Chapter 16

The CIA And The Lumumba Assassination

We delayed using what Hersh suppressed from the Brugioni book to include what, had he been an honest writer intending an honest book, he would not have overlooked, from another book. But, had Hersh used this other book, what he would have dared, malign Kennedy with would have been reduced enormously.

Both address the credibility that can be given by any writer to what the CIA and its people say without independent corroboration of it and without, to begin with, asking questions about it.

There is no question at all about it, those assassinations Hersh attributes to Kennedy were CIA assassinations and far from all of them. That compromises the CIA and its people as sources, yet they are all Hersh claims to have to pin the assassinations responsibility on Kennedy. Only those whose jobs those assassinations were!

There is also, with intelligence agencies and their personnel of all ranks, the question of truthfulness, really of their untruthfulness. Some of what one of Hersh's sources, former CIA Director Helms, said when he was interviewed after he got off scot free when charged with lying that as really perjury, when he got off on a deal, illustrates this basic truth when compared with what is to be quoted from Richard Mahoney. The basic truth is that it serves their purposes the spooks lie, and if than means perjury, they become felons — and get away with it, as Helms did.

The June 1, 1978 Los Angeles Times headlined the story it put together from what had been provided by wire services, "Helms Regrets Mafia Aid in Plot Against Castro." About three- fourths of the story follows, with only what relates to the Nixon administration and The Watergate scandal omitted:

Washington — Former CIA Director Richard Helms, breaking a long silence, said Wednesday: the agency's decision to enlist the Mafia in plotting against Cuban President Fidel Castro "is one of the greatest regrets of my life."

"When I found out about it, I should have corked it off and stopped it right then and there, and I am genuinely sorry that I didn't, and I can't do any more than say that," Helms said in a taped television interview with David Frost on NBC.

"I am sorry. It was a mistake. It was a case of poor judgement."

Helms said the agency was under pressure to "make contacts to Cuba," and he let the pressure "get the better of my judgement."

In 1975, West Coast mob leader John Rosselli told Congress that he and Sam Giancana, a Chicago Mafia figure were recruited in late 1960 on behalf of the CIA to attempt to assassinate Castro, his brother, Raul, and revolutionary Ché Guevara by putting poison pellets in their food.

Giancana was slain in his suburb Chicago home in what was called a Mafia "hit" before he could testify to Congress. Rosselli was murdered in Florida before he could be questioned in detail on the alleged murder plot.

Helms said there was "not the slightest evidence that any poison pellets ever even got to Havana."

We have the word of a gangster (Rosselli) that they did, but we have no record, no evidence, no nothing, and I don't believe it and I think he and his case officer grossly exaggerated what they accomplished or were trying to accomplish," Helms said.

At another point he said: "As far as the Mafia bit was concerned, that is one of the greatest regrets of my life — that I had anything to do with that."

He said the only thing he had authorized was an operation under which the Mafia would try to make contact with organized crime elements in Cuba and "I shouldn't have even authorized that."

Questioned further by Frost on whether the CIA or any American agency should consider assassination as a political tool, he said: "Assassination is not a way for the American government. It is not a way for the CIA.

"I was never in favor of it. Murder will out. It will always, eventually leak around in some fashion that it was done."

Helms commented publicly for the first time since he pleaded no contest last fall to a misdemeanor charge of lying to a Senate subcommittee about the CIA's covert attempts to subvert Chile's 1970 presidential election. He was given a six-month suspended jail sentence.

In the interview, Helms also: — Accused his successor, William Colby and former President Gerald R. Ford of weakening the CIA by opening up secret documents to the public and Congress. He said the Ford administration should have gone all the way to the Supreme Court before giving up the documents.

Helms said he "was never in favor of " assassination. What better reason could their be for his authorizing, being part of them?

He also said that "Assassination as a political tool is not a way for the American government. It is not a way for the CIA."

Whose way it certainly was!

For the CIA whose years of assassination plotting include more assassination plots than we can know. In this interview Helms added two to those the CIA had admitted earlier, its attempts to assassinate Raul Castro and Ché Guevara.

Helms makes it clear that all the CIA got from the Mafia was big talk, that there is no evidence it ever really did a thing about those assassinations.

What better reason could the CIA and Helms have had than the nothingness of their first assassination conspiracy with the Mafia to get into it with them all over again after that first one ended in scandal?

That the CIA did we saw earlier. It plotted to have the Mafia kill Castro a second time.

They all claim they were under great pressure but they never came up with any proof of that pressure to assassinate. There is none. There is only the opposite, in the Richard Mahoney book we soon come to. It was the CIA that wanted the assassinations its Helmses and Halperns claim, to avoid their own responsibilities, were compelled by those unproven "pressures."

With those from whom the pressure could have come dead, there is only the CIA's word that it was compelled by that alleged "pressure" from those now dead and from whom it claimed no such pressure when they were alive.

The claimed pressure from Kennedy, we have seen, is a lie.

But it was a lie to Hersh's liking so he added lies to it, added Hershian lies in support of the CIA's lies, to blame Kennedy.

It should also be noted that the Helms/CIA concept of democracy is for there to be no checks on it, nothing reported to the Congress that the CIA does not want Congress to know, the unelected CIA and the elected Congress.

This tells us how the Helms mind works, what he thinks democracy is, and that he thinks the CIA should be exempt from that system of freedom through self-government.

It is also the CIA's record in the Congo.

My friend David Wrone, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin and I were discussing Hersh's raping of our history of the Kennedy administration with regard to the assassination's responsibility for which Hersh attributes to Kennedy. (These are the assassinations about which Hersh told the Toronto Star's Lynda Hurst, [her italics] "Gimme a break," when she asked for proof that Kennedy had authorized any one of them.) One of the political assassinations for which Hersh held Kennedy responsible was that of Patrice Lumumba, who ruled the Congo, which had been a Belgian colony. Dave sent me a chapter of a thoroughly dependable book of authentic authorship that deals with it, unlike Hersh, with fact and with extensive source notes, a large percentage of which are to official documents. J.F.K.: Ordeal in Africa, published by the Oxford University Press in 1983, is by Richard D. Mahoney. He spent seven years researching it. He is a lawyer and a professor of International Studies at the American Graduate School of International Management.

Hersh missed this basic work in his research only because he wanted to; he knew he had to.

No effort is made to explain all the names that are not explained in what is quoted from the Mahoney chapter that includes the Lumumba assassination. It is titled "Lumumba's House." It is twenty pages long (pages 69-88) and, unlike Hersh, who has no end notes at all, these twenty pages have a hundred and eighty-seven end notes (pages 262-273).

Those explanations, which could have to be quite numerous and lengthy, are not included because they are not essential to the reason for including these sentences and paragraphs from the Mahoney classic to reflect the responsibility of the CIA and the Eisenhower administration for the Lumumba assassination and more, including the death if not the assassination of the UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold.

Katanga Province, with colonialist help, broke away from the Congo. There was a war in which there was foreign intervention, and Lumumba was taken prisoner.

There is no doubt at all about it, Kennedy had nothing to do with that assassination, which was before he took office; did not want it to happen; had stated a policy that meant Lumumba would be freed, not assassinated; and he was not able to influence events. As Mahoney wrote about it,

White House photographer Jacques Lowe caught Kennedy, horror struck with head in hand, receiving the first news by telephone a full four weeks later on February 13th. All the anguished searching for a way around Lumumba had been for naught. Forty-eight hours before Kennedy had even taken the presidential oath, Lumumba was already dead (page 70).

That picture captured Kennedy's great anguish, his shock, his disbelief, his sense of horror, as no posed picture possibly could. Oxford University Press used it on the cover, of which it takes about three-fourths.

Mahoney's first words in the chapter that follows that includes the Lumumba assassination and the words with which Mahoney concludes the chapter that precedes it, which follow in that order, help understanding:

The savagery of the Cold War might never have spread to Central Africa had it not been for the secession of Katanga — the Congo's alien within. Katanga's secession deprived the newly-independent Congo of half of its national revenue and brought the country to the brink of civil war. It also figured directly in the death of the two men most capable of restoring unity to the troubled country — Patrice Lumumba and Dag Hammarskjold (page 89).

* * *

The CIA station proposed that, in addition to ridding itself once and for all of Lumumba the Kasavubu-Mobutu regime follow Katanga's example and recruit large numbers of white officers to put some backbone into the ANC. Ambassador Timberlake whose diplomatic job had previously been little more than a fig leaf for the CIA operation, objected when he learned of this plan. He cabled home that this "will not cure the disease from which Mobutu's army is suffering but will simply provide expensive aspirin tablets to reduce fevers temporarily" (page 58).

Timberlake, Eisenhower's ambassador, continued as ambassador into the Kennedy administration.

From the second page of Mahoney's chapter, "Lumumba's House":

Four times during September and October, Lumumba had "escaped" confinement to rally supporters and to give speeches before large and cheering crowds. The Kasavubu-Mobutu regime had responded with an ultimatum to the UN, which they blamed for Lumumba's sorties: "The ANC is ready to do battle with the UN in order to arrest Patrice Lumumba" Mobutu, again, did not have the stomach to act.

Outside the inner ring of blue-helmeted UN soldiers surrounding the house and the second ring of Mobutu's paracommandos, there was a third presence: the CIA's small squad of assassins trying to "pierce both Congolese and UN guards" to reach "the target." (page 60).

Mahoney then has a subheading that follows. For it, the preceding and the ensuing source notes are all CIA cables. Devlin was CIA:

POSSIBILITY USE COMMANDO TYPE GROUP FOR ABDUCTION EITHER VIA ASSAULT ON HOUSE UP CLIFF FROM RIVER OR, MORE PROBABLY, IF ATTEMPTS ANOTHER BREAKOUT INTO TOWN . . .

Lumumba, however, eluded his would-be assassins by securing himself in the house with his wife and children. He dismissed most of his servants, "so entry by this means seems remote," Devlin reported to headquarters.7 The CIA's "hunting season" was further frustrated by the inability of agents to establish an "observation post" near the house possibly for the purpose of positioning a sniper (page 60).

On Mahoney's next page:

They were waiting for him. "[A] decision on breakout will probably be made shortly . . . station has several possible assets to use in event of breakout and studying several plans of action," Devlin cabled headquarters.11 On the night of November 27, during a tropical storm, Lumumba escaped. He picked up his wife and son Roland at the Guinean embassy and, with several followers, fled east toward Stanleyville. When president Nkrumah of Ghana heard the news he shook his head: "O impetuous man."12

The CIA worked with Mobutu and Sûrété Chief Nendaka "to get the roads blocked and troops alerted [to block] possible escape route." Three days after his escape from Leopoldville Lumumba was arrested at Mweka, near port Francqui (page 61).

The first of these two end notes is to other public sources of the information. The second one is to a CIA cable and the source Hersh used, the Church Committee report.

Then Mahoney gets to what he heads, "The Presidential Transition." In it he confirms what we reported earlier, that in its last days the Eisenhower administration was deciding and setting policy for the Kennedy administration instead of allowing the elected Kennedy administration to make and follow its own policies. It is clear that these last-minute policy gasps of the outgoing Eisenhower administration gave Kennedy no alternative other than following the policies the Eisenhower administration had set for him:

On the day before his inauguration, Kennedy met with Eisenhower to discuss foreign policy problems. On each crisis Eisenhower urged Kennedy to continue the hard line. He advised him not to rule out the possibility of unilateral military intervention to save Laos from the communists.21 Regarding Cuba, Eisenhower said that it had been "the policy of this government" to aid the and-Castro guerrillas "to the utmost." (As if to put the finishing touches on Kennedy's Cuban inheritance, Eisenhower had severed diplomatic relations with Cuba only seventeen days before he left the White House. He then told his staff that he wanted the Cuban exiles to set up a government-in-exile. "I'd like to see recognition accorded promptly. If possible before January 20."22)

The Eisenhower administration also made eleventh-hour efforts to tie its successor's hands in Africa. Kennedy's sharp attacks on the Eisenhower record in Africa before and during the campaign has aroused antipathy in the Washington foreign policy community. The Eisenhower men tried to rush through the appointments of six senior State Department officials as ambassadors to the new African countries in late December 1960. Chester Bowls and Robert Kennedy, representing the transition team, succeeded in blocking the effort.23

Nowhere was the Eisenhower record more vulnerable to exposure than in the Congo. The American plot to kill Lumumba was caught up in a web of secrets and alliances that could not, under any circumstances be permitted to unravel (page 62).

The first of these source notes is Eisenhower's Book, Waging Peace, 1956-61, page 614. The second says "This was called the Henderson Plan," and three sources are cited.

Once Eisenhower broke relations just a few days before Kennedy was sworn in and with those coming Bay of Pigs invaders of Cuba he had training in Guatemala, there was simply nothing Kennedy could do but be pulled by the ring Eisenhower had in his nose.

Mahoney says that "In his discussions with {Ambassador Adlai] Stevenson, Hammarskjold had accused [the Eisenhower ambassador to the Congo] Timberlake of having 'pleaded for the arrest of Lumumba.'"

Two pages later:

Like Nkrumah [of Ghana], Nehru [of India] was infuriated by the West's role in undermining Lumumba. "Mobutu's forces have behaved scandalously. Shocking treatment meted out to Lumumba and others has also aroused deep resentment," he wrote Hammarskjold in January 1961. The Eisenhower administration had tried to force Hammarskjold to withdraw his Special Representative Dayal (an old friend of Nehru and one of India's leading diplomats) from the Congo on the grounds that Dayal was pro-Lumumba and committed to the disbanding of the Kasavubu-Mobutu regime. Dayal's decision to throw up the protective UN cordon around Lumumba's house in October had incensed Kasavubu and his collaborators and had frustrated the CIA's attempt to get at Lumumba (page 64).

This says pretty clearly, not for the first time, that before Kennedy was President, the CIA was trying to assassinate Lumumba.

The UN was trying to restore peace and to save Lumumba and in this Kennedy was in full support of the UN:

At the first meeting of the Kennedy cabinet, Stevenson repeated the Hammarskjold proposal. In his State of the Union address a few days later, the President promised to stand behind the UN: "We shall continue to support the heroic efforts of the United Nations to restore peace and order . . . efforts which are now endangered by mounting tensions, unsolved problems, and decreasing support from many member states." As Hammarskjold had proposed, Kennedy sent messages to the Third World leaders who were contemplating a withdrawal of their contingents because of foreign subversion and the plight of Lumumba. "African independence must be genuine independence, not just a cover for some form of continuing control from the outside . . ." Kennedy wrote Nehru (pages 64-5).

Kennedy also offered a plan:

On February 1, the Congo Task Force submitted its policy proposals to the President. The Task Force recommended that the UN be given the right through the Security Council to use force to bring Congolese military factions under control and to cut off outside assistance. This proposal represented a sharp break from past US. policy, which had favored a toothless UN presence in the Congo in which UN forces were little more than a fig-leaf for the exercise of American and Belgian power (page 65).

There were still other ways in which Kennedy tried. Then Mahoney writes:

But what about Lumumba? Was he to be saved under Kennedy's plan? Or was the political price of ransoming him too high? Perhaps sensing that Lumumba's fate might be sealed before Kennedy was even inaugurated, Governor G. Mennen Williams (who had been named Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs) summoned a Belgian diplomat two days before the inauguration for an informal communication — that Lumumba not be "liquidated." Stevenson recommended Lumumba's release or, at the least, his protection from further harm (page 66).

Stevenson, Kennedy's ambassador to the UN, spoke for Kennedy in demanding Lumumba's "protection from further harm." Kennedy wanted to save Lumumba, not assassinate him.

The Lumumba the CIA wanted to assassinate, according to the still in place Eisenhower ambassador to the Congo, was needed urgently:

Even Timberlake admitted in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that "the sad fact is that there is not anybody down there outside Lumumba who has got the kind of energy and drive and imagination which would let him be Prime Minister (page 66).

By "newcomers" in what follows Mahoney refers to the Kennedy administration:

But these stirrings of dissent among the newcomers were not enough to neutralize the prevailing phobia about Lumumba within the established centers of power in Washington. The CIA's vested interest in protecting its clients in Leopoldville was deep. Top agency officials such as Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell and Bronson Tweedy had authorized and organized the assassination attempts against Lumumba. There could be no going back for personal, as much as official, reasons. Dulles met with President Kennedy about the Congo on January 26.

Devlin had reported on January 14 — six days before Kennedy took office — that Lumumba was to be delivered into the hands of his most hated enemies in Bakwanga. According to another source, it was Devlin's "forceful intercession" with Kasavubu and others that brought about the transfer. Devlin has denied this, but one CIA officer, Paul Sakwa, remembered that Devlin subsequently "took credit" for the assassination. The CIA base chief in Elisabethville, Mr Doyle, provided a touch of levity in the otherwise grim proceedings:

THANKS FOR PATRICE. IF WE HAD KNOWN HE WAS COMING, WE WOULD HAVE BAKED A SNAKE (page 67).

Both source notes include the Church committee report.

There is no doubt about it, the CIA, beginning at its very top, plotted the Lumumba assassination before Kennedy was President and then had it rushed so he would be assassinated before Kennedy was President and order that it not be done.

The Dulles in the next excerpt was the CIA Director:

At least in the view of Dulles and other Eisenhower holdovers, the release of Lumumba would result in a communist takeover and one more breach in the containment wall (page 68).

The lingering Eisenhower ambassador apparently believed that it was the CIA and the military rather than the President who determined what United States policy would be:

Ambassador Timberlake for some reason, was still worried that the Kennedy plan would bring Lumumba back. He believed, furthermore, that the Kennedy men had deliberately bypassed the CIA and the Defense Department in formulating the new policy. With Timberlake in attendance Congo meetings during the administration's first two weeks had a "dangerous consequences" of the Kennedy plan were soon front-page features (pages 68-9).

Then Mahoney gets to "The Murder of Lumumba."

In the Congo, the effect of erroneous press reports was even more damaging. The Kasavubu-Mobutu regime began to consider the Kennedy administration a threat to its very survival. The Kennedy plan was seen as evidence of "a new and unexpected solidarity with the Casablanca powers . . ." (the radical nonaligned African governments that supported Lumumba). The Léopoldville regime turned on the American embassy with sudden vehemence. The embassy received calls from "friends" suggesting that it would be unwise for Americans to be on the streets after dark. ANC troops were put on alert. In early February, Mobutu announced that before being disarmed his troops would do battle against the UN, a threat he carried out two weeks later.

The CIA station in Léopoldville bore much responsibility for the rupture. It had opposed any political solution to the power struggle and, worse, had fortified the resolve of Kasavubu and Mobutu, Nendaka and the rest to use violence against others to save themselves. During the first two weeks of January, as the inauguration of the Kennedy administration drew near, Devlin had spoken of the need to take "drastic steps" before it was too late. The irony was that despite the Kennedy administration's efforts in Washington and New York to find a workable formula for peace in the Congo, Devlin and his associates (with a virtual carte blanche from CIA headquarters and unlimited funds on which to draw) had more influence over the course of events in the Congo than had their nominal superiors in the White House and the State Department.

The effect was tragic: reports that the incoming administration planned to liberate the imprisoned Lumumba on the one hand, and the CIA's deadly urgings on the other acted like a closing vice on the desperate men in Léopoldville. On January 17, they put Lumumba and two of his leading supporters aboard a plane bound for Bakwanga, Kasai, the home territory of Lumumba's tribal enemy, "King" Albert Kalonji. When it was learned en route that there were UN troops at the Bakwanga airport, the plane was redirected to Elisabethville. Lumumba and the other two prisoners were beaten repeatedly during the flight. The sight of the brutality caused the Belgian radio operator to vomit, and the crew locked themselves in the cockpit. Shortly after arriving in Elisabethville the prisoners were executed, probably at the order of Katangese authorities. In Léopoldville the house that Lumumba had lived in was looted by Mobutu's soldiers (pages 69-70).

The CIA which had its own policy, opposed the Kennedy administration policy of finding a workable formula for peace that included freeing the political prisoners, saving Lumumba.

In the aftermath of the execution, the CIA was privately exultant.

"Stinky" (the agency's nickname for Lumumba) had finally been eliminated. Fourteen years later under the glare of congressional investigation, the CIA tuned penitent. Agency officials involved in the plot tried to minimize their role in so far as the documentary record would permit. "The fate of Lumumba in the end was purely an African event," former CIA Africa Division Chief Bronson Tweedy testified. John Stockwell, a CIA agent who had served in the Congo from 1965 to 1969, concluded otherwise: "Eventually he was killed, not by our poisons, but beaten to death, apparently by men who had agency cryptonyms and received agency salaries." Whichever conclusion lies closer to the truth, there can be little doubt that the CIA — though not the actual assassin — was a moving force behind the murder (pages 70-1).

This is the un-Hershed version, the actual history. In the Hershed version Kennedy was responsible for the Lumumba assassination for which the CIA was responsible, the CIA that had its own policy independent of that of the Kennedy administration and opposed to Kennedy's, the CIA that is always an unquestionably dependable source to Hersh.

As Mahoney says (on page 77), "The CIA station simply ignored Washington's diplomatic initiatives and continued its effort at 'king-making' in Léopoldville."

That the CIA's policy was contrary to that of the Kennedy administration's Mahoney says specifically:

According to one former CIA official, the agency's purpose in arming pro- Western Katanga was to build up a fall-back regime if the government in Léopoldville fell to Lumumbists. This practice was expressly contrary to U.S. policy and in direct violation of the UN-Security Council resolutions (page 81).

With regard to the Congo and the Lumumba assassination, Hersh exercised the "absolute" right he claimed to write history his way.

There are no Halperns, no Harveys among Mahoney's sources, none who had to cover themselves or the CIA, as those used by Hersh did.

There was no "pressure" on the CIA to get Lumumba killed.

It was the CIA's idea. As were the assassination plots.

The CIA whose word Hersh never questions, the CIA that to him is a always dependable, a trustworthy source.

This tells us a little about the CIA, what it is capable of; and whether its word can be taken as well as how it does what it does — for which Hersh holds Kennedy responsible.

What it does and whether its word can be taken, again from its record, is the reason for including some of what I wrote for another purpose years ago.