A new book published in London recently tells how the famous poison dispatched by Washington to kill Lumumba in 1960, was in fact ?designed to produce one of the diseases endemic to central Africa so that Lumumba’s death would look like an unfortunate accident?. Even the CIA station chief in Kinshasa at the time was so shocked that he shouted: ?Jesus Christ, isn’t this unusual?? Osei Boateng reports.

For those known contemptuously as ?conspiracy theorists?, Michela Wrong’s book, In The Footsteps of Mr Kurtz ? Living On the Brink of Disaster In The Congo, published recently by Fourth Estate, is a godsend.

For years, since the advent of HIV and Aids in 1980, the ?conspiracy theorists? have sought to provide evidence to show that HIV was developed as part of the American germ warfare/population control programme which started in 1945 ? a programme which, they say, has had dire consequences for today’s world, particularly Africa where Aids is said to be the biggest killer.

The American authorities, as expected, have dismissed the claims so vehemently that the ?conspiracy theorists? have looked like ?nutters?.

Yet, from time to time, revelations such as contained in Michela Wrong’s new book keep coming up, which tend to lend some credibility to the ?discredited? claims.

Michela is not one you can possibly call a ?conspiracy theorist?. The official introduction that comes with her book says: ?As a foreign correspondent for Reuters news agency, Michela began her career reporting on papal pronouncements in Rome and fashion collections in Paris. She later moved to Africa, where she spent six years covering events across the continent for Reuters, BBC and the Financial Times. She is now based in London.?

While researching the book, Michela spoke to a lot of the movers and shakers who made Congo what it is today. One of them is Larry Devlin, the former CIA station chief in Kinshasa, who is now enjoying his retirement in Virginia, USA.

?[Devlin’s] role in the traumatic events of Congo’s post-independence period,? Michela writes, ?was to leave him one of the most notorious CIA men in history, an example of how far the United States was willing to go in that epoch to sabotage the Soviet Union’s plans for global communist expansion.

?Mr Devlin’s life had been one of commotion: a bL?iacute;#8217;te noire for a generation of Africans still fuming over the way superpower intervention dictated events on the continent during the Cold War, he had been accused by conspiracy theorists of engineering the murder of Patrice Lumumba ? Congo’s first, inspirational prime minister.?

?Lumumba was no communist’

From his home in Virginia, Devlin told Michela that Lumumba was no communist. ?Poor Lumumba,? Devlin said. ?He was no communist. He was just a poor jerk who thought, ?I can use these people’. I’d seen that happen in Eastern Europe. It didn’t work very well for them, and it didn’t work for him.?

What really shocks is Devlin’s admission that he personally handled the famous poison (see NA, Feb & Jul/Aug 2000) that the CIA sent from Washington to Kinshasa in 1960 to kill Lumumba. The justification was that Lumumba was a ?dangerous loose canon?.

Says Michela: ?With Mobutu in charge, Lumumba was now in detention, but his Napoleon-like ability to whip up the crowds and convert waverers to his cause ? even at times his own jailers ? meant he remained a dangerous loose canon.

?In August of that year [1960], the CIA director himself had told Devlin that Lumumba’s removal was an ?urgent and prime objective’, an instruction that presumably could have covered anything from encouraging Lumumba’s rivals to topple him by legal means to funding a coup.

?Now Washington moved to direct action. Shortly after Mobutu’s takeover [on 14 September 1960], Devlin was advised by headquarters that ?Joe from Paris’ would be coming to Leopoldville on an urgent mission. ?I was told I’d recognise him, and I did. He was waiting at a cafe across from the embassy and he walked to my car and we went to a quiet place where we could talk’.

Michela continues: ?The man was a top CIA scientist and he had come to Kinshasa with a poison for Lumumba. Devlin, he said, was to arrange for it to be slipped into the prime minister’s food, or his toothpaste. The poison was cleverly designed to produce one of the diseases endemic to central Africa so that Lumumba’s death would look like an unfortunate accident. ?Jesus Christ, isn’t this unusual?’ was Devlin’s astonished reply.

?Joe from Paris acknowledged that it was [unusual], but said authorisation came from President Eisenhower himself.

?It was a job the usually conscientious Devlin somehow never got around to performing. He insisted, and has testified before a US Senate committee hearing, that while he held no moral objections to the principle of political assassination when demanded by circumstances, the killing of Lumumba was never a step he personally considered necessary or intended to carry out. ?If I had had Hitler in my sights in 1941 and I’d pulled the trigger, maybe 20 or 30 million people would be alive today. But I just never felt it was justified with Lumumba. I was hoping the Congolese would settle it amongst themselves, one way or another’.?

Although Devlin had access to Lumumba’s entourage, he stalled. ?The months passed, with the CIA considering first one assassination scenario and then another,? Michela reveals. ?Devlin eventually disposed of the poison by pouring it into the Congo River. ?I had the damn stuff in my drawer and I wanted to get rid of it’.?

In the end, as recent revelations in Belgium have shown, Lumumba was finally dispatched by the Belgians on 17 January 1961. His body was sawed into bits and doused in an acid bath in order to obliterate the evidence.

The wider implications

Devlin’s admission that ?a top CIA scientist? had told him that ?the poison was designed to produce one of the diseases endemic to central Africa so that Lumumba’s death would look like an unfortunate accident?, is bound to cause ripples in Africa and among ?conspiracy theorists? who have been saying for years that the deadly Ebola virus and its new colleague, HIV, were man-made; and were introduced into Congo (and by extension, Africa) by outsiders.

The Ebola virus is said to have originated in the Congo, so is HIV (when ?a man butchered a chimpanzee for food?). This September, a high-powered two-day conference was held in London to look into Ed Hooper’s theory (propounded in his book, The River, published last year) that Aids was ?unwittingly? spread by Western scientists who used chimpanzee kidneys from Congo in the manufacture of the polio vaccine in the late 1950s.

The vaccine was tested on hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting Africans in the Congo, Burundi and Rwanda between 1957 and 1960. ?[Hooper’s] findings, right or wrong? wrote John Vidal in The Guardian (London) recently, ?pose fundamental ethical and philosophical questions about big science, the way the West used Africa as an experimental research laboratory and how science is conducting itself today.?

Vidal quoted Gordon Scott, former head of virology at Edinburgh University and head of the East African Veterinary Research Organisation in the 1950s, as saying in a recent statement supporting Hooper’s theory: ?It seems to me that fear of having to lose money or pay compensation drives your opposition. My colleagues in the Centre of Tropical Veterinary Medicine who have worked in the tropics have no difficulty in accepting your hypothesis.?

But apart from saying they ?unwittingly? spread HIV, Hooper is not saying much new. In effect, he is confirming that HIV and Aids did originate in Africa (from chimpanzees) ? which is not something new to the ear. His hypothesis does not tackle what other concerned people have said for years that both Ebola and HIV were man-made viruses ?introduced? into Congo from abroad. In short, the viruses are not indigenous to Congo (and by extension, Africa) at all.

As one South African professor in London asked, after reading Michela’s book: ?How does one ?design’ a poison to ?produce a Central African disease’? If they could do that in 1960 as ?the top CIA scientist’ confirmed to Devlin, what couldn’t they do in 1979 or 1980 when the technology was even more advanced? Remember HIV/Aids is said to infect or kill more black Africans than any other people. Why only black Africans? There’s something fishy about it, you know.?

Poor Congo

Michela Wrong finishes off her account about Lumumba’s death by saying: ?Whoever actually pulled the trigger, in the eyes of Lumumbists and many other Zaireans, Mobutu always bore moral responsibility for Lumumba’s murderer, with the Western powers playing the part of Iago, whispering their instructions from behind the scenes.?

Her book, brilliantly written and very well researched, is, however, weak on the shenanigan that went into the ?creation? of Mobutu. Perhaps it did not interest her.

Devlin, however, told her that he remembered a reception that the American ambassador to Belgium threw for the Congolese politicians during the Independence Roundtable Talks in Brussels in 1960, in which he (Devlin) and his embassy colleagues ?launched themselves in a very deliberate bout of networking? ? to win over the Congolese politicians to the American cause.

According to Michela, Devlin said: ?Each of us drew up a list of 10 or 12 [Congolese] we had to meet, and afterwards we all got together to discuss our impressions. One name kept coming up. But it wasn’t on anyone’s list because he wasn’t an official delegation member, he was Lumumba’s secretary. But everyone agreed that this was an extremely intelligent man, very young, perhaps immature, but a man with great potential. They were right, because that was Mobutu.?

Michela takes up the story: ?But even in those early days, there are question marks over Mobutu’s motives. Congolese youths studying in Brussels were systematically approached by the Belgian secret services with an eye to future cooperation. Several contemporaries say that by the time Mobutu had made his next career step ? moving from journalism to act as Lumumba’s trusted personal aide, deciding who he saw, scheduling his activities, sitting in for him at economic negotiations in Brussels, ? he was an informer for Belgian intelligence.?

Michela goes on to ask a very vital question: ?What were the qualities that made so many players in the Congolese game single [Mobutu] out??

Her answer: ?Some remarked on his quiet good sense, the pragmatism that helped him rein in the excitable Lumumba when he was carried away by his own rhetoric. It accompanied an appetite for hard work: Mobutu was regularly getting up at five in the morning and working till 10 [in the night] during the crisis years. But the characteristic that, more than any other, eventually decreed that he won control of the country’s army was probably the brute courage he attributed to [his] childhood brush with the leopard.?


The troika that kept Mobutu in power

But ?brute courage? alone could not have sustained Mobutu in power for 37 years. Although Michela shies from making a direct link between Mobutu’s rise to power and Western interests, she nonetheless reveals that before coming to power Mobutu was very close to Devlin.

?By this stage,? she writes, ?Mobutu had become a regular visitor at Devlin’s household. The two men had got to know each other’s families, with Mobutu taking a particular shine to the CIA station chief’s young daughter, who liked to steal his cap and swagger stick and march up and down with them. However, what happened in November [Mobutu in fact seized power on 14 Sept 1960], Devlin maintained, was not the result of any advice on his part.?

He would say that, wouldn’t he? ?The US position and the British position,? Devlin told Michela, ?was that they did not want a coup, they wanted Kasavubu as president and Tshombe as prime minister. I told Mobutu that, and he smiled and said: ?A Johnson-Goldwater ticket you mean?’ (a Democrat-Republican combination that would have united the US’s two main parties). I said, Yes, and he said: ?Fine’. The next thing I knew, I was woken at five in the morning with the word he had just pulled a coup.?

According to Michela, Devlin says he has no apologies to make. ?It was too easy, he insisted, for a new generation to forget the very real imperatives of the day. ?You’re too young to remember much about the Cold War. But it was a real war and Mobutu played a rather key role in blocking Khrushchev. He was right for Congo at that time’.?

No wonder Mobutu ruled for 37 uninterrupted years (from 1960-1997), and was protected, funded and given respectability by Washington and its allies, despite the fact that Mobutu turned the looting of national coffers into an art form. To Michela, the following are the reasons for the Western support:

?For the Americans,? she writes, ?the Afro-optimism of the 1960s had ebbed away, to be replaced by a pragmatic appreciation that it needed Zaire as an ally in the fight to stem Communism’s spread.

?Even before Mobutu became head of state, the White House had signalled its regard by inviting [him] to meet President John Kennedy in Washington. The White House welcome was to be repeated under every American president through the 1970s and 1980s. The US, using Zaire’s bases as the conduit for arms destined for Angola’s rebels, was determined to keep Mobutu on board.?

In fact when the former CIA chief, George Bush, was elected president in June 1989, Mobutu was ?amazingly the first African head of state invited to stroll the [White House] lawns with Bush,? says Michela.

According to her, the French had a different motivation. ?Despite its Belgian roots, Zaire had come to be regarded as forming part of what Paris had labelled its chasse gardee ? that ?private hunting ground’ of African allies whose existence allowed France to punch above its weight in the international arena,? says Michela. ?[Zairean] schools and media propagated the French language, culture and values. In return, Paris assured Mobutu, as it assured all its African dinosaur friends, of its undying support.?

For the Belgians, ?it was a question of maintaining a toehold of influence in a former colony that was still home to several thousand Belgian expatriates,? Michela says. ?However difficult the scars left by colonisation made the task, Brussels was determined to maintain a historical link that allowed a small, none-too-impressive European nation to count as a significant world player.?

But that was not all. ?All three nations [America, France and Belgium],? continues Michela, ?wanted guaranteed access to Zaire’s mineral reserves ? especially, in the case of the US, the cobalt it needed to produce its fighter jets. And all three were counting, as Mobutu launched into his period of white elephant projects, on picking up some fat commercial contracts.?

The West, and particularly America, also wanted exclusive access to the strategic mineral, uranium, of which for a long time Zaire was the world’s biggest producer from its Shinkolobwe mine in Katanga.

In fact, the two atomic bombs that ended the Second World War (dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US) were made from Shinkolobwe uranium.

To this day, Africa still remains the world’s biggest producer of uranium ? from mines in South Africa, Congo and Namibia (in order of volume). Without Africa’s uranium, electricity production in most of the West would dry up, and their countries would come to a standstill. In fact they just cannot survive! It was, therefore, vital that the biggest producer of uranium at the time, Zaire and its leader Mobutu, were fed and watered.

That is why America and its allies used every means possible (including military power) to keep Mobutu in power. For example, when rebels invaded Katanga in the 1970s, America and France sent men and material to fight and save Mobutu’s regime.

It was more of the same in the 1990s when the Zairean army rioted in several cities ? France and Belgium sent in troops to keep Mobutu safe.

?Roger Morris, responsible for African affairs at the National Security Council under both Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, once estimated that Mobutu received close to $150m from the CIA during the first decade or so of his regime,? says Michela.

The IMF/World Bank role

In short, it was in the interests of the West to keep its ?most valued friend? (the words of President George Bush) in power as long as it takes, damn the consequences to the Congolese people.

According to Michela: ?As the years passed and Zaire was progressively pauperised, the bystander might be forgiven for concluding that the outside world was being kept in blissful ignorance of Mobutu’s venality.

?How else to explain the level of aid the country continued to enjoy? Between the start of the Zairean economic crisis in 1975 and Mobutu’s departure in 1997, Zaire received a total of $9.3 billion in foreign aid. Between 1975 and 1984, the sums averaged $331m a year, rising to an annual $542m from 1985 to 1994... In fact Mobutu’s foreign financial backers knew all too well what was going on.?

Michela tells the amazing story of how at one point in 1986 the IMF even had to ?beg? Mobutu to take more loans from the Fund.

Mobutu had been angered by the IMF’s not-too-straight role in suspending aid to Zaire because of a late transfer of $20-30m from his personal accounts abroad to balance the books in Kinshasa. The Fund had earlier discovered that Mobutu had moved $100-200m from a state-owned company and stashed it abroad. As a result, the IMF threatened to suspend lending.

To appease the Fund, Mobutu promised to transfer to Kinshasa $20-30m from his personal accounts abroad. But the money arrived too late for the IMF deadline. And the Fund cut aid to Zaire. Mobutu was furious and accused the IMF of having lied to him. Later, when the IMF relented and wanted to give Zaire a new loan, Mobutu ?told the Fund, to general amazement, to take a running jump?, according to Louis Goreux, the then IMF representative in Kinshasa.

?One thing the Fund does not like is to be told to go to hell, it was seen as an insult,? Goreux told Michela. But that is exactly what Mobutu did ? he told the IMF to go to hell.

?So a face-saving solution was put together, whereby funds granted under [a] new programme would quietly be deposited into a special account established on Zaire’s behalf in Washington,? reveals Michela. ?But Mobutu continued to sulk. Goreux searched around desperately for politicians friendly enough with Mobutu to mollify him.?

In the end, according to Goreux, the then French prime minister, Jacques Chirac, picked up the phone in Paris ? and Mobutu relented. ?He could present himself to the Zairean people as the man who had defied the international institutions, while still benefiting from an aid programme,? Michela says. ?Western self-interest made indulging Mobutu worthwhile.?

The end

Every good thing, they say, has an end. And Mobutu’s end came ? ignominiously, and deserted by his Western friends.

As the rebellion led by Laurent Kabila that started in October 1996 in eastern Congo gathered momentum in early 1997, Mobutu’s ministers and army chiefs left the country one by one.

?At one stage,? Michela reveals, ?the British and American embassies [in Kinshasa] became concerned that a dangerous power vacuum was opening up and actually called Kabila to urge him to speed up the exhausted rebel force’s advance.?

Then the Americans put the knife in. On 29 April 1997, they sent a delegation to tell a besieged and ill Mobutu (suffering from prostate cancer) that the end had come, and that he was not going to be saved by Washington.

?It was a very stark presentation,? recalls Daniel Simpson, the then US ambassador in Kinshasa [Simpson, in fact, did three tours of duty in Kinshasa]. ?It was heavy-going, as you can imagine. This was a guy who had worked with the US since the 1950s and he was being told: ?You’ll be dragged through the streets. These things could happen to you and we are not going to stop them’.?

Mobutu tried to remind his American friends of the good times they had had together. ?He said: ?If you want to stop this, you can call in your troops’. But history had moved on. We made it clear he wasn’t going to get that,? Simpson told Michela.

One of Mobutu’s closest security aides, Ngbanda Nzambo Ko Atumba, who was present at the meeting insists that the Americans promised to guarantee the safety of Mobutu and his family. They also promised that Mobutu’s MPR party would be part of the new political dispensation. ?We will ensure that your possessions, both inside and outside the country, will be untouched,? Ngbanda says the Americans further promised.

But Simpson denies it. He told Michela: ?We guaranteed Mobutu’s personal safety, that’s all. The rest comes from the Terminator [Ngbanda].?

?Lies,? retorts Mobutu’s son Nzanga (one of his 17 children), who was also at the meeting. He says the Americans did promise that his father’s possessions would be safe.

And Mobutu wept

At last, the Americans did not save Mobutu. They have since been trying to convince everybody, without much success, that they did not have a hand in, nor support, the rebellion that brought Ugandan, Rwandan and Burundian soldiers alongside a motley of rebel groups led by Laurent Kabila, into Kinshasa in May 1997.

As the rebels marched on Kinshasa, Mobutu and his family first fled to his huge marble palace at Gbadolite, his birthplace in Equatorial Province.

?Arriving in Gbadolite,? Michela reveals, ?the family realised they were no safer there than in Kinshasa. The years of neglect, all those unpaid salaries of the local DSP, now came home to roost. Retreating before the rebels, the loyal elite (of the Zairean army) was on the brink of turning against the Mobutu clan. It was time to go.? The date was 16 May 1997.

Sadly for Mobutu, his plane had returned to Kinshasa to pick up the remaining family members. ?And so the family that once hired Concorde without a second thought was reduced to borrowing a vast Russian cargo plane owned by Unita head Jonas Savimbi,? reveals Michela.

?Braving what Nzanga remembers as ?a very, very hostile group of DSP’ at the airport, the president, his family and a handful of loyal soldiers piled helter-skelter into the Ilyushin and took off.?

As the plane gained height, Mobutu’s own soldiers down below, shot at it. ?God’s hand was on us that day,? remembers Nzanga. ?[We were] lucky it was a Russian plane. If it had been a Boeing, it would have exploded.?

Their first stop was Lom?, Togo, where a surprised President Eyadema quickly dispatched a motorcade to the airport to fetch his fallen friend.

?Before allowing the car to drive off,? says Michela, ?Mobutu lowered the passenger window and addressed his security aide in a voice that was barely audible. ?Ngbanda, do you realise that even Nzimbi abandoned and betrayed me?’, the president said in disbelief. Then he burst into tears.?

Five days later, Mobutu and his family were on the move again, this time to Morocco where they became the guests of King Hassan. ?If the monarch remained a loyal friend to the end,? writes Michela, ?Mobutu’s exile was accompanied by a concerted washing of hands by former Western allies, timing to the second his transition from helmsman to has-been.?

A salutary lesson for African leaders.

Endtail

Four months later, (in September 1997) Mobutu was dead. He had succumbed to the prostate cancer that had dogged him for some time. But, according to Michela, ?the CIA, in one of its classic pieces of misinformation, confidently informed Washington that the president was suffering from Aids.?

The cruellest humiliation, however, was inflicted on him at Gbadolite, after he fled. The palace that he had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build was looted and vandalised by the people he had impoverished.

?From the headless pipes, water was pouring in a steady stream across the ground floor?, writes Michela, who was in Kinshasa at the time. ?On the spreading lake bobbled the contents of the boxes left behind in the family’s rush, evidence of a dying man’s physical collapse exposed to the world to see. Hundreds of adult incontinence nappies lay four or five layers thick, floating on the water.?

In far away Washington, a White House spokesman told the assembled media: ?Mobutu was a creature of history.?

In The Footsteps of Mr Kurtz ? Living On The Brink Of Disaster In The Congo is published by Fourth Estate (www.4thestate.co.uk), 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU. 324pp. ?13.99 pbk.

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