The CIA's Twisted Plot to Assassinate Patrice Lumumba—by Poisoning His Toiletries
The CIA's Twisted Plot to Assassinate Patrice Lumumba—by Poisoning His Toiletries
The CIA plotted for months on how to remove the popular Congolese leader, who was eliminated in 1961.
I’m still making my way through David Talbot’s 2015 book The Devil’s Chessboard, a history that explores the life of CIA Director Allen Dulles and the sordid history of the agency.
There are too many grisly anecdotes to recount showing how the CIA was involved in unlawful and unethical acts all over the world, but one that sticks out was the book’s treatment of Patrice Lumumba, an African nationalist who served as the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo before he was killed in 1961—with a shove from the CIA.
Lumumba was a thorn in the side of the agency, and his left-leaning politics led CIA officials to believe he was a stooge for the USSR (he wasn’t, as the CIA later admitted). So it was determined that Lumumba had to go—one way or the other.
First, a coup was arranged to have the democratically-elected Lumumba, who was demanding full independence for the Congolese people, removed from office and placed under arrest. To this end, the CIA tapped a young military colonel named Joseph Mobutu, who was friendly with Belgian intelligence (the Congo had long been under Belgian colonial rule) and would go on to rule for decades until he was ousted himself in a 1997 rebellion.
Then the CIA began exploring options to eliminate the popular Lumumba. Being the CIA, a single method was not chosen. Instead, various methods were explored to take out the Congolese leader and multiple people were tapped, including a pair of hitmen the agency had hired from Europe’s criminal underworld.
Talbot explains how the CIA equipped one of these cutthroats with a tube of poisoned toothpaste. Why toothpaste? Because one Dr. Ewen Cameron, at the behest of the CIA, had analyzed Lumumba and noted his immaculate white teeth. This led him to suggest a simple way to eliminate the troublesome leader: poison his dental products.
“In the end, the CIA did not go through with the toothpaste plot,” writes Talbot, “apparently deciding that poisoning a popular leader while he was under UN protective custody in his own house would be too flagrant a deed—one that, if traced back to the agency, would lead to unpleasant international repercussions.”
Instead, days before the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, the CIA arranged to have Lumumba chartered off on a plane to Katanga, a province that had broken from the Congo and was ruled by factions hostile to Lumumba.
This all but sealed Lumumba’s fate, CIA officials later testified.
“I think there was a general assumption, once we learned that he had been sent to Katanga, that his goose was cooked,” CIA station chief James Devlin, who helped orchestrate Lumumba’s fall, quipped to the Church Committee years later.
Devlin was right. During his flight to Katanga, Lumumba was beaten to a pulp. Then he was driven by jeep to a farm and beaten by members of rival political factions. The men, Talbot makes clear, had clear ties to US and Belgian intelligence.
“Eventually he was killed, not by our poisons, but beaten to death, apparently by men who had agency cryptonyms and received agency salaries,” said CIA agent John Stockwell, who was sent to the Congo in the aftermath of the assassination.
An Evil Empire?
It’s easy to think of this stuff as ancient history. But is it?
I recently watched a Timcast episode that explored the 2011 killing of Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki. A 16-year-old United States citizen, he was killed in Yemen by a drone strike ordered by Barack Obama while he was eating dinner.
Commenting on the clip, the Libertarian Party said, “The American empire is completely evil. It despises the American people and our respect for individual rights.”
The words jarred me a little. For the vast majority of my life, I never thought of my country as an empire. I never thought of my country as evil.
But the older I get and the closer I look, the more I realize our government has been doing some pretty evil things for a very long time—and those responsible are rarely if ever held accountable.
This scares me a little bit.
How Do We Fix Things?
It’s important to come to grips with these realities if we hope to improve things. How do we do that? It’s not a simple task, but it begins by recognizing the atrocities our government has committed and continues to commit today.
It begins by recognizing that the real villains are not men like Julian Assange, who reveal the state’s atrocities, but the men who imprison him for exposing the truth.
It begins by recognizing the government’s capacity for evil far outweighs its ability to create anything good, healthy, or beautiful.
It begins by rejecting political partisanship and believing these problems will be fixed if we only elect the right candidate.
It begins by recognizing the true revolt begins not by transforming our government but by transforming ourselves.
This last item is important.
"I am the only part of society I have been commissioned to save,” FEE founder Leonard Read once observed.
Read wasn’t telling us to look inward because he didn’t care about what happened to society. On the contrary, he was saying it was by each “looking inside himself” that society is saved, because “individuals 'reform' society."
This is sound advice.
Above all else, change will not come until we as individuals earnestly seek the truth and have the honesty to admit we might have been wrong about some things.
I certainly was. The US government is not the good guys. The CIA are not the good guys. One needn’t be a libertarian to realize this. Anyone who cracks David Talbot’s will likely reach reach the very same conclusion.
Until people realize this, expect people to look to the state or their country for salvation.