10

WHILE RELATIONS BETWEEN the United Nations and the Congolese government were degenerating further, I received a message from Bronson Tweedy asking me to agree to the temporary assignment of a senior officer to concentrate on the ultra-secret PROP operation under my direction. The message was couched in the friendliest of terms. Tweedy suggested that my other responsibilities were too heavy to permit the necessary focus on this operation and that I needed somebody who would get the job done.

It was clear, however, that Dick Bissell was dissatisfied with my failure to assassinate Lumumba. I sent in regular progress reports, but Headquarters wanted action. Either I had to get the job done myself or agree to put it into the hands of someone else. I knew that I really did not have the heart for the operation and had no intention of carrying it out. I also knew that I could not do justice to all of my other work and give the PROP operation the time and effort that it required.

I agreed to Headquarters’ plan and learned that the person assigned to handle the operation was Justin, an officer several grades senior to me whom I had known casually several years before. When he arrived, we had a frank talk about many important matters. He made it quite clear that he recognized my position as chief of station and agreed that he would work under my direction. He also said he was opposed to assassinating Lumumba. He thought the best solution was to capture him and turn him over to the Congolese government for trial. A third country national agent was about to join him and assist him. I had no need or reason to meet this agent whose brief was to work solely for Justin on the operation.

Justin got down to work immediately, but with concentric rings of troops around Lumumba’s residence—UN peacekeepers inside the fence and Congolese soldiers around the entire block—there was little chance of getting close to him.

The night of November 27, 1960, changed the entire political situation in the Congo. During a tremendous thunderstorm, Lumumba slipped through the Congolese lines and set out for Stanleyville. Numerous stories circulated concerning how he managed to escape, but I have never believed it worthwhile to determine which, if any, was correct. One was that he took advantage of the storm and, accompanied by a few followers, drove away in a darkened car while the Congolese and the United Nations troops were seeking cover. Another had it that he escaped dressed in the uniform of a Ghanaian UN soldier with the help of the Ghanaian ambassador.

Just how he managed his escape is of little importance. The fact is that he did get away and, in all likelihood, he received some assistance from the UN peacekeepers assigned to protect him. On the morning of November 28, a Moroccan soldier informed his superiors that a black car had left the compound during the night. It was not until that afternoon that UN troops searched the residence only to find it empty.

I learned from Bomboko of Lumumba’s escape, and Bomboko, along with the other commissioners, was greatly concerned. Confusion reigned and no one seemed to be organizing a chase. Of course, no one knew where Lumumba was actually headed but Stanleyville, his political fief, seemed a good bet. He had left a letter in his residence saying that he was going to Stanleyville to attend the funeral of his baby daughter who had been born dead in Switzerland, but we did not know whether that was true or merely intended to throw his pursuers off track.

I met with the commissioner of the interior, Mobutu, and Nendaka to discuss the escape and suggested that they trace the various routes that Lumumba might have taken. If he was trying to reach Stanleyville, he would have to use several river crossings along the way. Since ferries were used for most river crossings in the Congo, setting up checkpoints at those crossings offered the best way to try to catch him.

On November 29, I met with Colonel Louis Marlière, the Belgian army Force Publique officer who had done so much during the mutiny to restore order. He was also one of a limited number of Belgian officers who had been popular with the Congolese soldiers. I had heard that he had been the godfather of Mobutu’s first son, an action unfavorably viewed by his colleagues. Mobutu had kept him in Leopoldville as an adviser and, not surprisingly, Marlière had matters well in hand. I found him with a book of maps planning where soldiers should be sent to head off Lumumba before he reached Stanleyville.

I had been scheduled, in Rome, to attend a meeting of the chiefs of station working in Africa. In view of Lumumba’s escape, however, I sent a cable recommending that I miss the meeting. An immediate reply asked me to come, if only for twenty-four hours, because Dick Bissell wanted to discuss the Congo situation with me. I arrived about six in the evening in Rome where John, a senior administrative officer and an old and esteemed friend, met me. John drove me to the home of Tom Karramessines, a senior CIA officer, where we were joined for dinner by Dick Bissell and Bronson Tweedy. We talked Congo until nearly one in the morning when I left for my hotel, happy to find that they very much appreciated the success of the station’s operations and fully supported our efforts. All of my operations were discussed at length with one exception, the PROP operation. Much to my surprise, Bissell did not mention it.

The next day when the chiefs of station meeting broke for lunch, Bissell and Tweedy took me to lunch for two more hours of Congo talk. I made it to the airport just in time to catch my plane. I was settling into my seat when my eye caught the headlines of a newspaper someone in front of me was reading: “LUMUMBA CAPTURED .” We had been so busy talking about the Congo that we had not checked with the embassy or the station for the latest information on Lumumba.

Captain Gilbert Pongo, an army captain, captured Lumumba in Kasai province on his way to Stanleyville. Some Lumumba supporters claimed that Ghanaian troops refused to assist their leader. The Ghanaian commander, however, requested permission from UN headquarters to rescue Lumumba but General von Horn, the UN military commander, reported that the request was refused, presumably after Dayal had consulted Hammarskjöld in New York. (One can imagine what Dayal’s personal recommendation would have been.) The irony is that Lumumba might not have been captured at all had he not spent so much time speaking at public meetings along the way. Anicet Kashamura, Lumumba’s minister of information, reported that Lumumba spent five hours addressing one public meeting during which he denounced the clergy, the “Western imperialists,” Mobutu, and Kasavubu.

Lumumba was returned to Leopoldville by air on December 2, 1960. The Congolese soldiers, as was their unfortunate custom with prisoners, beat him while television and still cameramen captured the scene at the airport. The beating, immortalized on film, aroused the African-Asian group at the UN as well as other nations that had not played a major role in the Congo crisis, and it neatly served the purposes of the Soviets.

My job, however, was not to keep up with debates and diplomatic maneuvering at the UN; it was to prevent the Soviets from implementing their African policy. Had Lumumba succeeded in reaching Stanleyville, chaos would have returned. He would have declared himself the prime minister of the Congo, and the Soviets, Soviet Bloc countries, Chinese communists, and a number of African and the so-called non-aligned nations would have established embassies in Stanleyville. The civil war that was to break out and persist in the mid-sixties would have begun in 1960 while Khrushchev was still actively pursuing his African policy.

With the capture of Lumumba, his deputy prime minister, Antoine Gizenga, announced in Stanleyville that he was acting prime minister and head of the only lawful Congo government. While he did not pack Lumumba’s political wallop in the international community, this put the cat among the pigeons once again in Washington.

Gizenga managed to gain control of Orientale province, which had long been a Lumumba stronghold. That was bad enough, but worse yet, many of the Congolese soldiers rallied to his side. These units began taking over other areas to such an extent that they gave the Stanleyville Lumumbists a Christmas present. On December 25, some sixty soldiers from the Stanleyville garrison moved south into Kivu, the eastern province, and into its capital, Bukavu, where they captured the provincial president, several of his ministers, and the commander of the Bukavu garrison whose troops preferred to join the attackers rather than fight.

From Bukavu, they moved south along the shores of Lake Tanganyika, gathering additional Congolese troops to their cause until they eventually joined forces with the Balubakats, the political party of the Baluba tribesmen who were Tshombe’s main opponents in Katanga. Together, the Baluba and Gizenga’s forces occupied Manono, the largest town in northern Katanga and proclaimed it the capital of “North Katanga,” which they declared to be a new province. Other Lumumbist troops moved west into the northern reaches of Equateur province. All this happened rather rapidly and, once again, it appeared that Mobutu and his government were likely to fall.

I spent hours pouring over maps and meeting Mobutu, Bomboko, and Nendaka to discuss ways of stopping this new threat to their regime. I submitted several plans to them, but nothing happened. I was not, however, the only one concerned by the rapid expansion of the areas controlled by the Stanleyville forces and the fact that the government troops seldom, if ever, were willing to fight. Colonel Marlière, ever resourceful, developed a plan to recapture Bukavu. The problem was that the Bukavu airport was in Burundi, then held by Belgium as a trust territory.² That problem was effectively skirted when the necessary arrangements were made with the Belgian government, and one hundred loyal Congolese soldiers were flown into Burundi, where the Belgian authorities “expelled” them by truck into the Congo at a point near Bukavu.

However, when the Congolese soldiers arrived, they discovered that the Bukavu garrison had gone over to the Stanleyville forces. So, without further ado, the “valiant” Congolese troops surrendered rather than fight. As 1960 drew to an end, the situation remained unchanged with the Lumumbist forces, led by Gizenga, in control of Orientale province, a small piece of northern Equateur province, and a strip of varying width along the east side of the country running from Orientale down to north Katanga.

The Soviet Union failed to take advantage of the situation, waiting to see what action, if any, the more radical African nations (Ghana, Egypt, Guinea, Morocco, and Mali) would take. The leaders of those countries met in Casablanca to discuss the possibility of aiding Lumumba and Gizenga, but as so often happens when a group of egocentric political leaders gets together, they were unable to agree on a plan of action. As a result, Khrushchev hesitated and the Soviet Union missed an excellent opportunity to obtain a foothold in Africa. The conditions could not have been more favorable. A pro-Soviet rebel government was firmly installed in the east of the country and the anti-Western Dayal was running the United Nations operation in Leopoldville. Although Dayal regarded Gizenga with the same disdain he reserved for almost all Congolese, it is most unlikely that he would have acted to prevent the Soviet Union from supplying technicians, money, and weapons to strengthen the Stanleyville regime.

While we were worrying about that possibility, we had a brief break in our normal schedule. Louis Armstrong, the bandleader and great jazz trumpeter, was touring Africa on behalf of the United States Information Agency (USIA). For reasons that escaped us in the embassy, the USIA decided to have him play in Elisabethville, capital of the so-called Independent State of Katanga, a political entity that our own government did not recognize.

Ambassador Timberlake decided to make the best of a bad situation by attending the concert. The object was to talk to Tshombe, the elected president of the Congolese province of Katanga, without recognizing him as the president of an independent state. Tim assumed Tshombe would welcome an opportunity to meet a senior American official. Tim and Julie asked several of us to accompany them in order to contribute to the charade that we were indeed flying to Elisabethville merely to attend the concert.

While most of our party was assembled at the airport waiting for Lieutenant Colonel Edward Dannemiller, the army attaché, and his wife to arrive along with Frank Carlucci, Tally Palmer, the vice consul, drove into the hangar blowing her horn and screaming, “They are killing Carlucci and the Dannemillers.” Stretched across the back seat of her convertible was the warrant officer from Dannemiller’s office. He was covered with blood with a knife sticking out of his chest.

On hearing that Carlucci and the Dannemillers were in serious trouble, I threw the classified pouch that I was carrying to my wife for safe keeping. Mike, the temporary duty officer from our station, and I immediately set off in my car to try to help them. Tim, Julie, and my wife remained in the airport hangar at Ndjili to look after the warrant officer who had been stabbed. When Mike and I were stopped at the airport gate by a UN guard who presented arms with his submachine gun, I reached out and snatched it. Mike took off at full speed heading back toward Leopoldville.

In 1960, there was only one village between Limité, a suburb of Leopoldville, and Ndjili airport. In short order, we found a crowd throwing rocks at a burning embassy sedan near the village. Assuming that Carlucci or the Dannemillers were still in the car, I fired a short burst into the air, and when the crowd broke, I ran over to the burning car, pulled open the doors, and found it empty. Mike checked the trunk. Also empty. I grabbed a Congolese and asked where the mondeles (white people) had gone. He pointed toward the village and made a gesture as though he were cutting his throat.

Mike began looking for Carlucci and the Dannemillers on one side of the highway, and I ran from hut to hut on the other. At the end of the village I came upon two freshly dug plots, each about six by three feet. A shovel was resting beside one of them. I thought for sure Frank Carlucci and Dannemiller or his wife were in those plots. I asked the man standing near them to dig. Just as he got going, someone from the embassy arrived and told us that the Dannemillers and Carlucci had arrived at the airport. (I never did learn what those grave-like plots were for.)

When Mike and I got back to the airport, we found a visiting State Department doctor working on the warrant officer. Carlucci was bloody from knife wounds, but in less serious condition than the warrant officer from Dannemiller’s office. Finally, we had to leave for Elisabethville without Carlucci or the Dannemillers.

I later learned that a cyclist had turned directly in front of the embassy vehicle carrying the Dannemillers and Carlucci. The warrant officer, who was driving, swerved to avoid him, failed, and skidded to a stop. The law in the Congo, at that time, called for anyone involved in such an accident to turn himself or herself in at the nearest police station as rapidly as possible because the Congolese customarily lynched the person driving a car involved in a fatal accident. Instead, the warrant officer jumped out of the car and ran to help the cyclist who had been killed instantly.

The first man out of the village happened to be the brother of the cyclist, and, taking the law into his own hands, he stabbed the warrant officer. Frank Carlucci ran to help the officer while Dannemiller rushed to get his wife on a bus that had stopped nearby. Carlucci, who had been on the wrestling team at Princeton, succeeded in fighting the man with the knife, getting rather badly cut up in the process, until Bob Heavey, the embassy administrative officer, came by on his way to Ndjili. Heavey leapt out of his car and fought back-to-back with Carlucci until Tally Palmer drove up.

Heavey and Carlucci managed to lift the badly wounded warrant officer into her vehicle, but as the crowd moved in, they were unable to get into her car. They were saved when a Nigerian UN police patrol pulled them out of harm’s way. Prior to that awful incident, Heavey had not impressed me, but from then on I held him in high esteem. As for Carlucci, I had always seen him as an extremely competent Foreign Service officer; but he now stood out in my mind as an extremely courageous man. He was a good friend to me in the Congo and now, some forty-six years later, he remains a respected friend. The warrant officer survived after being rushed to a hospital in Leopoldville.

Finally, we climbed aboard the plane and headed for Elisabethville, arriving in time for a late lunch. Tshombe and a delegation of Katangan officials met us at the airport where a band played and cameras were in evidence on all sides. Tshombe clearly wanted to use the ambassador’s visit for his own propaganda purposes. From the airport we drove to Tshombe’s palace, formerly the residence of the Belgian governor of Katanga province, for lunch. It was a grand affair by African standards. There were a number of Katangan ministers and their wives, several of Tshombe’s Belgian military and civilian advisers, and, of course, Louis Armstrong and his wife.

While we were having an aperitif, someone noticed that Louis Armstrong had disappeared. It turned out that he was in front of the residence where a band was playing. Mrs. Armstrong laughed and said that Louis always loved bands, adding that he got his start as a young man playing with street bands in New Orleans.

There were speeches after lunch in which Tim was careful not to say anything that would imply recognition of the Katanga. Tshombe could be addressed as Monsieur le President since the United States recognized him as president of Katanga province. After the formalities, Tim, Tshombe, and Godefroid Munongo, the Katangan minister of the interior, withdrew for private discussions.

Unfortunately, nothing worthwhile came out of these talks apart from providing Tim with an understanding of what it was like to deal with the Katangans. While Tim was meeting with Tshombe, I circulated and talked with Colonel Crevecoeur, the Belgian officer who commanded Tshombe’s army; Major Weber, a Belgian officer who served as an adviser to Tshombe; and to several Katangan ministers. I did not gather any new intelligence and we already knew that the Belgian officers and senior civilians were either extensions of the Belgian government, Union Minière, or both. We also knew that they were completely committed to the cause of an independent Katanga.

After the long lunch and Tim’s meeting with Tshombe, we adjourned to our quarters for a siesta before the Louis Armstrong concert. Driving to and from the concert was a show in itself. Tshombe’s people had arranged the transportation, and we were paraded through a succession of Elisabethville neighborhoods. The drive was arranged with the intention of giving the impression to the people of Elisabethville that the United States respected Tshombe and that, eventually, we would see the light and recognize an independent Katanga.

Tim admitted afterwards that Tshombe had gained more from our presence than we had from meeting him and his ministers. The concert was sheer joy to those of us who love jazz. Louis was at his best, although judging by the polite but unenthusiastic applause I had the impression that the Africans did not appreciate jazz as much as do Americans and Europeans.

After the show, Tim called us aside with news that there had been a firefight near our homes in Leopoldville. Colonel Kokolo, commander of the Leopoldville garrison, and several members of his staff had been killed at the Ghanaian embassy when the Congolese government tried to force the Ghanaian ambassador to leave the country.

Mobutu, Bomboko, and Nendaka had consulted me several days previously over the problems with the Ghanaian ambassador who was spreading pro-Lumumba propaganda in the cité and among the Congolese soldiers. Bomboko, exercising his functions as foreign minister, had asked the ambassador to cease and desist, but the warning went unheeded. When Bomboko sought my advice, I naively suggested that all they had to do was declare the ambassador persona non grata, and he would leave the country.

“I’ve already done that,” Bomboko replied.

“And what happened?” I asked.

Bomboko shrugged. “The Ghanaian government just ignored it.”

I then suggested they send a special envoy to deliver a letter from President Kasavubu to President Kwame Nkrumah asking the latter to recall his ambassador. They followed my advice but Nkrumah refused to see the Congolese envoy or to accept the letter.

Since Ghana refused to play by the rules of international diplomacy, I recommended that the Congolese have a plane standing by and that they send a group of unarmed officers to the Ghanaian embassy along with a bus or a limousine. If the ambassador continued to refuse to leave, the officers should carry him to the vehicle, drive him to the airport, and put him on a plane to Ghana.

The Congolese followed this scenario to the letter. Colonel Kokolo and his men removed their pistol belts in plain view of the embassy, and, unarmed, went up the steps to the porch and knocked on the embassy door. When it was opened, they were met by a burst of submachine gunfire and were all killed. In response, Mobutu ordered his troops to surround the embassy. But the UN immediately sent in Tunisian troops, the contingent that was closest to Mobutu and the College of Commissioners’ government, to defend the embassy. The result was a firefight that went on for most of the night and into the next morning when a cease-fire was finally arranged.

In Elisabethville we knew only the limited amount of information that Rob McIlvaine had been able to cable the ambassador. Tim, Julie, Colette, and I were greatly upset because the Ghana embassy was located less than one hundred yards from our home and it was close to the American residence where our daughter was being cared for by the Timberlakes’ nurse. We wanted to leave immediately to return to our children, but it was impossible to fly at night in the Congo. There were no navigational aids and no lights. The pilots told us that we would have to wait until first light. It was a long, anxious night for all of us.

Rob McIlvaine met us at Ndjili airport the next day and assured us that our children were safe. His sixteen-year-old son, Steve, had crawled down the drainage ditches to reach the younger children and serve as their protector. Far from being traumatized by the events of the previous night, Maureen and the Timberlake children were full of stories about the adventure. Maureen later commented that she had felt better once a man—sixteen-year-old Steve—had arrived to protect them. When we returned to our home, we found that a few stray rounds had hit our house and that the back steps were covered with blood where someone had been shot.

 

THE AMERICAN presidential election in November 1960 captured the interest of the Congolese political intelligentsia, though not the masses. Members of the commissioners’ government were particularly interested and Bomboko followed the campaign step by step. On election night, forgetting the six-hour time difference between Leopoldville and Washington, he began calling me early in the evening to find out if I had information on the outcome. Intrigued by Kennedy’s youth and dynamism, Bomboko was a strong supporter of the Democratic candidate. Dayal and some of his sycophants within UN headquarters followed the election with equal interest but for different reasons. They were convinced that Kennedy would change America’s Congo policy and that he would follow the Dayal line. This indeed turned out to be case when, during the first few months of Kennedy’s administration, his advisers sought out Hammarskjöld for information on the Congo and he, in turn, obtained his views from Dayal.

After the election, the president-elect began to announce his cabinet appointees and Tim became worried about his future as well as the future of our Congo policy. When we heard that Chester Bowles had been appointed deputy secretary of state, Tim commented that it did not bode well for either and probably meant the end of his Foreign Service career. He had served under Bowles when the latter was ambassador to India and believed that Bowles had been greatly influenced by India’s non-aligned leaders, and was likely to accept Dayal’s views hook, line, and sinker. There had also been personal problems. He and the ambassador had had serious differences concerning a young officer in Tim’s department who had done everything to convince both Bowles and Tim that he was not meant to be in the Foreign Service. Bowles demanded that Tim give the officer an outstanding fitness report so that it would be easier to pawn him off on another embassy. Tim, an old Foreign Service hand, would not agree to such a plan and became angry as the argument continued. He gave the officer an unsatisfactory fitness report, but unfortunately Tim completely lost his temper and told Bowles that he was nothing but a moral prostitute. It was not the best way to win friends and influence people.

 

ON RETURNING to Leopoldville after the welcome break in Katanga, I was back at the old game of serving as an adviser to the commissioners’ government and monitoring developments in Thysville, a military camp about a hundred miles southwest of the capital where Lumumba was held a prisoner. We learned that he was often out of his jail cell and sometimes even had dinner with the camp officers. I warned my contacts in the government that both the army and the police were likely to mutiny unless immediate action was taken to increase their pay, but to no avail.

When Louis Armstrong held a concert in Leopoldville a few weeks after we returned from Katanga, I had another brief respite and was able to attend the show with my family. To our surprise, we found that Louis had no plans for dinner after the concert. So we invited the Armstrongs to dinner that evening, an event that remains one of our fondest memories of our years in the Congo.

Not long after the Armstrong concert, I drove to the airport one night to meet Bronson Tweedy, who was making a tour of his African parish. Bronson was one of our more delightful visitors, and we would always enjoy his visits. That evening I took my wife’s Fiat sports car to pick him up at the airport. When I arrived, I found Bronson talking with Stewart Alsop, the well-known American journalist and columnist, and his photographer. For a long time we stood around waiting for the USIA chief, or one of his assistants, to arrive and drive Alsop and the photographer into town, as they were scheduled to do. But the airport emptied out and it became clear that there would be no one else coming out from the embassy and, worse yet, no embassy vehicle. Since most international flights arrived in Leopoldville between one and five in the morning, there were seldom any taxis available and certainly none that night.

The two abandoned visitors, clutching their bags, gathered hopefully around my little Fiat. We managed to squeeze the baggage into the car’s trunk and in the small seating area behind the driver’s seat. With me driving and Bronson in the passenger seat, the only place for Alsop and his photographer to sit was on top of the luggage in the cramped back seat. This meant that their heads were well above the windshield so that by the time we got to town they were covered with bugs and smashed insects. They took the discomfort with good grace, and later, in an article on the Congo, Alsop commented at length on the good job being done by the CIA. Oddly enough, his references to USIA were shorter and less generous.