Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965
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Previously U-2 flights had operated from Greenland, darting in and out to photograph the ICBM sites at Plesetsk, about 500 miles north of Moscow. The dense northern network of Soviet anti-aircraft defences made it advisable to vary the route and the latest flight involved taking off from Peshawar in Pakistan, turning north towards Sverdlovsk, then north-west over Plesetsk to land at Bodo in Norway. At 11 a.m. on 1 May villagers in Povarnia near Sverdlovsk heard an explosion and spotted what they thought was a balloon in the sky. It turned out to be a parachute with the U-2 pilot, Gary Powers, attached. The KGB hastened to the scene. The U-2 had been disabled by an S-75 Surface-to-Air missile equipped with a proximity fuse. In Langley the CIA received the ominous signal ‘Bill Bailey didn’t come home.’ The news did not unduly perturb Eisenhower, as the U-2s were fitted with self-destruct devices and the pilot was supposed to remove himself from the equation with a poisoned pin – which Powers thoughtfully stopped his KGB interrogators fiddling with since a single prick was fatal.
Although the U-2 flights were an open secret to all except the American public, Ike persisted in denying their existence. The space agency NASA was prevailed on to issue a statement lamenting the loss of a weather-research plane over Lake Van in Turkey, which did not explain what it was doing near Sverdlovsk. Khrushchev lured Eisenhower into maintaining these fictions, until he revealed that the Soviets had most of the U-2 and that Gary Powers was ‘quite alive and kicking’. Eisenhower persisted in his visit to the Paris summit and walked into a Soviet propaganda trap. At the opening meeting he never got the chance to forswear any future U-2 flights, for the Russian leader started shouting. At one point the chairman, de Gaulle, interjected: ‘The acoustics in this room are excellent. We can all hear [Mr Khrushchev]. There is no need for him to raise his voice.’ When Khrushchev rekindled his choler, shouting ‘I have been overflown!’, de Gaulle sympathized, saying he had been overflown too, eighteen times, by a Soviet spy satellite. ‘As God sees me, my hands are clean,’ replied Khrushchev.8 Both he and the American President had turned bright red in the face under the emotion of it all. ‘We couldn’t possibly offer our hospitality to someone who had already, so to speak, made a mess at his host’s table,’ Khrushchev said, and the Soviet delegation walked out. A dejected Ike flew home, the autumnal peace efforts of his presidency a failure.9
Tribes and Bribes
It was in this tense atmosphere that events in the Congo suddenly impressed themselves on Washington’s attention. The Congo was a huge expanse of savannah and lush jungle straddling the Equator and extending from the West African coast to the interior. It was around a third of the size of the USA and equivalent in area to Western Europe. Since it bordered nine other states, Congo’s fate could not be ignored. The Belgian King Léopold (after whom the capital city was named) had ruthlessly exploited the Congo before international outrage resulted in the colony being taken over by the Belgian state in 1908. The Belgians had divided the colony into six vast provinces. It had roads, which have long since disappeared from today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as remarkably good medical services. Missionaries from the Roman Catholic Church dominated education. The Belgian Flamands were much given to drunken expatiation on what they called la mentalité bantoue, meaning the Conradian darkness just beneath the surface of even the few native évolués, a term we have already encountered in Algeria.10
The Congo’s thirteen and a half million Africans were divided into 200 tribes, speaking over 400 dialects. Its rich natural resources were unevenly distributed, with diamonds in south-central Kasai Province and copper, cobalt, tantalum and uranium in southerly Katanga neighbouring Rhodesia. Katanga was like a corporate fiefdom divided up among Belgian, British and South African conglomerates.
Throughout this vast sprawling country, unified only by an immense dirty brown river, Europeans monopolized all skilled positions, for only nineteen native Congolese were university graduates.11 From the late 1940s Congolese who had enjoyed a secondary education formed old boys’ associations, which together with socialist and Catholic study groups evolved into political parties. In the beginning these mirrored tensions in metropolitan Belgium between rival supporters of laïcité and religious education, but as time went on some forty parties reflected tribal divisions, whatever the outward ideological coloration.12
In late January 1960 representatives of the Congolese parties attended a round-table conference in Brussels, the goal of their hosts being to perpetuate Belgian administration and economic control after the Congo became nominally independent by 30 June. In May national elections were held. There were three main political figures: the Bakongo nobleman Joseph Kasavubu, the firebrand all-Congolese nationalist Patrice Lumumba from the Tetela tribe in Orientale Province and, in Katanga Province, the Balunda leader Moshe Tshombe, a Methodist businessman who was the best regarded in Western circles.
Belgium was ceding independence, but calculated that it would continue to rule. Belgians controlled business, the civil service and the officer corps of the army, which was exclusively European above the rank of sergeant. Following the election, Kasavubu became president and Lumumba prime minister. The former dreamed of restoring the ancient Bakongo kingdom, but Lumumba was a pan-African nationalist close to Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana. He had also been in contact with Soviet diplomats in Guinea and in Brussels. At the independence celebrations on 30 June, King Baudouin made an emollient speech, but walked out when Lumumba altered the tone of the occasion with a biting, unscheduled address:
We have known sarcasm and insults, endured blows morning, noon, and night, because we are ‘niggers’. Who will forget that a Black was addressed in the familiar tu, not as a friend, but because the polite vous was reserved for Whites only? We have seen our lands despoiled under the terms of what was supposedly the law of the land but which only recognised the right of the strongest. We have seen that this law was quite different for a White than for a Black: accommodating for the former, cruel and inhuman for the latter.13
Retrospective sainthood has invested Lumumba with an aura he did not enjoy in life. Although undoubtedly charismatic, he had spent a year in prison for embezzling at the post office where he worked as a clerk, before becoming sales manager of a brewery. He was a disorganized thinker but a gifted demagogue, which was not a quality prized by Western governments scarred by the memory of Mussolini and Hitler – and he reminded Americans of Fidel Castro.14
Immediately after independence Congolese government officials awarded themselves handsome pay rises, enabling former clerks to acquire cars. Two disastrous consequences flowed from this act of self-indulgence: the higher salaries would have to be paid by raising the tax take from Kasai and Katanga, which increased the desire of the local Congolese to keep the money for themselves; and the largesse was not extended to the Armée Nationale Congolese (ANC), where the senior Belgian military commander scrawled ‘Before Independence = After Independence’ on a blackboard for the benefit of his troops. Drunken and mutinous soldiers roamed the streets of Léopoldville, attacking Europeans, who fled in large numbers across the Congo River to neighbouring Brazzaville in the French Congo. ‘We are the masters now’ was a common refrain. A Soviet delegation sent to establish diplomatic relations was set upon and managed to get free only by exclaiming ‘Khrushchev!’ and ‘Sputnik!’15
Lurid accounts of rape and white flight in European newspapers gave the Belgians a fresh excuse to meddle. They shipped in 1,800 paratroopers, who sought to restore order with their customary lack of finesse, killing twelve Congolese soldiers on disembarking at the port of Matadi. Their presence caused the Congolese to panic. Following independence, mining interests led by the Belgian Union Minière du Haut Katanga encouraged Tshombe to secede. The educated African front men of the new state, complete with its flag of crosslets on a red and green background, regarded their fellow Africans with much the same contempt as did the whites. In fairness to the foreign interests, their primary concern w
as to cordon off Katanga from the chaos in the rest of Congo, for they always maintained secret contacts with the authorities in Léopoldville behind Tshombe’s back.16 Kasavubu and Lumumba tried to fly in to Elisabethville, the capital of Katanga, but found that European mercenaries had blocked the runways with burning oil drums.
While Kasavubu and Lumumba were away, the ministers they left behind in the capital appealed to the US for 3,500 troops to suppress the military mutiny. They were rebuffed by an administration that thought the UN was better placed for such a role. Kasavubu and Lumumba turned to the UN instead. Within three days the UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld had secured a resolution ordering Belgium to remove its forces so as to enable the Congolese government to function. The US joined the Soviets in favouring the despatch of a UN peacekeeping operation while the Europeans abstained. The Swedish Hammarskjöld worked the telephones to assemble a force of Ethiopians, Ghanaians, Moroccans and Tunisians for Operation Safari, to be led by General Carl Carlson von Horn, another Swede. Ninety US planes airlifted the bulk of this 12,000-strong force into the simmering former colony. The UN might have seemed neutral to any Westerner, but it was ominous that when they met the new troops Congolese officials inquired, ‘L’ONU? C’est quelle tribu?’ What tribe is that?17
Close acquaintance with Lumumba had not made Washington hearts grow fond. In July 1960 he spent three days in Washington, and against a background of reports of European women being raped in the Congo asked his State Department minders for a woman. What did he have in mind? ‘Une blanche blonde,’ he replied. After meetings in which Lumumba sat staring at the ceiling and mumbling to himself in between bouts of fervid utterance, senior officials at State formed the not unreasonable view that he was unbalanced. He was also reported to smoke hashish, which in 1960 made him a ‘drug addict’. On his final day in Washington, Lumumba thanked the Soviet Tass news agency for Soviet food aid to Congo, which seemed to confirm the official Belgian view, echoed by the US Ambassador to Brussels, that he was a Communist. In reality Lumumba was more like Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah or Guinea’s Sékou Touré than Castro, but the CIA’s Allen Dulles was convinced that Lumumba would have to go.18
Frustrated by the UN’s refusal to crush the Katangan secessionists, an enraged Lumumba declared that ‘We will take aid from the devil or anyone else as long as they get the Belgian troops out.’19 The Russians were soon in evidence. The first Ambassador, Mikhail Yakolev, and three KGB officers moved into a rented villa in Léopoldville. From mid-August 1960 Soviet aircraft based in Ghana flew Eastern Bloc technicians and a hundred motor vehicles to the Congo. They also delivered ten Ilyushin transport aircraft to enable Lumumba to move his forces around the vast country.20 For while the UN had come to restore peace, Lumumba was bent on restoring his grip on the whole country, and the Russians were going to help him.
The modest Soviet presence in turn drew in the CIA. Lawrence Devlin, a former army officer who had joined the CIA in the late 1940s, opened a new station in Léopoldville. On his first night in the capital, drunken Congolese soldiers mistook him for a Flamand and played Russian roulette with a gun to his head. Devlin signalled Bronson Tweedy, head of the Agency’s new Africa Division, that ‘Congo is experiencing a classic Communist effort to take over the government.’ Lumumba had long been in contact with the Soviets, but it was a moot point whether or not he was a Communist. A mercurial radical might have been more accurate, but the effect was the same.21
The American response was disproportionate, not helped by the fact that some senior officials believed the Congolese had only recently descended from the trees.22 At an NSC meeting on 1 August 1960, Eisenhower resolved to stymie Soviet intervention in the Congo. Assuming that they would try to Balkanize the Congo, he determined to consolidate it – but not under Lumumba. On 18 August the NSC reconvened to consider Devlin’s alarming report. When Ike made clear his belief that Lumumba was fronting for the Soviets, it had an effect akin to Henry II’s supposed exclamation ‘Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?’ with reference to Archbishop Thomas à Beckett. Whatever Ike’s precise phrasing, National Security Assistant Gordon Gray told the CIA that the President had expressed ‘extremely strong feelings on the necessity for very straightforward action’ against Lumumba.23 Allen Dulles agreed to proceed ‘as vigorously as the situation permits or requires . . . within the bounds of necessity and capacity’. On 26 August he personally signed off on a cable to Devlin, making the ‘removal’ of Lumumba ‘an urgent and prime objective’.24 Devlin was authorized to spend up to $100,000.
Soon, whenever Lumumba appeared in public rented crowds gathered to shout ‘Down with Lumumba!’ He was his own worst enemy. He had insisted that the UN force, which was not his to command, be diverted to crush the Katanga secessionists, only to be menaced by a new separatist movement under Albert Kalonji in the central diamond-rich province of Kasai. When UN Secretary-General Hammarskjöld refused to use his forces in this way, Lumumba accused him of being in the pay of Belgian mining interests. Relations between the two men were dreadful. Since the UN was preventing Lumumba’s troops from flying into Katanga, Soviet planes flew ANC troops from the Benalulua tribe under the command of the army chief (and Lumumba’s uncle) General Victor Lundula into Kasai instead. Lundula’s troops failed to recover control of the province, but did massacre about a thousand members of the Baluba tribe. By this time the UN and its allies had explicitly decided to back Kasavubu, although the home governments of the African 80 per cent of UN troops supported the more radical Lumumba.
The Congo had slipped into anarchy. Each day Africans and Europeans seeking rescue mobbed UN posts. The new and highly effective SIS station chief Daphne Park, a dead ringer for Miss Marple even when younger, once had to chase away an intruder in her suburban house by shouting ‘I am a witch! And if you don’t instantly go away your hands and feet will drop fall off.’ This worked. In several provinces communications were impossible. When one official asked for plans of the provincial telephone system, the new chief of communications proudly handed him the telephone directory. When Moroccan UN troops alighted upon a hospital, they found the head male nurse (the new Director) and an ‘assistant’ poised to perform an appendectomy on a terrified patient who had received no anaesthetic.25 Although the Moroccan troops were the best of the bunch, some of the senior UN personnel were questionable. The Ghanaian contingent was commanded by a British general. He once blithely described the ANC as ‘the nigger in the woodpile’ to the distinguished Afro-American diplomat Ralph Bunche.26
While Lumumba ‘governed’ the Congo via a bank of ten telephones in his office, a real foe quietly worked on his downfall. Since there were no weapons (or guards) in the US embassy, Devlin purchased small arms from Congolese soldiers. He recruited a network of agents, and forged contacts with Kasavubu, Foreign Minister Justin Bomboko, Chief of Police Victor Nendaka and Colonel Joseph Mobutu, the young former journalist whom Lumumba had appointed deputy to General Victor Lundula. Unknown to the hapless Lumumba, Mobutu had been working for Belgian intelligence for at least two years. On 5 September 1960, President Kasavubu announced the dismissal of Lumumba, who retaliated by dismissing Kasabuvu, something he lacked the legal right to do. Lumumba also lacked the armed power to prevail, as most of the troops loyal to him were now in South Kasai, which he hoped would be the springboard for retaking Katanga.27
The UN force prevented Lumumba’s troops returning to Léopoldville, thereby effectively taking sides in a civil war. A British UN official, Brian Urquhart, supplied Lumumba’s troops with enough beer to put them to sleep, while Ethiopian UN soldiers blocked the runway from which they might have taken off in Soviet aircraft. The UN also disabled Radio Congo, from which Lumumba might have rallied supporters in the capital. Although Lumumba managed to persuade both houses of parliament to back him by stationing his goons in the chambers, he had not reckoned on the ambitious Mobutu, who sought out Devlin for a quiet word. ‘The President and the Prime Minis
ter have dismissed each other,’ he said. ‘Political games! This is no way to create a strong, independent, democratic Congo!’ Greatly exaggerating the Soviet threat, Mobutu expressed his readiness to mount a coup, which would pave the way for a government of Congolese technocrats. All he required was the assurance of immediate US recognition of the new regime. Devlin was not authorized to license a coup, but he did just that.
The coup against Lumumba duly took place on 14 September 1960, Devlin having prevailed on Mobutu to keep Kasavubu as president to provide a semblance of legitimacy, permitting the US to recognize the regime without more ado. Kasavubu in turn appointed the new team of ‘technocrats’, of whom only Justin Bomboko had any experience in government. Mobutu spent the night of the coup drinking whisky in UN headquarters, listening to the announcement of his own putsch on the radio.28 By morning he had Lundula under house arrest and replaced him as chief of staff. At Devlin’s insistence Mobutu changed the name he proposed for the new regime from College of Commissars to College of Commissioners. Devlin and the Binza Group (named after the suburb where Kasavubu and Mobutu lived) decided everything of any importance, with any dissent trumped by Mobutu’s control of the army. What Devlin never knew was that Mobutu also sought advice from Daphne Park. It was a tense time. On 17 September the Soviet and Czech embassies were closed and the diplomats expelled. Ambassador Yakolev was thrown into an army truck like a sack of potatoes and driven to the airport.29