Assassinating Foreign Leaders Is Bad, Actually
A response to Simon Laird's critique of my post on the CIA's assassination plot of Congolese politician Patrice Émery Lumumba.
Simon Laird responded to my article pointing out that the CIA orchestrated the assassination of Patrice Lumumba (1925-1961).
Here is what Simon wrote:
Jon Miltimore recently wrote about the CIA’s plots against Patrice Lumumba, the Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the 1960s. The CIA plotted to poison his toothpaste. Eventually Congolese authorities arrested Lumumba and sent him on a plane to Katanga, a region of the Congo which was trying to gain independence from Lumumba’s centralized government. Shortly after he landed, Katangese men who had CIA connections killed Lumumba.
Patrice Lumumba became Prime Minister of the Congo when Belgian rule ended in June 1960. A government in Leopoldville declared independence with Lumumba as the Prime Minister and Joseph Kasa-Vubu as President. The regions of South Kasai and Katanga also declared independence. In August 1960, Lumumba sent his army to subjugate South Kasai, resulting in serious ethnic violence and massacres against civilians. Lumumba’s ultimate goal was to conquer Katanga and depose its democratically elected leader, Moise Tshombe. He needed to capture South Kasai first, because it had railways which were needed to advance on Katanga.
At the time, the CIA believed that Lumumba was working for the USSR. CIA director Allen Dulles described him as “a Castro or worse.”
Lumumba asked the Soviet Union to help him invade Katanga, seeking transport planes, trucks, and military advisers.
On September 5th, 1960, President Joseph Kasa-Vubu dismissed Lumumba as Prime Minister. Lumumba rejected the dismissal, creating a constitutional crisis. On September 14th, Colonel Joseph Mobutu (who had ties to the CIA) staged a military coup, against both Kasa-Vubu and Lumumba. Lumumba was placed under house arrest in Léopoldville. Lumumba’s henchmen fled to the Eastern part of the county and set up a rival government in Stanleyville. Lumumba later escaped house arrest and tried to reach Stanleyville, but was captured and sent to Katanga, where he was killed by Katangese agents who had CIA connections.
The CIA had initially thought that Lumumba was a paid Soviet agent, a claim which they later retracted. But there is no doubt that Lumumba was perfectly willing to work with the USSR to attack his peaceful neighbors. At the very least, Lumumba asked the Soviet Union to help him conquer a country which wanted independence, and depose their democratically elected leader.
Critics of American foreign policy can’t have it both ways. If it’s wrong to use force to depose a democratically elected leader, then Lumumba was wrong to try to depose Moïse Tshombe. Katanga had a right to defend itself, and the Katangese men were completely within their rights when they killed Patrice Lumumba. If it’s not wrong to use force to depose a democratically elected leader, then the fact that Lumumba was democratically elected has nothing to do with whether or not it was wrong to assassinate him.
In my view, assassinating Soviet-aligned left wing rulers was completely justified. They wanted to oppress their countrymen, subjugate neighboring countries, and turn the world over to Communist tyranny. Killing the leader of an enemy country is the quintessentially justifiable act of war. If you can kill the enemy leader without killing any hapless 18 year old conscripts, you should definitely do it. The critics of American foreign policy are wrong; the CIA’s plot to assassinate Lumumba was morally justified.
I don’t typically respond to articles written in response to my commentary, but I felt it was worth doing so in this case.
First, Simon certainly has the right to argue that the CIA should be in the assassination business. But he should recognize that this is illegal. Executive Order 12333, originally signed by Ronald Reagan and still in force today (with amendments), states: “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” (Gerald Ford signed a similar EO in 1976.)
That language is unambiguous. Yet I suspect Simon was so focused on his primary argument—that assassinating bad leaders is morally justified—that he never considered the legal one.
It is true that, before the Church Committee exposed the CIA’s ruthless tactics, there was no explicit prohibition on assassination like there is today. However, the absence of a specific prohibition did not make such actions legal. The CIA’s statutory authority did not authorize the killing of foreign political leaders.
Let’s set the legal question aside for a moment, however.
Simon should consider the implications of the principle he is endorsing. If it is acceptable for our government to openly—or secretly—assassinate foreign leaders it regards as threats, then other governments can invoke the same rationale. This is the rule of reciprocity.
One response, which Simon seems to imply, is: “Hey, we’re the good guys.” But that is a remarkably weak argument. It also raises an obvious question: Do “the good guys” secretly assassinate democratically elected leaders in violation of the law?
It seems obvious to me that political assassination is a form of barbarity—one that America’s leaders have wisely rejected in principle, and for good reason.
Offing the leaders of other countries is not merely illegal. It is reprehensible.
Again, Simon is free to endorse assassination as a tool of statecraft. But he should at least grapple with the incentives, escalation risks, and precedents such a policy would create. And he should understand the legal framework governing (i.e., prohibiting) the actions he is defending.
Yes, communism is bad. Socialism is bad. But Ronald Reagan wasn’t exactly a softy on communism, yet he recognized that political assassination is more fitting for mafias than constitutional governments.
Anyway, you can read Simon’s entire post here. Let me know in the comments who you think is right.
Simon's piece looks like Institutional justification against facts and treats Lumumba mainly as an aggressor against Katanga and South Kasai, and frames his killing as Katangese self-defense. That gets the causal chain backwards. The CIA didn't move against Lumumba because he was attacking secessionists — it moved against him because Katanga's secession was itself substantially a Belgian/Western mining-interest operation, and Lumumba's removal was about protecting that operation, not defending it.
A few corrections worth making:
1. Katanga's "independence" wasn't organic. Moise Tshombe's secession was bankrolled and militarily propped up by Union Minière du Haut Katanga, the Belgian mining conglomerate that controlled the copper, cobalt, and uranium wealth of the province — including uranium that had supplied the Manhattan Project. Belgian troops, officers, and mercenaries (recruited with Belgian and tacit Western backing) defended Tshombe's government from day one. Calling this a grassroots democratic state defending itself from Lumumba erases the fact that it existed to keep that mineral wealth out of a centralized Congolese government's hands.
2. The "Soviet agent" framing was manufactured, and the CIA itself knew it. Allen Dulles's "Castro or worse" framing predates any serious Soviet involvement — Lumumba turned to Moscow only *after* the US and Belgium had already moved to isolate and undermine him, withholding support a beleaguered new government desperately needed to hold the country together. Eisenhower authorized Lumumba's assassination (the CIA's poison-toothpaste plot via Sidney Gottlieb) in August 1960 — before the September 5 dismissal, before Mobutu's coup, before Lumumba's request for Soviet transport. The decision to kill him preceded the "Soviet threat" Simon cites as justification, not the other way around.
3. Lumumba's request for Soviet help was a response to a Western-engineered crisis, not unprovoked aggression. When South Kasai and Katanga seceded with Belgian backing within days of independence, and the UN refused Lumumba's request to use its peacekeeping force to suppress the secessions, Lumumba turned to Moscow as a last resort to hold his own country together against what was, in real terms, a Belgian-engineered dismemberment of a newly independent state. Treating this as comparable to Soviet client states "conquering neighbors" misreads the situation: it was an internationally recognized government trying to suppress an internal secessionist revolt backed by its former colonial ruler's corporate interests, not interstate conquest.
4. The actual killers were Belgian, not just "Katangese." Lumumba was beaten and tortured during the flight to Katanga in the presence of Belgian officers, and his execution on January 17, 1961, was carried out by a Katangese firing squad under direct Belgian command — Belgian officer Julien Gat gave the execution order, and Belgian commissioner Gerard Soete later admitted to dismembering and dissolving the body in acid to prevent any grave or shrine. The 2001 Belgian parliamentary inquiry concluded Belgium bore "moral responsibility," and in 2002 the Belgian government formally apologized. This wasn't a clean act of Katangese self-determination; it was a colonial power's intelligence and military apparatus eliminating a nationalist leader who threatened its post-colonial economic position.
5. Motive matters for Simon's own argument. Simon's moral case rests on Lumumba being a genuine Soviet-aligned threat bent on regional conquest. But the documentary record — National Security Council minutes, the Church Committee's 1975 investigation, and Belgian inquiry findings — shows the operative fear driving Eisenhower and Dulles wasn't really "Communist tyranny" abstractly, it was the prospect of a unified, resource-rich Congo under a charismatic nationalist who refused to guarantee Western access to Katanga's strategic minerals. The CIA's own station chief in Léopoldville, Lawrence Devlin, said as much in later testimony: the priority was preventing Lumumba from consolidating power, full stop, independent of whether Soviet involvement was ever realized in any substantial form.
None of this requires accepting that South Kasai's suppression was justified — it wasn't, and the violence there was real. But the actual record points to resource control and Cold War paranoia preceding and driving events, not a clean case of a peaceful secessionist state defending itself from a Soviet-backed aggressor. Simon's framing inverts cause and effect to make the killing look defensive when the planning for it predates the "threat" being cited.