Patrice Lumumba Assassination: A Few Quotes and Sources

Note: the assassination of Lumumba has been a question for many years. Some accounts seem to place most of the foreign responsibility on the CIA. Others place most of it on the Belgian government. Presumably both were involved. There are also other contradictions between the different accounts:

In a Leopoldville apartment, I heard a CIA man, who had had too much to drink, describe with satisfaction exactly how and where the newly independent country's first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, had been killed a few months earlier. He assumed that any American, even a visiting student like me, would share his relief at the assassination of a man the United States government considered a dangerous leftist troublemaker.

(Hochschild 1998, 3)

[In 1960] King Baudouin of Belgium arrived in Leopoldville to grant, officially and patronizingly, the Congo its freedom. He said, 'lt is now up to you, gentlemen, to show that you are worthy of our confidence." An angry, impromptu speech in reply by Patrice Lumumba caught the world's attention. Barely a month earlier, an election had made Lumumba a coalition-government prime minister. It was the first democratic national election the territory had ever had. In substance if not form, it would be, for more than thirty-five years, the last. Lumumba believed that political independence was not enough to free Africa from its colonial past; the continent must also cease to be an economic colony of Europe. His speeches set off immediate alarm signals in Western capitals. Belgian, British, and American corporations by now had vast investments in the Congo, which was rich in copper, cobalt, diamonds, gold, tin, manganese, and zinc. An inspired orator whose voice was rapidly carrying beyond his country's borders, Lumumba was a mercurial and charismatic figure. [end p. 301; start p.302] His message, Western governments feared, was contagious. Moreover, he could not be bought. Finding no sympathy in the West, he asked for help from the Soviet Union. Anathema to American and European capital, he became a leader whose days were numbered. Less than two months after being named the Congo's first democratically chosen prime minister, a U.S. National Security Council subcommittee on covert operations, which included CIA chief Allen Dulles, authorized his assassination. Richard Bissell, CIA operations chief at the time, later said, "The, President [Dwight D. Eisenhower] would have vastly preferred to have him taken care of some way other than by assassination, but he regarded Lumumba as I did and a lot of other people did: as a mad dog . . . and he wanted the problem dealt with."

Alternatives for dealing with "the problem" were considered, among them poison (a supply of which was sent to the CIA station chief in Leopoldville), a high-powered rifle, and free-lance hit men. But it proved hard to get close enough to Lumumba to use these, so, instead, the CIA supported anti-Lumumba elements within the factionalized Congo government, confident that before long they would do the job. They did. After being arrested and suffering a series of beatings, the prime minister was secretly shot in Elizabethville in January 1961. A CIA agent ended up driving around the city with Lumumba's body in his car's trunk, trying to find a place to dispose of it. We cannot know whether, had he survived, Lumumba would have stayed true to his rhetoric and to the hopes he embodied for so many people in Africa and elsewhere. But the United States saw to it that he never had a chance. Like millions of Congolese before him, he ended up dumped in an unmarked grave. The key figure in the Congolese forces that arranged Lumumba's murder was a young man named Joseph Desire Mobutu, then chief of staff of the army and a former NCO in the old colonial Force Publique.

(Hochschild 1998, 301-302)

Source: Adam Hochschild. King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin 1998.

A man I felt I understod, despite our differences, was an officer who had addressed my training class at the "farm" in 1965. Afterwards, he had opened up a surprisingly long way, referring to an adventure in Lubumbashi, driving about town after curfew with Patrice Lumumba's body in the trunk of his car, trying to decide what to do with it. . . . [Stockwell adds the following note with an asterisk at the bottom of the page:] He presented this story in a benign light, as though he had been trying to help. It was not until 1975 that I learned the CIA had plotted Lumumba's death.

(Stockwell 1978, 105)

I had lunched with Larry Devlin, my former patron and the famous eminence grise of the Congo program of the early sixties. After two long tours in the Congo, where he had shuffled new governments like cards, finally settling on Mobutu as president, Devlin had been put in charge of the agency's paramilitary program in Laos.

(Stockwell 1978, 136)

he [Devlin] was being summoned back to Washington to testify to the Senate's Church Committee about the Congo program. . . . What would he tell the Senate about Lumumba? Certainly he would never perjure himself, his testimony would be consistent with any written record and provable facts. At the same time I guessed than only he and President Mobutu would ever know the complete truth of Patrice Lumumba's assassination in 1960. Over whiskey other agency supergrades had bragged to me about their careers, disclosing remarkable operational secrets. Larry would brag too, but when it got to Lumumba he never had much to say.

(Stockwell 1978, 137).

CIA written records become mysteriously vague about the Lumumba assassination plot, the Trujillo assassination plot, and the Schneider assassination plot. In each case there are documents which place CIA officers in supportive contact wtih the eventual assassins but the link seems to break before the final deed.

(Stockwell 1978, 160 fn.)

In the Lumumba assassination plot the CIA was particularly diligent in its planning. Sid Gottlieb, chief of Technical Services Division, and courier of the poison, had no sooner reached Kinshasa than headquarters had followed him with cables urging that the poison be given to Lumumba promptly, before its power diminished. An agent was located who agreed to administer the fatal dose. A CIA staff officer on the one hand refused to do the killing, but on the other did agree to lure Lumumba into a situation where he could be poisoned. The poison was not used, apparently because of difficulties in staging the killing, but a month later, on January 17, 1961, Lumumba was beaten to death by henchmen of Congolese politicians who had close relationships with the CIA.

(Stockwell 1978, 236-237)

Eventually we learned Lumumba was killed, not by our poisons, but beaten to death, apparently by men who were loyal to men who had Agency cryptonyms and received Agency salaries. In death he became an eternal martyr and by installing Mobutu in the Zairian presidency, we committed ourselves to the "other side," . . .

(Open Letter to Admiral Stansifield Turner, Director, US Central Intelligence Agency, from John Stockwell, published in Outlook, Washington Post, April 10, 1977. Included as Appendix 7 of Stockwell's In Search of Enemies, 1978, p. 273)

Source: John Stockwell. In Search of Enemies. New York: Norton, 1978. (Page numbers listed are from the 1997 Replica Books reprint.)

See also more recent writings on the Lumumba assassination, writings that show a principal role for the Belgian government:

http://www.africasia.com/archive/na/00_02/nacs0201.htm

http://www.rastafarispeaks.com/cgi-bin/forum/archive1/config.pl?read=50166