by Ravi Somaiya
Another cable followed, though its sender is not known: “View change in location target, QJ/WIN anxious go Stanleyville and expressed desire execute plan by himself without using any apparat.”
The reply came back: “Concur QJ/WIN go Stanleyville *** we are prepared consider direct action by QJ/WIN but would like your reading on security factors. How close would this place [the United States] to the action?”
Lumumba never made it to Stanleyville anyway. He had a head start on his pursuers. But, depending whether you read an account that sees him as the Congo’s savior, or one that sees him as a dangerous firebrand, he either was compelled to stop and give speeches to his elated supporters, or could not resist the temptation. In any case, as he was about to cross the Sankuru River, a tributary of the mighty Congo, to safety, he was caught by Mobutu’s soldiers.
United Nations troops who were nearby, on the bank of the river, declined, after consulting headquarters, to restore their protection. So he was taken back to Leopoldville by men who had learned to hate him.
Video footage shows him surrounded by dozens of soldiers who are casually abusing him in a manner that makes clear he is no longer human to them, despite his attempts to maintain his dignity and poise. He was forced to eat a copy of one of his speeches as Mobutu looked on with barely suppressed glee.
He was held at Thysville for several weeks. The Belgian historian Ludo De Witte has painstakingly pieced together what happened next.3 He was tortured, repeatedly, by the soldiers at Thysville as they awaited instructions from a group of senior officials in Belgium who reported to the minister for African affairs, Count Harold d’Aspremont Lynden.
In January 1961, Lynden urged in a message that Lumumba “be transferred to Katanga with the least possible delay.” Lumumba was so despised in Katanga that this was tantamount to a death sentence.
The next day, Lumumba and two of his colleagues were flown to Elisabethville. Their captors beat them so savagely during the flight that the pilot was forced to ask them to stop because the plane was at risk of crashing. The Belgian soldiers who were accompanying either joined in or turned away.
The plane landed not at Elisabethville airport, which was controlled by the UN, but at a Katangese military base. All that a contingent of Swedish UN troops nearby saw was unnamed prisoners being escorted by about 130 Katangese police officers. The group quickly disappeared through a hole that had been specially cut in the base’s fence.
For weeks, Hammarskjöld knew only that Lumumba had been taken to Elisabethville in bad condition. But Russia accused him of complicity in his disappearance. It had, said a Soviet diplomat, been “carried out before the eyes of the ‘United Nations Command’ in the Congo. Thus neither the ‘United Nations Command’ nor the Secretary-General can divest themselves of responsibility for these acts organized for the benefit of the colonialists.”
The governments of Indonesia and Morocco and several Arab nations responded by withdrawing their contingents from the UN forces, severely weakening the peacekeeping effort.
On February 13, 1961, Katanga announced formally that Lumumba was dead, but blamed the inhabitants of a mysterious village who it said had captured and set upon him.
What actually happened, according to De Witte’s account, is that Lumumba and his two colleagues were taken to a home, where the leaders of Katanga, including Tshombe, attacked the prisoners until their bodies were smashed and bloodied beyond repair, and the suits of the Katangese leadership were covered in blood. They were driven into the jungle, still alive, tied to a tree, and executed by firing squad.
One of the Belgians involved, Gerard Soete, a former police commissioner, admitted later that he had helped chop Lumumba’s body up to dissolve it in acid. First, though, he pulled two of his teeth, which he stored in a little box as keepsakes.4
John Kennedy was leaving his country home in Middleburg, Virginia, to return to the White House when he heard that Lumumba was confirmed dead. His immediate fear was that the murder would only escalate the violence. “We in the United States regret this tragedy,” Adlai Stevenson, the US ambassador to the UN, said. “We hope that men everywhere will not seek revenge but reconciliation.” The British reserved judgment but condemned the violence, too.
Lumumba’s supporters were less circumspect. A mob of about three hundred African independence protesters immediately attacked the office of the Belgian envoy in Cairo with barrages of heavy stones. Another mob of about five hundred smashed up the Belgian embassy in Moscow.
UN troops in the Congo were put on alert for similar outbreaks of vengeance. Hammarskjöld had liked Lumumba, but had grown to worry that he was increasingly erratic. He described his conflicted feelings in a letter to Steinbeck shortly after Lumumba’s death was confirmed.
I incline to the conclusion that no one, in the long pull, will really profit from Lumumba’s death; least of all those outside the Congo who now strain to do so but should one day confront a reckoning with truth and decency… Events in the Congo move quickly and, it seems, so far always badly or in bad directions.
Hammarskjöld had always received death threats. Now, as the world began to blame him for failing to protect Lumumba, at least, and complicity in his death at worst, they ramped up.
Russia hated Hammarskjöld as an agent of the West. The West hated him for opening the door to Russia in the Congo. The Congolese hated him for Lumumba’s death. The Belgians and white Africans who had actually killed Lumumba hated him because he had attempted to stop their secession. He responded in a speech to the UN Security Council in New York.
The UN, Hammarskjöld said, had tried only to stop the war in the Congo escalating into an international conflict. “We countered effectively efforts from all sides to make the Congo a happy hunting ground for national interests,” he said. “To be a road-block to such efforts is to make yourself the target of attacks from all those who find their plans thwarted.”
Footnotes
1 One of Park’s colleagues described it, in 2017, as very similar to America under Donald Trump.
2 Devlin maintained until his death that he had calculated quickly: If he refused, he’d be replaced as station chief by someone who would do it. He writes, in his memoir, that he agreed but slow-rolled the operation, playing his bosses along. Another CIA operative in the Congo, Howard Imbrey, said later that Devlin had, in fact, sent the poison back to headquarters with a message: “Don’t you know the Belgians are going to kill him, what do you want us to do?”
3 De Witte, in a letter to the New York Review of Books in 2001, also lays some of the blame for the fall of Lumumba’s government at Hammarskjöld’s door, for failing, essentially, to use force in his favor. Senior UN officials dispute that interpretation.
4 Though the Belgian Parliament commissioned a report into De Witte’s findings, which named many of those involved, nobody has been brought to justice for the crime. There was little appetite for an activity that would have required a total remaking of Belgian society. Even King Baudouin, who had never forgiven the humiliation of Lumumba’s fiery independence day speech, knew of the plans to send him to his death.
Chapter 7
“Stateless soldier of fortune”
The Memling Hotel, an eight-story white edifice that filled one corner of the intersection of Avenues Moulaert and Stanley in central Leopoldville, was a hub for the diplomats, journalists, and spies1 who had poured in to the city during the conflict.
Inside, on December 14, 1960, a week or so after Lumumba had been taken, Jose Mankel, the safecracking CIA agent code-named QJWIN, sat in a sleek, white leather chair. He flicked his eyes from time to time at a man seated at the long bar in the double-height lobby.
Something made Mankel suspect that the man at the bar, beneath a strange haircut, was a spy like him. It was easy to spark up conversations at the Memling—everyone was out of place, really—and the two men started to talk.
The man told Mankel he was Austrian, and flashed an Austrian passport. But his German was stilt
ed. Even his English was strange, though he said he had lived in America for eight years. When he addressed the staff to order rounds of drinks for whoever was present, he spoke French with a distinctly Parisian accent.
His main mode of conversation was boasting. He said he had lost 12,000 francs playing poker recently. When he described his journey to Leopoldville—from Switzerland, via Frankfurt and Brazzaville—he made sure to mention that he had tens of thousands more in a Swiss bank.
And then, when a moment presented itself in the conversation, he made Mankel an offer. He was a secret agent, he explained, though he remained cagey about the details, and was organizing three networks—one to gather information, one for sabotage, and one an execution squad. He could pay Mankel a $300-a-month retainer.
After a little more evasiveness, the man said what he’d been desperate to say all along—that he worked for the Americans. He said that he met his contact at the central post office in Leopoldville, and asked that if Mankel saw him there, he pretend not to know him.
He boasted that he could get Polaroid cameras into the country in diplomatic pouches, and he stepped away to call an embassy from the bar’s phone—Mankel noted that it was extension 73—and spoke both English and French. He also made a call to Washington, DC, and to Switzerland, that Mankel overheard was about money.
He talked about the fact that he had three cars—one for work, a spare in case that broke down, and a third that he now realized he didn’t need at all and wanted to sell. He had also taken out leases on three photographic shops in the city, and had an apartment, too.
Mankel wanted to know more, and the men arranged to meet again. Eventually Mankel decided to borrow one of the man’s cars, because he had noted that the key ring also held the keys for a postal box.
He planned to make a wax indentation of the key, and copy it, to gain access and see who the man was. But Mankel had to leave the Congo earlier than expected and he never got the chance.2
CIA records, released years later, when operations in the Congo had become a public shame rather than a secret pride, show that the man was, in fact, another CIA agent. He had arrived in Leopoldville in December, after Lumumba was safely delivered to his enemies. He reported to Larry Devlin.
He was code-named WIROGUE and was an “essentially stateless soldier of fortune,” a former citizen of the Soviet republic of Georgia named either David Tzitzichivili or David de Panasket who was also a forger and former bank robber.
In September 1960, unnamed members of the CIA’s Africa Division had met with him to discuss an operational assignment. He was then provided with plastic surgery and a wig so that traveling Europeans would not recognize him, and plastic explosive for an unspecified purpose, and dispatched to Africa.
CIA headquarters messaged Leopoldville before he arrived to describe the agent. “He is indeed aware of the precepts of right and wrong, but if he is given an assignment that might be morally wrong in the eyes of the world, but necessary because his case officer ordered him to carry it out, then it is right, and he will dutifully undertake appropriate action for its execution without pangs of conscience. In a word, he can rationalize all actions.”
The message also outlined an “intent to use him as a utility agent in order to (a) organize and conduct a surveillance team; (b) intercept packages; (c) blow up bridges; and (d) execute other assignments requiring positive action. His utilization is not to be restricted to Leopoldville.”
In January 1961, days after Lumumba had died, drawing that mission to a close, WIROGUE asked to take flying lessons, to supplement his expertise in sabotage and demolitions. His assignment with the CIA did not formally end until September—the month that Hammarskjöld died.
Footnotes
1 These are fundamentally the same person.
2 Mankel was later arrested and put on trial for smuggling in Europe. The CIA discussed whether it could “salvage QJ/WIN for our purposes.” It is not recorded what happened after that.
Chapter 8
“No half-measures”
In August 1961, Hammarskjöld found his monkey, Greenback, hanging from the curtain cord in his Manhattan apartment. He was quite dead, his body limp and lifeless and suffocated as it swung in front of the sweltering skyline. He must have become tangled while playing. Hammarskjöld wrote of it in his journal, in a curious semi-poem that was the third-to-last thing he’d ever write.
Nobody was watching—
And who had ever understood
His efforts to be happy,
His moments of faith in us,
His constant anxiety,
Longing for something
The death hit him hard. It came at nearly the same moment that a friend in Sweden, Hjalmar Gullberg, a poet, had succumbed to a long-term degenerative disease. He wrote a letter to another friend to describe his feelings. “He was indeed one of the few and perhaps last representatives of a spiritual standard, a natural nobility, a warmth of heart and an iron-clad integrity, which is more necessary than ever in the present period of darkness and decay…”
It is likely Hammarskjöld thought of the Congo. Every time he dared hope that his efforts there might have lifted it from the mire of global proxy fights, it plunged in deeper.
By the time Greenback died, horror had overtaken Katanga. Tshombe’s government had ceased, effectively, to function except as a mercenary force determined to defeat both the UN and the Congolese central government and retain independence. UN soldiers were under attack, and fighting daily, against those forces.
In Elisabethville prisoners had escaped and were out looting. The thousands-strong Katangese army and police force, now swelled with even more mercenaries, also targeted “rebels”—certain tribes, notably the Baluba, that were loyal to Leopoldville and did not accept the secession of Katanga. One estimate suggests that, by early 1961, the Katangese and the mercenaries had massacred as many as seventy thousand. The Baluba, in turn, wandered in packs wielding sharpened bicycle chains as defense against any white European.
And cannibalism seems to have been more than just a racist rumor. One picture from the time shows a dead man, his head pointed down a slight slope, his body stretched above him. The meat from the man’s lower legs has been meticulously sliced away between the dirty boots, still on his feet, their laces neatly tied, and his knee-length shorts. The tibia and fibula are exposed in clean, sun-bleached white.
Civilians had learned to stay indoors, even if that meant sitting through the frequent power outages, and brushing their teeth with the local Simba beer when the water stopped.
The chaos was driven in part by forces that Hammarskjöld could not have known about. In the Élysée Palace in Paris, Jacques Foccart, Charles de Gaulle’s adviser on Africa and a supreme creature of French politics, elegant and secretive, had spent the preceding months focused on Katanga.
Foccart was short, pudgy, and always wore a gray suit. His one eccentricity was keeping a parrot.1 But he had been a resistance fighter during World War II. And the habits of cloaks and daggers had stayed with him. He ran his own foreign policy, with the permission of his friend the general.
In 1961, a steady stream of brutal-looking soldiers had been visiting him. These men had gained their first battle experiences in the First Indochina War in Vietnam, a conflict marked more than most by misery and torture. In the mid-1950s they had decamped to Algeria, a French colony, as it mounted guerrilla operations for independence.
They were willing to perpetrate casual horrors to prevent the country leaving France. They established a dozen or so torture chambers across the country. One of them, in a beautiful house called Villa Susini, became infamous. Two bathtubs sat in its courtyard, for drowning. One of its torturers became known as The Doctor, because he liked to use a scalpel. Women were subjected to systematic rape.
When it became clear that the French would lose, and that their government would negotiate with the Algerians, many of those soldiers had formed a terrorist organization, the Organisatio
n Armée Secrète. They killed and injured thousands of people in both Algeria and France in a brutal terrorist campaign to continue colonial rule.
The CIA had intelligence that suggested Foccart had offered these men a pardon for their crimes in Algeria if they would go to Katanga. De Gaulle wanted the uranium, cobalt, and copper for France if the Congo collapsed. And having home soldiers in place was a good start. Besides, many hated De Gaulle, and it might be better if they were far away.
It did not escape Foccart’s attention, as the soldiers began arriving in Katanga, that these ascetic and brutal men also hated Hammarskjöld. They blamed him for undermining the French empire in Algeria.
When they arrived in Katanga, they did not hide their loathing for the UN. One UN official had been attending a cocktail party when he felt a hard object pushed into his back. He turned to find the scarred and twisted face of a French soldier that had been partly shot away, pressed close to his. “You are betraying the last bastion of the white man in Africa,” the soldier said in a French accent. “You will get a knife in your back one of these days.”
The same soldier had boasted to journalists at the Hotel Leopold II that the UN was “pas de probleme! Vingt kilos de plastique et je m’en charge.” (No problem! Twenty pounds of plastic explosive and I’ll take care of it.)
The official leader of the French mercenaries, and effectively of the forces in Katanga, had been a guerrilla warfare expert called Roger Trinquier. He had always wanted to be a schoolteacher, until two years of national service gave him a taste for fighting.
Trinquier treated bloodshed with a chillingly academic mind-set, as though each death helped him refine his theories. “If the prisoner gives the information requested,” he wrote of interrogations in a book of his theories titled Modern Warfare, “the examination is quickly terminated; if not, specialists must force his secret from him.”