Stuart A. Reid: The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History Of The CIA And A Cold War Assassination (Knopf, 2023)

>> Stephen Kotkin: Ladies and gentlemen, I'm Stephen Kotkin, the director of the Hoover History Lab. And it's my honor to welcome our guest today, Stuart Reed, who is an executive editor at Foreign Affairs Magazine. Stuart's new book is published today, The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination.

I'm going to pass the book, my copy of the galleys around to our live studio audience of all the Cold War episodes. And there are very, very many, the big ones, like the Korean War, the assassination, coup, however you want to call it, Iran, Bay of Pigs, cuban missile crisis, Vietnam War, they're all extremely well studied.

Fortunately, we have very good source material, lots of declassified documentation, and a lot of excellent studies by now multigenerations of scholars. What happened in the Congo is, I think, not as well studied, not as well known, but no less significant in its repercussions all the way to the present day.

So we can only be really grateful. First, Stuart Reed putting in the hard work to bring us back to this history that, as I said, is still alive today. The format of our event will be for Stuart to come up and present for as long as he thinks is a good idea, 20 minutes, 30 minutes or so.

And then we'll go to questions both from our live studio audience and from our livestream audience that's following us on Zoom. So I ask you to hold your questions until Stuart has finished his presentation. Please join me. Warm welcome, Stuart Reed, The Lumumba Plot.

>> Stuart A. Reid: Thanks so much, Steve.

And it's really great to be here at Hoover Institution and at Stanford. So I'm just going to talk a little bit about the events of the Congo crisis and Patrice Lumumba, and then zoom out briefly for the sort of broader effects to this day. So this is Patrice Lumumba, and he became, as you know, Prime Minister of Congo upon independence in June 1960.

And before that, however, his own story is a really remarkable rise. He was born in a small village in the middle of the Belgian Congo in 1925. Like many African men at that time, he migrated to a larger city, Stanleyville, now known as Kisangani, and he joined the colonial administration, working as a postal clerk, rising up the ranks of the administration.

And he then got caught embezzling money from the post office, was sent thrown in jail, wrote and read furiously while in prison, was eventually released, and then became, of all things, a beer promoter. He moved to Leopoldville, the capital, now Kinshasa. And it was in this sudsy environment in Leopoldville in the late 1950s that he really cut his political teeth and became active in the nationalism movement in Congo, which came much later than in other colonies, in French colonies and British colonies.

The Belgians were intent on keeping, they had this expression, no elites, no problems. And so the idea was that you keep the population, uneducated, you keep them from interacting with one another, and you forestall the development of a political elite, and then you wouldn't have any problems. As you might suspect, this policy didn't end up working so well, and it wasn't able to be enforced.

But it did cause independence to be much delayed. And so Lumumba cofounded a political party and ran in parliamentary elections in May 1960, after the Belgians belatedly offloaded their colony, realizing that they could no longer hold on to it. They had wanted to for decades. But then, very quickly, everything changed and they realized that wasn't sustainable.

And so here is the Congolese government just days before independence in June 1960. And Lumumba is on the left here, and he was prime minister, and there were 23 ministers, plus ten at a junior rank. So, incredibly unwieldy, divided government. The point was inclusion, not coherence. So you had members of various ethnic groups, different regions represented, all sorts of political parties.

And you'll notice there's a man here, and that's Joseph Mobutu, who, at that point, was a junior minister in Lumumba's government. And they were great friends. Mobutu was Lumumba's protege and errand boy, and was included at a lower level in his government. One of the things that's noteworthy is, among these 23 ministers, there were only two university graduates.

And, in fact, there were less than. There were fewer than 20 congolese university graduates in the entire world at that time. So effectively had Belgium limited opportunities for educational advancement, that this was really a cabinet of people who had not been allowed to advance very far. They were all expert political organizers, and Mobutu himself was a brilliant autodidact, but they were really stunted professionally and educationally.

So Congo becomes independent on June 30th. This is a photo that would become the iconic image of the Congo crisis. This is actually taken a day before independence. And that's King Baudouin, whoops, standing up in the vertical there. And a Congolese man jumped out from the crowd and grabbed his sword, which, I mean, the symbolism was unmistakable, it was, we are in charge now.

And it was also, I think, an omen of the sort of chaos to come. So on June 30, the country becomes independent. Almost immediately, everything goes wrong. There's a mutiny in the army. The army had an all white officer corps, which was a holdover from colonialism. As you might expect, the Congolese rank and file we're not too fond of that.

And they, predictably, rebelled against their white officers. So gangs of soldiers were roaming the streets, and the white population, the Belgian population of Congo, fled en masse. And so you had this massive white flight. It was, again, because of the belgian colonial strategy. You had a It was really the Belgian elite that was running the country, air traffic controllers, doctors, teachers, that sort of thing.

So here are Belgian civilians fleeing on the ferry across the river. Belgium then sent military forces into Congo, its former colony, it did not have permission from the Congolese to do this, it was essentially invading. Ostensibly, it was to protect the Belgium citizens but it looked to everyone else like a recolonization.

So Lumumba is in charge and his country is falling apart before his very eyes. And one of the first decisions he makes to prove to be a key decision in, really, in world history was to appoint his friend Mobutu as head of the army. Again, they were political allies, Mobutu was the junior partner in the relationship and Mobutu himself had served in the military for six or seven years.

So it seemed like a natural choice to put him in charge of Africanizing the army and putting down the rebellion. Then on July 11, independence was June 30, there's another big event that rocks the Congo and that is the secession of Katanga, which is this mineral rich province here to the south east.

Is sort of this Belgian backed secession with the local provincial leaders in alliance with their Belgian backers and the various mineral, main mineral company there. So the country is literally splitting apart now and Lumumba makes the decision to call on the United Nations. He doesn't even know exactly what the UN could do, but he's desperate.

And so he and the president of Congo, Joseph Kasavubu send this telegram on July 12 to Doug Dag Hammarskjöld in New York requesting some sort of help that results in this massive and massively quickly set up peacekeeping operation. There were 5000 UN troops in Congo within a week, the Americans, the British and the Soviets were helping with the airlift.

The troops were mainly African, from fellow African countries, Tunisia, Morocco, Guinea, Ghana and Hammarskjöld set this up in record time and nothing like this had been done before. As you know, the UN had monitored ceasefires and truces but never had it been responsible for restoring order to an entire country.

But what the UN was unable to do to Lumumba's great frustration was enter Katanga. There were sort of two reasons for this, one, the interrelated the secessionists in Katanga didn't want the UN to come in. They saw that as a takeover by Lumumba and then the UN itself.

Doug Dag Hammarskjöld specifically worried that entering they'd have to fight their way and he didn't want. So Lumumba was endlessly frustrated with this, his own country. He didn't have access to the revenue center of it, and neither did the UN troops. So Lumumba, in late July 1960, flies to the United States and he meets in New York with Doug Dag Hammarskjöld, left there.

And, I mean, they had this extremely frustrating meeting where they were really talking past each other. Their styles could hardly have contrasted more. Lumumba was impatient, understandably demanding, blunt, Hammarskjöld is diplomatic, reserved, legalistic and Lumumba wanted Hammarskjöld to send in the troops to the secessionist province of Katanga, he didn't make any progress on that.

He then visits Washington, DC. He's hoping to visit President Eisenhower, he even brings presents for him a carved statue and a lamp. But he discovers, to his disappointment, that Eisenhower's out of town, he was in Newport, Rhode island, and then elsewhere. And at this point in the Eisenhower's presidency, he had really checked out.

He was almost 70 years old, he was tired of the job, he complained to one a that he wanted to just be taken out on the lawn and shot. This was not him at his most engaged in the presidency. So Lumumba meets instead with the State Department. So on the right, that's Christian Herder and Douglas Dillon.

With Lumumba, it's again a frustrating meeting and he doesn't get anything, he wants American aid, support for the UN breaking into Katanga, and he leaves America defeated and disappointed. And he also had, I think, rubbed a lot of American officials the wrong way and so when he goes back to Congo, he makes an extremely crucial decision, which is that he calls on the Soviet Union for help.

He sends a cable to Khrushchev asking for military aid, the purpose of that aid was so that he could intervene in Katanga with his own Congolese troops and finally bring his country back together of course, from the American perspective, it looked. Yeah, like he was inviting in the Soviets and therefore the Congolese Domino would fall and the country would become communist.

And so that's when Eisenhower, something really remarkable in the history of all American presidents happens. That's on August 18, 1960, Eisenhower, his national Security Council meeting and Eisenhower says something. The subject of Lumumba comes up and Eisenhower says something to the effect that Lumumba needs to be killed.

The exact words are lost to history but we know this from the NSC note taker at the meeting, who had testified to the church committee in 1975 that the president said this and he looked directly at Alan Dulles when he was saying this. So the implication was clear of whose job it was to get rid of Lumumba, another thing I found in my research it's an admittedly inconclusive piece of evidence.

But at the Eisenhower library in Kansas, there's handwritten notes from Gerard Smith, the director of policy planning at state department at the time. And I didn't know exactly what to make of this, and it's open to interpretation, but he wrote the word Lumumba and then had a giant bolden x next to it.

So that could mean many things, but I think it could also mean one particular thing. Eisenhower's words then set in motion this really remarkable CIA plot that feels like it comes out of fiction, which is that Sidney Gottlieb, the top chemist at the CIA is instructed by Dallas, via Richard Bissell, to get to work finding a way to kill Lumumba.

And so he picks a poison, botulinum toxin, and flies to Congo to deliver it to the station chief, CIA station chief at the time, Larry Devlin. When Devlin meets with Sidney Gottlieb. He, as he would recount in his memoir, could hardly believe what he was being told and asked, where did this order come from?

Gottlieb tells him it came from President Eisenhower at the very top. Now, the poisoning plot, it actually fizzles out because events intervene and the CIA hand sort of acted in a different way. And specifically, in September 1960, Mobutu steps in and takes charge in a military coup. He announces it by saying, this is not a military coup, but it was, in fact, very much one.

And in this, he was encouraged by the CIA. Larry Devlin, the station chief, met with him repeatedly in the days and weeks before the coup. He handed him a suitcase of cash, a briefcase of cash, $5,000 that Mobutu would use to pay off his officers and encouraged him to take power.

And he did. And here's Mobutu looking a little more confident in an interview. I love this photo of him. Now. As I mentioned earlier, Mobutu and Lumumba had been great friends. Mentor Lumba, mentoring Mobutu. And so there was a real personal element to this. And Mobutu was called the hamlet of the Congo because he couldn't quite decide what to do about Lumumba, his former friend and protege and mentor.

He eventually, though, acts again at the encouragement of the CIA and the Belgians and throws Lumumba in house arrest. So this is Lumumba and the prime minister's residence in Leopoldville, standing on the balcony there. And this is taken the moment the day that Mobutu sent his troops to surround the house, Mobutu's head of the military.

And so Lumumba's under house arrest. There were actually two rings of troops. There was an inner ring of Un troops preventing any harm from coming to Lumumba. And then there was an outer ring of Congolese troops preventing Lumumba from leaving. And Lumumba is endlessly frustrated by, he's now been deposed.

He's languishing under house arrest. He can't tour the city and speak to the people. And so he concocts this daring plan to escape and somehow he pulls it off. Late at night, there's a massive thunderstorm in Leopoldville and Lumumba hides under the legs of his domestic staff, who are in a car leaving the house.

And they pass through the Un ring without any problems. And they pass through the Congolese ring of troops without any problems. And that car is then he goes to another car and starts driving away to Stanleyville. Stanleyville, that's the city where he had come of age politically. It was also where at this point, his allies were regrouping, as they had all been kicked out of government with the Mobutu coup and were recapping in Stanleyville.

Several days later, however, Lumumba is captured. And again, there's an American role here. The CIA. Larry Devlin was helping Mobutu organize a search party suggesting different routes. A plane was hired and Lumumba's convoy was spotted from the air. And here's Lumumba being captured. He was returning to Leopoldville after being captured.

And, I mean, this was one of the harder parts of the book to write and perhaps read, is that he was. Lumumba was really manhandled and tortured at this point. He was thrown into the bed of a truck. This is another iconic image from the Congo crisis and sort of displayed like a prized catch for Mobutu.

And Mobutu realizes, okay, Lumumba can't be under house arrest. He escaped once. I'm not gonna let that happen. So he throws him in a military prison outside the capital, quite a bit outside the capital, and there Lumumba languishes. And I should talk a little bit about the timing.

So this is now December 1960. As you know, the Eisenhower administration was on its way out and the Kennedy administration was on its way in. And there was this real fear among Mobutu and his henchmen and among Devlin and his CIA superiors back in Washington. There was a real fear that Lumumba would come back to power.

And it was a legitimate fear because at one level, at a practical level, the troops guarding Lumumba at this military camp were on the verge of mutiny. And there were many pro Lumumba soldiers among them. So that was one concern, that they would spring him free. And then, more broadly, there were efforts at the UN to negotiate some sort of reconciliation between Lumumba and Mobutu and the president, Kasavubu was his name.

And the Kennedy administration, there were signs that it was going to take a less hard line stance toward Lumumba and would be open to the possibility that Lumumba could be rehabilitated, brought back to power as a prime minister, part of some coalition government. These were real veins of policy that were merging.

So what happens? And this is really the key moment of american intervention here, I think, the place where America has the most blood on its hands. What happens is Mobutu's military government decides to send Lumumba away to a province where it's certain he will die. The idea being we don't want to do the dirty work ourselves.

But we need to physically eliminate him or else he'll come back to power. And that would mean the end of the Mobutu regime. Mobutu or someone from his circle, we don't know who, informs Larry Devlin of this, that Lumumba is about to be transferred. Devlin knows exactly what that would mean.

And what does he do? Two things. One, he does not tell Mobutu or his allies to stop the transfer and intervene to save Lumumba's life. And two, he keeps headquarters in DC out of the loop. Even as he's updating them about other twists and turns in the crisis.

He neglects to mention the most significant development going on at that time, which is that he's just learned about this transfer. And the reason he did that is very clear, which is that had he told DC about this, he would certainly have gotten a message back saying, stop the transfer.

This is too big a policy to have happened, too big a decision to have happened during this transition period. How did he know this? Because a few days earlier, he had asked for another authorization, for another massive payment to Mobutu and had received the message. It's a transition period.

This is a question for the new administration. So he holds onto this news, keeps Washington out of the loop, and on January 17, 1961, three days before Kennedy takes the oath of office, Lumumba is sent to the breakaway province of Katanga. He's tortured horribly on the flight there, is tortured again upon arrival.

And this is Mohis Chambe, the secessionist leader of Katanga, he's present for some of the torturing and gets blood on his suit. And Lumumba is then taken away, driven away into a remote clearing in the countryside, where he is shot dead by a firing squad of local Congolese soldiers, acting at the orders of Belgian officers, because Katanga still had Belgian officers at that point, who in turn were answering to Tshombe's secessionist government.

And here's the site where Lumumba was killed. And that man is I actually met him in 2017 and interviewed him. And it was a fascinating experience and to treat as a journalist and writer, to get to hear from someone. And why he's important is because he actually witnessed Lumumba's murder.

He was 20 years old in 1960. He was hunting antelope with his father on a hunting trip. And late at night, they saw headlights coming off the road, which was unusual at this hour in this location. And so he and his father hid behind an anthill and watched everything play out.

And I was able to hear his version of events, which also matched the record, but added to it, matched the record of what we know. Now, just to sort of wrap up the story now. So Lumumba is dead, Mobutu's in charge, and he stays in charge. So here's Mobutu with JFK, Nixon, Reagan, George HW Bush.

And what I argue is that there was a fallacy operating here, which was the. Another historian has called it the Mobutu or chaos theory. And the idea was, there is no alternative to Mobutu, it's him or collapse. And at a day to day and week to week level, this sort of had a certain logic to it.

However, if you zoom out and think of the time horizon of decades, what it resulted in was tragedy. Mobutu ran Congo, which was then renamed Zaire, until 1997, total kleptocrat, repressive dictator. And in 1997, the entire country collapsed. And so began one of the deadliest civil wars in recent memory.

And I think you can really trace that back to us support from Mobutu, both in the moment in 1960 and then throughout the rest of the sixties and seventies and eighties. And it was only in the 90s, after the Cold War, that Washington finally cut him loose. And not surprisingly, he collapsed not long after.

And just to close, it brings me back. There's a quote just before Mobutu had this second coup, where he dispensed with the role of president and took power himself. But he had been the power behind the throne all along. And this was in 1965. And there's a memo that Harold Saunders, an NSC staffer, wrote justifying why, we couldn't do anything about this.

It's going to be Mobutu. We're just going to have to accept it. And he said, he is already our man. And I think that really summarized the logic at play. So thank you.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Thank you, Stuart. That was very economical. It's a compelling narrative history to recall these events in judicious fashion.

Very fair minded, good character sketches of the various individuals involved. Like, you gave us a hint of there. And then you're trying to draw this big lesson. So let's focus a little bit on the big lesson. So there's no plot in the sense that there's a meeting and people get together and they decide why and how.

This is just Eisenhower says something to Dulles and we're off to the races. So it seems like very consequential events deriving from an offhand remark. I mean, could that be. Could it be. It's almost an accident. I mean, what if Eisenhower had not spoken at the meeting when Lumumba's name came up?

 

>> Stuart A. Reid: I think it was not an accident. And we know that because there was not only this potentially offhand comment, but there was also a nudging follow up from Gordon Gray, the national security advisor at the time. So Eisenhower had said this comment, we don't know the exact words.

And then Dulles didn't do anything for a week or two, which was like Eisenhower, he was kind of checked out at that point. And Eisenhower and Dulles did not get along at that point. And so he gets a nudge from Gordon Gray saying, hey, remember that thing we talked about?

What's up with that? And that said, I think that's on August 25. So the meeting was August 18. And it's all phrased in this sort of backhanded language where in the notes from the meeting, it's something like, Mr. Gray reminded Mr. Dulles that in high quarters, here. The comments mentioned at the previous meeting are to be taken very seriously, or something like that.

It was more than an offhand comment.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Okay, and then the other piece that we have here is the zero sum logic with the Soviet Union, right? So the country's in chaos. There's military mutiny or whatever word we'd like to use. You use the word mutiny, I believe.

And a frustrated Lumumba who's botched his meeting with the UN Secretary General, I think that's how you describe it, he's basically botched it. He didn't understand where he was and with whom he was talking and how to approach such a person to get that person to help him.

So there's a botched meeting and he seems to have no recourse, and then he contacts the Soviets. He doesn't seem to understand the implications of contacting the Soviets, just like he doesn't understand how to manage the relationship with the UN general secretary. Is that a fair point?

>> Stuart A. Reid: Yes.

For the meeting with Hammarskjold, I would also put blame on Hammarskjold and that the Ghanaian ambassador to the UN would write that Hammarskjold couldn't fathom that an African would cross swords with him. So I think that was part of what was going on there as well. And Hammarskjold was sort high handed to him.

Lumumba did not understand the Cold War context. That's very clear. He himself said that he wanted to be neutral and that if he should visit Moscow, it's not a problem. He can visit any capital he wanted to. And he imagined that one could be neutral in the Cold War, which I don't think was an irrational thing to think.

But in Washington's eyes, there was no neutral, and he was seen as potentially useful. Stooge for the Soviets, as one version of the critique had it, or himself pro-communist, as a less sophisticated version of the critique had it.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Okay, I visited Lumumba University in Moscow many years after the fact, just as a point of information.

Okay, so Lumumba could have been smarter, more skilled, more adept at understanding the global context or what was at stake in these meetings. But you're fair in the sense that the other side could have understood as well all of that.

>> Stephen Kotkin: But now we get to Mobutu. Mobutu didn't have to go along with this.

Mobutu's agency here seems to be very significant. Right, you have him pictured there with that rogue's gallery of elected leaders in the United States, one after the other. But after all, Mobutu moved against Lumumba. Why would he do something like that? And could he have acted differently? For example, stayed in solidarity with Lumumba and defended the government?

 

>> Stuart A. Reid: Yeah, so to answer your question, I'll go into a little bit more detail, which is the coup was sort of there were two aspects to it. On September 5th, 1960, the president of Congo, Joseph Kasa-Vubu, announced that he was firing Lumumba, which was a legally dubious maneuver.

And Lumumba, in turn, announced that he had fired Kasa-Vubu.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yeah.

>> Stuart A. Reid: So you had the two top political leaders of Congo announcing that they had dismissed each other. So that was the instigating event of what happened next. And Mobutu steps into this stalemate and says, I'm neutralizing both politicians.

The military will be in charge, and by the end of the year, we'll figure something out and turn it to legitimate constitutional rule. So there was actually a period where Mobutu had not made up his mind, he saw himself as neutral, and he'd say it sort of depended on the day which way he seemed to be leaning.

And there was a lot of American pressure and Belgian pressure for him to act against Lumumba and not against Kasa-Vubu. So when he took charge, there was an initial period of true neutrality and wavering, that's when he was called the Hamlet of the Congo. And then he acted firmly against Lumumba.

But it took about a month, that process. And all the while, the Americans were paying him, the Belgians were whispering in his ear. Why did he do that? He could have chosen differently. There was a lot of pressure on him, but also, in his view, Lumumba had mismanaged relations with the West fatally.

And Mobutu saw himself as more pro-Western and suave with the diplomats, which he was, in a way. So yeah, Mobutu has a tremendous amount of agency here.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Mobutu could have restored Lumumba at any time in the process while taking everybody's money.

>> Stuart A. Reid: Yeah, but he would have probably put himself out of a job at that point.

 

>> Stephen Kotkin: Right, okay, just clarifying one more point before we open up to the audience. We have the Katanga secession, and that's another piece of agency that you bring up, and it's very prominent in the book. And that seems to have set off a lot of the circumstances that produce the tragic outcome.

 

>> Stephen Kotkin: And so what did Lumumba do or not do vis-a-vis the Katanga secession that he might have done differently had he understood better the situation he was in? In other words, did he overreact? Was it absolutely necessary for him to regain control over that province at that particular moment?

Did he see the consequences of trying to do that? Were others advising him to act differently? And then once he did act, and once it did precipitate or help precipitate the crisis, the Katanga secessionists, especially the guy that you showed, they seem also to have agency in the story and could have acted differently.

 

>> Stuart A. Reid: Yeah, so I think it's important to note there was a giant structural problem that created this secession. Which was, when the Belgians and the Congolese were working together to draft a provisional constitution, they couldn't really decide whether it should have a unitary system of government or a confederal system of government.

So they ended up with this compromise where there was a parliament and a central government, but the provinces had a lot of power as well, and had their own provincial assemblies which elected provincial rulers. So you had a real tension with the center and the provinces that was never really resolved.

And in the case of Katanga, it was, of course, providing all the revenue for the country. And so the secessionists wanted to keep that revenue to themselves. I think that the dispute that Lumumba had with the UN and with the West more broadly about Katanga was, does it need to be reintegrated to the country by force?

He thought, yes, he wanted the UN to do it. They wouldn't do it, so he wanted his own soldiers to do it. And he started that process and then he was ousted. The results showed that Lumumba was right, because ultimately, it took the UN to reintegrate Katanga by force through an invasion and operation that I think succeeded in 1963.

So I'm not sure what he could have done differently. He could have waited a little longer, but again, you're dealing with. He's nominally in charge as prime minister, and there's an entire chunk of the country, and the revenue-producing one at that, that isn't part of his country, effectively.

 

>> Stephen Kotkin: Just to be clear, I'm only asking questions. I'm not advocating a position here. It's just that the agency question is well described in the book, as I said, and the personalities are well described. I just wanted to bring that out. And your point about the Belgians educating, what was it?

How many PhDs, Congolese PhDs?

>> Stuart A. Reid: Not even PhDs, but graduates of university.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Okay, BAs, how many?

>> Stuart A. Reid: Fewer than 20.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Right, so that tells you what you need to know about the responsibility of the Belgian Congo in the crisis that unfolded after the Belgians left. Okay, there are many other issues, but let's get our live studio audience into the mix.

Who's gonna show the courage? You see the microphones are at the ready.

>> Joseph Ledford: Hi, Joseph Ledford, Hoover Fellow here. Thank you, Stewart, for the great talk. You mentioned George Smith's notes, so I'm very curious in what other documents you were able to uncover in your research from the American side.

Did you have success through the Freedom of Information Act? And could you also talk about documents on the Congolese side. Thank you.

>> Stuart A. Reid: So the book is primarily based on archival research. There's a lot of State Department archives At the National Archives, White House documents at the Eisenhower Library.

Then, in 2013, there was a big trove of CIA cables that was declassified. And those were really helpful because they show the day to day, back and forth at the operational level. Another key source of documents was the JFK assassination records, where every year they release new ones.

Some of the documents I was drawing on were only declassified in full January 2023, as I was finishing up the book. So that was a large portion of it. UN documents, they produced a tremendous amount of documentation and daily cables going back and forth. Those are really useful.

But all those sources are fundamentally Western in nature. Even the UN one, which was sort of, at that point, still dominated by the US. So it was really important for me to get the congolese side as well. And there aren't really that many documents because of the chaos that followed the Lumumba government, they were destroyed or lost or knows what happened.

So to get that side of the story, I did a few things. Lots of oral histories with Congolese actors at the time, obscure French language memoirs that Congolese politicians published in the 60s and 70s, and then interviews with surviving participants, often the children of the political class. So I spoke with his daughter, his son, and, you know, those were useful for filling in human details and color and that sort of thing.

 

>> Stephen Kotkin: And so yours is called The Secret History of the CIA in a Cold War Assassination. But the CIA has its own secret history of the episodes it participated in.

>> Stuart A. Reid: Yeah, and to my great frustration, this is still classified. So if anyone has an ally on the inside, its own internal history.

I don't know when they produced it, but it's a 54 page document, and there's been a FOIA request for it that is still pending. I wish I could have gotten my hands.

>> Stephen Kotkin: We have gotten the CIA history on the Iran episode from a slightly earlier period to yours.

So there is hope, I think, that, a, they have that document, and, b, it might see the light of day at some point, but. But your request for that was- I was not the one who made the request.

>> Stuart A. Reid: Someone else did on the public FOIA website.

>> Stephen Kotkin: I see.

Right, well, you just wield that foreign affairs editor intimidation. See if that works. Okay, I see Johan in the back and then this guy in the front. Please wait for the microphone.

>> Speaker 4: I already have the microphone.

>> Stephen Kotkin: You got it already?

>> Speaker 4: The privilege of jumping start.

 

>> Stephen Kotkin: You're good, please self identify.

>> Speaker 4: Yes, my name is Kha Leo, and I'm a visiting scholar at Hoover this year. And one thing about the Cold War in Africa was that Chairman Mao was very keen on Africa, and I believe he was a supporter of Lumumba. So I was wondering if you came across any materials on that front on how he dealt with Lumumba, with Mobutu, with that period, with the assassination, and just how China played any role in that period of history.

 

>> Stuart A. Reid: In the early part, the part that I was most interested in, China was basically not in the picture at all. There was a rally in Beijing after Lumumba's death to support him. There were chinese diplomats in attendance at the independence ceremonies, but they were not playing any significant role.

That changed, however. So after Lumumba's death, there was this massive rebellion in 1964. They were called Lumumbists, meaning followers of Lumumba. And there, I believe, the Chinese were arming the anti-Mobutu rebels. So they came to play a role. But later than in 1960, hand to China, for once, not decisive, I believe, is your conclusion.

 

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yes, in the back then, Johan, and then we have Jendai.

>> Speaker 5: I've got a couple of questions online.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Please keep them coming. Hi, Gibson.

>> Speaker 5: I'm Jan Smith, I'm a student at Stanford University and a research assistant with Professor Cochin. I was wondering how the Soviet Union reacted to Lumumba's assassination.

Did they suspect the United States to be a part of it in any way?

>> Stuart A. Reid: They suspected the United States was behind everything bad in Congo, so I assume they suspected that. But what was interesting to me is the Soviets viewed Lumumba fairly skeptically at first. Before independence, they had met with him and they thought he was an unreliable, insufficiently anticolonial activist.

And they, in fact, thought that someone else was the better horse to back. Which, funnily enough, the Americans also viewed Luma the same way. So there's sort of a convergence of views about Lumumba by both superpowers before independence. But they came to view the Congo crisis as a way primarily of scoring propaganda points.

So it was useful for a speech on the UN Security Council floor. But it was not a place where they could project much power. They were still weaker than they would become at that point. And so it was a propaganda gift to have Belgium and the United States not supporting this anticolonial activist Lumumba.

But they didn't view it as a place where they could have much control over events or direct anything. And indeed, when the soviet archives opened up, there wasn't much material. It was a peripheral concern for them. The Americans thought that the Soviets viewed it much differently.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Right, okay, Jendai, and then we'll go to the online, yeah.

 

>> Speaker 7: Thank you, Stuart, for a great presentation, and I'm really looking forward to reading the book. It's tremendously thick, so I'm sure there's a lot of great stuff in there. My question is two parts. One is Devlin, when he first gets the order to poison Lumumba, thinks it's crazy and apparently doesn't do it.

What then, do you account for the difference when you're saying essentially that by failure to act, he was acting right. Consciously. So. So what changed between those two decision points for him? And then the second is, I wonder about the bigger context of this. And specifically, this is probably one of the first times the United States actually goes against the former colonial colony, right?

Because the way it's presented here is as if the United States and Belgium was on the same side, but the Belgians actually supported succession in Katanga and the United States did not, right? Eisenhower and Kennedy both were saying, we're not going to have US boots to stop this, which is probably maybe what Lumumba wanted, something more forceful.

We're not going to have NATO do this, but we're going to have the UN do it. So it was that classic thing that the United States, I think, foreign policy does all the time, which is, let's have the UN do it. This is a big problem, right? It just pushed it on the UN, which has continued ever since then in Congo.

So I guess what I'm asking you is why do you think the United States effectively broke with. Belgium, which was also aligned with the Rhodesians, which was aligned with the South Africans, to succeed where all that uranium was, which was what we wanted, and we actually didn't, we took much of more I think of a neutral position vis a vis trying to create a unified Congo.

 

>> Stuart A. Reid: So, to answer your first question, Devlin received this order and then he himself would claim that he stalled on the poisoning plot. And there is some evidence of that. The main problem appears to have been that he couldn't actually gain access to Lumumba's house. The lumumba was under house arrest at that point.

There was no way of getting the poison in. And so there is some evidence to support this idea that he was stalling. So for instance, headquarters sent him to these nudging cables, being like, hey, what's going on with this? Why hasn't anything happened? And he writes back these.

I'm working on it. I'm working on it. They send these two agents, these European criminals that the CIA has recruited to help move the operation forward. On the other hand, he does write back with other suggestions about how Lumumba can be killed. For instance, he asks for a high powered rifle to be sent so that Lumumba could be shoddy.

Has some quote about the hunting season's good here when the light's right. So he was not exactly pushing back on it. What changed from that point to later on was, I think the threat of lumumba coming back to power really became real, both in terms of his potential being potentially being freed from prison.

And then ultimately coming back as prime minister. So I think the alarm bells were sort of flashing more in the period where Devlin gave the green light. And your second question. So this, I think, was the big dilemma for us policy in Africa at the time, was how much do we support our european allies versus how do we support the aspirations of the african people?

And it really came to a head in the Congo crisis. And I think early on in the period I focus on, there was not much daylight between the US and the Belgians, even on the Katanga question. The US stance was sort of, we're not going to be leading the charge on this, but we're not going to be trying to prevent katanga, we're not going to be actively helping put it down later, as you said, that did change.

And they were backing the UN. But even then, and I think it was 1963, when the UN was doing its final operation to remove the Belgian mercenaries from the last stronghold, the Kennedy administration was instructing the was taken back by how quickly things were moving and asked for the UN to sort of slow roll the final operation.

So there was, I think the US has really torn between Belgium and the congolese or african aspirations. Of course in the specific instance, it was backing Mobutu. And so I think a simpler answer to your question is Mobutu was against the Katanga succession, so therefore America was.

>> Stephen Kotkin: It's not much of a CIA station.

They don't have a high powered rifle. They got to wait for the botulism to come in on a plane. I mean, the picture of the CIA is that it's kind of ready for a coup and it's got a whole toolkit of coups. Or a closet where they did the one in Iran, there's Guatemala.

And you just open up the closet and here's all the stuff that you do, and you have this bimbo writing asking for a high powered rifle that doesn't fully comport with your driving narrative and your assignment of responsibility to these, what you would consider malefactors in the story.

 

>> Stuart A. Reid: Yeah, I mean, I think both things were going on. The CIA was, in many respects bumbling. To give you one quick example, I mentioned how the CIA recruited these two. It had previously recruited these two European criminals who were gonna came to Congo and we're gonna sort of move things forward and try and assassinate Lumumba.

They were kept separate. They weren't supposed to know about each other. And then they happened to be at the same hotel bar and get to talking to each other and figure out that they both are on a CIA mission in Concord. So there was this. It was like out of a spy farce.

So that was all true. On the other hand, Devlin, I would say was undeniably resourceful and capable. And when there were these key pivot moments in Congolese history, he made very clear decisions that had a very clear effect.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Still though, there are no criminals to recruit in Africa for this kind of thing, they got to import conspicuous Europeans.

All right, let's go to the online questions. I'm going to take a while to wrap my head around your image of our CIA here. Ann Spence writes, was there a hidden link involving the CIA between Lumumba's execution and the plane crash that killed the UN general secretary Hammerskold?

 

>> Stuart A. Reid: So I'm fairly skeptical of the conspiracy theories around dog Hammerskold's death. So September 1961, he's flying to negotiate a ceasefire for Katanga because the UN had been clashing with the secessionists there. The UN operation had sort of gotten further than Hammerschild wanted, and he was flying to capitulate essentially, the plane then crashed.

And there are many conflicting accounts of what witnesses saw, what happened, and in some way, we'll never know, I think, what actually happened. But one, planes crashed all the time due to pilot error in 1961. This was not the first UN plane crash in Congo. It was not the first of that particular type of plane to crash that year.

This was reality of air travel in the 1960s. And two, to my mind, the question of motive has never been sufficiently answered. You know, Hammerschold was flying to capitulate to the secessionists, so there wouldn't have really been much reason to get rid of him at that point. But it's a highly contested history and there are entire books on this topic.

In my book, it's a page or two, okay?

>> Stephen Kotkin: No conspiracy theory, just puncture that bubble. You're just no fun with you. All right, here's Arthur Kaufman from online. Great talk, exclamation point. Thank you, Arthur. Based on the lessons that you draw from the tragedy of Lumumba's downfall and the US role therein, how would you advise the current US government as it navigates relations with countries in the global south in the context of an emerging new cold war with China?

In other words, to what extent has Washington learned these lessons in the 60 years since Lumumba's murder?

>> Stuart A. Reid: Arthur was a research assistant who helped me greatly with the book. So thank you, Arthur. I think the main lesson of the events I describe is about the power of and the problem with paranoia.

And you can imagine your rival as 10 feet tall, as perfectly capable, as entirely malevolent. That was how America saw the Soviets in Congo in 1960. As I mentioned, it turns out they were just bumbling around and not particularly interested. And so I think, applied to today, and you have to be careful about exactly how you apply history.

But I think the lesson is to not read too much into your rivals activities and also be okay with countries not picking a side in the great geopolitical rivalry of the day in some sense. Steve may disagree with me on this, but the great lesson of the cold war was to stand back and let your rival make its own mistakes and collapse under its own weight.

Rather than a story about the success of containing the Soviet Union in every single place and every single moment in history. So that would be how I try and bring it back to the present day.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Okay, we'll go back to the live studio audience. Who's got the microphone?

Yes, please self identify.

>> Speaker 8: It's Kunalakis. I'm with the Hoover Institution. And this is actually a question for both of you, if you don't mind, Stephen. So I was a Moscow correspondent and got to spend lots of time with folks from Lumumba University as well, even dated one.

And it was clear that, as you said earlier, that there was great propaganda value to that. And I'd like you to fast forward to today. And whether it's the events in Chile or the events in Congo, how do those events that are at least understood to be directly related to the United States and the CIA, how do those events now, what have been the ripple effects?

And so that the contemporary understanding of where a great deal of Africa or a great deal of Latin America lands ideologically comes from these specific events in your perspective.

>> Stuart A. Reid: To my own surprise, I don't think the US role in Lumumba's death is a particularly salient issue in Congo today.

I'll let Steve speak for equivalent events elsewhere. So I think the main effect is not about the propaganda gift that this was, but really about installing Mobutu and the damage that his regime did to Congo. But Congolese, like many other Africans, are fairly pro-American population if you look at Afro barometer survey, for instance.

So it's not as if American malevolence is holding back relations all that much.

>> Stephen Kotkin: You mean you can just assassinate people and in the fullness of time you can get away with it? I mean, I think one reason this may have happened is because Mobutu ran the country for 30 plus years and did not, you know, he was pro american, on paper, at least, and the Americans were pro him, and so he didn't develop some ideology against the Americans as you would have in Iran, for instance.

Speaking of which, we should wait for the CIA's official history.

>> Speaker 9: The CIA's official history of the coup in 53 is deeply flawed. It's completely self congratulatory. It assumes roles for itself that if you look at Iranian archives, it's absolutely the delusion of a drunkard American thinking that he's going to turn over the country single-handedly.

So how are you going to actually find out what the actual role, not the imagined role, of the CIA, was?

>> Stuart A. Reid: I guess I should be grateful then that the CIA's internal history of the operation Congo has not, in fact, come out and was not available to me.

But just I've worked on this so long and I'm so obsessed with the events that I would love to know how it was seen internally, and I hope I can.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yeah, you're gonna have an official history, which is gonna be a whitewash, and then you're gonna have a lessons drawn.

What did we do wrong? What did we do right to feed into training and recruitment? And those are not going to overlap very much. In other words, they're gonna produce an understanding to be useful internally, and then they're gonna produce an understanding to be useful externally, right? But the notion of the bumbling CIA that takes a lot of credit for things has just been reintroduced, reinforcing a point that we've been discussing.

Let's stay on the document issue. We have from online Joel Cabrita, who's an associate professor of African history here at Stanford. For those of us interested in CIA activities in cold War Africa, does Mister Stewart have any advice on FOIA requests and how to go about them? Specifically, what timeline is one looking at for a request?

Also, any tips on how to frame the requests for maximum chances of success? Good question.

>> Stuart A. Reid: So I do not have advice on this because I looked into it and the time horizon for FOIA requests is ten years often, and my publisher would have been quite disappointed if it took me that long.

So FOIA is only one of several ways through which documents get declassified. So I relied on the other methods that others had done on my behalf.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Okay, so you have no advice to give.

>> Stuart A. Reid: I mean, the whole declassification- Apologetically, you have no advice to give. It's completely screwed up.

The US spends more on military bans than it does on declassification. And the process, as many people here know, just it takes way too long. And every single agency that touched a document has to sign off. So it's not encouraging.

>> Stephen Kotkin: First of all, some of that music in the military was quite good.

Dave Brubeck started as a military band in 1942. So let's be careful on military bands, if you don't mind.

>> Stuart A. Reid: I wasn't suggesting that the money be taken from the military.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Thank you. Okay, all right, we got a couple more from the live studio audience.

>> Tomasz Piskorski: Hello, my name is Thomas Bushevich.

I'm a research fellow here at the library and archives at Hoover. And I was struck by the graphic details you provide of Lumumba's tortures. And it struck me as, since he ends up being killed, not much time passes between the tortures and the killing. I mean, what was he tortured for?

Was it just gratuitous beatings of people who were hired to do him harm? Or was there some information that he had that his political rivals wanted to get? I mean, what was the point of those tortures there?

>> Stuart A. Reid: It was the former. It was really. There was no point.

Everyone knew he was gonna be killed. That was the goal. The minute he was loaded on the plane So it really was just gratuitous lack of humanity. And the broader context was that two things. The soldiers on the plane that took him to Katanga were members of the Luba ethnic group, which had reason to hate Lumumba because there was this operation that Lumumba oversaw or had some role in that was sort of turned into a massacre of their brethren.

So they viewed him as this destroyer of their people. And then when Lumumba landed, he was in the custody of the Katangan forces, who had been fed propaganda for months and months that Lumumba was a communist who wanted to invade Katanga and take it over. And there was a real hatred there, and personally, also a hatred on the part of Moise chambe, whose picture I showed earlier.

But, yeah, it was just really disturbing what happened.

>> Stephen Kotkin: So there's no trial, or. I mean, he's not accused of any crimes. There's no trial. He's just summarily executed after being tortured.

>> Stuart A. Reid: Some have talked about there was a cabinet meeting of the ministers in Katanga, but it was really a 30 minutes of whiskey fueled discussion after his arrival where they decided that he had to be gotten rid of.

 

>> Stephen Kotkin: This is the Belgian empire, not the British empire. Okay, I see in the very back there, that gentlemen, please self identify.

>> Alphanso Adams: Yes, my name's Alfonso Adams. I'm a national security affairs fellow here at Hoover. My question is more tangential to the other countries, the other independent African countries during this time frame, especially as Congo gains their independence and they see what essentially turns out to be a very young group of leaders.

What was their perception with regard to the way that Congo was attempting to address its internal conflicts with the United nations? And then after Lumumba's assassination, from your perspective, how did that shape other thoughts for those countries that had yet to gain their independence?

>> Stuart A. Reid: So, one important thing to note here is that the British and French, they started their decolonization process much earlier.

You had an African governor general of French colonies, and I think in central Africa, you had sort of these proto legislatures. There was a lot more educational contact where Africans were studying in European universities. Senegal had a representative in the National assembly in France. So there was much more of a deliberate effort to create an African political class.

There was basically none of that in Congo. So I think that was one of the main differences in the styles of decolonization. And I assume that leaders in other countries were sort of looking at the Congolese and thinking that they had way fewer advantages than they did in this respect.

Once the Congo crisis began, African countries, their most important role was as contributors to the peacekeeping operation. And that gave them a great say over the UN's Congo policy. And they were, most of them were on Lumumba's side about the UN having to go to Katanga. In fact, there was this great fear that if the UN didn't send them in, the Ghanaian troops would cast off their blue berets and just invade the province on their own, answering to Kwame Nkurumah rather than Dag Hammarskjold.

So, that said, they also had their frustrations with Lumumba. He held this African leaders conference in Leopoldville at the height of the crisis, which was not a wise thing to do. It ended up being not leaders, but sort of some foreign ministers and lesser officials. And the universal feeling out of that conference was not frustration with the UN or the west, but frustration with Lumumba.

So it's important to note he aggravated many of the fellow African leaders that he thought he had the support of. Okay, we got one in the back there in the middle.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Wait for the microphone.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Thank you.

>> Speaker 12: I was just curious to know how much, if any, kind of mass public support the Katanga secession movement had among local people there.

I mean, was it kind of ginned up by a cabal of Belgians, or did the mass of the population feel oppressed by the central government?

>> Stuart A. Reid: There was a significant amount of local support for it. There were also, Belgium instituted this last minute constitutional change before independence, which had the effect of giving the pro white settler party a lot more seats in the provincial legislature.

So there was a Belgian role. There was also an ethnic dimension to it. So Muiz Chambe claimed that he was the protector of the, what he called authentic Katangans, as opposed to newcomers from other ethnic groups who were seen as invading what was rightfully his and his people.

So it certainly was not purely a Belgian puppet regime. It was more of an alliance. Chambe and his supporters were moving in the same direction as the Belgian settlers and Belgian mining interests in that province. But it was both.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Okay, next.

>> Cole Bunzel: One thing I'm still. Self identify.

I'm Cole Bunzel, Hoover fellow here. One of the things I'm still having trouble wrapping my head around is why Eisenhower would so casually order an assassination if he hadn't had a history of ordering assassinations against communist or soviet friendly countries. I'm reminded of the situation in Egypt in the mid 1950s, where Eisenhower pursued a policy of appeasement toward a regime that was anti western and soviet friendly.

So did something change or was it about the African context? Maybe you could help me.

>> Stuart A. Reid: Yeah, I mean, I think it's hard to say with certainty. I think a few things were going on. One, it was Leighton Eisenhower's term. I think he was everyone saw him as grumpier and touchier.

Two, I think there probably was a racial element at play and this is a theme throughout my book which is that Congo was written off as a place where bad violent things could happen. And the US ambassador to Congo wrote about how it was not a civilized, Congolese were not a civilized people.

So I think it was that difference made it easier on Eisenhower's part to effectively say, well, no one rid me of this turbulent prime minister. And the other element is that I think Lumumba's style was really, it was he clashed with most of the American officials he met with.

There was really not a meeting of the minds. He was seen as demanding, erratic. And then the other thing I think is there was just the fear of soviet involvement. I don't know the egyptian case well at all. But in Congo, the cables coming out of Congo were hyperventilating about Larry Devlin said there was a classic communist effort to take over the government.

In these cold war terms, if that was about to happen, then in Eisenhower's own worldview, the easiest way to deal with this was to just get rid of Lumumba once and for all. And one other thing I'll add is there was an official note taker at the meeting.

A man named Robert Johnson worked for the NSC, and he was at the meeting and heard the comment. And then when he returned to his desk later and asked his superior what to do about that comment, he was told, don't record that in the notes. Don't mention it at all.

We know this because he later testified before the church committee. I think that is the one of the clearest pieces of evidence that Eisenhower said this. The other piece of evidence is what happened next, which is this whole plot was put in motion.

>> Stephen Kotkin: All right, let's close with asking you, did you learn what you wanted to learn by the time you were done?

You went into this project. It's very ambitious, tremendous amount of research. You produced a huge book. What did you want to learn going in? And did you learn that coming out, or did you learn something else coming out?

>> Stuart A. Reid: I think I wanted to know two things. One was, who was Lumumba?

He became this symbol and sort of adopted by the left, defiled by the right. But I wanted to know, who was he really? What did he really think? What did he want? What was he doing? And the other thing was, what did America want? And what was America doing?

And I think I did find answers to both those questions. Lumumba was a fascinating, complicated figure. He was Congo's best politician, but probably its worst statesman. And I really tried to describe him in his own words and through the prism of his own experiences. And then, as for the American aspect of it, I did manage to uncover a lot about what actually was going on, why the Americans were doing what they were doing, and the effect that it had on this country.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Ladies and gentlemen, please give it up, Stuart Reed. The Lumumba Plot.