The Belgians’ moustaches trembled with rage as they listened to Lumumba. The King turned to Kasavubu halfway through. ‘Mr President, was this planned?’ ‘Of course not, no,’ the new President replied.26 When Lumumba had finished, a band played an upbeat tune known as the ‘Independence Cha-cha-cha’. Across the country, people listened to their radios in wonder. Belgian officials were outraged and humiliated by this young upstart and his lack of respect. A formal lunch was delayed for two hours while the King and the Belgian cabinet deliberated whether to attend or not (they did). Afterwards Lumumba told Scott that he had made the speech to ‘satisfy the people’ and to reflect his own anger at the Belgians’ attempts to prevent him becoming prime minister in the preceding weeks.27 When the British representative from London had a fifteen-minute meeting with the new Prime Minister the following day, he came out saying ‘He is a no-good.’28 Like Nasser, Lumumba was a national liberationist who wanted to assert sovereignty against the West. He warned that he would not allow political colonialism to be replaced by a new form of indirect economic colonialism. This was an unwelcome message for countries which had large investments in the mining business as they extracted the country’s rich deposits of copper, cobalt and diamonds. The Congo held its breath, especially the 20,000 Belgians who remained in the country. For the first few days, the streets were quiet.
Ten days after independence, a sharply dressed American with his thin black hair slicked back in the fashion of the time stepped on board the ferry for Leopoldville. Daphne Park’s newly appointed opposite number from the CIA was heading into town. ‘There are a lot of black-tie dinners,’ a colleague had reassured Larry Devlin before he left. ‘You’ll be on the golf course by two o’clock every afternoon.’29 Reality soon hit him in the face, nearly fatally. As he stepped off the ferry, Devlin was faced with soldiers waving machetes in his face. ‘We will kill you,’ one said to him. Devlin had been recruited into the CIA from Harvard where he had been destined for the academic life. He had been enticed by the idea that the CIA would fight Moscow’s ambitions without the US having to engage in the type of open warfare he had witnessed as a soldier in the Second World War. Africa had been left to the Europeans for many years and the CIA had created its Africa division only in 1959. A cool customer in his dark suit, white shirt and shades and with a cigarette rarely out of his hands, Devlin would relish the chance to take on the Soviets in this important new Cold War arena as he became the arch-puppeteer of Congolese politics.
By the time Devlin arrived, the calm of independence a few days earlier had evaporated and the country had been plunged into chaos. The Force Publique was renamed the Congolese Army, but all of its senior officers were white and, like many Belgians, they believed that independence would not change the way things worked. To make the point, a general scrawled on a blackboard in front of his men, ‘Before independence = After independence’. That – followed by the announcement of a pay rise for civil servants but not for the army – was too much. A mutiny began in Thysville and unrest spread among soldiers throughout the country, including in the capital.
Daphne Park had a lucky escape in the midst of the violence thanks largely to an incident a few weeks earlier. She had been driving at night through the city when she was flagged down by a distressed African member of the Force Publique. She assumed it was some kind of accident. ‘My comrade is in trouble. Please come and help me,’ the man said. The streets were pitch black, bereft of lighting, which made the deep storm drains on either side particularly treacherous. Finally, they reached a group of men fighting on the ground. At the bottom of the pile was a friend of the man who had stopped Park. She halted the car and flashed the lights. She then climbed out and banged on the car until she had got everyone’s attention.
‘I’m very sorry but I’m a very bad driver and if I reverse I shall fall in the ditch, so I have to drive forwards. Would you mind all getting up and getting out of the way?’ she said.
The men roared with laughter at this woman who was not even able to reverse her car. They fell about, slapping each other on the back, crying, ‘She can’t reverse!’
‘And by the way, can I have that soldier?’ she added. ‘I’m going past the barracks.’ And so she drove off with the soldier and took him and his comrade home.
When the mutiny began, Park was driving back into town in the evening with an American. As she passed through the rubbish-strewn streets she turned a corner to be met with a scene of anarchy as drunken troops went on a rampage. People wandered around dazed, with battered and bleeding heads. Park was dragged out of her car.
‘He is American, I’m British,’ she said.
‘No, you lie, you are Flemish,’ they replied, identifying them as their real enemy.
At length, after arguing over their nationality, they were allowed back into their car.
Park eventually returned home to find an array of British nationals, mainly from the colonies, waiting outside her house in hope of some assistance from the British Consul. On 8 July, the British and French embassies had ordered the evacuation of all non-essential personnel. Stories of rape and murder by the Congolese troops had spread through the white community like wildfire. Everyone wanted to be taken to the ferry to get out to Brazzaville, the smaller and scruffier capital of the French Congo which lay just over the river from Leopoldville and acted as a refuge for those fleeing. Park explained that the ferry did not run before six in the morning and said that everyone should return just before then and without any weapons. Some protested that they needed to defend themselves. She pointed out that the troops had machine guns.
As their convoy headed for the ferry in the morning, soldiers high on drugs were stopping people at makeshift checkpoints and roughing them up. But Park navigated her way through. They seemed to be looking for Russians or Belgians, but not for Britons. A queue of abandoned cars a quarter of a mile long led up to the jetty. Once the ferry was in sight Park’s heart sank. Half a dozen cars were burning and there were bloodied people wandering around. Park walked up to the largest soldier, who looked to be in charge.
‘I am the British Consul and these are British subjects,’ she said.
To her astonishment she was embraced by the man, who said, ‘You are my friend. Don’t you remember me? You’re the one who can’t reverse.’
Park could not remember him at all.
He turned and said to all the others, ‘This is my friend – she can’t reverse you know.’ There were roars of laughter. ‘You are my friend when I wasn’t important, so what do you want?’ he asked.
‘I’d just like these people to get on the ferry to Brazzaville. They have all got business there.’
He looked at her. ‘You can’t go.’
‘I don’t want to go. I’ve got work here.’
‘All right. They are all your friends?’
‘They are all my dearest personal friends.’
Park saw them on to the ferry and headed back to the Embassy. A few weeks later, a telegram came from the Foreign Office stating that there had been a question asked in parliament about a British diplomat who had fraternised with the murderous Congolese soldiers. The Ambassador sent back a beautifully crafted but sizzling reply which ended the matter.
Devlin had his own close call. He was picked up by a band of mutinous soldiers in the centre of Leopoldville. Five of them took him to a hot, stuffy room filled with hemp smoke and proceeded to interrogate him, ignoring protests that he was a diplomat. One of the men demanded that Devlin kiss his feet. Devlin refused. He had seen how soldiers had stamped on people’s heads as they leant down.
‘Ever played Russian roulette?’ the soldier asked, putting a gun to his head and spinning the chamber. ‘Kiss my foot.’
‘Merde!’ Devlin replied.
The soldier pulled the trigger. Click. Nothing. He cocked the gun without spinning and demanded again that his foot be kissed.
‘Merde!’ shouted Devlin again.
Another click. The pattern
was repeated until the soldier came to pull the trigger for the sixth and – Devlin assumed – the last time.
Again Devlin shouted ‘Merde!’ and then he heard the click.
The gun had been empty. The soldiers laughed and offered him a drink before dropping him back in the centre of town.30
‘The Crisis in the Congo’ was fast becoming the big global news story of its day. Fleet Street’s finest headed into town for the show amid lurid, and almost entirely false, tales of the rape and murder of white women. The only time Park herself was subject to any kind of attack was in the imagination of the visiting British press pack. One day they gathered at the Embassy asking for the truth about the stories.
‘Well, Daphne, you’d better cope with this one,’ Ambassador Scott said playfully.
‘I have not been raped and no, I am not likely to be,’ she told the disappointed hacks.
‘Oh but you must have been,’ they replied. ‘Everyone’s been raped.’
‘I’m very sorry to disappoint you but I haven’t.’
‘Why don’t you tell them your story,’ the Ambassador said with a smile.
Park lived alone in her large house and had woken one morning to the sound of shuffling on the veranda. She had opened her door to find five stark-naked young warriors with spears. She explained that she did not have any work but would get them a drink. Eventually her servants arrived. ‘Who are these people on the veranda?’ she asked.
‘The chief is going to be very angry with us.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you don’t have a gun and you don’t have a dog and don’t have a nightwatchman, we were all afraid that somebody who didn’t know you would come and break in and do things to you. So we have been putting a guard on the house every night. You were not meant to know that it had happened because we knew you wouldn’t like it.’
Anticipation mounted among the ravenous pack as she told the story, and they steeled themselves for a front-page tale of a British female diplomat trapped, and treated who knows how by angry spear-wielding Africans. They listened attentively until she explained they had come only to guard her.
‘Oh. But then they came back and raped you?’ the hacks asked.
‘Don’t you ever listen to anything!’ exclaimed an exasperated Park.
‘There’s no story in that,’ they said, crestfallen. Park certainly made an impression on one of the more serious journalists who covered the crisis. ‘One of the most active and effective figures on the Leopoldville scene at the time,’ recalled Richard Beeston. ‘She was to be seen everywhere, a large bespectacled lady, usually with cigarette ash on her ample bosom.’31
As the mutiny continued, Lumumba’s problems multiplied. On 11 July, the southern province of Katanga seceded. Katanga was not just any province. It was where the bulk of the mineral resources lay and its leader, Moise Tshombe, based in the provincial capital of Elisabethville, hated Lumumba. He was also close to the Belgians, who saw a chance to use their man to build an alternative power base. A nasty breed of white mercenaries, some Belgian, a few British, bearded and wielding knives and guns, aided Tshombe. Stripped of Katanga’s riches, the Congo would not be a viable state. In London, the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan came under strong pressure from the business lobby and from the right of the Conservative Party to recognise the secession and back the Katangans.32 Secret delegations from Katanga had been approaching British officials from the previous year asking if they might be absorbed into the neighbouring British-led Central African Federation, whose leader in 1960 was also pushing Downing Street to help carve Katanga out of the Congo.33 The final challenge to Lumumba’s authority came when, only two weeks after granting independence, the Belgians responded to the escalating violence by sending in paratroopers to protect ‘Western interests’ and their citizens’ lives. This was a ‘humanitarian’ intervention, they explained, and explicitly modelled their rationale on that used by Britain and France in Suez in 1956.34
The secession of Katanga and the arrival of Belgian troops was beginning to look like a deliberate pincer move on Lumumba, who was now faced with the break-up of his country and its effective recolonisation.35 Lumumba stopped the army mutiny but in doing so took another step on his fateful journey. He asked one of his closest aides to become chief of staff to the army, a man he trusted like a brother. His name was Mobutu. Mobutu had been expelled from school and sent to the Force Publique as punishment. The experience was the making of him as his hard-working, risk-taking style brought him admirers, including Lumumba. What Lumumba did not know was that his friend had also become a friend of Larry Devlin. The beginnings of a long alliance had been forged at the conference in Belgium in January which Mobutu attended as an aide to Lumumba. Devlin had watched the Soviets working the delegations of locals looking for recruits and he had conducted his own inquiries as to who might be worth getting to know. The name of Lumumba’s personal secretary kept coming up. ‘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,’ Devlin later recalled.36 He denied that Mobutu became a recruited agent to whom he could give orders. ‘He was a co-operator, not a pussycat,’ he explained.37 Mobutu had an air of almost impossible bravery which was useful when, aged twenty-nine, he walked up to soldiers pointing their guns at him and slowly pulled down the barrels to quell the mutiny. He persuaded the men to return to their barracks, promising them a pay rise and so becoming their hero.
Lumumba needed help to deal with a country that was falling apart. He was also determined to crush his rival, Tshombe. He turned first to the United Nations. They sent in a large international force, but Lumumba was angry that they saw their role as one of strict neutrality and non-intervention and were unwilling to help him bring Katanga to heel (an outcome that was partly the result of British pressure behind the scenes to prevent such a role).38 UN officials found Lumumba increasingly erratic. ‘His dealings with the UN quickly deteriorated into a bewildering series of pleas for assistance, threats and ultimatums,’ recalled a UN official. ‘He issued improbable demands and expected instant results.’39
He began to look elsewhere for help in confronting the secessionists. At one point, members of his cabinet asked the US for 2,000 troops, but President Eisenhower said they could not provide military support unilaterally and Lumumba disavowed the request.40 So Lumumba made the next of his ruinous decisions. He first asked the Soviet Union to ‘follow’ the situation, a move designed to put pressure on the UN and the West to persuade the Belgians to get out. But fearing that the Katangan secession was about to become a fait accompli with Belgian help, a few days later he formally asked Khrushchev for assistance. He did not realise what a dangerous game he was playing. It was a time when Cold War tensions were at a high and he was introducing the superpower conflict into the Congo. After those initial fears of tanks rolling through Austria, the confrontation in Eastern and Central Europe had settled into stasis, especially after the crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 had made it clear that roll-back was over. So increasingly East and West had begun to project their struggle further afield, seeking allies and proxies against each other in the Middle East, Asia and now Africa. Khrushchev in Moscow had seen an opportunity to use decolonisation as a means of winning influence and introducing Communism in the developing world, making his overtures with the offer of military and economic assistance to those leaders like Nkrumah who were socialist in orientation and who disliked Western attempts to perpetuate economic dependency. In the summer of 1960, just as the Congo crisis began, the KGB opened up its first department to specialise in sub-Saharan Africa.41
Daphne Park had reported back to MI6 that after independence Lumumba might turn to Moscow.42 Now, the Congo crisis rose quickly to the top of the agenda, not just for the spies but for the British cabinet. On 19 July, the Foreign Secretary reported that Lumumba was threatening to accept an offer of military as
sistance from the Soviet Union unless the UN called on all Belgian forces to withdraw in three days.43 Lumumba made a disastrous visit to the US soon afterwards. One State Department official who met him described him as having an almost ‘“psychotic” personality’. ‘He would never look you in the eye. He looked up at the sky. And a tremendous flow of words came out … And his words didn’t ever have any relation to the particular things that we wanted to discuss … You had a feeling that he was a person that was gripped by this fervour that I can only characterize as messianic … he was just not a rational being.’44 Scott in Leopoldville at first cautioned against listening too much to the Americans. ‘Lumumba is not mad,’ he cabled home; ‘we have to deal with Lumumba.’45
But the CIA and Washington were becoming alarmed, fearing that the Congo crisis might be the trigger for war. Devlin never trusted Lumumba. He believed that the Prime Minister’s staff included known KGB agents and others under their influence. While he did not think Lumumba himself was a Soviet agent, he did believe he was getting too close to Moscow. ‘The ambassador and I concluded that while Lumumba thought he could use the Soviets, they were, in fact, using him,’ Devlin later recalled.46 If the Soviets intervened in force, then the Americans would go in against them. ‘We would all be in the fight,’ as President Eisenhower put it.47 In London, Harold Macmillan mused apocalyptically in his diary: ‘I have felt uneasy about the summer of 1960. It has a terrible similarity to 1914. Now, Congo may play the role of Serbia. Except for the terror of the nuclear power on both sides, we might easily slide into the 1914 situation.’48 George Kennedy Young believed that the Congo was the first test for a new Russian strategy of ‘revolution by proxy’. The Joint Intelligence Committee in London began work on a paper on the Russian capabilities for intervention, and military planners undertook ‘preliminary work’ on a response.49
Hundreds of KGB men, Devlin believed, were flooding into the country during July and August. His agents at the airport counted anyone white coming off a Russian plane as a citizen of the Soviet Union and quite possibly KGB. The Soviets had backed away from a full-scale military intervention but they were offering extensive support. Devlin was sure that arms and ammunition were also arriving, packed in Red Cross boxes, as part of a Soviet strategy to make Lumumba dependent and ultimately ensure that he was under their control.50
Art of Betrayal Page 14