by Ravi Somaiya
Footnotes
1 Until relatively recently, Sweden had very high rates of incarceration for mental illness. That has been taken as evidence of a prevalence of mental illness there. It is more likely to be evidence of a desire to categorize away those who didn’t quite fit in. Strindberg was institutionalized, for example. The country also performed involuntary lobotomies into the 1950s, and involuntary sterilization up until 1975.
2 Waldenström would later become a renowned doctor.
3 Bernadotte was later assassinated by a militant Israeli group, Lehi, after he had tried to broker a peace with Palestine in 1948. In 1983, one of Lehi’s former leaders, Yitzhak Shamir, became prime minister of Israel.
4 Wallenberg disappeared in Russia in 1945. He was never heard from again.
Chapter 4
“The inevitable result will at best be chaos”
The summer of 1960 was a season of hatreds in Leopoldville. One person could not merely disagree with another, but had to despise them or justify why they did not. It seemed every soul felt as though they had been treated unfairly—by life, by each other, by the government, by the Belgians, by the Congolese, by fate. The grievances were hard to dismiss as wanton self-pity because, in a way, each of them was right.
Lumumba had formed a fragile government, but it existed in name only. And he lived with the constant threat that one or other of his allies would turn and seize power.
Across the country, power stations lay idle. Telephone exchanges were unstaffed. Police stations empty. Transportation stilled. When the large steel door to one prison failed to close due to overcrowding, the wardens drove a Land Rover into it until it was snugly in place and a pool of blood was forming underneath.
In time, the traffic lights in Leopoldville would fall into disrepair and cease to work. The tractors and forklifts that were donated to try to rebuild would rust to junk, unused. A visitor to the city years later noticed that there were no old people, and that the city’s most illustrious café had become a bazaar for the disabled and disfigured to offer ivory carvings and small paintings for sale.
The UN forces, now twenty thousand strong in their distinctive blue helmets, had set up in a series of rough encampments. Their light-blue flags flew over the airports in Leopoldville and Elisabethville, too. From outside the Congo, they appeared as little islands of international good intention. From inside, they were just another faction. In Katanga, where Tshombe’s mercenary force had grown to twelve thousand, they were the enemy.
It was called the Congo Crisis.
An American consular official, Larry Devlin, who had recently arrived in Leopoldville with his wife and young daughter, wrote that there was “anarchy throughout the city and, no doubt, through the country at large. Central authority had broken down; there was no one in control who could prevent random acts of barbarity.”
Devlin was thirty-seven, a handsome and laconic Californian with a thicket of black hair and the harried elegance and thrill at close shaves of a foreign correspondent. Though he had a banal consular title, he was, in fact, the CIA’s incoming chief of station, Congo.
The official position of the US government in the summer of 1960 was support for the UN in its mission to reunite the Congo and to rid the country of foreign influences. But Devlin and his superiors saw this as mere detail in a much bigger game. It was synonymous, in his mind, with furthering the interests of the United States against Russia.
The Cold War, he would tell anyone who asked, was much better than the hot version—the version his father had fought twice, in World Wars I and II, and that he had fought, carrying his father’s Colt .45 in the latter.
The details of his subsequent career in the CIA remain classified. But it seems to have included stints in Moscow and Hanoi. And it had led him now to the second floor of the US embassy in Leopoldville, an elegant, flat-roofed block on the corner of Avenue des Aviateurs, near the river, with a facade divided into neat squares by patterned screens.
Devlin had been told that his time in Leopoldville would be dominated by dinners and golfing—that he’d mostly be subtly pulling political strings.
But Congolese soldiers, functionally answerable to nobody, patrolled the streets. They gathered in thickets at the docks, or on street corners, looking for white Europeans. They dressed in their fatigues and, because they had been trained for jungle not urban warfare, sported branches and leaves sticking up from their helmets as an indication of battle-readiness. Pedestrians learned to spot and avoid the shrubbery. To miscalculate was to be drawn, as Devlin was, into their games.
One day that summer, according to his own account, Devlin was picked up by a band of mutinous soldiers and taken to a run-down room near the Congolese quarter of the city. He protested, as the men lit up thick joints and filled the hot room with billowing and pungent clouds of smoke, that he was a diplomat.
A tall soldier in a filthy uniform walked toward him. He picked up a chair, turned its back toward Devlin, sat down astride it, and began removing one of his boots.
“Come over here and kiss my foot, flamand,” he said, according to Devlin, using one of the pejorative terms for white Europeans that had proliferated in the Congo. Devlin had seen this particular game before. If the victim refused, he was beaten. If he accepted, he’d have his face kicked into the ground.
He refused.
The soldier turned his back, pulled a revolver, and began ostentatiously removing its bullets, out of sight. He got up from the chair, put the gun to Devlin’s head, and asked him again to kiss his foot. He refused again.
Click. Relief flooded through Devlin. Click. He yelled merde now between each pull of the trigger. Click. “Just kiss my foot, patron, and you have nothing to fear.” Click. Click. “Last chance, patron. Kiss this foot.”
Click. The soldiers collapsed in laughter and the game was over. The gun had been empty. They called it Congolese roulette. They insisted that Devlin stay and help them finish a bottle of wine they had stolen, then drove him back.
Devlin learned fast that there were never any guarantees that the next game would not end in death. That no two days were precisely the same. That no rules applied. Congolese soldiers mounted checkpoints virtually at random.
The warring factions in the Congolese government might strike out against one another with a wild announcement that never came to anything. Total silence, or kind words, could end in sudden barbarity.
He began preparing for the overwhelming likelihood that a mob of Congolese soldiers would turn one day and attack the American embassy. He had been carrying either a hammer or a butcher’s knife in his jacket. But neither his small team of half a dozen CIA operatives, nor the embassy security staff, he felt, had enough guns.
So he drove his battered Peugeot 403 through Leopoldville, searching for guns to buy. He exchanged a few thick wads of fresh dollar bills for an arsenal. He ended up with a Thompson submachine gun—the one with the big, round magazine, often seen in 1930s gangster films—two semi-automatic Browning pistols, and a box of fragmentation grenades.
Inside the embassy he and a small group of operatives piled all their secret documents into specially supplied “burn barrels”—lined with enough magnesium to blow the roof off if a match were thrown in.
If a mob did attack the building and get inside, the evidence of America’s policy on the Congo could be incinerated in a flash of white light. The CIA had created an Africa Division in 1959. The agency did not see the wave of independence movements as a triumph for African nations that had long chafed under colonialism. It saw them as new territory in the battle against the Soviets.
Devlin had placed a freshly recruited Congolese agent1 at Leopoldville’s N’djili Airport with a notepad. He told the man that any white person disembarking from a Russian plane was to be considered a citizen of the Soviet Union. Tallying studiously, the agent had counted several hundred.
Devlin suspected, too, that the Red Cross boxes that arrived on Soviet planes carried weapons
and matériel for either Lumumba or one of the regional leaders they sought to influence. Many of those leaders were now traveling across the country to and from Leopoldville in pristine new Russian Ilyushin planes and Mil helicopters.
He briefed his superiors that if the Soviets managed to influence and control the Congo, they would use the country as “a base to infiltrate and extend their influence over the nine countries or colonies surrounding the Congo.”
It would, he told them, breezily taking several dizzying hypotheticals as fact, mean that the Soviets had an “extraordinary power base in Africa.” That, in turn, would foster increased influence among less developed nations, and with the UN. And enable them to outflank NATO with military bases on the Mediterranean. It would certainly give them control of the Congo’s minerals—including cobalt—and thus imperil America’s own weapons and space programs.
The CIA director, Allen Dulles, agreed wholeheartedly with the assessment. On August 18, Devlin sent a cable back to headquarters. He believed that the Congo was experiencing a classic Communist takeover run by the Soviets themselves, and their Czech, Guinean, and Ghanaian proxies, both through local Communist parties and covertly. The decisive period, he said in the stilted language of cables, was not far off. “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 or Guinea.”
He proposed assisting anti-Lumumba forces. The CIA’s plan was to replace him with a leader, and a government, that better suited the US. On August 27, the reply arrived on the machine in Devlin’s office. In “high quarters,” it said, implying sign-off from the White House, the clear conclusion was that if Lumumba continued to hold high office, “the inevitable result will at best be chaos and at worst pave the way to Communist takeover of the Congo with disastrous consequences.” Consequently, it said, “we conclude that his removal must be an urgent and prime objective.”
The message gave Devlin broader authority, and encouraged him to take more aggressive action, so long as it was covert. He had, in a break from the usual policy, unlimited funds, and could use his discretion to conduct operations without permission from headquarters. The program he began would grow to become the largest and most expensive in the history of the CIA to that point ($12 million, or about $350 million at current prices).
Devlin’s aim was to replace Lumumba with Joseph Kasavubu, Lumumba’s long-term ally. The two men had birthed a revolution together, but had found victory to be much more difficult than the struggle. Their friendship and alliance had crumbled when exposed to power. Kasavubu now aligned himself with the US. And Devlin wanted to foment and quietly enact a political coup.
His operatives and agents left fat envelopes of cash on the desks of government officials, after brief conversations. It was an attempt to addict them to the flow of dollars, so that if an important political decision needed to be made—say, if a new leader had to be chosen instead of Lumumba—they might be more persuadable.
Anti-Lumumba protests, rallies, and minor acts of violence often featured a white American standing nearby, quietly directing. And Devlin himself fostered relations with a gang known as the Binza group, made up of Congolese political leaders who had drifted away from Lumumba. It was headed by Mobutu, the army chief.
The Binza group visited his home, a nicely laid-out house run by his French wife, Colette, a former ambulance driver for the Free French forces whom he had met during World War II. She served them opulent dinners of lobster imported, packed on ice, from Angola, and cooked à l’Américaine, with a spicy sauce.
Devlin had realized that in the midst of chaos, only overwhelming force carried any weight. And so the head of the army, Mobutu, would have the last word if Kasavubu attempted to overthrow Lumumba. In his memoir, Devlin says he saved Mobutu’s life in September 1960. He had gone to visit the soldier at home, when he saw “a Congolese in civilian clothes standing with his back toward me” aiming a gun at Mobutu. Devlin jumped on the gunman and grabbed the barrel of the gun as they wrestled, twisting it around so the man’s finger broke inside the trigger guard.
In September 1960, Kasavubu declared himself the new leader of the Congo. Lumumba attempted to depose him right back, and the men warred in speeches and radio broadcasts, and furiously attempted to gather support in Parliament.
Mobutu, still grateful to Devlin, arrested Lumumba. He was held at a house surrounded by two cordons. One was made up of Mobutu’s soldiers. The other had been supplied by Hammarskjöld, who was constantly updated on the situation in New York.
Hammarskjöld wanted, more than anything else, for the fighting to stop, so civilian reconstruction could begin. He did not accept the American view that Kasavubu was now the Congolese leader. But he also did not feel he had a mandate to do anything more than protect Lumumba.
“You try to save a drowning man,” he told the assembled delegates at the UN, “without prior authorization and even when he resists you; you do not let him go even when he tries to strangle you.”
Devlin saw it otherwise. This was a successfully orchestrated switch to a much friendlier government. As effective and brilliant as Iran in 1953. The UN, he wrote later, remained dangerously supportive of Lumumba, and he suspected that Hammarskjöld’s forces were plotting to disarm the Congolese army, and even restore Lumumba to power. “We knew if that happened,” he wrote, “it would mean civil strife, the end of Mobutu and… the return of the Soviets.”
Footnotes
1 In CIA parlance, those who work on active duty, like Devlin, are operatives. They sometimes recruit agents—locals or others who agree to work for them on a specific task.
Chapter 5
“You there! I am a witch”
At around the same time in London, in the quiet wood-paneled office that forms the main part of the prime minister’s suite at 10 Downing Street, Harold Macmillan sat behind an imposing leather-topped desk.
Macmillan, a friend of the queen who sported a gray walrus mustache and pin-striped three-piece suits, looked every inch the corporatist, conservative, and capable leader he had become after four years in office and nearly forty in government.
His official position was that Britain would support Hammarskjöld, and the United Nations, in reuniting the Congo. But he was seasoned enough to know there were always wheels-within-wheels. A harried-looking Foreign Office official handed him a report, on thick beige paper. He began to read.
It was marked TOP SECRET PERSONAL and was a report from the Secret Intelligence Service, Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, also known as MI6. It described growing Russian and Chinese influence in Africa, and an abdication by the Belgians who had run the Congo, plunging the nation into abject chaos.
Conspiracy theories were rife, it reported. The same piece of news would instantly be interpreted in five different ways, all of them hinting darkly at a grand plot by the British or the Americans. The Belgians were convinced, for example, that there was a plan in place for Britain to shove them out and take over all the lucrative mineral concessions.
Meanwhile, the Russians, the report said, without recognizing the contradiction, actually were engaged in a conspiracy. They aimed to establish bases, and to gain control of a nationalist movement “through which they can exploit trouble, wherever it may arise in Black Africa.” All the tides were in their favor.
SIS decided to send Daphne Park. She was about to turn forty but had settled early into an agelessness that made it hard to guess whether she was thirty or sixty. She looked a little like Miss Marple, down to the glasses, rolling gait, and palpable intelligence.
She usually had cigarette ash on her blouse. “I have always looked like a cheerful, fat missionary,” she used to say. “It wouldn’t be any use if you went around looking sinister, would it?”
Park had grown up in Africa, about five hundred miles from Dar es Salaam, in what is now Tanzania but was then
the British protectorate of Tanganyika. Her father was a colonial speculator who had panned for gold and grown tobacco and coffee there.
Her childhood had been spent in a mud-brick hut with no running water and kerosene lamps. By their light she read early spy novels by John Buchan, and adventure stories by Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain.
She had won a scholarship first to school in England, then to Oxford during World War II, to study French. (Her classmates recall that she had taken part in a mock bombing, and had been so convincing in her screams and histrionics that she had alarmed the local officials.)
After Oxford, she had railed against the wartime orthodoxy that saw women only as nurses. She wanted front-line action. To be where things were happening. So she had pushed from the nursing corps into a support role that made use of her fluent French. She was to prepare Allied Special Forces soldiers who were being parachuted into France ahead of D-Day for their missions.
She got to know and like these men, with the full knowledge that many of them would die gruesome, uncelebrated deaths at the hands of desperate Nazis. In one case, it became something more. She had begun an affair with a soldier, an American called Douglas DeWitt Bazata, a marksman and boxer described as “a red-haired soldier of fortune.” He called all of his superiors “sugar.”1 It was the only documented romantic relationship in her life.
After the war, the military machinery rearranged itself into a sprawling intelligence apparatus for a more shadowy fight in the decades to come. Park was posted to Vienna to compete with American, French, and Russian spies to recruit, or even kidnap, German scientists who might be useful. It was called dragon hunting, and was the first postwar assignment of her career as an intelligence officer. She formally joined SIS in 1948.