CONGO: the CIA and the fall of Congo

CIA’s program initially focused on removing Lumumba, not only through assassination if necessary but also with an array of nonlethal means.

Patrice Émery Lumumba was a Congolese independence leader and the first democratically elected prime minister of Congo.

"The inquiry concluded that Belgium wanted Lumumba arrested and, not being  particularly concerned with his physical well-being, took no action to prevent his death even though it knew he probably would be killed. ."

 From 1960 to 1968, CIA conduct­ed a series of fast-paced, multifaceted covert action (CA) operations in the newly independent Republic of the Congo (the Democratic Republic of the Congo today) to stabilize the government and minimize communist influence in a strategically vital, re­source-rich location in central Africa. The overall program—the largest in the CIA’s history up until then—com­prised activities dealing with regime change, political action, propaganda, air and marine operations, and arms interdiction, as well as support to a spectacular hostage rescue mission. By the time the operations ended, CIA had spent nearly $12 million (over $80 million today) in accom­plishing the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations’ objec­tive of establishing a pro-Western leadership in the Congo. President Jo­seph Mobutu, who became permanent head of state in 1965 after serving in that capacity de facto at various times, was a reliable and staunchly anticommunist ally of Washington’s until his overthrow in 1997.

 Some elements of the program, particularly the notorious assassi­nation plot against Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba that was exten­sively recounted in 1975 in one of the Church Committee’s reports, have been described in open sources. However, besides the documentary excerpts in that report, limited releas­es

 releas­es in the State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series, and random items on the Internet and in other compilations, a comprehensive set of primary sources about CIA activities in the Congo has not been available until now. FRUS, 1964–1968, Volume XXIII, Congo, 1960–19681 is

 the newest in a series of retrospective volumes from the State Department’s Office of the Historian (HO) to compensate for the lack of CA-related material in previously published collections about countries and time periods when CIA covert interventions were an indispensable, and often widely recognized, element of US foreign policy.

After scholars, the media, and some members of Congress pillo­ried HO for publishing a volume on Iran for 1951–54 that contained no documents about the CIA-engineered regime-change operation in 1953,2 Congress in October 1991 passed a statute mandating that FRUS was to be “a thorough, accurate, and reliable documentary record of major United States foreign policy decisions and significant United States diplomatic activity” and ordering “other depart­ments, agencies, and other entities of the United States Government…[to] cooperate with the Office of the His­torian by providing full and complete access to the records pertinent to United States foreign policy deci­sions and actions and by providing copies of selected records” older than 25 years.

Not with standing the new law and DCI R. James Woolsey’s pledge in 1993 to seek declassification review of 11 covert actions, including in the Congo, the two FRUS volumes published in the early 1990s on that country for 1958 through 1963 con­tained very few documents about the Agency’s CA operations there—even on the Lumumba assassination plot.4 In the case of the first volume, the FRUS editors decided not to delay publication by seeking additional records under the access require­ments of the just-enacted FRUS law. In the second, HO and CIA were still working out how to implement those requirements, taking into account the Agency’s concerns about protecting sources and methods and the fact that its records management prac­tices were not designed to facilitate scholarly research. Serious interagen­cy difficulties over HO access to and CIA review of CA-related documents arose over the next few years but were mostly resolved by the early 2000s in an interagency agreement.

The new procedures in that agree­ment facilitated the completion of the volume discussed here, which was held up after HO’s outside advisory committee in 1997 questioned the completeness and accuracy of the previous collections on the Congo. HO originally conceived Congo, 1960–1968 as a volume document­ing US policy during the Johnson presidency, but, at the committee’s suggestion, it postponed publication to incorporate relevant CA material missing from previous compendia.

The collection is well worth the wait, and specialists are making use of it already.a In no other single source will scholars find a richer compilation of intelligence and policy documents that, when used in conjunction with the two earlier volumes, helps underscore why the fate of the Congo, as well as the other newly independent nations in Africa, drew so much attention from US na­tional security decisionmakers then. Before 1960, when, in British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s famous phrase, “the wind of change” began blowing over the continent, the So­viet Union, China, and their proxies had paid little attention to it.

By early 1965, however, commu­nist countries had established over 100 diplomatic, consular, and trade missions; extended over $850 million in economic grants and credits; set up front organizations, cover entities, agents of influence, and clandestine assets; and provided assistance to anti-Western groups directly and through their allies. 

The Congo—for­merly a Belgian colony, one-quarter the size of the United States, with immense natural wealth and strate­gically situated in a now-contested region—was a Cold War prize of the first order. “If Congo deteriorates and Western influence fades rapidly,” the chief of CIA’s Africa Division (AF) wrote in June 1960, 10 days before the Congo gained its independence, the “Bloc will have a feast and will not need to work very hard for it.”

Congo, 1960–1968 provides essential material for understanding how the United States and its Congo­lese allies prevented the “feast” from happening. The volume contains 582 documents and editorial notes and is divided roughly into two sections. 

The first, covering 1960 to 1963, depicts the Congo’s political crisis and the extensive influence of CIA covert actions to remove Lumumba from power and then to encourage allegiance to the Leopoldville gov­ernment—especially the pervasive use of money to buy loyalties within leadership circles. The second part, covering 1964 to 1968, describes the continuation of the political action programs and the expansion of paramilitary and air support to the Congolese government in its effort to quell provincial rebellions, some of them communist-aided.

Over one-third of the sources in the volume are from CIA, and over 40 percent pertain to CA (the rest are about diplomacy, policy, and military matters). A number of the editorial notes usefully summarize heavily redacted documents or paraphrase intelligence information that other­wise might not have survived the review process in raw form. 

In both the documents and the notes, the editors helpfully have used bracketed insertions to indicate names, titles, or agencies in place of cryptonyms that were not declassified. Similarly, in cases when more than one individual whose name cannot be declassified is mentioned in a document, they have been designated as “[Identity 1],” “[Identity 2],” and so forth for clar­ity—a much better procedure than repetitively using “[less than one line declassified].” 

A More Nuanced View of the Situation

The documents from early 1960 at the inception of the covert program show CIA’s nuanced view of the Congo’s unsettled internal situation and the Agency’s fashioning of sensi­ble operational objectives to achieve the Eisenhower administration’s goal of regime change.6 President Dwight Eisenhower clearly expressed his dis­quiet over developments in postcolo­nial Africa at a meeting with senior advisers in August 1960:

“The President observed that in the last twelve months, the world has developed a kind of ferment greater than he could remember in recent times. The Communists are trying to take control of this, and have succeeded to the extent that… in many cases [people] are now saying that the Communists are thinking of the common man while the United States is ded­icated to supporting outmoded regimes”

CIA operations officers under­stood the challenges facing them as they dealt with a population of 14 million divided into over 200 ethnic groups and four major tribes, with fewer than 20 Congolese college graduates in the entire country, led by a government heavily dependent on the former Belgian colonialists to maintain infrastructure, services, and security, with an army that was poor­ly trained, inadequately equipped, and badly led, and a fractured political structure consisting of four semi-autonomous regions and a weak and factious “central” government in the capital of Leopoldville (Kinshasa today). The US ambassador in the early 1960s, Clare Timberlake, sym­pathized with the Agency officers he worked with: “Every time I look at this truly discouraging mess, I shud­der over the painfully slow, frustrat­ing and costly job ahead for the UN and US if the Congo is to really be helped. On the other hand, we can’t let go of this bull’s tail.”8

One of the most valuable contri­butions Congo, 1960–1968 is likely to make is moving scholarship past its prevailing fixation on Lumum­ba and toward an examination of CIA’s multiyear, multifarious covert program and the complexities of planning and implementing it.

 The volume provides additional detail about the assassination plot against Lumumba and his eventual death at the hands of tribal rivals abetted by their Belgian allies, substantiating the findings of a Belgian parliamentary inquiry in 2001.a9 Beyond that, for students of intelligence operations, the collection demonstrates the wide range of “soft” and “hard” covert initiatives CIA undertook in an often rapidly changing operational environ­ment

CIA’s program initially focused on removing Lumumba, not only through assassination if necessary but also with an array of nonlethal un­dertakings that showed the Agency’s clear understanding of the Congo’s political dynamics. The activities included contacts with oppositionists who were working to oust Lumumba with parliamentary action; payments to army commander Mobutu to ensure the loyalty of key officers and the support of legislative leaders; street demonstrations; and “black” broadcasts from a radio station in nearby Brazzaville, across the border in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to encourage a revolt against Lumumba.

 CIA concen­trated on stabilizing and supporting the government of President Joseph Kasavubu and Prime Ministers Cyrille Adoula and Moise Tshombe, with Mobutu as behind-the-scenes power broker

After Lumumba fled house arrest in the capital in late November 1960 and was tracked down and killed soon after,10  CIA concen­trated on stabilizing and supporting the government of President Joseph Kasavubu and Prime Ministers Cyrille Adoula and Moise Tshombe, with Mobutu as behind-the-scenes power broker. CIA used an extensive assortment of covert techniques to accomplish that objective:

Advice and subsidies to political and tribal leaders.

• Funds to Mobutu to buy the alle­giances of army officers through salary subsidies and purchases of ordnance and communications and transportation equipment.

• Payments to agents of influence in the Adoula administration and to sources in the leftist opposition.

• Parliamentary maneuvering aided by covert money.

• Contacts with labor unions and student associations.

• Newspaper subsidies, radio broad­casts, leaflet distributions, and street demonstrations.

• Efforts to influence delegations from the United Nations (UN) to adopt positions that favored the Congolese government.11

The CIA’s program persisted through several political crises in the Congo during 1962–63 and at least can be credited with helping the government survive them. As of mid-1964, however, the US strategic goal of bringing about a broad-based governing coalition with national appeal remained unaccomplished. The replacement of Adoula with Tshombe, who led a different faction, in July 1964 prompted a suspension of political action efforts while the new government established itself and soon became preoccupied with putting down rebel uprisings. By August, insurgents controlled over one-sixth of the country, and the Agency redirected most resources to reinforcing and rebuilding tribal allegiances in contested areas and in­directly assisting the Congolese army by funding mercenaries in its employ.

For the better part of a year, CIA opted to promote unity rather than division by declining Tshombe’s and other politicians’ approaches for indi­vidual subsidies. By mid-1965, when Tshombe and Kasavubu seemed near­ly beyond reconciliation, the Agency tried to resume its previous political intriguing and buying of access and influence but became frustrated when the embassy resisted. US ability to affect Congolese leaders’ decisions “has never been lower since depar­ture of Lumumba,” Leopoldville Sta­tion wrote in late October. A month later, Mobutu—“our only anchor to the windward” and “the best man… to act as a balance wheel between the contending political leaders,” assert­ed CIA—staged a bloodless coup and took over the government.12

In Concert with US Policy

Documents in the collection show that CIA’s political program was strategically coordinated with overt policies and benefited from close co­operation between the chief of station (COS) and the ambassador, at least at first, and the COS’s back channel to the Congolese government, partic­ularly with Mobutu. Larry Devlin, COS from July 1960 to May 1963 and July 1965 to June 1967, had pro­ductive relationships with Timberlake and Edmund Guillon, less so with G. McMurtrie Godley, who disap­proved of the station’s machinationswith local leaders. 

Still, Devlin large­ly had a free hand, and his skill and connections were so valuable that he was brought back as an informal interlocutor with the Congolese gov­ernment between his tours. The State Department noted in 1965 that

“from the outset the Congo operation has had to cope with successive crises on a crash basis. The very nature of the problem has meant that great reliance had to be placed on close coordination between the Ambassador and the Station Chief in the expenditure of funds. Both Ambassadors Guillon and Godley appear to have had confidence in the CIA Station Chief and in his conduct of operations. Although courses of action have frequently been discussed between represen­tatives of the Department and CIA, the bulk of the day to day operational decisions were tak­en in the field without reference to the Department”

Devlin’s quasi-ambassadorial dealings with Mobutu underscored that the army chief was indispens­able to the Congo’s stability and, by extension, US policy in the Congo and sub-Saharan Africa. Devlin’s fascinating personal and profes­sional interaction with Mobutu, so evocatively described in his memoir, comes through in the official record as well, as does his indirect influence on policy decisions in Washington. The chief of AF wrote in 1967 that Mobutu had

“become accustomed and to some degree dependent on the informal channel to the U.S. Government thus provided [and] would interpret the ter­mination of this relationship— particularly if termination were more or less coincident with Devlin’s [second] departure— as evidence of a desire on the part of the U.S. Government to disengage from the close and friendly relations that have characterized dealings between the governments for most of the period since 1960.”

Story to be continued…