. The British were also obstructive, prohibiting weapons flights to cross Uganda. After the French had also refused financial support, Hammarskjöld decided to try to mediate with Tshombe in person. He died when his aircraft crashed en route from Léopoldville to Ndola in Northern Rhodesia, where he hoped to broker a meeting between Tshombe and Adoula. Though some persist in claiming that the Swede was assassinated, in fact the crash was probably due to pilot error during a night flight.
Different elements of the US administration gave Kennedy conflicting advice. Non-interventionists thought the Congo ‘has a right to its own War of the Roses’, while others wanted the US to contribute military assistance to UN operations, a view forcefully argued by UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson. While Kennedy vacillated about whether to bolster the UN force with American planes and troops, the new UN Secretary-General – the Burmese U Thant – abandoned his lifelong pacifism and ordered UN forces to suppress army mutineers in Kivu Province after they had abducted and murdered thirteen Italian airmen serving with the UN.
Despite many misgivings, Kennedy decided to put US prestige on the line. Threatening to deploy jets and helicopters, he helped the UN broker a ceasefire, and sent his personal plane to fly Tshombe to Kitona for talks with Adoula. Placed under house arrest by Mobutu, Tshombe promptly agreed to merge his 18,000 troops with those of the central government, and to take his place in parliament in Léopoldville. The secession seemed to be over, but just as Kennedy was congratulating himself on his successful mediation Tshombe was freed and reneged on the agreement, with his southern power base seemingly as secure as ever. The only positive development was that Adoula and Mobutu finally suppressed Gizenga’s rebellion in Orientale. Gizenga survived imprisonment for the next two and a half years on the malarial island of Bula Bemba.41
Meanwhile the Soviets had returned to the Congo, with a diplomatic mission consisting mainly of KGB officers, which was initially based in Gizenga’s Stanleyville. The pro-Western Adoula put obstacles in the way of their accreditation for as long as he could, as did the CIA. Having failed to bug the premises the Soviets would occupy before they arrived, Devlin hired a colourfully attired witch doctor to dance and chant in front of the embassy, cursing anyone who entered, to inhibit the KGB’s ability to recruit Congolese agents.42 According to Second Secretary Yuri Viktorov:
We immediately faced the problems of food, clothing, and service. Shops were empty; all that we could buy there were American chickens, which seemed to have been frozen during World War II, and sometimes fish. At the local markets, there were lots of tropical fruit at a very low price – bananas, pineapples, papaya, mangoes etc. But there were no fruits to which we were accustomed – apples, pears, plums etc. Only occasionally could we buy meat, and what was especially bad, there was almost no milk or other dairy products.
Consumer durables could only be bought across the river at Brazzaville in French Congo, though even there there was not much to be had to furnish a flat in Moscow, let alone a country dacha, the humdrum goals of all Soviet diplomats and their spouses.43
Kennedy threw his weight behind State Department plans for a graduated economic embargo on Katanga’s cobalt and copper, while pressuring the big mining interests to pay their corporate taxes directly to the central government rather than to Elisabethville. US transport aircraft flew UN forces and their supplies wherever they needed to go. After Katangan forces had shot down a UN helicopter on Christmas Eve 1962, the UN launched Operation Grand Slam after a delay caused by British reluctance to supply the UN’s Indian aircraft with bombs. The Katangan air force was destroyed and ground forces moved quickly enough to prevent Tshombe from realizing his threat to blow up all the mines under his control. Brushing aside Tshombe’s attempts to buy himself time through more negotiations, U Thant ordered his troops to press ahead until in late January 1963 Tshombe threw in the towel and fled, ultimately to Franco’s Spain.
That May Kennedy received the thirty-two-year-old General Joseph Mobutu in the White House. Outside in the Rose Garden, as they posed for pictures, Kennedy remarked, ‘General, if it hadn’t been for you, the whole thing would have collapsed and the Communists would have taken over.’ Mobutu modestly agreed: ‘I do what I am able to do.’44 Since the UN force was about to depart, Mobutu asked whether the US might provide the arms and technicians needed to help modernize the Congolese army. He inquired whether he and ten fellow officers might receive parachute training at Forts Bragg and Benning. All this could be arranged, said a ‘delighted’ President.45 In 1965 Mobuto deposed Kasavubu to rule Zaire, as he renamed the Congo in 1971. He would be warmly regarded by Nixon, Carter – with Zaire receiving half of US aid to sub-Saharan Africa during his presidency – Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
The crisis in the Congo has become a textbook example of the almost intractable problems that statesmen face in real time and within a kind of fog of conflicting forces and inadequate intelligence. While the CIA conspiracy to murder Lumumba has given plenty of reasons for retrospective moral outrage, it is worth considering the imponderables and uncertainties of a foreign policy crisis that combined a local risk of anarchy with the real prospect of Soviet aggrandizement in a strategically crucial area of Central Africa. Belgium, Britain and Fra
nce all had their separate agendas, as did some of the African participating nations. Nor was US attention constant, as Kennedy had to deal simultaneously with the challenges of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Finally, it was unfortunate that the largest peacekeeping operation in UN history involved a state larger than Western Europe, and that the armed mission exceeded both its capacities and its original mandate. While O’Brien revelled in a world-level role not enjoyed by any Irishman before or since, peacekeeping was probably not best done with fighter-bombers and tanks.46
Guinea and Ghana
The Congolese crisis was a violent version of a rapidly developing Cold War in Africa.47 Elsewhere the contest was less sanguinary, though still conducted in deadly earnest in this vast proxy venue. West Africa was a major theatre. In Soviet eyes, the former French colony of Guinea, about the same size as Great Britain or Oregon but containing half the world’s known reserves of bauxite, represented the best ‘window into Africa’. Its president, Sékou Touré, was an aristocratic Marxist-Leninist postal workers’ union activist. In 1958 Touré’s party won a referendum for immediate independence and a rejection of the new French Community, the only Francophone African colony to opt for such a repudiation.
The rest gained their independence two years later, but in Guinea the French were spitefully vindictive. All French administrators and technicians left almost overnight, ripping out telephone cables and even smashing light bulbs. What could not be burned was tipped into the ocean. In addition, there was the more general problem that the colonial powers had never linked infrastructures between adjacent countries. This did not apply just to roads, but even to telecommunications. If you wanted to make a telephone call from the Guinean capital of Conakry to Freetown in Sierra Leone (eighty miles away), the calls had to be routed through either London or Paris.48
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