Keep your head down, think small, look after yourself: these constituted the lessons of Leopold. The spirit, once comprehensively crushed, does not recover easily. For seventy-five years, from 1885 to 1960, Congo’s population had marinated in humiliation. No malevolent witch-doctor could have devised a better preparation for the coming of a second Great Dictator.
CHAPTER THREE
Birth of the Leopard
‘Politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.’
—Charles de Gaulle
There was a moment in 1960, when, if a white man had stayed his hand and decided not to get involved, the newly independent Congo’s history would have taken a very different course. It was the split second when a young CIA station chief who had crossed a tense capital walked around a corner at one of Leopoldville’s military camps and surprised a man in civilian clothing taking aim at a figure walking away.
‘I guess I was a Boy Scout too long, because without thinking I jumped at the man with the pistol. Then I was sorry, because it turned out he was very strong,’ he recalled. ‘We rolled around in the dirt and I finally remembered something I’d learnt in army training. He had his hand in the trigger guard and I pulled it back until the bone snapped.’ The scuffle attracted the attention of the intended victim’s bodyguards who, misunderstanding the situation, promptly started beating up the Good Samaritan. ‘All I could think about,’ he chuckled, ‘was why the hell did I get involved?’
A generation of Zaireans might today ask themselves the very same question, but with a greater degree of asperity and rather less humour. For the target of the botched assassination attempt, staged at the orders of an aspiring Congolese politician with Soviet contacts, was Colonel Joseph Désiré Mobutu, who had just taken over the running of the country. If the white man in question—Larry Devlin—had not intervened, who knows what route the country would have followed?
But then, interference, whether muscular or subtle, was always something of a forte of Mr Devlin’s. His role in the traumatic events of Congo’s post-independence period was to leave him one of the most notorious CIA men in history, an example of just how far the United States was willing to go in that epoch to sabotage the Soviet Union’s plans for global communist expansion.
Mr Devlin’s life had been one of commotion: a bête noire for a generation of Africans still fuming over the way superpower intervention dictated events on the continent during the Cold War, he had been accused by conspiracy theorists of engineering the murder of Patrice Lumumba—Congo’s first, inspirational prime minister. Grown fragile and snowy-haired in his seventies, he had survived wars (two), uprisings (two), crash landings (four), heart attacks (several), beatings and assassination attempts (many) and a medical death sentence (two months to live, delivered, mistakenly, in 1984 when doctors spotted what they thought was an inoperable brain tumour).
It had not all been pain and suffering. He learned to dance in Leopoldville’s sweaty nightclubs, argued politics into the small hours with the young men who were to become Congo’s movers and shakers and got tipsy on the sun-baked sandbanks of the Congo river.
But it had all taken its toll, leaving him unsteady on his feet, floating above the pavement with the uncertain grace of a fifteenth-century schooner setting out on its first journey to the New World, an old-fashioned gentleman who opened car doors for a lady, gently insisted on paying and who dressed with a studied elegance wholly appropriate for a man who once, during some bizarre career interlude, ghosted articles for French fashion designer Jacques Fath.
The consultancy work Devlin continued doing on Africa from his home in Virginia did not take up all his time and in retirement he had grown chatty. Two instincts were warring within him. On the one hand, he had been attacked too many times by the press as the kingmaker who put Mobutu in power, starred as the ruthless secret agent in too many thinly fictionalised accounts of the Congo crisis, not to be wary. On the other hand, with time on his hands and as the kind of man who clearly enjoyed female company, this was a not entirely unpleasant opportunity to set the record straight.
His voice had the gravelly timbre of a man who smoked three packets of cigarettes a day until a brush with open-heart surgery. His hands—creased by a million experiences, the wedding ring so deep-set in the flesh it seemed welded to the bone—would give a palm-reader pause for thought. But the brain was as keen and irreverent as ever. And with his defiant insistence that he regretted nothing about the CIA’s support for Mobutu, Larry Devlin was a reminder that whatever happened in the end, there was a time when Mobutu was not just the hope of interfering Americans obsessed with domino metaphors, but of a population exasperated by the dithering, squabbling and tribalism of its civilian leaders.
‘What you must never forget is that there were many periods to Mobutu. You saw the pitiful end. But he was so different at the start. I can remember him as a dynamic, idealistic young man who was determined to have an independent state in the Congo and really seemed to believe in all the things Africa’s leaders then stood for.’
They first met in Brussels in early 1960, when members of Congo’s embryonic political establishment found themselves negotiating independence terms with their colonial master. Five years earlier, a Belgian expert had triggered an uproar at home by putting forward a thirty-year programme for a pull-out. Most Belgians believed they had another 100 years to go, plenty of time to train up and educate their eventual replacements. Subsequent events had exposed how out of touch even that supposedly accelerated schedule really was: riots in Congo’s major cities, increasingly vocal demands by the country’s ‘evolués’ and France’s and Britain’s disengagement from their own African possessions had forced Belgium to realise decolonisation was due.
Having accepted the principle, Brussels set about formalising its withdrawal with indecent haste. But while Belgium was pulling up the colonial drawbridge, other powers were becoming interested in the new opportunities the postwar configuration was throwing up. The two sessions of round-table talks in Brussels provided a rare chance for their representatives to size up the future leadership of the Congo, whose size, geographical position and huge resource base made it the natural linchpin of central Africa.
Devlin was working in Brussels at the time. He was a young man who already had a lifetime’s experience behind him. A committed anti-Nazi, he had interrupted his college studies to sign up as a private in the US Army, had served in Italy and been injured. Returning to college, he had been recruited by a Central Intelligence Agency no doubt impressed by his war record, his sharp mind and his mastery of several languages. His speciality was Soviet operations and he had become skilled at ‘turning’ Soviet bloc officials, a process he remembered now as being ‘better than an orgasm’ when successfully pulled off.
But he had angered a superior in the process and his career had fallen into something of a slump when the Congolese negotiations opened and he began picking up alarming signs of Soviet activity in Brussels: ‘I noticed that Soviets were contacting one by one every member of the various delegations at the round table conference. I got curious as to what they were doing and why. What I found was that they were essentially spotting, assessing and trying to recruit. It was a classic effort on their part. The Russians wanted to use the Congo as their stepping stone into Africa.’
The Soviets knew they had a potential ally in Patrice Lumumba. A public speaker with a near-miraculous ability to win round his audience, this former post office employee had become the spearhead of Congo’s independence campaign. Inspired by the pan-Africanism of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Guinea’s Sekou Touré, he was a flamboyant, erratic figure, bubbling with ideas. Released from jail to attend the Brussels meeting, he was brimming with resentment over Western imperialism in Africa.
The Soviet contacts with the delegations from Leopoldville were enough to ensure the US embassy in Brussels got involved. The American ambassador threw a reception for the Congolese and Devlin and his embassy colleagues l
aunched themselves in a very deliberate bout of networking. ‘Each of us drew up a list of 10 or 12 people we had to meet and afterwards we all got together to discuss our impressions. One name kept coming up. But it wasn’t on anyone’s list because he wasn’t an official delegation member, he was Lumumba’s secretary. But everyone agreed that this was an extremely intelligent man, very young, perhaps immature, but a man with great potential. They were right, because that was Mobutu.’
The next time Devlin met Mobutu was in the Congo Republic—his new posting—as all hell broke loose. Less than a week after independence on 30 June 1960, Belgium’s haste was having inevitable consequences. Told there were to be no immediate moves to ‘Africanise’ an army exclusively commanded by Belgian officers, Congo’s troops mutinied, whites were beaten and raped and the Belgian technicians who ran the country’s administration headed en masse for the airport.
Prime Minister Lumumba appointed Mobutu army chief of staff. Touring the country’s military bases, playing up his own army experience, Mobutu persuaded the soldiers to return to barracks. But the mutiny was not Lumumba’s only problem. Belgian paratroopers had landed in what the Congolese assumed to be a second colonial takeover. The new state seemed doomed to break up as, encouraged by a former colonial master bent on ensuring continued access to Congo’s mineral wealth, first copper-producing Katanga and then diamond-rich Kasai seceded.
The UN responded to the crisis with extraordinary speed. Its reaction time, like the hordes of journalists who flooded into Congo to cover those years, was a measure of the enormous hopes the West was pinning on Africa during those years. Impossible as it is to imagine in the year 2000, when the renewed threat of national fragmentation raises barely a flicker of international interest, the Congo of the 1960s was one of the world’s biggest news stories.
The first UN troops landed in Leopoldville the day after Lumumba and President Joseph Kasavubu called on the UN Security Council for protection from foreign aggression. But Lumumba, who had hoped they would help snuff out the secession movements in the south, was bitterly disappointed by their limited mandate, which barred them from interfering in Congo’s internal conflicts.
Feeling betrayed by the West, Lumumba turned to the Soviet Union for help, requesting transport planes, trucks and weapons to wipe out the breakaway movements in Kasai and Katanga. Nikita Khrushchev obliged. The military aid arrived too late to prevent a bloody débâcle in Kasai, where the Congolese army lost control, slaughtering hundreds of Luba tribespeople. But for Washington what mattered was that this was the first time Moscow had intervened militarily in a conflict so far from its own borders. It represented a dangerous ratcheting up of the Cold War game.
‘I had a little Congolese sitting at the airport counting any white man who came off a Soviet aircraft in batches of five. Roughly 1,000 came in during a period of six weeks. They were there as “conseillers techniques” and they were posted to all the ministries,’ recalled Devlin. ‘To my mind it was clearly an effort to take over. It made good sense when you stopped to think about it. All nine countries surrounding the Congo had their problems. If the Soviets could have gotten control of the Congo they could have used it as a base, bringing in Africans, training them in sabotage and military skills and sending them home to do their duty. I determined to try and block that.’
It was a line of argument that was to justify more than three decades of American support. But if for Washington Lumumba was showing a worrying resemblance to Fidel Castro, Devlin himself, ironically enough, never believed in the sincerity of Lumumba’s conversion to the Soviet cause. ‘Poor Lumumba. He was no communist. He was just a poor jerk who thought “I can use these people”. I’d seen that happen in Eastern Europe. It didn’t work very well for them, and it didn’t work for him.’
The wave of Soviet arrivals triggered the collapse of Lumumba’s strained relations with Kasavubu, Congo’s lethargic president. At times, too many times, politics in Congo resembled one of those hysterical farces in which policemen with floppy truncheons and red noses bounce from one outraged prima donna to another. ‘I’m the head of state. Arrest that man!’ ‘No, I’M the head of state. That man is an impostor. Arrest him!’ Only the reality was more dangerous than amusing. In a surreal sequence the prime minister and president announced over the radio that they had sacked each other. Mobutu was put in an impossible position, with both men ordering him to take their rival into custody.
The army chief of staff was already unhappy with the turn events were taking. ‘The Russians were brutally stupid. It was so obvious what they were doing,’ marvelled Devlin. ‘They sent these people to lecture the army. It was the crudest of propaganda, 1920s Marxism, printed in Ghana in English, which the Congolese didn’t understand. Mobutu went to Lumumba and said “let’s keep these people out of the army”. Lumumba said “sure, sure I’ll take care of that”, but he didn’t. It kept happening and finally Mobutu said: “I didn’t fight the Belgians to then have my country colonised a second time.” ’
Exactly what role Devlin played in determining subsequent events was not clear. Cable traffic between Leopoldville and Washington shows he received authorisation for an operation aimed at ‘replacing Lumumba with a pro-Western group’ in mid-August 1960. Despite his friendliness, Devlin remained bound by the promises of confidentiality made to the CIA, contemptuous of those in the intelligence services who leaked government secrets. All he would say was that it was during those dramatic days that he really got to know Mobutu. The army chief was already being leaned on by the Western embassies—whose advice was given added weight by the fact that they were helping him pay his fractious troops—President Kasavubu, the student body and his own men. No doubt the CIA station chief brought his own persuasive skills, that talent acquired during years of ‘turning’ Soviet personnel, into play as Mobutu edged towards one of the hardest decisions of his life.
The eventual outcome, Devlin acknowledged, came as no surprise. On 14 September 1960, Mobutu neutralised both Kasavubu and Lumumba in what he described as a ‘peaceful revolution’ aimed at giving the civilian politicians a chance to calm down and settle their differences. Soviet bloc diplomatic personnel were given forty-eight hours to leave. The huge African domino had not fallen: Congo had been kept safely out of Soviet hands.
It was exactly what Washington wanted. But Devlin nonetheless rejected any notion of Mobutu being an American tool. ‘He was never a puppet. When he felt it was against the interests of the Congo, he wouldn’t do it, when it didn’t go against his country’s interests, he would go along with our views. He was always independent, it just happened that at a certain point we were going in the same direction.’ And like many commentators of the day, he still believed that Mobutu, an earnest twenty-nine-year-old pushed to prominence by a failure of leadership and a jumble of cascading events rather than personal ambition, was genuinely reluctant to take over in 1960. Such modesty would not last very long.
Who was the man who so impressed Devlin and the diplomats as they circulated, glasses in hand and mental notebooks at the ready, at the reception in Brussels?
Joseph Désiré Mobutu was born on 14 October 1930 in the central town of Lisala, where the Congo river runs deep and wide after its grandiose circular sweep across half a continent. That early proximity to the river, he always claimed, left him with a visceral love of the water. ‘I can say that I was born on the river…Whenever I can, I live on the river, which for me represents the majesty of my country.’
He was a member of the Ngbandi tribe, one of the smaller of the country’s 200-plus ethnic groupings. Anthropologists believe the Ngbandi trace their lineage back to the central Sudanese regions of Darfur and Kordofan, an area that was repeatedly targeted by Moslem Arab conquerors from the sixteenth century onwards. Fleeing the slave raids and Islamicisation, his animist ancestors fled south, heading for the very equatorial heart of the continent, where they in turn subjugated the local Bantus. Safe in the glowering forests that later so terrif
ied Western explorers, they intermarried and the Ngbandi—who took their name from a legendary fighter—gradually acquired an identity. They emerged as a loose affiliation of war-like tribes speaking the same language and straddling the Ubangi, a subsidiary of the great Congo river, with one foot in what is today Central African Republic and another in Congo.
Like all autocrats, Mobutu was later to mythologise his own upbringing. In one story, almost certainly apocryphal, he described walking in the woods with his grandfather. When a leopard leaped from the undergrowth, the boy shrank away. The grandfather remonstrated with him and, ashamed and piqued, the young Mobutu seized a spear and slew the leopard. ‘From that day on,’ said Mobutu, ‘I am afraid of nothing.’ He was to use the animal at the centre of this coming-of-age fable as his personal insignia, a symbol of pride, strength and courage. It was also the origin of his trademark leopardskin hats which, in a curious juxtaposition of machismo and decadence, he had made by a Paris couturier, keeping a collection of at least seven on hand.
The truth of those early years is somewhat less romantic. Some of Mobutu’s contemporaries recall that in the pre-independence era, there was a tendency amongst city dwellers to sneer at the Ngbandi, marooned in one of the least accessible zones of Africa, as coarse rustics who had barely shed their loin-cloths in favour of Western-style clothing; good hunters, yes, but in need of some urban refinement.
Mobutu would later ensure that changed. But when he was growing up, he belonged to a tribe regarded as ‘sous-evolué’—under-evolved. He shared with many prominent men a keen awareness of his humble origins, a source of resentment pushing him ceaselessly, fruitlessly, to try and prove his superiority. And if Mobutu’s ethnic origins were not enough of a burden, there was another issue calculated to niggle at the confidence of an impressionable youngster—his parentage.
In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz Page 7