The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination

by Stuart A. Reid

America had seen this movie before and didn’t like how it ended: after Guinea’s independence from France two years earlier, the Soviets had flooded the country with aid, and it now seemed firmly in their orbit.

Bunche served as a State Department adviser to the U.S. delegation at the 1945 San Francisco conference, where the UN was born, and the following year joined the organization itself, back when it was still occupying temporary headquarters at Hunter College in the Bronx. In 1949, he spent eighty-one days negotiating an Arab-Israeli armistice—an experience that won him the Nobel Peace Prize. After Hammarskjöld became secretary-general, Bunche became his most trusted deputy.

This was hardly a surprising outcome. As with many other European colonies, the borders of the Belgian Congo had been drawn with no consideration of ethnic boundaries, and so its fourteen million people were not a natural grouping but a jumble of hundreds of different ethnicities with little shared sense of national belonging.

Ethnicity formed the basis of government in rural areas and operated as a source of solidarity in the cities. Most voters still identified first as Kongo, Mongo, Luba, and so on—not, as Lumumba did, as Congolese.

The man who was set to lead Senegal into independence later in the year, Léopold Senghor, was a noted poet, a graduate of the University of Paris, and a former deputy in France’s National Assembly.

Julius Nyerere, who was about to take the reins of independent Tanganyika, had a master’s degree from the University of Edinburgh and would soon translate Julius Caesar into Swahili.

Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, held two master’s degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and had studied philo...

he had still managed to translate the work of his friend Saint-John Perse, a French poet and ex-diplomat.

Congo is beautiful and that their country expects them, as it expects every Congolese, to fulfill the sacred task of rebuilding our independence, our sovereignty; for without justice there is no dignity and without independence there are no free men.

English and German copies of the Israeli philosopher Martin Buber’s I and Thou (Hammarskjöld had agreed to translate the book into Swedish),

Recently returned from China, where he received training in Maoist guerrilla warfare tactics, Mulele now styled himself as a mystical bush commander, impervious to bullets and imbued with the power of flight.

When the Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara and a cadre of his Afro-Cuban followers arrived on the eastern border of the Congo in April 1965, lured by the opportunity to assist fellow freedom fighters, the rebels struck them as cowardly, more interested in swilling millet beer and frequenting brothels than in conducting raids on the ANC.

On the morning of November 20, 1975, copies of the 349-page document, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, landed on the desks of all U.S. senators.

The CIA had backed the dissidents who shot and killed Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican Republic’s dictator, in 1961 and may even have furnished the guns used in the murder.

The Kennedy administration supported the 1963 coup that killed South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Nhu.

Seven years later, the Nixon administration backed and armed the plotters of a failed coup attempt in Chile, who nonetheless succeeded in assas...

U.S. and UN cable traffic during the Congo crisis is rife with paternalism and exasperation with the “children” running the newly independent country, including the “little boy” Lumumba.