Richard Bissell, then head of the CIA’s covert action, said, “The Agency had put a top priority, probably, on a range of different methods of getting rid of Lumumba in the sense of either destroying him physically, incapacitating him, or eliminating his political influence.” Ibid. As De Witte shows, it was the Belgian government that actually carried out Lumumba’s assassination on January 17, 1961, three days before Kennedy became president.
