We're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. Emil Kashinsky, culture
editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show at
radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr ls T.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and if you want
to support our work, you can go to the premium version of our website
sign up there as well. Today we're joined by author Stuart Reed. He's
an executive editor of Foreign Affairs. He's written for The Atlantic, The New
York Times, The Washington Post, political magazine, Slate, and more.
And he's the author of a fascinating, massive new book called The La Mumba
Plot, The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War assassinate Assassination.
Stuart, thank you very much for joining us. Thanks for having me.
Now. If we could start just by talking a little bit about why you
wanted to tackle the Lamumba assassination in this book, that would be awesome.
What drew you to this project in particular? So I had the chance to
travel to Congo in twenty fourteen and that got me reading up in the country's
history, and the more I read, the more I realized there was this
amazing, tragic, fascinating moment in nineteen sixty where the country became independent from
Belgium, and then sort of all hell broke loose very quickly, and it
was the big Cold War crisis of its day. It was front page in
the New York Times nearly every day at the time, yet I had barely
heard of it and knew very little about it. So I wanted to know
more about what happened in this moment, why the CIA in particular was so
active in the events following Congo's independence, And then the characters also just really
drew me in there, these fascinating lives at the center of it all.
Oh my gosh, Absolutely, I can't wait to get into all of that.
But before we begin, maybe, and I think a lot of listeners
also, probably on the right in particular, you know, the story is
not nearly as familiar as it should be to many Americans, and I'm sure
we'll talk a little bit about why, but I think it's especially unfamiliar to
those of us on the right who have been a lot more until recent years
sort of trusting of the security apparatus and the intelligence community. But if you
could us just start Stewart by telling us a little bit about the DRC,
just the history. We can't. I know, you could talk for hours,
I'm sure about the rich history of the DRC and how it's tied up
in the history of the West and all of that. But if you could
just give us a little bit of background that people might need in order to
sort of be able to understand where Patrisa Lamumbuk comes from, that would be
great. So the Congo was colonized by the Belgian king, King Leopold the
Second beginning around eighteen eighty five, and what was notable was that unlike other
European colonies, this did not belong to the state. It belonged to King
Leopold personally. So he ran this colony as a sort of resource extraction racket,
and then eventually the human rights abuses were so bad even for the early
nineteen hundreds, that he was forced to turn it over to the Belgian state.
So then the Congo became a Belgian colony in the same way that other
European countries had colonies. Fast forward into the late nineteen fifties, the wind
of change are blowing across Africa, European powers are finally realizing that their colonial
possessions are not sustainable and that the inhabitants of these places are demanding to be
free, and so Congo excuse me, Belgium very quickly decides it has to
offload the Congo. It decides this basically in January nineteen sixty, and independence
was set for June nineteen sixty, so everything happened really, really quickly.
The man at the helm of the new country as prime Minister was Patrice Lamumba,
and he had had this remarkable rise. Grew up poor in a small
village, moved to a city, joined the Belgian colonial administration as a postal
clerk, got arrested from bezzling funds, thrown in jail. After jail,
he sort of remade himself as a beer salesman of all things, and got
active in anti colonial pro independent circles and co founded a political party. And
then in May nineteen sixty, when elections parliamentary elections were held, his party
won the most votes and so he was asked a former government and became prime
minister upon independence on June thirtieth, nineteen sixty. And it's remarkable just how
it all. It happened so quickly. Just to give you one sort of
example of that, as late as nineteen fifty five, there was a Belgian
academic who released a plan called the thirty year Plan for the Independence of the
Belgian Congo. So the idea was that only by nineteen eighty five would the
Congo be finally ready for independence. Then you know, there was pushback,
there was an anti colonial riot and the capital things changed very quickly, but
the Belgian sort of only woke up belatedly to the fact that what they were
trying to hold on to was not sustainable. And this obviously is happening in
the middle of the Cold War, So there are all kinds of things we're
going to talk about when it comes to that, and this is a good
transition. What are Lamimba's politics? So where does he fall? And that's
one of the difficulties here when we're talking about the Cold War mindset. Of
course, it's nobody fit as neatly onto the spectrum of communism and capitalism as
the United States and the Soviet Union wanted them to, or acted like they
did. But what were Lamimbo's politics? You know, maybe just even from
the Congolese perspective. Yeah, so, as you you mentioned earlier, I
think you're completely right that La Mumba's stories. You know, it's not that
well known among Americans period, but to the extent that it is, it's
more well known among the left because posthumously, La Mumba was sort of adopted
by the left and became this you know, Pan African hero and anti colonial
symbol. But what I strove to do in my book was just sort of
set aside all the myth making and mythology that's that's a crude around the Mumba
and just look at the man himself, his actions, his words, you
know, his own experiences, rather than what other people ascribed to him.
And what struck me was that he was actually much more pro American than was
understood at the time or would be understood later. You know, he spoke
of sending Conglei's children to American schools, not Russian schools. He was not
in favor of nationalizing economic activity. He signed right after Independent, he signed
over signed a contract for the Congo's mineral and hydro electric resources to be developed
by an American entrepreneur. So what were his politics? I mean, he
never really got a chance to actually institute a governing agenda because the country just
fell into chaos within literally days, So it became at that point just a
pure game of survival rather than implementing any sort of ideology. I think a
lot of the Congolese politicians were sort of a blank slate during the elections because
there was no record to run on because there had been no Congolese politicians before,
and you know, people claimed various ideologies and what you know, the
unifying factor was that people had different opinions about, you know, how anti
Belgian to be, how pro strong central government versus week central government. So
what can be said about Lamumba is that he was a fierce proponent of Congolese
independence and nationalism. He wanted a strong central government as opposed to a week
one in the system of federalism, which other politicians wanted. He talked about
charting a neutral course between East and West. That's sort of almost as much
as we can say about Lumba's political ideology. He was also a pan Africanist,
meaning he saw Africans as engaged in the same collective struggle, but there
wasn't much data to really draw on to figure out what La Mumba's political ideology
was, because it just became about survival very quickly. Yeah, it reminds
me a little bit of the Sakarno Indonesia story, which is I mean,
your book is it goes into so much CIA sort of general CIA history,
and I want to talk a little bit about that at some point. But
if we could talk about just sort of the state of the CIA in the
year nineteen sixty, it's obviously under Alan Dulles, although not for too much
longer. Right before JFK takes office, it's the Eisenhower administration. They've been
sort of experimenting with all of these cups to prevent Soviet footholds from happening all
over the world. So what is the CIA's kind of positioning politically in the
United States and then globally as the La Mumba plot starts to coalesce. So
this was the era of sort of the wild West era for the CIA.
There was basically zero oversight, certainly not from Congress and barely from the White
House. So the CIA had a lot of independent power. It was run
by Alan Dalles, whose brother John Foster had been the Secretary of State until
his death. So Dallas had accumulated a lot of power and it could operate
as it saw fit. It was also the CIA was very young and relatively
small. It was founded as this successor to the OSS, the World War
two era espionage service, and so it was a new organization that there weren't
well developed norms and site at all. So in the case of Congo,
what happens is during the crisis, as Lamumba is watching his country fall apart,
he asks the UN for help. The UN provides peacekeepers but doesn't succeed
in restoring order. He travels to the United States, asks the United States
for help, gets rebuffed, and then and only then does he turn to
the Soviets. And that really set off alarm bells in the CIA, which
thought that Lamumba was about to turn Congo communists and invite in the Soviets,
and and sort of that set in motion this really crazy plan of a plot
to assassinate Lamumba with poison that the CIA station chief was supposed to put in
Lamumba's food or toothpaste. So the CIA at the time, like the broader
Eisenhower administration, was pretty paranoid about the advance of communism and sort of interpreted
every move La Mumba made in the context of, you know, seeing a
Soviet hand behind him. In fact, he was you know, the Soviets
weren't that interested. One of the funny things, in a way was that
after the Cold War, when the Soviet archives opened up, there wasn't that
much in there about Congo because they viewed it as a faraway place where communism
was unlikely to take hold. The Soviet was not as powerful in nineteen sixty
as it would become, so this was a distant concern where they could score
some propaganda points, but not a place where they could have real influence.
If you read the cables to and from Washington and the CIA, you know
there's the Soviets seemed very active, right, utter paranoia. And if you
could, I mean, you've spent a long time digging into this case study,
and you know, years researching this case study, what were the extent
of Lamumba's ties to the Soviets. Because you mentioned something interesting which is repeated
in certain other case studies, and I'm remembering correctly, Sakarno is a pretty
good example of this. You could maybe make this true of Cashro as well.
But the US approach to the country either pushes people in some of these
case studies further into the arms of the Soviets or you know, puts them
on the radar of the Soviets when the Soviets weren't even really thinking of them
at all. Where what were Lamimba's ties to Soviet communism? So Lumumba was,
you know, trying to seduce everyone. He wanted aid for his country.
He didn't really care where it came from. He was and he did
have a tendency to sort of tell whatever the person in front of him wanted
to hear. So, you know, you see the meetings with the US
embassy and he's being very pro American, and with the meetings with the Soviet
ambassador, he's saying nice things about Moscow, which is, you know,
I guess, a typical position of a politician trying to play both sides of
the Cold War. What we do know is that his inherent interest in the
Soviets, I'd say, was limited. He wanted practical help, specifically military
help, so that he could invade. He could send his government forces into
the breakaway province of Katonga and reintegrate that because that province had seceeded shortly after
independence and he wanted US help first is what he preferred. So when he
was in Washington, d c. In July nineteen sixty, he gives a
press conference where he asks for US troops to be sent to the Congo,
which you could not have pleased Moscow. So what he eventually does, after
getting rebuffed is send a telegram to Nikita Krushev asking for this and that military
help. And the Soviets were kind of annoyed to be They had said lots
of things about how they're watching this situation closely, and you know, the
evil Belgian imperialists, et cetera. But then La Mumba sort of called their
bluff and asked for military help, and so they started the process of giving
him some token aid, you know, some trucks, some planes. But
then events intervened and Lamumba was overthrown in a military coup backed by the CIA.
That sort of that made him no longer in power, and sort of
the question of Soviet aid was a point. So Lamumba, to summarize,
was not inherently pro communist. He was looking for practical military help and willing
to accept that from the Soviets, but we know he would have preferred it
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And that brings us to the assassination itself. The assassination plot as well.
You describe it in the book as the forceful transfer of La Mumba into enemy
territory, and this in and of itself is cinematic and it's just like an
incredible tragedy. The story is very compelling. You already mentioned the toothpaste and
all of that stuff. Talk to us about that. The phrase that jumped
out at me, forceful forceful transfer jumped out at me because that is the
you know the I think that is the right way to put it. And
I imagine there are people in the CIA that would to this day or people
that were involved at the time that would to this day maybe quibble with the
language. I don't know. You would know more obviously since you've been doing
this. But forcefool transfer is tell us why that term can accurately accurately describe
the CIA's involvement in the ultimate death of Lamimba. Right. So first,
it's important to point out that the poisoning plot sort of it fizzled out and
became a point where the station chief, Larry Devlin, was not able to
get access to Lamumba's house, so he ended up claiming he threw the poisons
and buried them on the banks of the Congo River. So that whole plot,
the CIA did try and kill Lamumba through poisons. They were dispatched to
Congo, it was instructed to go into Lamba's two base, but it sort
of didn't happen that way. So what did happen is there's a military coup
where Joseph Mobutu takes power encouraged by the station chief, the CIA station chief,
financed arranged by the CIA station chief takes power. La Mumba is under
house arrest, No longer prime minister. And then Lamumba tries to escape and
you know, slips out of out of the house where he's being kept hiding
in the back seat of a car under the legs of his domestic servants.
And then Lamumba's caught by you know, a search party organized with the help
of the CIA, and he's then thrown in a military prison. And Mabutu,
who's now in charge as the military leader, knows that, you know,
okay, so we need to do something about Lamumba. It's his thinking.
And here the timing is important. This is December nineteen sixty. Kennedy's
won the election. The Eisenhower administration is coming to a close, and there's
a real fear both in the Congo and in Washington, d C. That
that the Kennedy administration will have a sort of more pro La Mumba policy towards
Congo and might even allow him to come back as prime minister. He'll be
freed, He'll come back to prime minister. There are signs from the camp
that this is a real, viable possibility. So Mobutu knows this and knows
that that would mean the end of his political career and so he decides to
transfer to Lamumba to a province where it's certain that Lamimba will be killed upon
landing. Basically everyone agreed about this, and at that point Lamumba and Larry
Devlin, the station chief, had a very intimate relationship. Devlin was constantly,
you know, handing over suitcases of cash and advising him on the most
intimate matters of Congolese politics. And so we now know from the cable traffic
that was relatively recently declassified that on January fourteenth, nineteen sixty one, Mobutu
or someone from his circle tells Larry Devlin, Hey, we're about to transfer
Lamumba to a province where he'll be killed. And so Devlin hears this and
does two things. One he doesn't try and tell Mabutu to not do this
or try and talk him out of it, which in the context of their
intimate relationship was a green light. And two, he actively keeps headquarters in
Washington, d C. Out of the loop. So even as he's updating
them about other twists and turns in Congo, he sits on the most explosive
news. Why does he do this because he rightly fears that if he tells
his superiors what's about to happen, they'll instruct him to intervene because the Kennedy
administration is coming in. Other requests for much smaller things have been denied on
the grounds to Devlin that you know, we need to just wait, and
this is a question for the new administration. We're in a transition. We
can't have big things happening in Congo. So Devlin gives this green light to
the Mobutu circle. He conspires to keep headquarters out of the loop, and
then on January seventeenth, Lamumba is flown to the breakaway province of Katonga,
tortured the entire way and taken out of the plane, tortured even more,
and then driven into a remote clearing where he's killed by Congolese firing squad answering
commanded by Belgian officers who in turn were answering to the secessionist government there.
And he's killed just three days before Kennedy is inaugurated. It just, I
mean, so much going on there, and you mentioned, you know,
some of this we learned from recently declassified cables, and you know, maybe
if we pause here just to get a little bit from you as a researcher
going through this book. How much of this I mean, I think one
of the reasons that some of this stuff isn't as well known as it should
be and isn't as you know at present in for example, history textbooks and
curriculum, as it should be, is that the stories are still you know
that we are learning more about some of these stories every single year. How
much did you find who started working on this project that just in the last
maybe two decades we didn't know some of it, We didn't know some of
it for sure? How much your new information are we continuing to learn about
all of this stuff? So much? It really bottled my mind. So
a lot was learned in the nineteen seventies and nineteen seventy five with the Church
Committee, specifically about that poisoning plot. And the Church Committee focused extensively on
that poisoning plot and sort of let the CIA off the hook in a way
because that particular plot never panned out. Then only in twenty thirteen there was
a new A big trove of cables was finally declassified, and then there were
some things I you know, this book came out in October and I was
finishing it up in January and February, and there were documents being declassified you
know, that week that I then quickly incorporated their contents into my book.
So there's a lot of stuff that was hidden, and to my great frustration,
there's a lot that still is hidden. I mean, it's been sixty
three years. I truly think literally nothing about what the US did in Congo
in nineteen sixty and nineteen sixty one should be classified. There's no plausible reason
for secrecy that I can come up with. The problem is that that the
US government's declassification system is just completely broken and underfunded, and so everything takes
forever, and you know, there's no default declassification. Everything has to go
through this extensive review process. So yeah, to my own surprise, there
were there were still many, you know, nuggets out there waiting to be
found. And let's say, if we go back to the question of Kennedy.
You know, this is David Talbot and others sort of cast this and
I think rightfully as one of the big moments in the relationship between John F.
Kennedy and Alan Dallas, and then some people extrapolate that there and say
this is one of the big moment moments in the build up to Alan Alan
Dalls's potential alleged involvement in the Kennedy assassination. As you were looking into Kennedy's
reaction to how the CIA sort of kept him in the dark about Lamumba,
did that cast any new light for you on the relationship on this very important
historically relationship between Kennedy and Alan Dallas. So my understanding is that the nail
in the coffin for Alan Dallas was the Bay of Pigs operation, which he
and Richard Bissel, his one of his deputies, were ultimately fired for their
or asked to resign or whatever for their role in this with Lamuma. It's
interesting because Kennedy took office on January twentieth, nineteen sixty one, thinking that
Lamumba was still alive, even though he had died three days earlier. Because
for about three weeks, Lamuma's death was kept a secret from all but a
small circle of people who are involved in it. So there was this weird
period where everyone knew that Lamumba had been flown to Katanga, but they didn't
know whether he was in jail or had been murdered, and so there was
an open question, and so Kennedy takes office still thinking that there's some chance
that Lamouma is alive. And so there's this whole alternate policy that's being developed
where some members of Kennedy's camp argue for getting rid of the Mobutu military dictatorship,
bringing Parliament back to power, and including La Mumba in some sort of
coalition government. It all becomes a point on I think it's February thirteenth when
the world learns that La Mumba has indeed died, and Kennedy is supposedly distraught
by this, but it all happened under his predecessor now also at that time.
I suspect, although it's hard to know for sure, that Kennedy did
not know about the plot to assassinate La Mumba, the CIA plot, and
probably did not know the extent of CIA involvement in Mumba's overthrow and eventual death.
I mean, the CIA role in the transfer that really was did not
come out and only partially until the Church Committee. But Kennedy certainly knew that
the CIA was supporting Mobutu. He would meet with Mobutu in nineteen sixty three
at the White House, you know, telling him that if it weren't for
you, General, the Communists would have taken over. And so Kennedy becomes
the first US president of many US presidents to have this very close relationship with
Mobutu, whom he knows is receiving CIA funding. Now, the soft power
that the CIA used in the Congo is just sometimes it borders on absurd,
and you know that's part of the CIA's history and a lot of different places.
What can you tell us about their soft power their attempt to wield soft
power in the Congo. And I'm asking this because I sort of specifically want
to hear more about the Louis Armstrong, the Louis Armstrong visit that you write
about Stewart in the book, right, so that in fact was more of
a State Department initiative. And so there is this weird split screen moment where
in October nineteen sixty Armstrong comes to Congo as part of this Great Jazz Tour,
sort of acting as an ambassador on behalf of American culture and music,
and has a big concert in the main stadium in Leopoldville. The Capitol also
flies to Elizabethville and Katonga and does a concert there, and at the same
time as he's being paraded through the streets and the US is showing how they
are a friend of the Connolly's people. This whole Cia plot is happening,
and Devlin is cabling headquarters about how he can't get access to Lamuva's house to
poison him and asking for a hunting rifle to be sent so that he can
try a different means of assassinating him. So there, but this really gets
that actually the broader tension in US foreign policy at the time, because you
know, under in the colonial era, the US had just been sort of
backing the European powers, it's European allies. But then as African countries started
to gain independence, the US sort of had to choose do we want to
be on the side of our nice European NATO allies or more important longer term,
the side of the African people. And we you know, we don't
want to be lumped in with the British and the French and the Belgians in
Africa. We want to show that America is you know, pro freedom and
also in the context of the Cold War, we want to win them over
to our side. On the other hand, there was this sense that,
you know, we couldn't entirely trust the African politicians and publics to make up
their own mind, and hence the ci IS medaling in Congo where it tried
to and successfully did tip things in its direction and install a pro American leader.
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that's so interesting that it was the State Department that there was. Yeah,
you used to the term split screen. That's fascinating that there was this,
you know, the wielding of soft power in one direction. Will you have
something happening completely different under the surface. Do you do you know whether the
CIA and State coordinated at all on that or is it your impression that it
was These were totally separate in an almost noteworthy way. I the assassination plot
was very closely held, I believe, if I'm remembering correctly. Larry Devlin,
the CIA station chief chief claimed that he never even told the US Ambassador
to Congo about it, So I think this was a totally secret within the
CIA operation that would not have leaked out into the State Department. That said,
the ambassador to Congo at the time, a man named Claire Timberlake,
was also no fan of Lamumba and certainly aware of his government's general opposition to
him. But you know, the way the US government works, sometimes the
left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. And I mean perhaps
with the Armstrong tour in particular, maybe at the time one could have claimed,
well, you know, it's not necessarily hypocritical to be promoting American culture
at the same time as we're trying to pick our own leader. But it
did get the tension, I think, And yeah, that's man, that
is really fascinating. The other thing I was wondering about that is, I
mean, this was authorized by I'm sure, like you, you've spent a
long time on getting to the bottom of all of this, but this is
ultimately the buck stops with with Alan Dallas, not with uh, not with
Eisenhower, but with Dallas. It's Dallas that who authorizes that is who is
the sort of like, because that's one of the biggest questions about all of
these random CIA activities at the time around the world. You know, but
are you acting on any constitutional authority? I mean I and a lot of
thought of other people would say, of course not. But who ultimately is
sort of to blame for authorizing the forceful transfer or the allowing of Lamimba's murder?
Right, So, just to back up a bit, it's the poisoning
plot. Interestingly enough, was not a case of an out of control CIA
freelancing and getting out of its skis. Eisenho on August eighteenth, nineteen sixty
said something to the effect that Lamumba had to be physically eliminated. We know
this for a few reasons. One, the note taker at the meeting later
testified to the Church committee that he remembered the president saying something to that effect.
I also, when I was digging around the Eisenhower archives in Kansas,
I found handwritten notes from the meeting where someone writes la Mumba and then a
big black accent next to his name, which could mean lots of things,
but adds to the evidence. And then we know what happened next, which
is that Dulles after hearing this order essentially on August eighteenth, nineteen sixty,
Dallas doesn't really do anything. And so there's another meeting about a week later
where Eisenhower's National security advisor, Gordon Gray says to Dulles basically, hey,
remember that thing the President talked about last week, Like, I just want
to make sure you're on that, And Della says, oh, okay,
okay, got it. And only then does the operation set in motion.
So what's unique about the Lamuma cases that you really can trace it to the
top in terms of that poisoning plot. Now in the way that Lamumba ultimately
died, that was at the total opposite end of the spectrum. That was
a local initiative in Congo, Greenland, as I mentioned by the CIA station
chief, who was actively keeping headquarters out of the loop because at that time
Lamomba, you know, Washington didn't need Lamumba dead at that point and didn't
in fact necessarily want him dead. The State Department instructed the US ambassador to
Congo to plead for Lamumba's humane treatment. So there was a total flip in
policy where earlier they wanted him dead and had stuff set in motion to achieve
that end and then only later did they they completely flip. But the man
on the spot, Larry Devlin, was able. He had a lot of
power and authority. I mean, this is nineteen sixty one. The communications
with Washington were not that great, so you necessarily had to rely a lot
on the man in the field making decisions on his own, and Devlin took
advantage of that to the fullest. You know. The other thing in this
case and some of the others, in this case is one of the more
interesting ones because Lumumba is killed by opposition and not the CIA, as you
just explained, What can you tell us about the level of organic political opposition
to La Mumba that did exist, because you know, in some of these
situations it's sort of hard to tell what's astroturfed and what's organic. And I
imagine, you know, having spent years on this, that's abundantly clear,
like sort of trying to disentangle the AstroTurf from the organic, and it's almost
becomes a chicken or an egg. But what was his political opposition like on
the ground in the Congo before his death? Yeah, so that there was
real legitimate opposition to Lamumba particularly, he was seen as having you know,
mishandled the great crisis that his country was in, where the army mutiny,
the province, two provinces succeeded, everything was falling apart, and La Mumba
was blamed by many for not handling that well, and a fair case could
be made for that. I should also point out, however, that he
was the most popular politician in Congo. You know, it was a very
fractured political scene, and he didn't by any means win the parliamentary elections and
anything approaching landslide, but he was, you know, he was the democratically
elected leader. The CIA also funded street protests in the capitol, so you
know, there was that sort of asterturfing that you're talking about. And then
there were also these two very powerful secessionist movements. So in South Kasai,
one breakaway province, a diamond rich province, there was a you know,
secessionist movement that was anti Lamumba. And then also in Katonga, the copper
rich province in the southeast, there was an anti Lamumba secessionist movement that was
very much backed by the Belgian Belgian mining interests the Belgian government. So were
there Did Lamumba have legitimate, real opponents, yes? Were they also massively
empowered by outside interests who agreed with them, Yes, as well. And
when it comes to Lamumba's ultimate death, I mean, it's sort of like
a lot of different actors had to do things in a certain way in order
for La Mumba to die, and one of those actors a key point was
the CIA station chief. And part of the problem of you know, not
telling these stories is we don't learn from those mistakes. So I'm curious Stewart,
as you were studying this story so closely for so long, if you
could tell us just a little bit of out what happened, and some people
actually probably know because of Mabutu, But what happened in the power vacuum,
what happened in the years after, and what some of the big maybe you
stand out lessons that the US and other powers can take from this example are.
So the CIA viewed its operations in Congo as its success, and in
extremely narrow Cold War terms, that was, there was a certain truth to
that a potentially pro Soviet leader had been eliminated, and in his place,
the US backed a pro American military leader, and you know, in the
Cold War context, what was not to like the problem, of course was
that the Congolese people suffered as a result. So Mobutu, you know,
it replaces La Mumba in September nineteen sixty stays in power, sort of the
power behind the throne until nineteen sixty five, were he gets rid of the
pretense that he's not technically in charge and becomes president himself, and then he
he runs the country into the ground over the next thirty plus years, and
in nineteen ninety six nineteen ninety seven, the country that he's renamed Zaire outright
collapses, sparking a civil war that was one of the deadliest in recent history.
So you have thirty plus years of dictatorship, poverty, repression followed by
one of the bloodiest civil wars that resulted from this hollow regime finally caving in.
So the consequences are pretty clear. And the irony, I think is
that I mean American, the US thought it was getting this nice pro American
regime, but in fact Mabutu, like was, was not particularly pro American
in any way. So he invited in North Korean military advisors. For instance,
he kicked out two US ambassadors for showing insufficient respect him he wants,
in the height of irony, accused the CIA of plotting to overthrow him.
So it wasn't as if the US even got this clientt pro American dictator for
all the money it was paying. It got a erratic, kleptocratic leader who
destroyed the country. I mean, I think the lesson for today is to
beware of sort of short term thinking about you know, at any given moment,
it can seem like this safe thing to do is back the pro American
military ruler. But if you expand the time horizon even just a bit and
think about longer term stability, and certainly if you start to include the needs
of the everyday people living in that country, you can start to see the
downsides of propping up an unrepresentative military regime. And Sir, one more question,
why have you here? Just because it was something that kind of came
to the forefront in the last couple of days of conversation, there was a
lot of panic over TikTok videos about the Osama bin Laden letter to America,
and actually there's a CIA connection to Osama Bin Laden that a lot of people
know about the misja haden And just while we're talking about lessons, uh and
talking about lessons that you know, we we don't even talk about in the
sort of like high profile political discourse. We don't even think or talk about
these things all too often. Do you see today, maybe especially with younger
people, that the less we talk about some of this stuff, the more
powerful it is. You know, when when young people have one view of
a conflict that maybe lacks some nuance and then hear things that they're missing,
it's it's seems to me counterproductive. It seems to me that you know,
it does, you know, lead people down different paths, you know,
the sort of truth becomes forbidden and takes on a new sort of power and
can drive people in good directions, can also drive people in bad direct just
because you know, it seems like we're we're still hiding some things from the
global community. Yeah, I mean, I think secrecy, especially secrecy about
something from nineteen sixty and nineteen sixty one, is not a sign of confidence.
A good open democracy should be able to say, you know what,
here are the files of things we did many many years ago. We're just
putting it all out on the table. We're a you know, self correcting,
confident democracy that isn't afraid of the ghosts and its own the skeletons in
its own closet. But because of this broken declassification system, the US is
effectively just hiding all this stuff and refusing to have it be open, which
breeds, you know, yet more conspiracy theories and oh what are you hiding?
And I think, you know, I don't think there's some very intentional
decision at high levels of the US government to keep the CONGO files closed.
It's just a sort of purecratic problem of no one's incentivized to care about this
within the US government. The result is that all this stuff that should be
open is still kept behind lock and key. And I mean, I think
this is it's an opportunity for the United States, particularly when it comes to
the CONGO files, to open it up and say, okay, world,
here's what happened. Have at it. You know, we have we have
nothing to hide. And you know, just because our predecessors sixty plus years
ago did bad things doesn't mean we're inherently evil today. It can also be
a nice diplomatic gift to Congo in the context of trying to you know,
curry favor with the Congolese government as opposed to having them you know, cozy
up to Rush or China. It just seems like an easy diplomatic win,
the right thing to do, good for openness and scholarship. Yet it's still
so much of it is hidden. There's a CIA, their internal history of
the operations against La Mumba are still classified in full. So I just think
it's long past time to open up the files. And how do the people
in the Congo see the US today? You know, I came into this
project expecting, oh, well, you know, they must be very anti
American, given all the terrible things Washington did to them in nineteen sixty nineteen
sixty one, you know, just like how Iranians are anti American because of
the you know, Mosedekkup or whatever. To my surprise, Congo, like
much of the rest of Sub Saharan Africa, is actually quite pro American.
And so it's sort of a puzzle in a way. I think what explains
that is one that US malfeasans was not particularly well known at the time and
only came out later. And also for thirty plus years, they had a
dictator who was not explicitly anti American, with the exceptions I mentioned earlier.
So unlike Iran, where you had a regime in power that was, you
know, constantly chanting death to America, in Congo, you didn't have that.
The The population is way less anti American than you might expect, given
what they've suffered at the hands of Americans. Stuart Read, author of the
La Mumba Plot, The Secret History of the CIA in a Cold War Assassination.
This is a massive book with new stuff in it. First of all,
congratulations Stuart, and thank you so much for taking the time to talk
about it on the show. It was really fun talking to you. Thanks
for having me. Of course, you have been listening to another edition of
The Federalist for Radio hour a Memalikashinski, culture editor here at The Federalist.
We'll be back soon with more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and
anxious for the fray. Right. Well, you