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

by Stuart A. Reid

The CIA and its station chief in the Congo, Larry Devlin, had a hand in nearly every major development leading up to Lumumba’s murder, from his fall from power to his forceful transfer into rebel-held territory on the day of his death.

As the Cold War intensified, America appeared to have stopped a Communist takeover in its tracks and, in Joseph Mobutu (who later called himself Mobutu Sese Seko), installed a friendly dictator keen on aligning with the Western bloc.

The American intervention in the Congo was an early battle in a decades-long series of covert actions that would showcase the conflict between interests and values in American statecraft.

It was in the Congo that the United States and the Soviet Union first faced off in a theater far from either homeland, transforming the Cold War, until then first and foremost a European affair, into a truly global struggle.

Contrary to a common Western belief at the time, Lumumba was not pro-Communist in any sense of the term, nor was he, as a slightly more sophisticated critique had it, particularly vulnerable to Soviet influence. In fact, all the available evidence suggests he harbored a greater affinity for the United States than he did for the Soviet Union. Nor, however, was Lumumba a naive victim of Western machinations, as left-wing historians sometimes suggest. Yes, he was subject to powerful forces he could not control—and some he could not even see—but he had more agency than many imagine. He made brilliant choices and confounding choices. He was his country’s greatest politician and perhaps its worst statesman.

One person who saw Leopold’s project for what it was was a young Polish mariner named Konrad Korzeniowski, who in 1890 took a job piloting a steamboat on the Congo River. Later, under the pen name Joseph Conrad, he would fictionalize his experience—“a little (and only very little)”—in Heart of Darkness. “To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire,” the novel’s disillusioned protagonist says, “with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.”

Leopold’s colonial vanity project would earn a place in the pantheon of human atrocities. Owing partly to outright murder but mostly to social disruption and the mass starvation and disease it caused, the population of the Congo basin is thought to have been cut in half from 1880 to 1920.

By dint of his fluency in French and “Europeanized” comportment, Lumumba became what in colonial parlance was called an évolué. The term—French for “evolved person”—was reserved for subjects who, in their compliance and eagerness to emulate European settlers, were poster children of colonialism’s “civilizing mission.”

The natives could become carpenters but not architects, veterinary aides but not doctors, laboratory assistants but not scientists, and clerks but not lawyers. The sole avenue for upper-level study was the priesthood. (No wonder so many Congolese, after finishing seminary, suddenly discovered that they weren’t fit to be men of the cloth.)

The guides’ eponymous creator, Eugene Fodor, was a Hungarian native distressed to watch Eastern Europe fall into the Soviet orbit, and as a naturalized U.S. citizen, he considered it his patriotic duty to let the CIA use his company as a front. (The funding he received in exchange didn’t hurt, either.) The profession of travel writer was an ideal cover for a spy like Devlin, since it offered a ready excuse for ranging widely across Europe while taking extensive photographs and notes. The problem was that Fodor insisted on getting actual work out of his charges, telling the CIA to send “real writers, not civil engineers.”

Lumumba seemed interested in the Soviets only insofar as they could provide funds. He did not look to them for ideological inspiration. And the Soviets didn’t see him as a horse worth backing.

In fact, Mobutu had probably been in the pay of Belgian intelligence as early as 1956, the year he had left the army.

Eisenhower already had little faith in the Congo’s prospects. A footdragger on civil rights at home, the president was a skeptic of independence in Africa, too. When Dulles pointed out that some eighty political parties were vying for power in the Congo, Eisenhower quipped that he didn’t realize so many people in the colony could read. (In fact, the Congo’s literacy rate, at more than 40 percent, was among the highest on the continent; for all the deficiencies in secondary and higher education, access to primary school was widespread.)

The Belgians had banned Congolese men from studying anything other than the priesthood until the 1940s, resulting in a cabinet of the unschooled. There were fewer than twenty Congolese university graduates in the entire world, and only two of them—Justin Bomboko, the foreign minister, and Thomas Kanza, the ambassador to the UN—were part of the new government. Among the rest of the cabinet, only a handful had finished high school.

This was white flight on an unprecedented scale: within two weeks of independence, some 60,000 of the 80,000 Europeans remaining in the Congo had left.

For Socrates, it was hemlock, the alkaloid-filled herb the Greek philosopher was forced to drink as a death sentence for impiety. For the empress Xu Pingjun of the Han dynasty, it was aconite, a deadly buttercup given to her by a suborned physician. For the Roman emperor Claudius, it was an intoxicating compound infused into mushrooms that were served to him by his eunuch waiter. For Dmitry Shemyaka, the Grand Duke of Moscow, it was arsenic with which a rival had adulterated his chicken dinner. As long as powerful people have walked the earth, their enemies have had occasion to kill them with poison. The CIA’s poisoning plots were the logical extension of the covert action programs it had been developing since its postwar founding. With American power at a new high, the temptation to quietly tip events in foreign countries to the United States’ advantage—sometimes by helping overthrow democratically elected leaders it deemed bothersome—proved irresistible.

Gottlieb’s interest, however, lay in medicine, chemistry, and biology—in learning how to enhance, or lay waste to, the human mind and body. For a decade, he ran MKULTRA, the CIA’s human experiments in mind control for use in interrogation. Gottlieb and his men gave LSD to unwitting subjects—prisoners, college students, drug addicts, johns, and psychiatric patients, many of them Black. At an addiction treatment center in Lexington, Kentucky, seven human guinea pigs were kept on LSD for seventy-seven days straight. Gottlieb even ran his LSD tests on colleagues, once spiking the triple sec of an army scientist named Frank Olson; nine days later, Olson died after falling from the tenth floor of a New York City hotel.

Kennedy talked about Africa on the campaign trail more than any U.S. presidential candidate before or since. By one count, he referenced the continent 479 times in his campaign speeches. As he saw it, the Eisenhower administration’s lack of interest in Africa had allowed the Soviets to gain ground. “I have seen us ignore Africa,” he said in his last televised debate against Richard Nixon. In a campaign booklet, he railed against “policies which refuse to accept the inevitable triumph of nationalism in Africa—the inevitable end of colonialism.”

And yet, as an unreleased Church Committee report concluded, “The U.S. became deeply involved through covert action in a country which represented no strategic threat to the U.S.; which housed no significant U.S. commercial interests; in which few American citizens resided; and which was contiguous to no U.S. territory.”

what the U.S. Senator William Fulbright would call “the arrogance of power,” the idea that America’s might gave it the right to remake foreign societies and governments in its own image. But the extensive U.S. involvement in the Congo is also explained by a Cold War shibboleth: the domino theory. If a single country fell to the Communists, then one by one, so would neighboring ones. The lack of evidence for this theory—never before had a Communist takeover actually set off such a chain reaction—did not keep it from becoming an article of faith among U.S. policy makers and the American public.

Similar distortions caused the United States to fundamentally misjudge Lumumba. He was, admittedly, tricky to pin down. He modulated his message to the recipient, and he pivoted quickly. He was reactive rather than proactive. But any politician who managed to win the contest to become Congolese prime minister was likely to demonstrate such traits and to play both sides of the Cold War. In fact, Lumumba was naturally inclined toward the United States.

Richard Helms, Richard Bissell’s deputy at the CIA, testified before the Church Committee, he could not recall which camp Lumumba belonged to. “I am relatively certain that he represented something that the United States government didn’t like, but I can’t remember anymore what it was,” he said. He asked his interrogators for help. “Was he a rightist or leftist?…What was wrong with Lumumba? Why didn’t we like him?”

American ignorance often went hand in hand with racist attitudes toward the Congolese people and their leaders. 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.

Lumumba’s daughter, Juliana, thought it strange that around the world, governments were still hunting aging Nazis, yet no one seemed moved to prosecute those responsible for her father’s death. Adding insult to injury, the sole remaining relic of her father was moldering away in Brussels.

Researchers looking into America’s Cold War foreign policy face other needless hurdles. Declassification requests routinely take more than a decade to receive a final decision. In 2018, an investigative reporter filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the CIA’s internal history of its operations against Lumumba. As of this writing, in 2023, the request is still pending. The United States spends a pittance on declassification: about $100 million a year, a fourth of the Pentagon’s budget for military bands. The U.S. intelligence community has resisted efforts to replace costly manual reviews with ones conducted by the magic of artificial intelligence. And bafflingly, there is no rule that any document older than a certain number of years must be automatically declassified. Democracies are defined by openness, accountability, and free inquiry. More than six decades after Patrice Lumumba’s murder, what could possibly be worth hiding, and from whom?