A Cold War Killing That Still Haunts Congo

As Congolese citizens head to the polls on Dec. 20, a new book opens old wounds that have yet to heal. The book reminds them why and how the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with its great potential and vast mineral and natural resources—valued at an estimated $24 trillion—has yet to emerge as the rich and powerful country of their dreams.

The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination, Stuart A. Reid, Knopf, 624 pp., $35.00, October 2023.

In The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination, a meticulously researched and well-written page turner, Foreign Affairs executive editor Stuart Reid revisits one of the most consequential political murders of modern history: the assassination of Patrice Lumumba.

It’s a story that has been recounted many times in hundreds of articles and several notable books, including Madeleine Kalb’s Congo Cables, which combed U.S. declassified cables to reconstruct the events leading to the murder, and Ludo De Witte’s The Assassination of Lumumba, which led to the Belgian Parliament’s recognition of Belgium’s responsibility in Lumumba’s death. Given the evidence, it’s remarkable no Congolese government has ever sued for redress and reparations.

Reid begins by taking his readers to Mélin, a picturesque village an hour’s drive from Brussels, where Godelieve Soete kept spent bullets and Lumumba’s gold-crowned tooth—all that was left of his body after it was reportedly dissolved in sulfuric acid—that she received from her late father, Gerard Soete, the police commissioner who supervised the destruction of Lumumba’s remains. She relinquished her father’s macabre trophies only when police officers produced a search warrant in January 2016.

Reid’s accomplishment is not to provide new revelations. Rather, The Lumumba Plot embarks on a reexamination of a cold case whereby he revisits available evidence of the crime, including recently declassified documents not available to authors who previously wrote about the killing. He paints substantial biographical portraits of the victim and allows his readers to appreciate Lumumba as a human being in his own time and space.

Patrice Émery Lumumba is a name that enters the mind of Congolese children as soon as they enroll in primary school. Lumumba’s experience, particularly his assassination and martyrdom, will shape their political consciousness and awareness of the place and role of Congo in world affairs.

Lumumba was a self-made man and autodidact who did not graduate from primary school. As a postal clerk in Stanleyville (renamed Kisangani), he established himself as an important community leader with good connections to the local Belgian administration. His standing in the community and his closeness to the Belgian colonial authorities enabled him to meet King Baudouin in 1955 when the latter visited Congo.

The next year, he visited Belgium on a state-sponsored trip, along with other condescendingly labeled évolués—literally “evolved persons.” One salient characteristic of the évolués is that they tended to see themselves as Belgians in the making, separated themselves from their fellow Congolese, fought for their own privileges, did not internalize the grievances of the population at large, and were more interested in approval by the colonial powers. Lumumba relished his évolué status.

In 1956, he embezzled funds at the postal service where he was a clerk. He was arrested and served part of his sentence at the Stanleyville prison before moving to Leopoldville (renamed Kinshasa), over a thousand miles away. On his release in 1957, he was hired as an accountant assistant at a brewery, and later promoted to sales director, with a salary and other rewards reserved for Belgian managers.

It was at this time that he met Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, then the editor of Actualités Africaines, a weekly supplement in the newspaper L’Avenir. The two became friends as Lumumba courted the media. In 1958, Lumumba co-founded the Mouvement National Congolais with Cyrille Adoula, Joseph Iléo, Gaston Diomi, Joseph Ngalula, and others, mostly from Conscience Africaine, a pro-Catholic Church group with an eponymous publication.

At this point, Lumumba was still in the good graces of the Belgians. After his return from the All-African People’s Conference in Accra, he gave a strong, unequivocal surprise speech making the case for independence on Dec. 28, 1958.

That speech, which echoed Joseph Kasavubu’s Abako party’s demands for immediate independence, set Lumumba on a collision course with his erstwhile Belgian friends. From there, Lumumba would have the fastest rise and fall of any Congolese politician.

He served as Congo’s first prime minister, at the time of independence from Belgium, from late June 1960, alongside Kasavubu, the first president. Rocked by turbulent domestic politics and great-power competition, his tenure as head of government lasted just two and a half months.

Lumumba’s old friend and army chief of general staff, Mobutu, staged his first coup—and dismissed both the president and the prime minister—on Sept. 14, 1960. Mobutu, however, reinstated Kasavubu under pressure from his foreign advisors and backers. But he placed Lumumba under house arrest and, when he escaped, Mobutu launched a pursuit culminating in Lumumba’s arrest and torture.

Eventually, when it became too difficult to hold the former prime minister without a trial or legal grounds, Mobutu and his Congolese partners and foreign advisors arranged for Lumumba’s rendition to the southern Katanga province—where his enemies, Congolese and foreign—were content to settle their scores.

On Jan. 17, 1961, a little over six months after he had ascended to the premiership, Lumumba was executed with two of his associates, Joseph Okito and Maurice Mpolo. After they hastily buried the bodies, the killers unearthed their remains later, hacked them into pieces, and disposed of them in sulfuric acid. They burned whatever pieces did not dissolve.

Today, only the gold-crowned tooth remains of Congo’s first prime minister, which Belgium returned to his family in June 2022, 61 years later. That same month, King Philippe of Belgium visited Congo. The monarch reaffirmed his deepest regrets for the wounds of the past but offered no apology.

“Depending on whom you ask,” Reid writes, “Lumumba was an agent of chaos who deserved his fate, a hapless fool outmaneuvered by more powerful forces, or a flawless hero cut down by imperial cruelty. Few can acknowledge that he was none of these things.” And this was true then and is true today in Congo and among Congolese.

Children do not always understand the contours of political and historical events, but they still have an appreciation of their gravity. When I was 8 years old, my family visited the Brouwez house outside Lubumbashi (formerly Elisabethville), where Lumumba and his associates were tortured before their execution. It was a morbid experience. The keepers had adorned a wall with a painting of Lumumba with bold patriotic words honoring his sacrifice: “Le pays exige des martyrs, je me présente.” The country requires martyrs, here I am.

As a schoolchild in the 1970s in Lubumbashi, the old capital of Moïse Tshombe’s secessionist province, I remember that the specter of the violence remained ever present. It had been but a few years since the assassination. President Mobutu—who renamed himself Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa za Banga, “the all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake,” and rechristened the country as Zaire—had embarked on a nation-building and national cohesion program. Not all parts of Congo were receptive to this initiative. Many of Tshombe’s associates were powerful in town. And there were regular reports of disappearances and abductions.

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From the intersection of Avenue des Chutes and Avenue Kambove where my family lived, I walked four blocks up to Collège Imara. One of the last houses I saw before I entered the school compound belonged to Godefroid Munongo. Munongo had been Tshombe’s minister of the interior during the secession. He had roughed up Lumumba when he arrived in Elisabethville—before he faced the death squad.

When I walked two blocks down Avenue des Chutes, I would pass the U.S. Consulate, the star-spangled banner flying high in the wind. Next to the consulate was Tshombe’s old mansion, which was now the provincial governor’s residence. To most Congolese, the U.S. Consulate meant the CIA. Whatever the agency did, I had no idea. But as an 8-year-old, I was certain of one thing: The CIA killed Lumumba. That’s what the grown-ups said.

Mobutu’s residence was three blocks away in a different direction. Whenever he visited, neighborhood children ran to watch his Puma helicopter land and catch a glimpse of him. He would graciously wave at the children. To us, he was literally larger than life. And that was even more so when he stood in his convertible. However, we heard from the grown-ups that he was a CIA man and had killed Lumumba.

The brutality and viciousness of Lumumba’s murder stand out in the history of political assassinations. His enemies did not just want him dead; they were determined to erase all that existed of him. They executed him, cut him into pieces, and melted his body away in acid. What type of humans do such things? That question has haunted generations of Congolese and many others.

Reid attempts to answer this question as well as he can with the materials he collected. Reid builds part of his case around a National Security Council meeting at the White House on Aug. 18, 1960, which Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA; the secretaries of defense, treasury, and commerce; and Douglas Dillon, the undersecretary of state, attended.

At issue was Lumumba’s break with Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations’ secretary-general, over the organization’s operations in Congo and the fear that Lumumba might replace the U.N. with the Soviets, which was unacceptable for the Americans and their allies. Reid writes that Dulles “jumped in to repeat his allegation that Lumumba was in the Soviets’ pay.” For U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, it was inconceivable that one man, supported by the Soviets, would force Washington out of Congo.

“It was likely at this point in the discussion that the president made a fateful utterance,” Reid continues. “Robert Johnson, the official note taker for the meeting, noticed the president turn toward Dulles. Then, he recalled, ‘President Eisenhower said something—I can no longer remember his words—that came across to me as an order for the assassination of Lumumba.’ Fifteen seconds of stunned silence followed Eisenhower’s remark, as the room digested the apparent directive. It was just one sentence, and a somewhat euphemistically phrased one at that, but Johnson would forever remember the shock he felt in that moment.”

According to Reid, when Johnson asked his boss for clarification, he was told not to mention it. It appears that the people who attended the meeting interpreted Eisenhower’s words differently. He writes that Dillon, for instance, did not recall a “clearcut order” but admitted that the “general feeling” of the U.S. government was that Lumumba had to be dealt with. But the president’s son, John Eisenhower, who also attended the meeting, insisted that his father would not give such an order “in front of twenty-one people.” Regardless, the death machine was set in motion, and no one stopped it.

Lumumba’s murder in Katanga spawned a hagiography around him that tends to present him either as an enlightened one amid darkness or a victim. This is a disservice to both Lumumba and Congo.

Reid shuns both the hagiography and the victimization roads, writing instead: “Above all, Lumumba was the author of his own story. It is the story of a striver whose intellect and perseverance lifted him from humble circumstances into his country’s highest political office. It is the story of a man who wooed the most powerful nation on earth but ended up accidentally turning it against him.”

The Lumumba story is vital but mostly misunderstood. The time has come for it to be revisited, and Reid has done so admirably. It is also time for redress and reparations for the families of the martyrs and for the Congolese people—a gesture that would help heal deep and lingering historical wounds.