Dwight David Eisenhower and John Fitzgerald Kennedy met alone in the Oval Office on the morning of January 19, 1961, the day before the torch of power was passed. The president wasn’t confident of JFK, who had won the November election over Vice President Nixon by 118,550 votes out of nearly 69 million cast, a margin owing much to Kennedy’s rhetoric that the Russians were winning the cold war. Ike was a five-star general handing over the secret protocols for launching nuclear war and the stratagems of covert operations to a young man who had been a navy lieutenant, junior grade, in World War II.
They walked out together and met with the old and the new secretaries of state, defense, and treasury in the Cabinet Room. Kennedy raised the question of the CIA’s plans to invade Cuba. Nine days before, a headline on the front page of the New York Times had blazoned: “U.S. Helps Train an Anti-Castro Force at Secret Guatemalan Air-Ground Base; Clash with Cuba Feared.” Ike said it had to be done: the United States could not live with Castro in power, and for good measure it should dispose with the Dominican dictator Trujillo at the same time. At that moment, a diplomatic pouch of small arms dispatched by the CIA was en route to the Dominican Republic. And at the same hour, the deposed prime minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, the target of a CIA-sponsored coup spurred by Ike’s wrath, had just been sent to his death in a squalid prison.
Kennedy had inherited the most powerful political warfare machine in the world. But he was forty-three years old, the youngest president ever elected, and his inexperience showed in the shakiness of his command soon after he was inaugurated. His supreme self-confidence was shattered by the Bay of Pigs invasion. The doomed mission exposed America’s incapacity to coordinate its military, intelligence, and diplomatic powers. On April 27, a week after 118 of the CIA’s Cubans were killed and 1,202 captured as their commando assault collapsed, Kennedy sought with a measure of desperation to draw a distinction between how the United States conducted itself in such affairs of state and how the Soviets did it.
“We are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence—on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day,” he said in a speech before the American Newspaper Publishers Association. “It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.” The president was projecting his own thoughts and fears. He now knew that the American machine was less than well-knit and in need of an urgent overhaul.
The Kremlin had sized up JFK as a weakling. He took a shellacking when he held a summit meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna in June; the Soviet leader was warlike and bellicose, brusquely challenging the president. Kennedy said Khrushchev beat him up because of the Bay of Pigs, because he thought any president so young and inexperienced as to get in that mess could be taken easily, and that anyone who got into it and didn’t see it through had no guts. This was an accurate assessment. Khrushchev immediately went forward with plans to erect the Berlin Wall—millions already had fled communist East Germany for the West—and within a year he was shipping nuclear weapons to Cuba, to protect it as a launching pad for revolution in the Western Hemisphere.
Far from abandoning covert action, JFK handed control over the CIA’s paramilitary operations to his thirty-five-year-old brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and in less than three years they launched 163 of them, on average one a week, almost as many as Eisenhower had undertaken in eight years. The Kennedys put Castro in their crosshairs, following up on the assassination plots first mounted by the Eisenhower White House. They embraced the most muscular clandestine operations as essential weapons for political warfare, as a catapult for projecting and protecting American power and influence in the eyes of the world, and as magic bullets for the escalating battles America faced in Southeast Asia, Central America, and Africa.
The Soviets did the same: the doctrine emerging at the KGB was that the war between the United States and the Soviet Union would be fought and won on the battlefields of the Third World. Shortly after the Vienna summit, KGB chief Alexander Shelepin sent Khrushchev a breathtakingly ambitious plan to “create circumstances in different areas of the world which would assist in diverting the attention and forces of the United States and its allies.” A key part of the plan was to use the national liberation movements rising in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as part of the larger struggle against Washington, and to spark “armed uprisings against pro-Western reactionary governments.” Nowhere was riper for revolution and counterrevolution than Africa. In the past year alone, seventeen African nations had freed themselves from the chains of their white masters. America saw chaos afoot as colonialism crumbled; chaos incubated communism; the next Castro could arise unseen at any time. The threat that any nation could go communist was absolute anathema at the White House.
No country was a bigger prize than the Congo. It was “the heart of the Cold War struggle” in the 1960s, said Frank Carlucci, in those days a political officer at the newest American embassy in Africa, later deputy director of the CIA and the secretary of defense. And it was the target of a political warfare operation that went on under eight presidents and lasted for more than thirty years. The secret history of American influence in the Congo, limned in documents declassified in 2014, reveals what could happen when the United States sought to harmonize its military, diplomatic, intelligence, and economic instruments during the cold war. It could control the fate of a huge and strategically crucial country, the cornerstone of a continent, with a hidden hand.
The Congo was the largest and potentially most powerful of the emerging black African nations: nearly one million square miles, one-third the size of the United States. It held great riches: two-thirds of the world’s diamonds, half its cobalt, a tenth of its copper, the uranium at the core of America’s nuclear weapons, gold and oil and rubber and rare earths. Its people had suffered seventy-five years of oppression under Belgium, the most vicious colonial regime of the twentieth century. The cruel and avaricious King Leopold took everything he could steal in “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human consciousness,” wrote Joseph Conrad, whose Heart of Darkness captured the rape of the Congo as it happened. Leopold became one of the richest men on earth, and his minions murdered millions as they pillaged. The nation’s ruling class was engorged with the wealth it had mined from the Congo until World War II shattered five centuries of European colonial power, and the sun started setting on the last of the great empires.
The Belgians had dreamed that they could stave off independence for decades to come. They were deluding themselves. A year before Kennedy was inaugurated, in January 1960, they had reluctantly convened the thin ranks of Congolese leaders at a conference in Brussels, gambling on finding a prime minister to serve as their pliant puppet. They had made few other provisions for the peaceful transfer of power. To the horror of the colonizers, the delegates elected Patrice Lumumba, who had just been released from prison, where he had been locked up for preaching liberation. The United States knew very little about Lumumba. The files of the CIA and the State Department held the barest biographical sketch of his life. He was thirty-four, a postal clerk turned political firebrand, and “the first voice really to shout for independence,” said Owen Roberts, an American consul in the Congo; “he was a charismatic, loud leader” who had gotten his ideas from reading Voltaire and Rousseau, not Marx and Engels. Roberts testified to Congress that Lumumba was an African nationalist, not the communist he was caricatured to be: “Yes, he was radical, but he could hardly be a communist because there weren’t any communist materials in the Belgian Congo. Or any communists.” The Soviets concurred in this judgment. Lumumba had met with B. A. Savinov, a mid-level Soviet diplomat in Brussels, to ask for material aid from Moscow for his political movement. Savinov conveyed the request to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with a cautionary note: Lumumba did not qualify as a communist; his ideology was inchoate.
The United States feared him nevertheless. Everyone held their breath as Independence Day drew near. Robinson McIlvaine was sent to open the American embassy as chargé d’affaires in the capital of Léopoldville, a city of white buildings and deep green tropical foliage on the banks of the swirling, churning Congo River. He had no firm instructions from his superiors. “There was almost nobody who had any idea what was going to happen,” he said. “I don’t think anybody in the U.S. Government had much idea about this part of the world.” This was not entirely the case. Robert D. Murphy represented the United States at the independence ceremonies. He had been Truman’s ambassador in Brussels, and he had admired the strength of Belgian rule in the Congo firsthand. He had been Ike’s chief political adviser during World War II, one of his key cold war advisers at the White House, and most recently in charge of political affairs at the State Department. He would go on to serve as an intelligence and foreign affairs consultant to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter. On the day of the Congo’s independence, he was a director of Morgan Guaranty Trust, deeply invested with Société Générale and American companies holding immense stakes at risk in the nation’s minerals and mines. Eisenhower’s secretary of defense, his undersecretary of state, and his ambassador in Belgium all were business magnates whose corporate portfolios had millions at risk, and they had an intense interest in what was going to happen in the Congo.
Things happened fast. “Independence was June thirtieth. I arrived the week before,” McIlvaine remembered. “We got through the Fourth of July. It was the sixth when the whole place fell apart.” The Congolese army, the Force Publique, had twenty-four thousand black soldiers in its ranks, led by one thousand Belgian officers, and on the fifth of July, their commander, General Émile Janssens, had written an edict on a blackboard: “Before independence equals after independence.” But the soldiers wanted promotions and pay raises now that their white officers were leaving, and when Lumumba didn’t immediately increase their ranks and salaries, they ran riot. The Belgians flew in paratroopers to seize the national airport and the mines. Fighting to turn back time, they orchestrated the secession of Katanga, the immense southern province where the great mineral riches lay, creating a military base and a shadow government in its capital, Elisabethville. The Belgians proclaimed the Republic of Katanga, anointed their favorite political figure in the Congo, Moise Tshombe, as its president, and gave it a constitution, a flag, and a national anthem.
The UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld moved with great speed in the second half of July to win approval for a peacekeeping mission, the biggest and most complex mobilization of its kind the UN ever had undertaken. The goal was enforcing a cease-fire and compelling Belgium to withdraw its troops. Lumumba flew to New York, appealed to the United Nations for more forceful support, and then on July 27 made a quick trip to Washington, where he asked the leaders of the State Department for financial and technical help. The minutes of the meeting read: “The Prime Minister said that he did not wish the Congo to emerge from a colonial status only to fall under the domination of some other form of dictatorship or ideological influence. We are, he said, Africans and wish to remain so.” The patrician undersecretary of state C. Douglas Dillon found him appalling. “Just not a rational being,” he sniffed.
The White House, the leaders of the CIA, and the members of the NSC looked upon Lumumba with great dismay. They saw him as another Castro and the Congo as a ripe target for a Soviet coup. Allen Dulles told Eisenhower, without evidence, that it was safe to go on the assumption that Lumumba had been bought out by the Belgian Communist Party on orders from Moscow. The CIA officer whom Dulles had assigned to take care of the Congo, Lawrence R. Devlin, had told the director that if the Soviets got their hooks into Lumumba, they would soon control the country’s diamonds, oil, and uranium; use the Congo as a base to extend their influence throughout Africa; and vastly increase their power, influence, and prestige throughout the Third World. On July 29, the Joint Chiefs of Staff reported to Eisenhower:
The United States must be prepared at any time to take appropriate military action as necessary to prevent or defeat Soviet military intervention in the Congo. Multilateral action would be preferable but unilateral action may be necessary. In the present Soviet belligerent mood, the USSR could estimate that the United States would not oppose them. We must be prepared to oppose and defeat them. In order to prevent their making such a rash move, they must be made to understand that we will not tolerate a Soviet military takeover of the Congo.
A note-taker recorded that Ike told his national security team on August 1: “In the last twelve months, the world has developed a kind of ferment greater than he could remember in recent times. The Communists are trying to take control of this and have succeeded to the extent that [college students] are now saying the Communists are thinking of the common man, while the United States is dedicated to supporting outmoded regimes.” America could not afford to lose that battle.
A few days thereafter, more than eleven thousand troops had arrived in the Congo under the UN banner, a majority from African countries, with orders to shoot only in self-defense in their mission to ease out the Belgians. Lumumba’s faith in the mission wavered when he saw that the West would not use force to help him secure his power against his colonial oppressors and that any aid that the United States deigned to send him would be channeled through the UN. Sometime during the next two weeks or so, he secretly determined to ask the Soviets for military support: weapons, transport planes, trucks, and communications gear.
The country was up for grabs. Into the maelstrom flew Larry Devlin, the new CIA chief of station. He soon became the proconsul of the Congo. Devlin cut a sharp figure, très sportif: slicked-back black hair, dark lightweight suit, open-necked white shirt, Ray-Bans shielding his eyes. He had just turned thirty-eight, and he had long been a man of the world. He’d fought in North Africa and Europe under Eisenhower in World War II, and in 1949, while he was studying for a master’s degree in international relations at Harvard, he’d been recruited for the CIA by a visiting lecturer named McGeorge Bundy. (At that time, Bundy was the youngest member of a secret group perfecting the Marshall Plan’s mechanisms to finance the CIA’s covert operations; the Council on Foreign Relations conclave included Dwight Eisenhower, Allen Dulles, Dick Bissell, and George Kennan. In January 1961, Bundy left his post as dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences to become President Kennedy’s national security adviser.) In his first years as a spy, Devlin had traveled the globe in the guise of a writer of travel guides, excellent cover for the craft of espionage. His last posting had been in Brussels, where he’d posed as a diplomat, and with his onward assignment to the Congo in hand, he’d observed the tumultuous conference that made Lumumba prime minister.
Devlin was whip-smart, courageous, tireless, devoted to skullduggery, and every bit as devious as his profession demanded him to be. He was convinced that he was witnessing a Soviet effort to take over the Congo and to use it as the foundation for building a communist Africa. “We had a very clear mission to conduct political warfare,” he said almost half a century later, and “we were working for the president of the United States.” The spirit of the mission was gung ho: money was no object, no holds barred, no questions asked. In the days after he arrived in the Congo, he began to help shape American foreign policy. And that policy was the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba.
“Lumumba moving left and Commie influence increasing,” Devlin wrote to CIA headquarters in the chopped syntax of cablese on August 11, 1960. “Unless he stopped near future, believe he will become strongman, eliminating moderate opposition and establishing regime under influence if not fully controlled by Commies. Thus believe fall Lumumba would assist Western objectives … all Station efforts concentrated this campaign on crash basis.” On August 18, he wrote: “Whether or not Lumumba actually Commie or just playing Commie game to assist his solidifying power, anti-West forces rapidly increasing power Congo and there may be little time left in which take action to avoid another Cuba.” This got the president’s full attention. On that same day an extraordinary meeting of the National Security Council took place in the elegant seaside setting of Newport, Rhode Island, where Eisenhower was vacationing. The note taker, an NSC staffer named Robert Johnson, later testified under oath that he heard Eisenhower turn to Allen Dulles and say that Lumumba should be assassinated. A stunned silence ensued.
That same week, perhaps that same day, Soviet pilots flew fifteen transport planes into Stanleyville, Lumumba’s home base and the locus of his political support, which lay sixteen hundred rough miles of road from the capital. Their objective, never fulfilled, was to support Lumumba in a military assault on the Belgian forces in Katanga, to be carried out by Congolese army troops. Over the summer, as Devlin later determined, hundreds of Soviets and Czechs had streamed into Léopoldville, ostensibly to deliver food and offer economic aid and to help Lumumba run his ministries, but in reality with the hope of planting the hammer and sickle in the heart of Africa. The new Soviet ambassador arrived the same week Devlin did, as did a three-man KGB contingent. After presenting his credentials, the envoy handed Lumumba a note from Khrushchev expressing solidarity and comparing the situation in the Congo to the early days of the Soviet Union, which had been invaded by foreign soldiers, including Americans, after the triumph of the Russian revolution.
On August 27, Dulles wrote to Devlin: The White House had decided that if Lumumba continued in power, “the inevitable result will at best be chaos and at worst pave the way to Communist takeover of the Congo with disastrous consequences.… Consequently we conclude that his removal must be an urgent and prime objective and that under existing conditions this should be a high priority of our covert action.” He authorized Devlin to spend up to $100,000 on any single aspect of that covert action without asking headquarters—an extraordinary grant of power. The station chief already was drawing up what he called “a three-page plan, step-by-step-by-step, as to what should be done and when, right from the time of buying the first senator.” These steps were not limited to buying or renting the allegiances of politicians, trying to fix votes for a parliamentary motion of censure against Lumumba, and paying demonstrators to shout him down when he spoke at a meeting of African foreign ministers in Léopoldville. Devlin had to find the new leader of the Congo.
The station chief left the embassy for the presidential palace on the night of September 13 looking for Lumumba. He encountered instead a slender young soldier in full military dress named Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, who was twenty-nine, had served as a sergeant major under the Belgians, the highest rank attainable, and had been their paid informer in the Congo since 1956. The two men had met before, in Brussels, during the run-up to the election, and they had sized one another up in full: a good spy’s fingertips start tingling when he spots talent, and Mobutu recognized power when he saw it. They quickly got down to business. Colonel Mobutu told Devlin that the army was prepared to overthrow Lumumba—if the United States would recognize the new junta. On the spot, Devlin agreed on behalf of his country to back a coup. Mobutu boldly asked for $5,000 in cash, and without hesitation, Devlin said he’d have it in the morning. The station chief returned to the embassy and then, at 2 a.m., went to the residence of the new American ambassador, Clare Timberlake, waking him to tell him what he’d done.
Like his compatriots in Washington, Timberlake, a thirty-year veteran of the Foreign Service, thought that chaos in the Congo would give the Soviets a golden opportunity to create a surging communist front in Africa. Unlike most of them, he also saw that if the Belgians resurrected their colonial powers at gunpoint in the name of conquering chaos, black Africa could collectively recoil from the West. The chances of success of the unarmed and unprecedented United Nations mission in the Congo were unknowable. Here was a way for the United States to impose its own order on its own terms. The ambassador gave the station chief the go-ahead. Devlin immediately cabled Dulles to report that he had recruited Mobutu, who had the promise of long-term “political action potential, provided he does not destroy himself in plot.” The director was overjoyed. He dropped a hint with a wink and a smile at the next National Security Council meeting: it wasn’t easy to run a coup in the Congo, he said, but he had the wheels in motion.
The Congo had been front-page news all summer, and many of the world’s leading foreign correspondents had converged at the Regina Hotel in Léopoldville. After midnight on September 15, Mobutu called a press conference at the hotel. He leaped upon a table and announced a bloodless coup. He proclaimed himself the commander of the army, and said he had decided to neutralize the chief of state, the government, and the legislature. Lumumba, he said, was under house arrest. This was not a coup d’état, he insisted, but a peaceful revolution. To make his allegiances clear, he was shuttering the Soviet embassy and expelling its diplomats and spies; 480 Russian and Czech personnel were declared personae non gratae and ordered to leave on the next plane.
Devlin sent a flash message, the highest priority, to CIA headquarters. In his excitement, he forgot the code word for coup and instead used the word for war. That got the president of the United States out of bed. The station chief quickly followed up with a plan for a “crash operation” to bolster Colonel Mobutu. “A: Mobutu needs financial assistance to pay certain troops and officers, provide gas for troop movements. B. Mobutu needs French-speaking economic, political and security advisers. C. Mobutu desires security team to work against Lumumba and Communists.” The National Security Council approved all of this and more: a steady flow of arms and ammunition. A briefing paper for the White House by American intelligence analysts concluded that the fractious Congo now had one true center of power: “The Mobutu military dictatorship.” General Mobutu and the CIA were running the country now.
But as Dulles told the president: “Lumumba was not yet disposed of and remained a grave danger.” CIA deputy director Richard Bissell, who had more than one murder plot already on his hands, let Devlin know that he wanted Lumumba dead before Eisenhower left office on January 20. Bissell sent the CIA’s top scientist, a clubfooted biochemist named Sidney Gottlieb, out to Léopoldville. Gottlieb ran the CIA’s search for methods of mind control; he had dosed legions of unsuspecting human guinea pigs with LSD, and he himself had taken the drug a hundred times or more. One of his sidelines was chemical warfare: specifically, the use of poison to assassinate political leaders. He arrived carrying a satchel filled with syringes and toxins. Plan A was to inject poison into Lumumba’s toothpaste. He said it was now Devlin’s job to find an agent in Mobutu’s camp and order him to kill Patrice Lumumba.
“Jesus H. Christ!” Devlin said. “Who authorized this?”
“President Eisenhower,” the doctor replied.
Devlin locked the murder weapons in his office safe and agonized. He had killed the enemy in war, but this was different. He couldn’t bring himself to do it, but he couldn’t tell that to his superiors. In November, Bissell dispatched two more men to finish the job: a CIA officer named Justin O’Donnell and a hit man known to history only by his cryptonym of QJ/WIN, a foreign citizen with a criminal background recruited by the CIA somewhere in Europe. A third man sent to assist Devlin was WI/ROGUE, a stateless soldier of fortune whose resume included forgery and bank robbery. The poison-toothpaste operation never came off, and in time Devlin buried the contents of the satchel on the banks of the Congo River. He proposed to Mobutu that the job should be done the old-fashioned way—with a bullet—when the time was ripe. But the CIA’s assassins never got near their target, and neither did Mobutu’s allies. Lumumba was under house arrest, guarded by 150 troops from the army and the United Nations—the Congolese to prevent him from escaping into UN custody and the UN to prevent him from being killed by the Congolese. And then, as a violent thunderstorm struck on the night of November 27, Lumumba slipped past his guards and set out for Stanleyville.
Devlin told headquarters that he was working with Mobutu to get the roads blocked and his troops alerted. Lumumba was captured four days later, flown back to the capital, jailed, and beaten. Mobutu came by to spit in his face. On January 17, 1961, by a twist of fate, Frank Carlucci and a visiting United States senator were the last two Americans to see him alive. “We were having a drink about mid-afternoon at a sidewalk café and a truck went by,” Carlucci recalled. “Lumumba had his hands tied behind his back and was in the rear part of the truck. The truck was on the way to the airport.” A DC-4 flew the prisoner to Elisabethville in Katanga province, the southernmost city of the Congo, and into the hands of his enemies. The CIA base chief in Katanga cabled Devlin that Lumumba had debarked in chains, badly beaten, his teeth knocked from his head, and taken to a prison where he was guarded by white soldiers.
On the evening of January 19, the last full day of the Eisenhower administration, the base chief reported that a Belgian officer had executed Lumumba with a burst of submachine gunfire. He was not deeply mourned in Moscow. Khrushchev told the American ambassador in Moscow, Llewellyn Thompson, that his imprisonment and death had served the Soviets’ interests. The ambassador reported: “With respect to Congo K said what had happened there and particularly murder of Lumumba had helped communism. Lumumba was not Communist and he doubted if he would have become one.” In the Kremlin’s eyes, the chances of a Communist takeover at independence had been nil.
The White House and the CIA started to cement their plans for political control of the Congo as soon as Kennedy was sworn in. CIA headquarters sent Mobutu $250,000 along with a fresh injection of weapons and direct instructions from on high: he should take the role of the power behind the throne. Devlin was to assure him that he’d get all the money he wanted for himself, to be the paymaster for his troops in Léopoldville, and to expand his power in the capital and in the provinces. From the start, the CIA would send Mobutu a list of candidates for president, prime minister, and cabinet officials for his approval. He would then meet with these handpicked political leaders and tell them they could not obtain office nor run the government without him. Mobutu accepted the plan.
Devlin told his superiors: “Agree political realities require some form constitutionality for new govt. However if we to be realistic, must be satisfied with democratic façade.”
On March 3, 1961, President Kennedy and his National Security Council—CIA director Allen Dulles, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy—discussed political warfare plans for the Congo at a two-hour meeting in the White House. JFK said he wanted the CIA to expedite and expand its “silver bullets” program in the Congo. A bandolier of silver bullets was at hand. Dulles immediately notified Devlin, using the CIA’s own code word for itself, KUBARK. “At high level policy meeting three March KUBARK received reaffirmation of authority to expend funds both to bribe [deleted] forces and supplement pay of selected Mobutu forces where needed to assure loyalty,” the director wrote to Devlin. “Urge you canvass all means for using funds securely and effectively for these purposes.”
President Kennedy was well aware of these payments and their purposes in their minutest details. “As you requested last week, we are arranging a meeting at which all of our clandestine activities in support of political leaders and parties will be discussed with you. In particular, at that meeting, there will be presented a proposal for action in the Congo which has the support of the ambassador and our Department of State,” Bundy wrote to the president on June 10, 1961. “Meanwhile, one small aspect of this Congo proposal has been presented with an urgency which has led me to approve it in your absence, on the basis of clear State Department concurrence. This is an expenditure of $23,000 in support of particular activities designed to strengthen the moderate camp in the Congo. Very much larger sums have been spent in the past in the same direction, through the same channels and without embarrassment.” Bundy trusted Devlin’s judgment, and why wouldn’t he? He himself had recruited the man from the hallowed halls of Harvard into the labyrinth of the CIA.
Over the course of six years, the CIA poured at least $11.7 million into the political warfare campaign to put Mobutu in power and keep him there, more than $100 million in today’s dollars, insofar as can be documented. The declassified annals of the cold war do not thus far reveal another military strongman who received that level of personal financial assistance from the United States. Devlin delivered more than $1 million of that money to Mobutu in the first months of the Kennedy administration. It paid for weapons, communications gear, trucks, and jeeps. It went to bribe the Congo’s principal military and civilian leaders. It underwrote a political coalition to control the parliament when it reconvened. It created propaganda, print and broadcast. And it met Mobutu’s endlessly mounting demands for himself. Devlin consolidated his political control by putting Mobutu’s two closest allies, Justin Bamboko, the minister of foreign affairs, and Victor Nendaka, the chief of the secret police, on the CIA’s payroll. These three were the core of the Binza group, so named after the neighborhood where they convened. The group was the true government. Devlin was its leader. They set out to run the country and to select its next prime minister.
This wasn’t enough for Devlin. In increasingly urgent and occasionally angry dispatches to CIA headquarters, he called for a rethinking of American foreign policy in all of Africa. “Independence in the Congo has resulted in chaos, great difficulties for the West and an opportunity for the Soviet Bloc to exploit the situation to its own ends,” he wrote on October 12. “The time for ad hoc KUBARK action to meet the emergency must now give way to a detailed and organized plan of action which looks beyond today to the eventual form that [the United States] wishes to see the future take in the Congo and, for that matter, in Central Africa. KUBARK can take major credit for the fall of the Lumumba govt [and] the success of the Mobutu coup,” he wrote. But “instead of becoming a strong force for the preservation of law and order, the army … has taken the law into its own hands, arbitrarily arresting Congolese and foreigners, robbing banks and looting.” They were “little more than an armed mob.” And now the Soviets were creeping back in the picture, covertly supporting a breakaway political group led by Lumumba’s deputy up the Congo River in Stanleyville, reopening their embassy, and offering military aid to Mobutu’s many enemies. A KGB beachhead in Stanleyville had been established that summer in cohort with the Czech intelligence service, the StB. It set up an arms pipeline that trickled and sputtered while the Czechs set up safe houses for Lumumba’s supporters in the capital.
Devlin said the United States wasn’t doing enough to stop communism and its ally, chaos, in the Congo. What was needed, he argued, was a more massive political warfare operation, including military support and training for the army, planes and helicopters for an air force, foreign aid and food programs, building roads and bridges, ginning up more muscular diplomacy and propaganda and public information operations—all the available means at America’s control. Mobutu had made an impassioned plea for direct support from the United States, and Devlin agreed with him. He reiterated that Mobutu was the key to success for American foreign policy in all of Africa and a cornerstone for the global struggle against the Soviets.
The president and the Special Group, the White House covert-action panel led by Bobby Kennedy, strongly agreed with Devlin. They expanded the CIA’s financial support for Mobutu, the Binza group, and their handpicked front man, Prime Minister Cyrille Adoula, in November. JFK also authorized an injection of money and propaganda to “enhance the political image of Prime Minister Adoula domestically and internationally and to furnish him and his closest collaborators with a base of domestic power.” Devlin reported that it would be necessary to “grease many palms” to build that base. But, working through the State Department, he helped secure an invitation for Adoula to meet President Kennedy at the White House. He prepped the prime minister as best he could. The meeting on February 5, 1962, was desultory; Adoula complained at length that the army was twice the size it should be but said he had no idea what to do with the thousands of otherwise unemployable soldiers who should be stripped from its ranks.
Over the next year, Devlin held Mobutu as closely as he could, drinking and dining with him several times a week, meeting his every demand for money. He reported continually to Washington that Mobutu remained the only man with the political and military qualifications needed to keep the country from chaos. He assured Mobutu that he, too, would one day get to the White House. And after some wrangling, he secured that invitation, though it was highly unusual for a military commander, much less a coup leader, to meet one-on-one with the president of the United States. Plans were set for a two-week trip: a full-dress reception by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a tour of the United States Military Academy at West Point, lunch at the CIA’s new headquarters in the wooded hills above the Potomac, and an hour in the Oval Office. The royal treatment reflected the power vested in Mobutu.
Devlin sent more than two hundred reports to headquarters in 1962, the gist of which he and his superiors summarized for the State Department and the White House in March 1963. “A multitude of nearly insoluble problems” had plagued the Congo since independence. Yet the station chief and his recruited agents had created “a government which was as pro-American as any that could be expected in Africa,” and the CIA had held that government together: “On numerous occasions, financial support as well as political guidance to Adoula and his principal supporters have enabled them to survive immediate, short-term crises, failure in which might have resulted in the downfall of the government.” The CIA was financing and feeding information to “a new newspaper which is generally recognized to be a government outlet.” It was bankrolling a major labor union. It had created a paramilitary force for counterinsurgency. And, as ever, it was enriching General Mobutu and his allies. President Kennedy personally approved all of this.
In May, Devlin won a promotion to the CIA’s equivalent of a one-star general and a new assignment as chief of the East Africa division at headquarters. He planned to leave as soon as Mobutu returned from his visit to Washington. As he was on his way out, a new chief political officer, the State Department’s Lewis Hoffacker, arrived at the American embassy. Like Devlin, he’d been in the Congo for nearly three years, most of it at the Elisabethville consulate in Katanga. His reporting was so riveting that the president had called him back to Washington for a personal briefing. Hoffacker was mightily impressed by the empire that the station chief had built. “CIA was very big and conspicuous,” he observed. “They were everywhere: in the government, in the military, and in the embassy. Everybody knew who they were; they were the backbone of the central government.” He was less impressed after a long meeting with Mobutu: “He was a lazy lout,” and his army was “a rabble. Rape and pillage was their first priority. They did not provide any security for the Congolese. They were just corrupt, ineffective and he was likewise, from the very beginning, just taking care of himself.”
On May 23, 1963, Mobutu lunched with the CIA’s chieftains in Langley, Virginia. That day, Devlin cabled what he thought would be his final report from the Congo: Mobutu was America’s best friend in Africa, and although he had his failings, the United States should continue to bet on him. There was no alternative to his power. Eight days later, President Kennedy sat down with the general in the White House. He asked what more the United States could do for the Congo. Deliver us direct military aid, Mobutu said—American training, trucks, communications, and other war materiel for his troops. “If you give me equipment,” he told JFK, “I’ll be ready.” But he’d need three years to straighten out his country. Mobutu also wanted a few things for himself: four weeks of parachute training at Fort Benning, two weeks at the Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, and a command aircraft, an African Air Force One. The president said he’d be delighted to provide all that and more. The floodgates were open: in the 1960s, Congo received about $800 million in economic aid, more than any other country in black Africa. The president told Mobutu that there was nobody in the world who had done more to maintain freedom in Africa. “General,” he said, “if it hadn’t been for you, the whole thing would have collapsed and the Communists would have taken over.” Mobutu replied, “I do what I am able to do.” The president told him he’d done an outstanding job. In September Mobutu and his allies dissolved the parliament and declared martial law. The political parties who opposed them were banned, and they went underground.
The Soviets had sent a new diplomatic delegation to the Congo, along with a new KGB station chief, Boris Voronin, whose orders were to work with the banished opposition. He was fingered by the CIA, and Mobutu decided to crush him. On November 19, 1963, Voronin was arrested, beaten within an inch of his life, and the next evening transported to the Ndola prison, a circle of hell inside a military base. Mobutu came in the middle of the night. His men dragged their captive into the prison yard, and he told the Russian spy that it was his last chance to confess. The soldiers raised their rifles. And then Mobutu called off the show in his theater of cruelty. In the morning, he cut off the electricity and telephone lines to the Soviet embassy and ordered it shuttered and its personnel expelled for the second time in two years. On the morning of November 21, an American—very likely Ben Cushing, the new CIA chief of station—braced a bruised and barefoot Boris Voronin and suggested without success that he might prefer a new life in the West to the prospect of “Siberian exile.” Spy-versus-spy confrontations like this, the CIA face-to-face with the KGB, were rare moments in the war inside the cold war.
President Kennedy was assassinated the next day in Dallas by a United States Marine veteran who had defected to Moscow and returned to America. By all reliable accounts, Khrushchev and Castro were horrified, and the KGB’s hands were clean, but the killing still haunts the imagination, and for millions, the murder remains the black hole of American history. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, CIA director John McCone had to swear to his fellow Catholic Bobby Kennedy, with an invocation of the sacramental blood and body of Christ, that his officers were innocent in the death of the president.
Among JFK’s many legacies to President Lyndon B. Johnson was a growing confrontation with communism throughout the Third World, from Saigon to Stanleyville. At the highest levels of the government, men like McCone and Secretary of State Rusk worried that the United States was losing the contest for hearts and minds in Africa. Rusk suggested a global divide-and-conquer operation. He asked “that CIA do everything possible covertly to stimulate and incite resentment” between black Africans and “the Muslim slave traders” of the Arab world. McCone assured him that “the covert support we were giving had turned the tide of the battle.”
But the Kremlin and the KGB were aligning with governments and liberation movements from Algeria to South Africa, where Nelson Mandela of the African National Congress, a secret member of the Communist Party, had been arrested and sentenced to life in prison in 1962. (A CIA officer, Donald Rickard, undercover as the American vice-consul in Durban, gave the South African government the tip-off that led to his capture; he later called Mandela the most dangerous communist in the world outside the Soviet Union.) The year before, the Soviets had created Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow as an international magnet school; the KGB oversaw it, its officers recruiting and training promising young men for future battles in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. The Soviets were trying with mixed success to arm Lumumba’s followers for a countercoup in the Congo once the United Nations peacekeeping force withdrew in June 1964. Those loyalists, enraged by the rottenness of their government and dreaming of taking power in the name of their slain prime minister, aimed to establish a people’s republic based in Stanleyville. Mobutu’s undisciplined army was ill-equipped to meet that threat. Voicing widely held fears, the Pentagon’s special-operations commander, General Paul Adams, wrote to the Joint Chiefs that a victory by the insurgents would lead directly to a communist-dominated black Africa. The stalwart diplomat Averell Harriman, now the undersecretary of state for political affairs, went to the Congo and pledged that American military aircraft would be delivered with great speed. The list included weaponry never before seen in that part of the world: B-26 bombers, helicopters, and light aircraft equipped with .50-caliber machine guns, rockets, and five-hundred-pound bombs for counterinsurgency missions. Devlin would be the commander of this air force.
LBJ had appointed a new ambassador, the veteran diplomat G. McMurtrie “Mac” Godley, who arrived in March. The core of the country team—Godley, CIA station chief Cushing, and the exceptionally erudite deputy chief of station, Charles Cogan, magna cum laude, Harvard, class of ’49—all had the benefit of Devlin’s guidance from headquarters. They worked with a new figurehead prime minister, Moise Tshombe, darling of the Belgians and their erstwhile emperor of Katanga. (“Tshombe had little external support,” Cogan wrote half a century later. “Other African nations, for example, refused to have anything to do with him.”) The Americans now had an impressive military force ready to deploy against the Stanleyville rebels. The growing CIA paramilitary team worked with hundreds of white mercenaries, most from the racist regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia, led by a well-known commando named “Mad Mike” Hoare. The CIA’s air force in the Congo had the power to inflict shock and awe; the pilots included CIA officers and contractors, as well as Cuban veterans of the Bay of Pigs. In June, Mobutu talked two of the American pilots into assaulting rebel positions for three days. The Joint Chiefs pushed back hard when the State Department expressed queasiness over the fact that Americans were dropping napalm on Africans.
By late July the strongest of the rebel forces, who called themselves the Simba, Swahili for “Lions,” had surrounded Stanleyville, and hundreds of American and European missionaries, along with the small United States consulate, were at their mercy. Ambassador Godley ordered the American consul, Mike Hoyt, to hold the fort. This proved a misjudgment. Hoyt, the CIA base chief David Grinwis (undercover as the vice-consul), a CIA communications officer, and two more staffers were captured when the city fell, creating the first American hostage crisis of the cold war. “I knew it was foolhardy to stay,” Hoyt remembered; the rebels had made it very plain “that Americans were on their shit list.” The Simba leaders told Hoyt to send a cable to Washington, warning that he would be killed unless the CIA’s air force was grounded. Devlin immediately returned to the Congo to lead a mission to rescue the hostages.
“Stanleyville is in rebel hands,” the NSC staff reported to President Johnson on August 6. “Central Government may collapse in next several weeks.… There is real danger Communists will be able to exploit in near future.” The White House was already on a knife’s edge: LBJ was about to send aircraft carriers and warplanes to attack North Vietnam for the first time. On August 10, Devlin reported to headquarters in a cable from the CIA station in the capital that he could foresee a “Commie field day in the Congo” if the tide didn’t turn. “If Commies worked fast enough, they might be able to exploit rebel govt for Commie ends [and launch] subversion ops into many east, central and west African countries.”
The president, Secretary of Defense McNamara, Secretary of State Rusk, and CIA director McCone convened at an NSC meeting the next day. LBJ was intensely worried. Time was running out, he said, and the Congo had to be saved. At McCone’s direction, Devlin drew up a plan requisitioning seven long-range bombers, two military transports, combat helicopters, pilots, and air crews for an air war in the Congo. The ground war was a bigger problem. “The Congolese Army is totally ineffective,” he wrote, and “only with Belgian or other white officers can an effective striking force be put in the field.” The United States should “support the immediate development of a 3,000-man force with 200 white mercenaries,” and the CIA would pay the commandos.
This looked less like political warfare and more like a resurgence of imperial power to Carl Rowan, the African American director of the United States Information Agency, and the only member of LBJ’s inner circle who wasn’t a white man. He wrote to the president: “United States planes are hauling in Belgian guns to be used by South African and Southern Rhodesian mercenaries to kill Africans,” and he pointed out, “Saving the present situation in the Congo … could lose us the longer-range struggle for all of Africa.” Devlin and the CIA pressed on through that moral quagmire. They sought, and the White House approved, a large injection of hard currency for the white mercenaries and $750,000 for Mobutu. The general then requisitioned an additional $35 million for his spies and security forces, whose ranks would be beefed up by Belgians. Ambassador Godley was taken aback by all this. On August 19, he cabled Washington with a warning that “we may well soon find ourselves in all-out support, alone or with Belgians, of minority regime being propped up by … US financed secret police” and firmly aligned with apartheid regimes “against most, if not all of this vast continent.” This fact was not soon forgotten among the African nations caught in the cross fire between Moscow and Washington. As the civil rights movement in the United States reached a crescendo, America had wrapped itself in a colonial flag in Africa, in alliance with the covert armies of apartheid.
On November 24, twelve American C-130 transports flew 545 Belgian paratroopers to Stanleyville. After the CIA’s bombers dropped air strikes on rebel positions, the Belgian commandos and a CIA strike force of eighteen Cubans seized the town by force and mowed the Simbas down by the hundreds. Twenty-one hostages, including two Americans, were killed; the consular and CIA officers were freed. Two days later Hoyt and Grinwis were drinking champagne on an Air France flight to New York. The president got the word at his Texas ranch, where he’d been basking in the aftermath of a landslide election victory. LBJ had had grave doubts about the mission. He didn’t want to turn the country and perhaps the continent into another Vietnam. But in the end, he felt he had no choice, for the CIA reported that the international forces of communism in Africa—soon to be led in a disastrous mission commanded by Castro’s field marshal Che Guevara—would never stop trying to seize the Congo.
Richard Helms, soon to become the CIA’s director, wanted no country where his officers had a measure of control over the course of human events to go communist on his watch. He called Devlin into his office at headquarters in the spring of 1965. Helms possessed all the social graces and an iron fist to complement them. He allowed that it would be an excellent idea if Devlin returned to the Congo. Devlin thought not: he wanted to fight the CIA’s battles in the Vietnam War. Helms was compelled to order him back to Africa. The command was auspicious. On July 19, Devlin, newly reinstalled, dined and drank once again with Mobutu. The general asked: How did Devlin like the climate? He meant the political climate. The puppet president and prime minister were two scorpions in a bottle corked by Mobutu, each seeking to depose the other.
The tensions in the capital were boiling over by the time the rainy season started in late October. The CIA officer and his prized asset had a come-to-Jesus meeting on the night of November 19. “Mobutu turned to Devlin and stated he wished seek latter’s personal advice. He emphasized he speaking to Devlin as friend,” the station chief reported in a cable. Mobutu proposed to resolve the conflict once and for all. “Mobutu stressed he does not repeat not wish to stage another coup d’état. However said he believes it to be his duty to try find compromise solution to current political impasse. Thus, he asked Devlin if he could suggest a solution.” He was looking for a green light. Devlin reported: “Since Station knows of no satisfactory alternative to Mobutu as commander of army, and in view of Mobutu’s long-time cooperation … Station believes it is incumbent upon USG to try help Mobutu.” They met again, two days later, on November 21. Mobutu wanted $100,000 immediately. Devlin reported that this request represented America’s last opportunity to influence the fate of the nation.
“Crisis in Congo,” the NSC aide Robert “Blowtorch Bob” Komer wrote to Bundy at roughly the same hour. “Mobutu is the key; perhaps he can force a compromise. You’ll probably have a new plea at 303 for baksheesh to this end.” The 303 Committee—formerly the Special Group—was Bundy and the number two men at CIA, State, and Defense; it was the clearinghouse for major covert actions. The four conferred by telephone. Bundy had in hand a detailed memo from his staff that concluded: “We can back Mobutu. We could either back him in a coup or let him put together the best formula he can.… He is already our man. He controls the army (with our help). He has shown himself the most sensible leader in the current mess. At the moment, he knows the ins and outs of the situation better than we do.” Mobutu was a master manipulator of the men who thought they could manipulate him.
At five o’clock in the morning on November 25, Mobutu announced that he had taken over the Congo and deposed the president and prime minister. Devlin went to see him at eleven-thirty. Mobutu struck the pose of a statesman, saying that he understood that the United States might not immediately recognize his regime, but stressing that he was counting on America’s support for his survival. For his part, Devlin cabled the CIA: “Mobutu said he would appreciate receiving all advisors that KUBARK can provide. He specifically cited need for advisor to guide information ministry [and] a political advisor to provide him with guidance.… He stressed he looking to KUBARK for advice and guidance now and in future.… He wants to maintain close working relationship with Station.” Headquarters wrote back commending Devlin for a job well done and instructing him to continue to support Mobutu to the utmost. The station chief followed up on December 13. He wrote that Mobutu was “the last hope for the West in the Congo.”
So began the slow death of a nation.
One of the first things Mobutu did upon taking power was to hang four former cabinet ministers before a crowd of fifty thousand. The CIA kept him on the payroll for at least two years thereafter. Soon he did not need its money. He revived the mines that produced the Congo’s wealth—diamonds, silver, gold, copper, cobalt, tin, uranium, zinc, and more—and then he seized control of their riches. By 1970, they were his and his alone. The diamonds were “flown off to Belgium for Mobutu’s account,” said Michael Newlin, the deputy chief of mission at the American embassy from 1972 to 1975. The gold went to Switzerland. And he took not only the diamonds and the gold, but everything from which wealth could be extracted, and the lion’s share of the revenues from foreign exchange and state marketing operations. “There was no investment in the country by Mobutu and his rich relatives and cronies. They were skimming off everything,” Newlin said. “Through, I guess, intercepts, we found out that the central bank was about to ship the silver deposit, the entire silver deposit in the national bank, to a storefront in Jersey City.” By 1973, Mobutu had seized full or partial control of every major foreign-owned company in the country—factories, farms, wholesale firms—and made them his private property. He now pocketed half of the nation’s revenues or more. By the end of the decade, he was one of the wealthiest men in the world; his ever-expanding fortune eventually was estimated at $5 billion. He jailed his real and imagined enemies at will. A man could be Mobutu’s minister one day and his prisoner at the point of death the next. He had become the new King Leopold.
Larry Devlin had a ringside seat to this carnival of corruption. He returned to the nation he had saved from chaos and communism after he retired from the CIA as chief of the Africa division in 1974. He was for many years thereafter the chief business agent in Africa for Maurice Tempelsman, a fabulously wealthy Belgian American diamond merchant and mining kingpin, Mobutu’s silent business partner, the longtime companion of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and later in life a major financial contributor and confidant to President Bill Clinton. Shortly before Devlin’s death in 2008, he spoke proudly about his service with the CIA: “In those years, we kept the Soviets from taking over Africa, or a very large part of Africa. We were in the business of political warfare. And we didn’t win ’em all. But we won that one.”
Mobutu remained in the good graces of the United States for the rest of the cold war, continuing to receive significant American military and economic aid despite his corruption and his human rights abuses, in great part due to his relationship with the CIA. When the agency wanted to supply weapons to would-be African leaders it supported, such as the Angolan rebel Jonas Savimbi, Mobutu would provide airfields for transshipment. He sent troops to back CIA-supported governments and insurgencies in Africa, and he served as a vital switchboard for American intelligence. Even Jimmy Carter, the president who made human rights the lodestar of his foreign policy, welcomed him to the White House with an honor guard and ruffles and flourishes. (On the occasion of that visit, two senior State Department officials made a friendly wager. Frank G. Wisner, the son of the CIA’s covert-operations czar, bet William C. Harrop, an experienced Africa hand, a dollar that Mobutu had worn out his welcome in the Oval Office. Harrop kept that dollar framed above his desk for the next forty years as proof that human rights would seldom prevail in American foreign policy.)
“Mobutu had a tremendous amount of charisma, human magnetism, charm. He was also a brilliant schemer and plotter,” said Robert Oakley, the American ambassador from 1979 to 1982. “Not once do I remember Mobutu making any comments or showing any interest in the benefits that our assistance was providing his country. He was neither grateful or interested; he just wanted more.” Mobutu stole his nation’s wealth, Oakley said, with the help of the Société Générale in Brussels, which served by turns as a holding company for Belgium’s colonial wealth, the privy purse of the king, a laundromat for Mobutu’s money, and the repository for much of his loot. “He did share some of these illegal profits with his Belgian buddies, so that everyone except the people benefitted,” Oakley said. As he and his cronies enjoyed the spoils of his power, his nation’s most basic infrastructures rotted in the heat, the jungle began to reclaim the towns and cities beyond the capital, and his soldiers brutally oppressed his citizens. A formal CIA assessment of Mobutu, prepared in advance of his meeting with President Reagan in December 1986, presented the rationale for the unwavering support he had received from the United States. “President Mobutu is arguably unique in Africa in his support for US national security objectives,” it began, “and his political demise would have serious implications for the United States and cost Washington its closest friend in Africa.” The feeling was mutual: “Mobutu perceives that the United States has repeatedly responded to his needs when he has been faced with major threats to his government, and he sees this as a special relationship.” The CIA recommended that when Mobutu came to the White House, he should be “recognized as an African statesman.”
Reagan so recognized him. Three years later, President George H. W. Bush, a former CIA director, was especially effusive in his welcome. He called Mobutu one of America’s oldest and most valued allies. But as Mobutu’s wealth grew, so did his cruelty, said Brandon Grove, the American ambassador under Reagan: “There was great fear of Mobutu, and of his army in particular, by people in villages and the countryside who suffered constantly from pillaging, brutality and rape by his underpaid or unpaid soldiers, who exacted their ‘pay’ from villagers by stealing food.” Mobutu had his enormous yacht, Kamaniola, where he received Reagan’s CIA director, William E. Casey, and Bush’s secretary of state, James A. Baker III, on the River Congo. He had his palaces in Switzerland and France and Spain and Italy, his extraordinary apartment on the Avenue Foch in Paris, and his immense fortune, and it still was not enough. He built a Versailles in the rain forest, a huge palace of Italian marble and green malachite at Gbadolite, his ancestral village in the northwest corner of the Congo, with a discotheque, a nuclear fallout shelter, Louis XIV furniture, and an airport outfitted for the Concorde. He began to spend more and more time in the Oz world of Gbadolite, while doing “almost nothing to provide schools and functioning hospitals, roads, water, sanitation, electricity, housing, or anything else,” Grove said. “Democratic institutions and respect for human rights had no place in his schemes. Mobutu felt himself accountable to no one.” Every American president from Kennedy onward had seen him as an instrument of American political warfare in Africa, and their unwavering support had protected him and burnished his image, against all evidence, in the eyes of the world.
“I think that, looking back, historians are going to say, ‘How could the United States have been wedded to such a dictator for so long? Because there was a confrontation with the Soviet Union, a consideration which, in the end, proved specious?’ But that was the situation,” said Bill Harrop, the American ambassador under Reagan and Bush. In 1993, two years after Harrop left that post, and as the country fell into abject ruin, he reflected that Mobutu was “a genius at manipulating the ethnic, military, and regional politics of his country. He was also a genius at manipulating the United States of America … the National Security Council, the Department of State, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Department of Defense.” He continued:
If we needed African support or help on issues before the UN, General Mobutu was always there. Our relationship was by no means just a one-way street. For instance, if there were a vote in the Security Council about the exclusion of Israel from some body, or if we needed support in the Security Council to do with Korea, Puerto Rico, or whatever the classic issues of the day were, we could always count on President Mobutu.
So there were a lot of reasons why the United States embraced this extraordinary, authoritarian, selfish dictator. But these were the facts and that was the way we operated. Part of his genius was utilizing the United States, explaining that one reason that he was in power was that he was America’s man.
That rationale was destroyed by the end of the cold war. But by then the Congo was destroyed as well. In 1997, thirty-seven years after his rapprochement with America, Mobutu fled in the face of an armed rebellion, and he soon died in exile. The Congo erupted into an epochal conflagration, an African world war in which nine nations fought and five million people were killed or injured. Our man had stockpiled the arsenal and lit the fuse.