Julian Dorey Podcast - 🤯 [VIDEO] - CIA vs KGB's 1960 Covert War for Congo | Stuart Reid • 165

Episode Date: October 31, 2023

BUY STUART’S BOOK: https://www.amazon.com/Lumumba-Plot-Secret-History-Assassination/dp/1524748811  (***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Stuart Reid is a journalist, author, and historian. Reid is currently an executive editor of Foreign  Affairs. EPISODE LINKS: - Get 15% OFF MudWTR (PROMO CODE: “JULIAN”): https://mudwtr.com/julian  - Julian Dorey PODCAST MERCH: https://legacy.23point5.com/creator/Julian-Dorey-9826?tab=Featured   - Support our Show on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey  - Join our DISCORD: https://discord.gg/ubyXDkWx CREDITS: - Hosted & Produced by Julian D. Dorey - Intro & Episode Edit by Alessi Allaman ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - The CIA & KGB in Congo, Patrice Lumumba, & Belgium Colonization Background 11:52 - Belgium’s corrupt government in Congo 19:16 - Lumumba’s rise to political power in Congo 25:13 - African independence movements across Congo 31:38 - How big CIA was in 1960s; Intel Agencies in Belgian Congo 38:10 - Lumumba’s popularity rise; Belgium gives up Congo; CIA & Intel take places 45:28 - Joseph Kasavubu’s backstory; Lumumba’s first cabinet 53:02 - Revolt against Belgian soldiers; UN Peacekeepers sent in 57:02 - The cessessions of South Kasai & Katanga 1:04:42 - Lumumba & Kasavubu make peace; Mobutu comes into picture 1:10:22 - Lumumba calls Soviet Union (USSR); Allen Dulles & CIA ignore Lumumba 1:13:12 - Sydney Gottlieb & the CIA plans for Lumumba 1:23:42 - KGB Aid never makes it to Lumumba; Mobutu & CIA; Lumumba arrested 1:32:42 - Lumumba escapes house arrest; 2 European CIA Agents 1:39:32 - JFK & Lumumba 1:46:42 - KGB (Soviet) Involvement in Congo; Lumumba executed 1:55:38 - Congo Crisis (Civil War breaks out); Larry Devlin & CIA post Lumumba 2:02:31 - US Power Vacuum; What won Cold War 2:10:02 - Russian influence in Africa 2:12:06 - “The Lumumba Plot” ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “JULIANDOREY”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Music via Artlist.io ~ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 165 - Stuart Reid Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey guys, I need your help with three quick things, and if you're watching me on Spotify video right now, you can see this timer to my right, it is going to be fast. Number one, if you are not already following the show, please hit that follow button on Spotify or whatever audio platform you're on. Number two, if you're on Spotify right now, on our show's homepage in the description, you will see a link to our Spotify podcast clips channel. That's right, we are posting clips from this podcast every single day on there. There is a whole library. So go over there and follow. And finally, number three, if you are on Spotify or Apple, please leave a five-star review. It is a huge, huge help to the show. Now let's get to the episode. So that sets off massive alarm bells in the CIA and Larry Devlin, he's the CIA station chief in Congo. He sends a cable to his headquarters in D.C. and says, this is the beginnings of a classic communist effort to take over the government.

So then what happens is there's this August 18th meeting at the White House where President Eisenhower says something to the effect of, while he's looking at Dulles, the CIA director says, you know, we need to get rid of Lumumba or something. The exact words are lost to history, but it was clear that the way Dulles received it was get rid of men, physical sense. Is there another way? So that is the beginning of a series of events where the CIA decides to send poison to the Congo that Larry Devlin, CIA station chief, is to inject into Lumumba's food or toothpaste so that it'll kill it. Stuart, thank you for being here, man. Thanks for having me. So this is your

first book, your first baby. It is my first book. It is not my first actual baby, but it is my first book. Well, you picked a doozy to start this with. I've been looking forward to this podcast. The book is called The Lumumba Plot. You got it right there. And if you can actually hold that up for a second, people can see how thick this thing is. This is a 618 page book. Is that right? Something like that. But you know, there's footnotes at the end. So I don't want readers to think it's longer than it actually is. The last page of actual story text is like 430 or something. Well, it's good. It's really good. I've had a chance to read some of it before we got in here.

I'm familiar with the story. This is one of those, like, let's go historical plot type things that is kind of from that flurry of history of the early 60s when so much shit was going on with the Cold War and a lot of little things happened in the underground of espionage, not the least of which is what went down in the Congo, which you've reported on. So before we even get into the story though here, how did you pick this one? How did you fall into this story about Lumumba? Sure. So I'm an editor at Foreign Affairs Magazine, and I always had a bit of a specialty, a bit of a focus on Africa. And in 2014, I got to travel to what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo to work on an article that I was taken with the country and started reading up on its history. And the more I read, the more I realized there was this great untold story from 1960 and 1961 when the country became independent, immediately fell into chaos.

It was front-page news in the New York Times every day. And later it got overshadowed by other Cold War crises, but it was really the big Cold War news story of the day. And basically, like when we think about simple history of the Cold War and words like the CIA and KGB get thrown around, I think what a lot of the people out there like me get to is that, oh, we were overthrowing governments left and right and it seems to me like when we look at patrice lamumba who's going to be the center of the story here you had a guy who had an incredible life story very interesting background growing up under belgian rule i do want to start with that in a second but it wasn't so much that he wanted to be a part of russia and like take this was my interpretation take their side like with the soviet union it was a survival tactic in the sense that he wasn't getting support from the United States. Maybe they were a little scared that he had like some communist political

beliefs and therefore it created this schism in the country that he then bore the brunt of at the end. Yeah. So the country becomes independent from Belgium. Immediately, things go to hell in a handbasket. And Lumumba, who's the country's new prime minister, asks for help from the UN, which sends in peacekeeping forces, asks for help from the United States, which says, no, go through the UN. But the country's still falling apart. It's chaotic. And so then he made the fateful and fatal mistake of asking for help from the Soviet Union. But as you said, you're absolutely right. He was not pro-Soviet. He was not communist.

In fact, as I show in the book, all the evidence suggests that he was really more pro-American than pro-Soviet. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill. When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer. So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders.

Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart.0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. But U.S. officials and the CIA sort of miscategorized him and thought he was part of this big communist plot to take over Africa. And this was just the height of Cold War paranoia. And they misjudged him and then worked to overthrow him. Well, let's start at the beginning with it and what I hinted at with how Belgium was even involved with all this. So my understanding is that before 1960, which we'll get to when it started to turn over away from Belgian control, they had been around in the country for at least 50 years, a little more than that? Yeah, more than that.

So Belgian involvement in Congo begins in the 1880s with the creation of the Congo Free State. So you may have heard of the book King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hoekstra, which I highly recommend. And King Leopold, the king of Belgium, developed, conquered this colony, created this colony in the middle of Africa. He actually never visited it once, which was interesting. And what was different about it is it wasn't legally part of the Belgian state. It was his personal colony under his personal control. It eventually, after a series of human rights atrocities, there was an outcry globally, and he was forced to hand over the colony to the Belgian government,

which then took over and then continued to run it as a colony until 1960. And his, I guess, like, one of the things that we don't really think about is the cultural effect that that has on, you know, people's language and identity. I mean, colonialism is this, it still happens, but it's this very past history as well, where countries from, say, Europe and even America, like, went into other countries and imposed their way of living. But, you know, what did he – did he change, like, the language of the country? Like, what did they speak when he went there and that turned over to, like, French as they spoke in Belgium? Like, how did that go down? So like most of Africa at that time, there was a real mix of different ethnic groups that were then suddenly arbitrarily forced into one colony. These were Europeans drawing lines on a map at the Berlin conference in the 1880s, carving up Africa.

And that had little to do with the actual on the ground reality of who was living where. So you have the creation of this artificial state, this colony. And, you know, everyone, there were many different languages spoken. And suddenly, it was all technically under the control of the Belgians. French was the official language. So Lumumba grew up learning French and spoke that. But yeah, you really had with colonialism in Belgium, excuse me, in Congo as elsewhere, you had the imposition of these European systems and laws and culture and mores onto an African context that was often not receptive to it. And did a lot of Belgians move there?

Like, did they have a ton of people on the ground? Or was it more just like the government and they send people in and out to do business and plunder? So it wasn't primarily a settler colony like Kenya, for instance, was with the British. There were about 100,000 Belgians in the Congo by the time of independence in 1960, but it was run largely as a sort of hands-off operation. And there were 100,000 Belgians, but there were 13 million Congolese. So there wasn't a huge settler presence unlike in other places in africa and i'm not sure if you said this right at the beginning when i was messing

with the camera but what types of resources were there in in the congo like what were the primary loot that that belgium was looking to take advantage of yeah well it changed over time it was rubber at one point it was ivory at another point um i mean humans they were there was a slave gathering operation before the belgians came um and then by the time of independence it was really minerals um uranium and then copper um and to this day the country is extremely rich in natural resources. So there's a ton there obviously to take advantage of, and a bunch of the other countries in Africa had things that,

whether it be Belgium or Great Britain or France, that they took advantage of, kind of crazy part of history. But what about like the, I don't know if I want to use the word brainwashing of society but when it comes to the resources that the people had like did the belgians come in and and affect how the citizens could even be educated or how they could make it in society such that they were held down to a lower lower class system so that they could kind of rule over them or was there anything like that yeah i mean so there was de facto segregation and there was really tight control on the types of education that could that congolese could receive so the belgians were petrified that they would create a politically aware class that would start demanding independence, which happened anyways. But so they, you know, black people were allowed

to become veterinary assistants, but not doctors. Clerks, but not lawyers. That sort of thing. And so there was a real cap on how far you could rise if you were Congolese. And they opened, I think it was in 1956, they finally opened the first university in Congo that was open to the African population as well as the European population.

But they really, that was belated. And in contrast to other European powers, like France and the United Kingdom, Belgium really worked assiduously to keep the population, you know, not educated. And that reflected in Lumumba's own education himself. We can talk about that in a bit. But he, you know, he never advanced higher than a school for postal clerks because he wasn't able to. So how did their, like, what was their government set up then? Did they have complete control only of native Belgians and not even have

any roles whatsoever for natives of the Congo? Or did they at least have, you know, try to give them the allure of like, well, you have some people who are in our government here. No, they very much asserted control over everyone or tried to. I think the extent of Belgian control varied by geography, but there was certainly an attempt to control every aspect of life. There were rules about the native population could not drink liquor, for instance, or couldn't buy liquor. They couldn't see movies that were deemed – the same movies that were deemed unsuitable for white children. So there really was a heavy-handed approach. At a certain point, they utterly lost control and couldn't remain ruling any longer. Sure.

So before they got there, though – I'm going backwards now a little bit i'm just curious like what it looked like if it's very hard for me to put myself in the shoes of being on the ground in what is let's call it what it is like more of a third world country and suddenly having colonialists come in and say you work for us now basically like in a way enslaving the population yeah if even if they're getting some jobs and whatever like they're limiting what they can do and they're coming onto their land and saying we own this now like do they bring an army when they do this like is is it just 3 000 men pull up and they say we control it now or is it more was there any bloodshed going on with that? Like, how does this control happen? Like, it seems like it was a snap of a finger.

Yeah, I mean, there definitely was force involved. And I mean, it began with Stanley, Henry Morton Stanley, this Welsh-American explorer who King Leopold sent on a mission to Congo to sort of gather up treaties, claiming land and that sort of thing. There was also an army, a colonial army called the Force Publique. And that was – the officers were white Belgians and then the enlisted, the rank and file were Congolese. So there was also a sort of – there was very much a hard power aspect to Belgian rule in the Congo for sure. Now let's talk about Lumumba because that's the core of the story here. So as you said, he's born in I think 1925.

He grows – he is born into and grows up within Belgian rule. And you mentioned that he did not get well educated, but he was like a very, he was a dense reader. He was in a lot of ways still a self-educated man, no? Yeah, he was very smart. He was self-taught. He joined a library. He read constantly, wrote a ton, was also a really skilled political organizer. Higher education wasn't permitted to him because of the system. But you know,

within the limits of Belgian colonialism, he, you know, achieved a remarkable amount and, you know, became very politically skilled and, and as I mentioned, well read. And where did he grow up? What was his childhood like? So he grew up, he was born in this village called Onulua.ua in the Kasai province in Congo. And he was taught by American missionaries, which I found interesting. His first contact with outsiders was with Americans who educated him at the missionary near him. And there were many missionaries, mostly Belgian in the Congo, but some American as well. And he was baptized by an American.

And he was, his teachers were very frustrated with him. He's clearly a precocious, but also rebellious boy. And he then, in his teenage years, early 20s, he eventually moved to the city of Stanleyville, as it was known at the time, which was a major regional center. And that's really where he began his political and professional rise. I'll stick a map of that in the corner of the screen. So when he gets there, at what point did he start, like what age did he start working? I know he worked as a postal worker. He was also like a beer salesman or something.

When did he go to work? I think it was probably his late teens or early 20s. And yeah, he became a postal clerk. So he's joining the administration, the Belgian administration. He went to postal school, as i mentioned um and for i think 11 years was a postal clerk that ended uh very poorly when he was caught embezzling money from the accounts that businesses kept at the post office what was he doing there um he uh he his defense was that he had run out of money and was trying to live as a Europeanized Congolese man

in Stanleyville. He, you know, had magazine subscriptions and he wanted to send his kids to a good school and eat proper food. And so he basically just ran out of money and his solution was stealing from the post office. The book was really thrown at him and he was it's sort of complicated to get into but he was punished not just for the embezzlement which was real and happened but also for his sort of political activism his nascent

pushing back against the colonial system when had that really started and how did that, how did that develop? Like, did he start groups himself right away or did, did he have, maybe the better question is, did he have clear heroes that he looked up to from a political standpoint that inspired him to look at his own situation in Congo? Yeah, I mean, it developed slowly. So, remember, the broader context here is the Belgians were trying to prevent, trying to keep the Congolese politically stunted and not connected with each other, and, you know, banning various books

and that sort of thing. Um, so his political consciousness, I'd say, developed more slowly than perhaps his counterparts in other African countries. But it did develop. And over the course of the late Belgians, asking for very limited reform, saying, you know, it's no, I don't want to overthrow the whole system. I just think we should make certain changes to reduce discrimination, that sort of thing. And then over just a matter of years, really, he turned into the, you know, anti-colonial activists that we would all come to know.

But he didn't start out that way. Was there like, were there catastrophic events that turned him? Were there times where, I don't know, like Belgian officials massacred citizens for random shit for no reason or things like that that kind of like straw that broke the camel's back them yeah well so for him personally he was arrested for um uh for embezzlement as i mentioned it was in prison over the course of 1956 um and then i mean a really key turning point in all this history is in January 1959, there are what were known as the Leopoldville riots. Leopoldville was the capital at the time.

And the Belgian administration had denied the right for a political group to hold a meeting. And that turned into these days of riots where the population just really rose up and was destroying everything. And that was super important because it convinced the Belgians, who had imagined that they'd be holding on to their colony long into the future, uh-oh, we need to give this up, we can't hold on. You know, the winds of change are coming to Africa,

and the population isn't just gonna accept being oppressed and so that really changed everything with the 1959 riots are you sick of the coffee jitters from drinking it too many days in a row how about that dreaded afternoon crash well then listen up because i have an amazing on-the-go drink for you to try mud water mud water is a coffee alternative containing four adaptogenic mushrooms. Big words because they're really cool. With only a fraction of the caffeine of a cup of coffee, you're still going to get that all-day energy without the jitters or the crash. And by the way, each ingredient was added for a very specific purpose. You got cacao and chai for a

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Now let's get back to the show. Well, you know what I was just thinking of as you said that i should have thought this earlier but you know this is they're controlling this long before and then through world wars one but in this case more importantly for what i'm getting at like world war ii so we all know world war ii hitler was trying to conquest of africa and everything we know belgium was getting bombed like crazy as he was moving across western europe eventually obviously at all turn thank god but like what was did did anything happen to change the status of the country during those years or was belgium still running business as usual um my understanding

it's a little bit about outside the scope of my what i'm familiar with but i believe the congo you know remained it definitely did remain a belgian colony and it was most importantly known for providing the uranium that was used in the atomic bombs that were dropped over japan so it was contributing to the allied cause in that way okay so obviously like we had oss people on the ground during those years i would take it no you know there is a book about that and it i don't know the details but i um and and there's some story where the the uranium was shipped clandestinely to the United States and maybe sat in a warehouse in New York or something like that. I don't know the details, but that's a whole other story there for sure. That's very interesting.

All right, so back to Lumumba though. He becomes this kind of political leader. That's what was a little confusing to me. It seemed like it was, it happened awfully quickly. Like he went from a postal their, the whole Congolese political class basically didn't exist in the mid 50s. And suddenly, in 1960, you had to have politicians and people in charge. So Lumumba, his journey was, he was arrested, as I mentioned, spent time in jail, wrote a book while he was in jail expressing his political views at the time, which in retrospect seemed quite moderate. And then after getting out of prison, he became a beer promoter.

He moved to the capital, Leopoldville, worked for a brewery, and that really allowed him to, you know, be a very public man about town. And sort of in that atmosphere of beer in Leopoldville, he morphed into politics. And, um, co-founded this, uh, political party, the Congolese National Movement, um, that was, you know,

there were other political groups as well. And then as, you know, 58 turned into 59, turned into 60, it was very, you know, suddenly the demands for independence were growing louder and louder, and suddenly Belgium finally realized that it couldn't just keep ignoring them. So if he turned that fast and did it after prison, like, I would think with the control the Belgians had over the country, if a political dissident in this case, who's a convicted criminal in their eyes, sitting in prison is writing a book, like, wouldn't they just not let that be published? Like, how did, did a lot of people read it?

It wasn't published, actually. It was, but not due to censorship, I'd say. It was, you know, he mailed it off to some publisher and then never heard back. They weren't interested. It maybe wasn't even that good. But the important thing to keep in mind is the Belgians were really losing control.

They had exerted control successfully for decades, but then very quickly, they were not able, you know, the demands are growing and they looked around at the rest of Africa and they see in Algeria, there's a war being fought against the French and Belgium thinks, okay, we don't want that. In Indonesia, the Dutch had faced a similar type war against them and Belgium realized, okay, we actually don't want an anti-colonial war. We've had this colony for a long time. It's time to offload it quickly. So it seems like it was all the – it seems similar to, say, the Arab Spring in 2011 in the sense that one country kind of starts doing something and the other countries follow.

Is that what caused the uprising? There was, over the course of the late 1950s, there were all sorts of independence movements across the continent. And they were, they were talking to each other, they met with each other at these Pan-African conferences, Lumumba went to those. And yeah, in 1960, there were actually 17 nations

that became independent that year. Mm-hmm. So it all moved very quickly. Where did these... Were these conferences, these pan-African conferences, like in secret or where would they do them? Well, some of them were in, for instance, Ghana, which had become independent in 1957.

So you could hold a conference there openly because it was no longer under European control. But they wouldn't be killed when they went back? Well, so Lumumba was allowed to go to this conference because things were sort of changing by the very end. And Belgium, for instance denied another politician joseph casabubu from attending the conference but they let lumumba go maybe they didn't think he was as much of a threat so they were starting to sort of very tentatively permit various forms of political discussion how nice of them okay so he starts going to these conferences these different countries start seceding i guess from colonial rule this is where we're also now unquestionably smack dab in the middle of that

whole cold war conflict around the world where it's like a race to see who has more influence in what countries like at what point does you said the US obviously had involvement as far back as World War Two with the uranium and stuff. But at what point did they start? I guess operating on the ground in Congo and deciding how they want this to go? Yeah. So as all these new African countries were entering international life as independent countries, the United States very quickly sought to rack up all allies. And it saw this new continent coming into international life as a place to compete for influence. And there was a sense of a contest with the soviets

and it was just the sense that these new countries were up for grabs and they had to choose one side or the other and so better that they side with america than the soviets um so now all that said in congo in particular the cia did not think it was going to be a very interesting, lively place after independence. Why is that? It had been this extremely calm, placid colony for decades. Um, and the CIA station chief that was the...

The person they appointed to be CIA station chief in Congo was Larry Devlin, who was 37 or 38 years old at the time. So this was not... You know, he had no experience in Africa. This was not seen as this extremely important posting. No one really expected that bad things were going to happen. In fact, the Belgians, they thought that the biggest issue facing Congo after independence was going to be what role would the Flemish language play?

You know, there's French and Flemish and Belgian. They thought this is going to be the big question, which is laughable in retrospect. But that's how it was seen at the time. What does a CIA station look like back then in Congo? Is it totally covert or is it operating openly? Yeah. So, I mean, it was like in most places there were there's a u.s embassy you know u.s consulate and then became a u.s embassy with independence and there were was a station chief

there who you know officially would have been uh you know political officer or the economic attache or something like that that that's called official cover um and there were a handful of people there from commutes that become learning sessions to dishwashing filled with laughs podcasts can help you make the most out of your everyday and when it comes to everyday spending you can count on the pc insiders world elite mastercard to help you earn the most pc optimum points everywhere you you shop. The PC Insider's World Elite MasterCard, the card for living unlimited. Conditions apply to all benefits. Visit pcfinancial.ca for details. Very few pre-independence and a little more after independence. But they didn't view this as like this extremely important CIA station where

we need to really be bulking up and sending our best people. Congo was not seen as a place where events were going to be particularly interesting. Did you do a lot of work in your reporting here on the buildup of, say, the CIA in post-World War II when it moved from OSS to CIA and what what their I guess strategy was around the world yeah I mean what's interesting is I think they were so European focused as you said it grew out of the OSS which was the world war ii clandestine service and I think the CIA thought that the main contest in the Cold War was going to be in Europe, which is indeed where it was for the 40s and most of the 50s. And within the late 50s and early 60s, not thinking that the third world was going to be the organization was at this point? How many countries they were operating in? I assume it was almost all of them.

But how many people they had? Obviously, they're putting heavier resources as you laid out in some places than others. But do we know how much the CIA was completely and fully the CIA by 1959? That's a good question. I don't have numbers, but my sense is that it was small but growing. And I mean, in the case I know well, the Congo, it was from, let's say, 1960 to 1965,

it grew from a handful of officers to a big station humming with activity and military advisors. And I imagine that was replicated in other places as well. Oh, so – OK. So was there any – here's another question. Was there – did they bring any military presence there outside of like UN peacekeepers or something as this was heading into the Congo crisis? So there was a limited military presence that, as you said, was part of the UN peacekeeping mission where the U.S. was helping fly supplies there. But really, you know, actually after Lumumba's death in the mid-60s, the CIA had this whole massive paramilitary operation in the congo to help

mabutu put down um various rebellions that were popping up which is getting ahead of ourselves in the story okay that's interesting so outside and i want to circle back around on cia and some of the characters there because there are some interesting names that popped up. But who else was operating within the country, let's say, in like the late 50s? Obviously KGB. Did you have MI6 and other countries involved as well who aren't necessarily directly there? How did that look? Yeah.

So, I mean, before independence, the communist world had very little access to the belgian congo because the belgians didn't want communist infiltration so they policed that so the the soviet i don't think the soviets even had a presence i think it was the the czechoslovakians had a presence um but after independence when you know it's up to to the Congo to decide who can come there, uh, you had the CIA, as I mentioned, you did have, um, MI6, there's this, uh, British spy, a woman named Daphne Park, whose life is fascinating. Um, she was there. What was, what, let's take that tangent right there. What's so fascinating about her? There's a book about her called Queen of Spies, but she was this sort of legendary British spy

and a woman in a field that was dominated by men way ahead of her time and also very daring and witty and a whole larger-than-life figure. What was her like? I mean, obviously, I didn't write the book, but what was her, like, claim to fame as a spy? You know, I'm not sure the answer to that question. She was in Congo, I know.

I kind of wasn't looking at what she did afterwards. But she also exaggerated a lot, and it's sometimes hard to tell with her what was fact and what was fiction. Don't you hate that shit? I mean, it came up a lot in researching this book for sure. Yeah. And then the KGB was, did have a small presence in Congo. The Americans thought it was much bigger than it ended up being. And, you know, with the opening of the Soviet archives,

one thing that's, that became clear was that Moscow viewed the Congo, not as this, you know, important area where it could gain a toehold in Africa, but as this sort of peripheral, peripheral concern where it could, you know, score some propaganda points, but it wasn't ever going to be able to compete with the West there. But at the time, the Americans were paranoid and thought that, you know, they were seeing Soviet ghosts everywhere. So I take it the GDP out of this place, even with their resources, wasn't, wasn't something to jump at. It seems that way. That's, I'd say that's accurate. It was, you know, it's interesting. A lot of the sources I was reading would talk about how the Congo was this massive strategically important country in the heart of Africa. And yet the United States got way more involved than it needed to.

Is also part of that the fact that like a lot of the country is covered by uncharted rainforest? You know, like it, so it's not, I mean, I'm not familiar with what it looks like on the ground there today or what it did, but it would seem to me that you have segments of the country that are like open outside the rainforest and then a lot of the country covered by that so it's also kind of spread out it's not like this kind of centralized you know one province type place is that fair to say yeah i mean it's a massive country that um it almost you know doesn't make it you wouldn't design it as a country today.

It's got grouping together all sorts of different ethnic groups. The geography varies on a continental scale. There are mountains, snow-capped mountains and rainforest and savanna. And it's – yeah, it's the size of Western Europe. Eighty times larger than Belgium. Europe. 80 times larger than Belgium. It's 80 times larger than Belgium. That's a scary thought. And they were able to go colonize that thing.

It's wild how that happened. That's like a part of history. Like, as I said, it's, we all know what happened, but it's like this thing like, oh yeah, Africa got colonized. And it's like snap of the finger type history. But it's insane to me how easily some of that happened and how the indignance and entitlement to go in there and be like, well, this is ours now.

I just will never get over that. But human beings are funny. So anyway, back to Lumumba though. So he's participating in these conferences as we laid out. He's becoming a clear leader. A lot of the prospective leadership are obviously native people from Congo who were raised under the restrictive rule. Maybe they're not as educated as other leaders would be around the world

because it wasn't allowed to them, but he's able to rise up through this he's clearly a smart guy what like what did his what made people within the country gravitate towards him and like we laid out already that there were other countries around africa who were seeking freedom at this time and successfully doing it so that drives a lot of emotion within the country be like well we want to be out of this too but like what made what made the people say okay this is the guy this is the guy we're looking up to yeah so there are a few factors i mean one he was a real organizational whiz. He just knew how to register voters, distribute campaign literature. He was extremely efficient and talented at that because he had been active in all sorts of associations and was just a very skilled political organizer.

So that's one thing. Two, I think people found his message appealing in that he was, many other politicians were sort of playing ethnic politics and trying to, you know, divide, divide the Congolese. He was promoting a message of unity saying, you know, we come from many different ethnic groups, but we all are Congolese and we need to become independent as one single country together. But I think the most important factor was his charisma. You know, everyone who heard him could not help but remark at how charismatic he was. Even his enemies, even, you know, the U.S. ambassador who hated him would like to say that if Lumumba had walked into a restaurant as waiter, he would have walked out as prime minister because he was just so convincing and charismatic.

Um, so he really had a way of speaking to people, um, interlacing his arguments with sort of, uh, logical, rational argumentation and impassioned, you know, calls to action. Um, and he was, uh, he became the uh he became the most the politician that won the most votes when they had a parliamentary election just before independence and then was that their first election like since belgian rule first ever yeah how did that come to be like so the belgians i guess like signed off on them doing that yeah so when the belgians at a certain point, very belatedly, they realized they had to give up control of the Congo, that there was too great a risk of some sort of Algeria-style war.

So they have this conference with the Congolese in Belgium where they negotiate how independence is going to work. And so there are elections in May of 1960, independences in June, and Congolese for the first time ever are allowed to pick who will represent them at a national level. This is where I'm a little hazy on some of this history here

and how this exactly went down. So the Belgians are giving up control, but then the world is kind of stepping in like, well, we may kind of fill the gaps here by paying off some people. Yeah, so the Belgians were saying, okay, this colony is no longer going to be ours. It's going to be an independent country. The writing is on the wall. It's going to be anachronistic and dangerous to still have a colony going forward belgians of course imagined that they would still retain considerable control especially economic control um you know but the

country would be nominally independent so belgium was trying to you know it wanted it accepted that the country would have to be independent but but thought it could still influence things. And then other countries were also getting interested. So the United States wanted to, you know, thought it was important to keep a close eye on Congolese politics. The Soviets did the same as part of this Cold War contest where it seemed to matter, you know, how many friends you had and which side every country was on now did the people of the congo though seeing as this is their first election and the belgians are like letting it happen is there not like suspicion that this is like all going to be a fixed election they're going to put in puppets of their own people and it's like they're it's

just word salad that they're saying oh we don we don't really want this anymore. But in a way, they're still going to have it. Yeah, I mean, I think what's, so there were all, there were many, many Congolese political parties. And so these were not, you know, naive groups that were merely subject to outside forces. They were sort of playing both sides and, you know, talking to the belgians talking to the americans talking to the soviets um everyone was really jockeying for position and it was this big contest for who was going to actually have political power after independence and so lumumba was one member among many different actors trying to do that and how were they setting up the government so he obviously, ran for prime minister, but they had, like, a president too.

Like, what was... maybe did they have an influence, like a... another example government from the world that they wanted to model it after? How was that decided? Yeah, so at... this was all decided at the... this round table conference in January and February 1960, where the Congolese were meeting with the Belgians to discuss, okay, how's independence gonna work?

Where was that conference? That was in Brussels. Hmm. And, um... What ended up happening was that the Belgian system of government was basically copied and imposed on Congo. That was what was agreed to. And there were even sections of the Belgian constitution that were just copied and imposed on congo that was what was agreed to and there were even sections of the

belgian constitution that were just copied and pasted right into the congolese one and the setup was it was a parliamentary system um but there was a head of state so in belgium there's a parliament and then the head of state is the king and what happened for the congo was that there was a parliament and then the head of state was the president and by head of state you mean someone that isn't necessarily they're not deciding legislation but they they are they oversee that the government is performing due according to whatever the people are electing yeah so like this was actually one of the big problems that, you know, this led to massive problems later.

But in Belgium, the king had sort of been floating above politics. He had certain constitutional powers, but over time, it had been rendered a sort of purely ceremonial role. When they copied and pasted that to the Congo, with the president, um, who ended up being Joseph Kasavubu, it wasn't entirely clear what his powers and role, powers were and role

was. And that led to all sorts of problems down the line with this rivalry between Lumumba on one hand as prime minister and Kasavubu as president on the other. What was Casa Vubu's story? What was his background? Yeah, so he's an interesting character. He was from the ethnic group Congo, with a K, and from the lower Congo region. And he was, in many ways, the father of Congolese independence more than Lumumba was,

in that he had originally been the bolder, more prominent anti-colonial activist than Lumumba was. Lumumba was sort of a latecomer in comparison. And he led his own group called Abaco. And he was really a rival with lumumba up until independence and then indeed after independence as well what was the politics was was there like a severe politics difference or more so a difference on the viewpoint of the colonials like one was more vicious than the other like what was the difference there um it was primarily uh basically an ethnic politics difference so

casavubu was much more of an ethnic nationalist meaning he thought you know he represented the interest of his people and you know occasionally flirted with the idea of them having their own independent country, whereas Lumumba was more of a pure nationalist in that he thought there should be one country. Lumumba's own ethnic group was in fact so small that it wouldn't have worked for him to have run on an ethnic platform. So there was that political difference. And then there was a real contrast in styles. Lumumba was charismatic, very active and energetic.

Kasavubu was not that. He was sort of taciturn, slow-moving, wait-and-see. And they had very different political styles. Okay. So that was kind of... That seems like it's set up to fail in a lot of ways. Yeah. Because there's not... Like, you're starting a whole... You're basically starting a country.

You have the people there. They've been there forever, but they've been under rule now. You're starting an entirely new way of business. You have different ethnic groups, as you laid out, across the country who have totally different desires, I guess, and you're trying to organize this all in a vacuum. It's pretty hard. Who were some of the other big players, though, besides those two who were at, say, like the controls of government. Yeah, so there were, I mean, when the country became independent on June 30th, 1960,

I think there were 23 different ministers, which is chaotic and a recipe for disaster, as it proved to be. Is that, are you referring to like everything from prime minister to like minister of defense to minister? Exactly, yeah. And the reason was, so Lumumba gets the most votes from those parliamentary elections and he is asked to form a government. And because the country is so divided, there are so many different political parties, so many different ethnic groups. He sort of cobbles together this very unwieldy coalition um that entailed 23 uh 23 different ministers um

i mean perhaps the most important person we should mention in lumumba's cabinet is joseph mabutu who um as you know becomes more important in the story as as time goes on were they were mabutu and Lumumba friends? Yeah. Or was that a political alliance only? They were very much friends. Mobutu was the junior partner in the relationship. He was sort of Lumumba's assistant and secretary.

Mobutu had been in the army, the colonial army. He had then become a journalist. Oh, he was in the colonial army? Yeah, like his officers were white Belgians and he was, you know, in the ranks. And he then sort of strayed into

journalism and writing and opinion journalism. And he and Lumumba met at the offices of his newspaper once and mabutu was admiring this more prominent political figure and um they became they became close friends so lumumba puts him in his his first cabinet i guess so to speak yeah it's like a junior minister or something and so if i was understanding that correctly, he's technically elected too? Or like Lumumba is the one getting elected and he then decides who all goes in there?

Yeah, so Mobutu was not elected. So the cabinet included a lot of people who are members of parliament who were elected. But then at sort of this lower rank, Mobutu was a, I think it's called a minister of state. So he was not elected. He wasn't a politician, hadn't run, but he was, you know, sort of second level official. Got it. And what was, by the way, what was like Lumumba's, what was the rest of his life like? Did he have a family at this point?

What was his background there? Yeah, he, by this point, he was on his third marriage oh shit um yeah the first was sort of um just for the purposes of getting this extra allowance from his employer the post office the second um uh was brief and and um did not produce any children. And then his third marriage to Paulina Panga was the main one that, you know, that was the more lasting relationship. And that's the one he has when he comes to power, obviously. Yes.

Okay. And he had children with her. Yeah. Okay. So what, the election was in 1959? It was in May of 1960, just before independence. Okay, so he wins office, he sets up this ministry. Did the Belgians leave the country completely at that time? No. So that's one of the kind of interesting parts of the story,

that the Belgians really, there were all these Belgian administrators. So you had, you know, everything from meteorologists to air traffic control officers to doctors. There was a whole sort of Belgian elite that was basically running the country in colonial times. And it was imagined that they would stay on after independence so you'd have congolese running the show at the top but then underneath them you'd have all these belgians who sort of imagine that they themselves would actually be in charge what could possibly go wrong exactly

yeah um so uh yeah i mean we can get to that in a second, but that does go wrong. Well, explain that if you don't mind. Sure. So the country becomes independent, and then there's a few days of calm, and then everything goes crazy. The army, which still had white officers ruling over black soldiers after independence. After independence. Right, which is...

Again, what could go wrong? Right. So they revolt against their officers. There's a mutiny. After independence. paratroopers. So it's basically, you know, intervening in its former colony militarily without its, without the permission of the Congolese leaders. How many days is this? Like after the election? I mean, the mutinies on July 5th,

independence was on June 30th. So this is fast. Very fast. Okay. Um, the Belgians intervene. Lumumba asks for help from the United Nations to send in a peace years after World War Two, and the idea is to keep peace. But like, what was the power of it at this point? I feel like we kind of take for granted the whole UN sent peacekeepers when we hear all these stories. But this is all

the way back in 1960. Yeah. So the UN was founded in 1946, right after World War Two. And it had different aspects to it. At one level, it was just a forum for the world's countries to come together, but there was also the UN Security Council, which was this smaller body of the five permanent members who were all the victors of World War II, along with, at that point, six other countries. So that was the UN Security Council. And then you had the Secretary General,

who in 1953 became Dag Hammarskjöld, who plays a big role in my story. And so the UN was slowly getting into the peacekeeping business over the course of the 40s and 50s. It originally was sort of taking a very limited role and sending observers to like monitor a truce or ceasefire. That was its role. And then in Congo, for the very first time, it took on this whole new mission of trying to restore order to an entire country. So there were, so peacekeepers were, you know, they weren't, they were all from various different countries.

So most of them were Africans. They were, you know, from Guinea and Ghana and Tunisia and other places. And then there were also some Swedes and some Irish troops. And, you know, many different countries contributed to this international force. And the idea was you have, you know, there's chaos going on in Congo. Congo requests help from the UN. So the UN sends in this peacekeeping force, with the idea being that it's a neutral force that can, you know, control, order, allow the Belgians to get, you know, to finally go home, the Belgian forces, and provide stability so that the country can, you know, continue on as normal.

Yeah. So you had, like the, I'd imagine the streets are filled with different factions of people of, what's the official term for it, by the way, like Congos, Congolans? Congolese. Congolese. I knew I was going to fuck that up. But you had different Congolese factions who had, in this power vacuum, different political beliefs. Basically, it seems like rioting in cities in some ways because some people obviously supported the new government.

Others wanted a totally different one. So when the UN sent in peacekeeping forces, like how many people? We're talking 10 to 12 million people in this country. There's probably, you know, maybe a million outside during this time because it's a chaotic time. Like how many people is the UN sending and how do they even keep control? I think there were like 10,000 troops. That's not nothing. Yeah.

But, you know, the country is massive and so it was a real struggle to actually exert control in this environment. But yeah, I think there were about and break off. So you had Katanga, which was the mineral-rich province in the southeast, and then South Kasai, which was a diamond-rich province just to the west of Katanga. And so you had – within weeks of independence this this one country had sort of splintered yeah let's let's talk about that because the the katanga angle is at the core of lumumba story and how all that went down what was the other one called again the diamond rich south kasai south kasai okay you know what let's start with south kasai because i know less about that and katanga is the more important one so what was the how did that end up being fixed and what was the significance like how long did that last where they were actually seceded so that was yeah as you said it was sort of the less important and less successful secessionist movement but it was a diamond rich area that produced industrial

diamonds actually not the like kinds for engagement rings, but, you know, for machines that grind stuff. Oh, got it. And it was led by this man named Albert Calongi, who is sort of one of the more grotesque figures in my book and that, you know, ended up committing all sorts of atrocities and really went downhill. But that was sort of this short-lived, never quite consolidated independence, whereas the one in Katanga was much more successful. It's a much bigger,

richer state. It was more actively backed by the Belgians than the other one. Oh, okay. All right. So let's get to Katanga. They were backed by the Belgians. Right. So the Belgians, once the country, Congo, goes into chaos, the Belgians sort of shift their strategy and think, okay, well, if we can keep Katanga calm and have autonomy there, the minerals will keep flowing, the white population there, which was significant, will, you know, not be driven out and things will run as normal. And so there was this local leader, Moise Chambé, who was pro-secession, and he sort of allied himself with the Belgians in that province, and they made common cause,

and he declared a dependence, and it effectively enjoyed a separate status for quite some time. So he's an opportunist completely, it seems like. Yeah. Was he a guy who politically prior to this power vacuum was someone who had been trying to secede from the Belgians, and now it was just the full-blown opportunity of actually having power for himself by partnering with them?

Yeah, I mean, he had always sort of flirted with this idea of independent Katanga, and there was an ethnic element to it as well. What was that? Well, he talked about people who were authentically from Katanga versus this other ethnic group that were more newcomers. So that was one aspect of it. But then it was also, you know, he was an opportunistic politician, as most are, and really hated Lumumba and, you know, thought Lumumba was a communist and feared central government control, did not want Lumumba or anyone from the capital coming in and controlling his province and having any of the mineral revenues go to the treasury and the capital, that sort of thing. Real quick, to all my Discord people out there, the Julian Dory Discord is officially live.

I put the link down in the description below. So go hit that join the community and say what's up there's all kinds of features in there and i look forward to hearing from you guys let's get it popping so lamumba's idea was to create a full-blown central government where every and this is part of that belgian conference i guess where every province is run centrally through that when in fact and i know less about this but when in fact i think we were talking about it a bit earlier there are some very different provinces obviously throughout congo that have entirely different lifestyles ways of living and needs and they would some places would prefer to have like

almost like in a not perfect parallel like a states versus federal government type deal that the united states constitution was kind of trying to set up yeah i mean this was like a big debate before independence what kind of system of government is gonna is is congo going to have on the one hand was it going to have a purely unitary system where all power is in the capital and the subunits the provinces don't have much power at all or at the other end of the spectrum was it going to be more of a federal model which is what nigeria ended up adopting so there were other countries doing this um it sort of made this compromise in the middle that didn't work well and that it was fundamentally a unitary state with um power in the capital but the provinces had their own provincial legislatures which were powerful and those legislatures elected a senate so there was

kind of this halfway nature that meant that there was constantly this tension between the central government and the provinces. So what day did Katanga declare independence? Like right after the election? July 11. So right after independence. Yeah. I'm trying to put my timeline that you gave earlier. June 30 is independence. 30th. But what was the fifth again? Mutiny on the 5th. Right. Katanga declares independence on the 11th i believe okay and how does lamumba respond to that when when they did um you know shocked surprised curious and um you know his country is falling apart before his very eyes how many people were in katanga approximately again yeah i don't have the number on the tip of my tongue but it was way bigger than kasai so it was a significant it was bigger than

kasai and it also had uh it was one of the places where the white belgian population was concentrated in the country okay let me actually check that real fast just because you said there's 10 to 12 million people in the car i think 13 million in the con at the time. 13 million, okay. So just to put that in there. Katanga population today encompasses 497,000 square miles. I'll put a map of this in the corner of the screen as well. What's the population? You'd have to see what it is in 1969. Right, yeah, so it's not going to be...

All right, I'll have to try to find that later. But either way, you'll see that map in the corner of the screen. It's a pretty big province over there. And so they secede. Lumumba's pissed off. They secede on the 11th. Is there military action immediately from lamumba's side or no so um the congolese army is this unmanageable mess of a mutiny um but that's right because they had all

the belgians still in there and everything too yeah well they were you know lamumba very soon after the mutiny he you fired, announced that the white officer corps was no more and that it would be Africanized, the entire army, but it's still, you know, he did not have full control over the army, which was divided and chaotic at the time. But what he does do, it's this interesting moment of unity. So I mentioned his rivalry with Kasavubu earlier. Yes. But there's this interesting moment of unity so i mentioned his rivalry with casavubu earlier yes but there's this that's the president the president there's this brief moment where lumumba and casavubu sort of set aside their differences and get into this propeller plane and fly across the country to try and put down the mutiny of flying from town to town provincial capital provincial capital trying to restore restore order and calm and that.

But they aren't able to get into Katanga. The provincial forces there, the governor and his henchmen sort of prevent him from landing physically. Okay, so they're having significant problems across what's still mainland Congo. They had the little problem in Kasai and then they can't even get into katanga so if i'm remembering this correctly this is where mabutu comes in he did something that was like a big like did he kill a lot of people or something like that in katanga take action as head of the military not yet so what um what his role at this point was so lumumba appointed mabutu to be in charge of the army effectively and to manage the process of africanizing it so you know everyone was promoted one rank the white officers were no more and mabutu was put in charge of sort of managing that whole process oh so they so they were getting all the Belgians out,

like, right away. Um, of the military. And so, Mobutu had been in the military in the past, and so that was why Lumumba turned to him. He said, okay, you know, you, my friend, have served in the military, you seem to have a good relationship with the troops, you're now in charge of making, you know,

taking charge of the army. And it was an extremely fateful decision for the history of the country. Do we have like an idea of how big the army was at that point? I think it was 20,000 troops. Okay. So that's something. So he takes control of the army. And you said I was getting ahead of myself there a little bit. So what, between what i was thinking about and where we are now what what what happened in the interim yeah so um the un comes in with all these peacekeepers and that doesn't really solve the problem and that katanga is still not letting lumumba's forces come in, Mobutu's forces. It's not letting the UN come in. It's running its whole own operation there. The Belgian officers are still in the military in

Katanga. They've been kicked out everywhere else. But that, you know, secession is not breaking. And so Lumumba's really frustrated with this. Um, he can't exert control over his country. And so, and he's called in the UN, and they're not helping him to the degree he wants. So, and he asks the United States for help. He travels to Washington, D.C. Oh, he did? When did he go there? In July 1960.

Oh, during the, in the middle of all this? Yeah. Wow. And Eisenhower's out of town, so he doesn't meet with him, the president, but he does get a meeting with the Secretary of State, a guy named Christian Herter at the time. And he asks, Lumumba asks for American help, and they sort of brush him back and say, you know, just ask the UN, you know, it's not our job to do that. Well, this is a little bit fascinating to me, though,

because you laid out towards the beginning about how there wasn't, say, the international interest as much in Congo. Nonetheless, you're starting a land grab now in Africa that's well underway involving other countries where, like, who's allied with who, U.S. or Russia and and soviet union and this is also am i correct that this is like a year after the whole cuban revolution went down uh something

like that the timing might be a little maybe cuban revolution was 57 58 something like that yes a year or two yeah something like that and you have the new leader of a country that's in a little bit of turmoil that is a free-for-all right now coming to the united states visiting meeting with our i guess like other side diplomats here and they're totally brushing him aside yeah i mean i think the thought was twofold one One, the Americans thought that the UN would sort of take care of their interest in Congo. And two, there was very little appetite for the United States to directly send US troops to Congo. This was a faraway place. It wouldn't be particularly popular.

It's a marginal concern. It doesn't make sense. And also, then that might provoke a Soviet response if suddenly there are American troops streaming into a country in Africa. So the United States did not want to have an actual presence. It also, part of what was going on was it just viewed Lumumba as a bit of a question mark and not a reliable pro-American partner. He was, you know, who knows what he thinks was the idea. And so they wanted to keep a bit of arm's length from him. But it's interesting because in retrospect,

Lumumba was seen as this pro-Soviet figure and he became a popular icon among the left, but he was actually asking the Americans for help. He even called on U.S. troops to be sent to Congo. When he was in D.C., he gave a press conference asking for the United States to send troops. Oh, publicly. Yeah. Now, what?

So the U.N. is not helping him. The United States is turning down his overtures. That's when, in August 1960, he calls on the soviet union for help ah okay but even before we go to that this is just very fascinating to me i didn't realize he gave like a public give a public address they're asking for it yeah first of all we look at the common complaint that comes out of my mouth a lot too but from a lot of people these days where it's like oh why why is the u.s always starting a war somewhere or putting boots on the ground it is fascinating though that in some of these places not all of them but in this example would be one you do have places who are asking for it too

you know they want it there you know whether or not that's going to be a good thing or not is a whole nother point but i guess when you're in the middle of a mutiny you kind of call for that but he doesn't seem like it seems like yes he wants a more central government there i'm just trying to analyze him a little bit but like what you said you said there in retrospect he seems like you know this communist and sympathizer because as we're going to get to like he did he did end up calling up the soviet after being turned down by the United States. But at this point, did we – before that in July, what was the CIA saying about him? Did they already think he was that or were trying to label him that because they were labeling everyone a communist sympathizer at that point? Or were they like, okay, this is just not that

important. Don't worry about it. We'll get to it later. Yeah, well, so the CIA at the time, specifically, Alan Dulles, the director of the CIA, he did not think much of Lumumba. He at a White House meeting, he mentioned that Lumumba had had this embezzlement conviction. He said that he had taken Soviet or communist money. He really, you know, had written him off. But others in the U.S. government, like the Secretary of State Christian Herter, like Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the ambassador to the U.N., were much more sympathetic towards Lumumba and thought, oh no, he's, you know, this probably neutral figure we can work with. That was in July 1960. But then the moment Lumumba asked the Soviets for help, that sort of, the nail was in the coffin there. Right. So he calls up the Soviets.

Like, what do you do? Call up Khrushchev? He wrote a telegram to Khrushchev. Oh, really? Directly to him? I mean i mean addressed him i don't know if it was delivered to the soviet ambassador but um yeah asking for very specific help like you know planes trucks weapons that sort of thing okay now how does the us respond to that there we we already covered that they obviously had a station on the ground and everything characters players what's going on at this point yeah so that sets off massive alarm bells in the cia and larry devlin he's the cia station chief in congo he sends a cable to his headquarters in dc and says um there's a this is a the beginnings of a classic communist effort to take over the government. Um... And...

So then what happens also is there's this August 18th meeting at the White House where President Eisenhower says something to the effect of looking at... While he's looking at Dulles, the CIA director says, you know, we need to get rid of Lumumba or something. The exact words are lost to history, but it was clear that, you know, the way Dulles received it was that get rid of meant

get rid of in a physical sense. Is there another way? Is there another way to take that one? It's that, you know, will no one rid me of this troublesome prime minister? Yeah. Oh, my God. And so that is the beginning of a series of events where the CIA decides to send poison to the Congo

that Larry Devlin, CIA station chief, is to inject into Lumumba's food or toothpaste so that it'll kill him. And it's this, you know, it's out of a movie, it feels like, but this crazy plot where Sidney Gottlieb, who is this CIA chemist, is tasked with picking this poison and flying it to Congo to deliver to Larry Devlin, and Devlin is instructed to use it to kill Lumumba.

Oh, like MKUlt Ultra Sidney Gottlieb yeah okay for people out there that don't know about MK Ultra that is say the psychedelic experiments of the CIA that focused on mind control and Sidney Gottlieb who's a very fascinating figure was at the heart of that. Back in the day, my buddy Danny Jones did an amazing podcast with a guy whose name eludes me right now. He was a... It won't take long to tell you Neutrals ingredients. Vodka, soda, natural flavors.

So, what should we talk about? No sugar added? Neutral. Refreshingly simple. Long time New York Times columnist. Stephen Kinzer, probably? Might be. I wrote a book about Gottlieb. Yeah, it's probably him. And he talked about that a lot. So I guess check out that guy's book because that's a really, really good podcast. But that dude was a fascinating figure. He was,

he didn't seem to have like the personality you'd expect from a guy like that, but when did he – you said he was their head chemist at this point? Yeah, he was the – In 1960? Yeah, I forget his exact title, but he was in the technical services division of the CIA and was sort of the – his background was in chemistry and he was the person you turned to if you wanted to develop or find a poison to kill a leader. What was his history? How long had he been with the CIA, and did he have a background long before working with them? Yeah, I think he joined in the 40s, like many of the people in this era did. And he was something of an outsider in that, you know, the CIA was very blue blood, Ivy

League. He was Jewish from the Bronx, you know, didn't go to the Ivy League. He was a scientist. And, but he, he developed, you know, he rose very quickly because he was, he was brilliant and had this technical mind and was also able to explain things in plain english to everyday you know officers within the cia that was sort of his um what made him get so far ahead but so anyways he ends up picking uh botulinum toxin um which is the the poison that causes botulism and flies to Leopoldville and delivers it in a bag to Larry Devlin.

Okay, so Devlin, I take it, had assets around Lumumba? Well, as it turned out, he wasn't able to – that was the plan. But he wasn't able to actually That was the plan, but he wasn't able to actually gain access to Lumumba's house. So just to sort of bring us to where we are in the story now. Yep. Lumumba, um, is... Uh, in September 1960, he's failed to bring Katanga under his control.

The South Kasai secession is still going on. The country is still chaotic. The UN is unable to restore order. Lumumba is overthrown by Kasavubu, the president. Rather, the president announces that he's fired Lumumba. Lumumba says, you can't fire me, I fire you. Did he have the power to do that constitutionally? This was a great debate.

There was a line in the constitution, an article that you could read to make this argument. The problem, as I mentioned earlier, is that there were these traditions in Belgium where the king didn't really intervene. So there was the text, and then there was sort of the understanding of how the powers could be used.

So it was a legally dubious maneuver by which Kasavubu fired Lumumba. And it's important to say he was egged on in this by the CIA, who met with him in early August, on August 8th. This is actually something I discovered that I don't think has been, has not been reported in other books, is that very earlier than we thought, on August 8th,

the CIA station chief who was leaving the Congo, so not Devlin, but his predecessor, who was still just sort of hanging around, met with Kasavubu and tried, you know, encouraged him to consider firing Lumumba, which he eventually did how did he encourage him saying you know have you read article whatever of the constitution there's this great clause there you should consider using and you know that sort of thing a veiled threat type deal that if you don't do this it's gonna be a problem for you or just like hey we know you don't like this guy already here's a way you can get him out i think it was more um i don't know if there i don't think there's any um veiled threat aspect to it it's you know impossible to say all we have is the document um the the minutes from

that meeting how'd you discover that by the way it was in the archives um in i believe it's at the eisenhower presidential library in k Kansas where I went. Oh, wow. And... so, the United States encourages Kasavubu to fire Lumumba, and then it funds street protests against Lumumba. And then finally, Kasavubu acts and announces Lumumba's firing in September of 1960. Lumumba says,

no, I fire you. And so there's this impasse where both the country's two leaders, two top leaders have announced that they've fired each other. And no one really knows what to do. And both claim that they're still in power. And then into the void steps Mobutu, who was head of the army, sort of lurking in the background, steps in and announces that he's now in charge oh he said he's in charge basically in so many words he he claimed that they were

neutralized he said you know the army is stepping in and we're in control now these politicians are squabbling and i'm intervening to set things right now he had been friends with lumumba as we laid out was do we know if there being any conversations ahead of this where he says like, you either got to figure this out or I have to, or. Yeah. So there were over the, in the, you know, two or three months after independence, Lumumba and Mobutu, their relationship worsened and worsened and worsened. And so at a certain point mabutu basically turned on his friend and neutralized him and then put him under house arrest um and that was sort of when he really finally acted against him and that brings us to where we were because larry devlin was trying to get the poisons

into lumumba's house where lumumba was under house arrest and couldn't find a way to do it. So that, but the U S so August 8th is that meeting where they sit down, CIA sits down with Casa Vubu, the previous station chief and says, Oh, you should fire this guy. Had what, because you said that Lumumba called or sent the telegram to Khrushchev in August. Was it before August 8th? I think it was after August 8th. But at that point, the knock against Lumumba was not that he had asked the Soviets for help, but that he was unable to control his country and seemingly maybe open to the Soviets and certainly not a reliable american partner but it all changed really quickly because august 8th is not that long after his july 20 something visit to dc so things

were moving changing by the day right but they did rebuff him there too so they obviously weren't like a fan now there's thing now they're it's almost like they're you know i i don't know the name for it but you know the psychological concept of you call someone something they're not for long enough they eventually become it you know what i mean it's almost like they were trying to make that happen like oh this guy's visiting us asking for help in dc fuck him put him over here he'll he's probably a communist he'll become one and then he ends up then they're sitting down with the president a few days later in the beginning of august having this meeting say oh you should get rid of this guy and then he does actually send a telegram to try to show there is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy

here that you know it the united states spurned lumumba thinking he was potentially pro-soviet and and that really drove him into moscow's arms. So, he at some time after the August 8th meeting, he does, he sends that telegram. Now the blood's in the water and they can say, oh, he actually is, they can try to say like, oh, he actually is a communist. And then you said September is when Mobutu steps in and puts him under house arrest? September is when Mobutu steps in and takes charge. I think he puts him under house arrest in October of 1960. Okay, so two angles I want to go to here. Let's go Lumumba and then Mobutu, as far as like their contact with the Soviets and the US, respectively. So when Lumumba

sends that telegram to Russia, and it to the higher-ups in the Russian government, do they end up sending any of the stuff he requested? Yes, but most of it never got there in time. Before he was, like, arrested or something. Yeah, so this was the sort of thing I had to look at carefully. They're all, you know, it became conventional wisdom that Khrushchev sent all these planes. The planes appear to have never made it out of Stanleyville. Weapons didn't successfully enter the country.

They were in Cairo waiting to be flown into the Congo. There were these 100 trucks that were sent. Um, their fate is kind of unclear. So, you know, it's, we don't know exactly what happened to every single piece of equipment, but the long story short is the Soviet aid was too little too late, because by the time it finally arrived,

that was when Lumumba was fired by Cassavuba and then shortly after sort of neutralized by Mobutu. But the action to act on it was taken and that was confirmed. He wanted it and he thought it would help him, but it didn't end up – he wasn't able to use it eventually. Okay. So bottom line is though the Soviets do attempt to step in. At this point, early on in the conversation, we were jumping around a little bit at the beginning, but you had mentioned after the Congo uprising, there was all kinds of presence on the ground from different agencies and stuff. But at this point, when Lumumba sends that telegram, KGB already had some people there? The evidence suggests that there were just three KGB officers in Congo at the time. Larry Devlin claimed that there were hundreds of Soviet advisors, but he was just counting

every white person that walked off a Russian plane or something. But there was a bit of confusion because the Soviets were helping with the UN operation with the airlift. So there were Soviet and American and British planes coming in and out of Congo to help with the UN, flying troops and supplies. Oh, God.

So that was different from an actual Soviet intervention. Okay, so do we know if Lumumba had any contact with any of those KGB guys on the ground to discuss, like... He met with the Soviet ambassador, Yakhlevev, and, uh, and he, you know, had a cable correspondence with Khrushchev. But Lumumba himself was very open about this. He said,

look, I'm not communist. I'm not... I just need help. My country's falling apart. I think he said something like, I'll call on the devil if need be. And, um, he was, you know, acting in a... out of desperation, not sort of affinity for one side or the other. Okay. And then Mobutu, who's going to arrest him soon,

when did the CIA first approach him? So the first contact appears to have been during that roundtable conference in January and February 1960. Mobutu was there as Lumumba's helper and secretary. So they were interested in him, but not Lumumba. That's interesting. And Devlin, the embassy in Brussels, held this cocktail reception to get to know the Congolese political leaders.

And Devlin was there because he was about to, later that year, take the CIA station chief posting in Congo. And he would later recall that, you know, he met all these people, but one guy really stood out. And he would never forget the name, Mobutu. And so, he met him there. And then, after independence in Congo, I think he ran into him on the street once or something,

but really didn't have much contact with him until right before Mobutu took power in that coup in September 1960. They were meeting very frequently, and Mobutu asked for American money to help with his coup and pay off you know loyal officers and devlin delivered a briefcase with five thousand dollars cash the next day was mobutu aware that's in september right there okay was mobutu aware that lamumba had now reached out to the

soviets yeah i think the story of mobutu and lumumba is one of mobutu just getting frustrated with lumumba and seeing him as not stable as too erratic and as um alienating the west through things like reaching out to the soviets okay so they give him the bag of cash and they tell him, okay, you're the leader now. We want you to go arrest Lumumba. Yeah. So the CIA was begging Mobutu for weeks to arrest Lumumba, but Mobutu was, they called him the Hamlet of the Congo because he was so indecisive. He had neutralized Lumumba and casavubu the president and the prime minister but then he had sort of dragged his feet and didn't you know would say one day that oh maybe they'll come back to power that sort of thing

he was not acting firmly against lumumba and um you know perhaps he was had some sort of guilt of he owed his entire political career to Lumumba. This was a friend. He doesn't seem to have been particularly eager to really act against him. But eventually pressure prevails and he puts Lumumba under house arrest and prevents him from leaving. Was the U.S. telling him to arrest Cassavubu too? No. So Cassavubu was seen as this pro-Western, reliable figure. And so in the dispute between Lumumba and Cassavubu, the Americans and the Belgians really took the side of Cassavubu.

Right. But on what grounds then are they arresting Lumumba? Are they telling him to arrest Lumumba if he's not also going to arrest Cassavubu right so but on what grounds then are they arresting lumumba are they telling him to arrest lumumba if he's not also going to arrest casabubu he's guilty of the same thing it seems in my mind if they're going to arrest them it was um more that they were preventing him from leaving his house and so there were well which is i guess a form of arrest so they uh they encircled there were lumumba has was in the prime minister's residence still official residence even though he was no longer acting as prime minister although he claimed he was prime minister legitimately um there was a ring of uh un troops that were protecting uh protecting, protecting Lumumba.

And then there were the Congolese army troops, Mobutu's men, who were around on the outer ring, you know, trying to prevent, they wanted to prevent Lumumba from getting out. So he was... They couldn't arrest him physically because the UN was protecting him. God, that's such a mess. Yeah.

Okay, so, but they put him under, Mobutu puts him under house arrest in September. And at this point then, did you say he had already declared that he was ahead, he was the head of the government before that? I mean, I don't think he put it in those words, but he said, you know, he announced that he was in charge and and was de facto in charge yeah that was September 14th I think okay so they they put they put Lumumba under house arrest and and simply I guess later that month in September like that yeah and then what happens next is he now like on an international stage going and saying I am in charge charge, the ex-prime minister is out, I already said that, but now he's literally under arrest, you report to me now he's using the phone a lot um but he's trapped in

his house basically and larry devlin's trying to get access to it somehow through someone to poison him that's not working he then writes a cable to his superiors in Washington saying he requests a hunting rifle so that someone could shoot Lumumba if he comes out on his balcony. And so over the course of November, what happens is Lumumba just grows increasingly frustrated being trapped and, and his, his plan to come back as prime minister is, is thwarted. And so he makes this very fateful decision to escape from house arrest. Oh, he escaped from house arrest. Yeah. So in late November, 1960, he gets into the back of... Um, it's... There's this massive thunderstorm in Leopoldville. He crouches in the back of a car and, uh, underneath the legs of, you know, hiding under

his domestic staff who's leaving for the day. And he's crouched down in the back seat, and he escapes through both the ring of Congolese troops and the ring of UN troops and starts a getaway. And where'd he go? So he tries to go back to Stanleyville, which is his, that's the city where he came of age politically. That's where his political base is.

And the idea being that he can go to stanleyville and sort of start uh you know that's where the government will now be he and his allies will be there he'll be like i'm the prime minister of congo and we're now based in stanleyville because you know leopoldville is taken over by kasavubu and Mobutu. So he and others, sort of small group of people, including his wife and two-year-old son, start this epic escape by car and are eventually caught in early December 1960.

Oh, so they were on the run for well when did he escape november 27th so just a few days really okay so they're on the run they must have figured it out pretty quick he escaped and did they even get did he ever in that point get to have meetings with anyone any loyalists and actually start trying to put together organization or was he just completely like on the lam and no one even knew about it so his big mistake was to not be incognito and he sort of was recognized all the time and gave political speeches and sort of it turned into what should have been this quick escape turned into sort of like a whistle stop campaign tour. Oh, so he went public.

Yeah. I mean, I think part of it was unavoidable. He was sort of he was, you know, the most famous politician in the land and was recognized. Is this getting covered? Like, is there any TV coverage at this point? And I was going to say, like, they don't have that in 1960 there, I assume, right? No. coverage at this point and i was going to say like they don't have that in 1960 there i assume right no but um but reports were starting to filter back into the capital and uh mobutu was working with larry devlin the cia station chief to sort of organize a search party and he was

lamuba was spotted by plane and there were reports on the ground as well and so he was pretty quickly captured by mobutu's forces well i take it that's not good for him so at this point i'm assuming they don't put him under house arrest again right and i should mention at this point the cia had also been sort of trying these other harebrained schemes where it had done things like it had hired these two European criminals and flown them to the Congo and tried to, um, you know, one of them got plastic surgery for a nose job and a toupee so that he

wouldn't be recognized. And there are all sorts of sort of weird, um, spy games going on. Uh, but everything changes when Lumumba is arrested. Wait, I'm sorry.

Go back. I can't help myself with that one. Two European criminals or whatever? Yeah. So this is one of the weirder parts of my book. There are these two CIA agents. One is from Luxembourg. His codename is Q.J. Wynn.

Okay. The other is from France, but originally Georgia, the country, and his codename is W.I. Rogue. And they're both these sort of underworld figures who had been recruited earlier by the agency and then sent to Congo for this mission where they were supposed to undermine Lumumba and help with the assassination operation. It ends up, they're sort of, it's like out of a Cold War spy comedy in a way. They ended up, they didn't know about each other by design, but then they end up running into each other at the same hotel and basically figuring out that they're both working for the CIA.

So nothing really comes of that, but it's this crazy subplot. But at that point, it doesn't matter when he's captured, because now... Once he's captured, that's where things really take a tragic turn for Lumumba. You're correct.

He was not sent back to house arrest. Instead, he was taken to this military camp and imprisoned there. And at this point, CIA, I guess, stops their own little operation to try to kill him. Are they putting pressure on Mobutu to execute him now? So what happens is Lumumba is in military jail, basically. But there's still this sense that he could come back. As I mentioned earlier, he's so charismatic. So one of the things that almost happens is that Mobutu and also the CIA

are very worried that Lumumba's going to talk to the officers at the camp where he's under arrest and through his powers of persuasion, convince them to set him free. So it's, it's, there's almost a sense that Lumumba is, um, you know, always able to spring back and just very close to returning to power and that, um, you know, even in captivity, he's, he's this threat. So then another sort of interesting development that's happening is, so this is January 1961.

The Eisenhower administration is coming to an end. JFK had been elected in November, and he's about to take office January 20th, his inauguration. And there's this sense both among Mobutu and his circle and in the CIA that when JFK takes office, he might not be so anti-Lamumba. And so there's this fear that Eisenhower, Republican, conservative cold warrior, JFK had made lots of campaign comes to power, takes office, there'll be some sort of deal and Lumumba will be released and then able to spring back as prime minister. And for Mobutu and for Larry Devlin, this is a nightmare in the making. And so what happens is Devlin learns from someone in Mobutu's circle

that Lumumba is about to be transferred to a province of his death. Originally, it was actually South Kasai was where they thought he was going to go. It ended up being Katanga, but it sort of didn't matter. In either of those places, everyone knew that was enemy territory and Lumumba would be probably killed. And so this is in the days before JFK is about to become president. Devlin learns this information that there's this big thing about to happen. What does he do with it? He sits on it. He doesn't tell headquarters in D.C. about the most explosive news in the Congo,

even as he's telling them about many other things. And he doesn't tell Mobutu to stop this and to not send Lumumba. And given the relationship they had, it was very much a green light. I might have missed that for a second. They were, because I think I misheard. Did you say to the province of his death? A province where they knew he was going to get killed. Right, and then I wasn't sure if you had said that

or if you had said a name of something. So are you saying they were sending them to Katanga? Yeah, so not to get too into details, but there's this little thing where they originally, Devlin was told Lumumba was about to get sent to South Kasai. Yep. And then as events developed, that plan changed and it ended up being Katanga.

But both were provinces that were seceding, and both were provinces where the leader of that province had sworn that they would kill Lumumba. So they were... It sounds like, maybe I'm making the wrong leap here, but they were trying to send him, at this point, out of their country so he's not their problem. They were trying

to they knew what was going to happen but they didn't want to do the dirty work themselves right right and so this was the plan and to go back for a second because i don't think we went there we might have skipped over this but i had hinted at this a little bit ago wasn't there something where like mabutu and his men executed a lot of civilians in katanga during that uprising which now at this point is still going on with the secession yeah so so it was actually in south kasai which is where the other secessionist province and so there was this military operation you know ordered by lamumba carried out by mabutu and his men when is this like july august august 1960 and it ends up um there are a lot of civilian casualties it's it's called the bakwonga massacre

because bakwonga is the name of the capital of the that secessionist province um and so that does a few things. Lumumba loses completely the confidence of the United Nations who holds him responsible for these atrocities. And it also – the leader of that province is now – considers Lumumba a sworn enemy. But Lumumba – did I misunderstand this? Lumumba didn't want that to happen. So it's sort of a matter of debate how much he was involved. He had his, one of his ministers, I believe, and who was actually related to him, was on the ground involved in the operation.

Mobutu was ostensibly in charge. It's, you know, a little fuzzy exactly the lines of authority, but sort of all that matters in the end is that this got pinned on Lumumba as, you know, his final error in office. and there was this sense after that that he really he had to go okay so fast forwarding again now back to where we were in january 1961 with kennedy coming in a little background on that i'm wondering about we all know the history now of kennedy once he got into office and the butting heads with the CIA, the Bay of Pigs, all that.

And then there's a lot of talk around his assassination and whether there was involvement there. That's a separate conversation. leading up to him being in office, like when he was campaigning, was he already sending like veiled threats to like the CIA or like some central intelligence operating in the United States as he later would take on an office? And that's part of why CIA didn't like him? Or was it just what you kind of laid out where CIA was thinking, ah, he seems to be a little sympathetic to some of these smaller nations around the world where we're going to have less control. So let's take care of things now before he gets in here. It was much more of the latter. I don't think there was some, you know, specific anti-CIA element to his campaign whatsoever, even under the surface. It was more

at the sort of overt policy level. Eisenhower had taken a very clear position on Congo, which was that Lumumba was unacceptable as a leader and dangerous. Kennedy had sort of sent signals that – and based on who his advisors were, a lot of people legitimately believed that Kennedy would have a more open to Lumumba policy versus a hardline thing, um, which fit in Kennedy's broader campaign message of, you know, doing more outreach to African countries and he contended that the U.S. was, you know, behind in Africa and not paying enough attention to the continent and, you know, viewing it overly simplistically in Cold War terms and so promised a more sophisticated Africa policy. had requested back in August from the Soviet Union had never arrived, as you said, at least in time before he was under house arrest. But are they trying to intervene at this point to put him back into power and help out at

all? No, basically the Soviets were shut out from that point because Mobutu had ordered all Soviet officials, and that would include intelligence personnel, to leave the country. The embassy shut down. Now, what they were starting to do is support the government that was forming in Stanleyville. in December 1960, January 1961. I don't think much had actually happened yet. It would be only later that the Soviets, I mean, the Soviets eventually did intervene in the Congo, but not at this point. Yeah, too late for our friend Lumumba. So he's, we're in January, Kennedy's about to come in,

CIA is, Devlin, you you said is basically sitting on information that he's going to be sent to one of these two provinces where he will surely be killed because he wants to basically assassinate him by withholding rather than active what devlin feared was that if and he was probably right about this, if he had told headquarters, hey, this big development is in the works, they would have told him, actually, we can't have big moves. policy at this point. And we know this because Devlin had just a few days earlier asked for a big new round of money to pay off Mobutu so that Mobutu could keep his officers loyal. And after, you know, he didn't get his usual response, which was a check. Instead, this time he got a response saying, actually, hold off. We can't have – that's a big question.

The new administration is about to take office. We can't decide big things like this. So Devlin knew very well that if he had informed headquarters about this new development regarding Lumumba's transfer, the very likely response would have been, use your influence with Mobutu to stop this. We can't have a big development. It's not the time to make big changes in policy in Congo. But he didn't do that. He sat on it, was interpreted as a green light, no doubt. And Lumumba was sent to Katanga province on January 17th, 1961, and died within hours. He was brutally executed, no?

Yeah, he was shot by a firing squad. Along with two of his fellow, his political allies. So they were arrested with him, I assume, in December, those guys? I think they had been arrested separately if I'm remembering correctly. OK. Now you spent what, like four, four and a half years, something like that? Something like that, yeah. On doing this book.

And we outlined at the beginning kind of how you fell into it. But you went over to congo as well who'd you speak with when you were over there so a bunch of people and that was um you know it was really important for me to get the congolese side of the story because most of the documents are american belgian from the un but part of the goal of this book is to really tell the full story and bring the congese story and Congolese voices back in. So I spoke with Lumumba's daughter, his son, um, who, you know, had... were very young, but nevertheless had

these great memories of their father. And then I also tracked down a man who was 14 at the time of Lumumba's death and actually witnessed it. He was hunting with his father. They're hunting antelope. In Katanga, I guess. In Katanga, late at night or on a hunting trip. And suddenly they see these headlights pull off the road

and prisoners dragged out of the car. And then they're sort of crouching behind an anthill, watching all this, witnessing the execution. And he knew who it was right then? I think only later did he realize the significance of what he had seen. Whoa, how'd you find that guy? So I worked with this very resourceful Congolese journalist in Lubumbashi, the capital of Katanga is now known.

It used to be Elizabethville in the time I'm writing about. And we went to, I wanted to see the site where Lumumba was murdered, which is now sort of this memorial. And when I went there, I was, you know, taking notes and taking pictures and looking around. And then he mentioned, he said, oh, you know, there's a man who lives not far from here who actually was there the night. And I said, okay, how can we meet this man? And so he, you know, we waited around, someone went on a motorbike to go find this man wherever he lived. And he and some others emerged with him and he sat down with me and I had an interpreter. He didn't speak French.

He spoke the Swahili dialect of that area and managed to interview him and hear his remembrances and get some details from actually what it was like witnessing this. Was he matter of fact about it or was it a really traumatizing thing for him he was very matter of fact about it yeah yeah i mean 60 plus years by then yeah and you said he was like 14 14 at the time yeah but he's also you know he's in a war-torn province you know he's probably seen a lot of other things in his life too but that's that's pretty crazy that you got that and you his children you said you spoke with them they were they were i mean they had to be what like three four years old when he died um his daughter was maybe four or five his son was a little older son francois was maybe eight or nine i think um so you know when you're interviewing someone like that you're not going to

get useful information about dates and the political intrigue but just memories of what what your father was like what do you remember when this happened what did it look like um when you're under house arrest that sort of thing what i mean were they after their father was executed what what was the family's life and in the country like yeah so that's a whole fascinating other story they um some of them escaped before he was um murdered they were smuggled out disguised you know an egyptian diplomat actually um sort of pretended to be their father and flew on a plane with them to Cairo. And then they were a guest of Nasser there,

the leader of Egypt at the time. Oh, wow. But Lumumu's youngest, his two-year-old son, stayed behind in the Congo and was caught while they were escaping. But anyway, so that family ended up growing up in large part in Egypt, his children. And when I met with his daughter, Juliana, she was, you know, on the phone, she was speaking Arabic,

and then she'd switch to French with me, and then also knew a bit of English as well. So they have this whole interesting um childhood and but obviously a very tragic one as well and that they lost their father violently and at a very early age and she lives in the Congo today it sounds like she does so they were one of the you know footnotes of the story is that Mobutu, who, as maybe people may know, ended up being – spoiler alert – becomes the dictator of Congo until 1997. So it stays in power for – changes name to Mobutu Sese Seko. And they changed the name of the country too, right? It became Zaire.

OK. But now it's back to Congo. Yeah. Now it's back to congo at some point so there's uh yeah whole other story there how much like how is lamumba viewed in congo today is he a hero is he a polarizing figure i think largely he's viewed as a hero that would vary by location to some degree and ethnic group,

but he is viewed as this national icon. I mean, if you go there, you see there's statues of him. His face is on T-shirts and on wraps and that sort of thing. And yeah, he really is viewed as this tragic figure who was a great man who led the country and then met a violent death. Well, let's go to the years after he died

because that's obviously a core of the country story because you have the Congo crisis. It lasts approximately like five years or so. Is that right? So Lumumba is killed. Is it now like a full-blown civil war for five years? How did that go? Yeah, so Lumumba is killed.

Mobutu is in charge but then very soon after lumumba's death the government in stanleyville which that was the place he's trying to get to when he escaped that rises and influence there's this brief little political deal where everything's fine, but then things really fall apart, and you have these two rebellions, the Simba rebellion, Simba's Swahili for Lion, and the Quilu rebellion, and basically half the country is in rebel hands, and Mobutu is struggling to exert control. And the Americans help him as much as possible.

As I mentioned earlier earlier there's this massive paramilitary operation but um it takes a lot of time and money and bloodshed but then in 1965 sort of mobutu finally consolidates control and the rebellions are put down and he's in charge and then you know that's so begins his 30 plus years of rule were there were the rebellions led by like allies of lumumba yeah they were called lumumbists actually so was it like some of his friends from life leading it yeah it was his political allies people from his uh stronghold in stanleyville and they were very, in their view, carrying on Lumumba's legacy

and fighting against the unrepresentative central government that Mobutu was now in charge of. And obviously, during these years, tens of thousands of people die during this war, effectively, right? Yeah, it was definitely a violent time, but tragically not the most violent time but you know tragically not the most violent time that the country would see okay so just putting the timeline together in my head of those five years and i don't know like the waves of how this went until he did consolidate

power in 65 but what we can tell is that from 61 to 63, Kennedy's there, and he's out of the picture after November 63. You said, though, that Devlin and the CIA was still heavily backing Mobutu through all these years. Were they basically able to put this thing over the top after Kennedy died because now the gloves were off, or am I taking a leap there that's not fair? Kennedy very quickly came to support the hardline policy on Congo there was this initial period where it seemed he might go either way but once Lumumba was out of the picture the question of whether to support Lumumba or not was a moot point right um and then sort of everyone was on the same page essentially um within the u.s government okay and so he then takes power in 65 congo crisis ends it becomes why'd they name it

sair like what was the thought there mubutu had this whole um what he called his authenticity campaign and the idea was to get rid of all the vestiges of Belgian colonialism. And so, you know, Joseph Mobutu, he himself became Mobutu Sese Seiko. Zaire was seen as a more authentic name. Ironically, it was actually derived from a Portuguese word. So it wasn't particularly anti-European, in fact. But it was this whole campaign where he was trying to um you know get rid of all the european influence um you know people wore these special suits that didn't have you know didn't look like european suits and there were all sorts of um he had a leopard skin cat and right leopard

skin cap and carried a cane and so there's this whole idea of African authenticity. Um, of course, it was, uh, you know, undermined by the fact that he had all these European villas, um, where he was stashing his... his ill-gotten gains. They always do. But that was his line. Gotcha. So at this point, what is, in 65, once he consolidates, what is the chessboard of the Cold War in Africa look like?

You know, how many, how much power and influence does the U.S. have versus KGP? Like, what are some of the notable countries in the middle of that yeah so um i mean there were a lot of countries in africa that was were sort of left-leaning and vaguely pro-soviet like guinea would be a good example some would put ghana in that category but it wasn't as if the soviets had you know like a large number of firm allies in Africa. From the U.S. perspective, in like narrow Cold War terms, Congo was a success in that they had installed this pro-American tyrant in Mobutu, who was this friendly dictator that would advance American interests. So it was thought.

He ended up being, you know, he would do things like he he had the north koreans come and train his military and sort of did things that didn't seem particularly pro-american but um but in this narrow cold war chessboard logic he was seen as like okay that's our our man conga's you know on the american side um of course the people who paid the the price for this were the congolese people themselves who had 30 plus years of repression poverty right and eventually war and what and really fast forward and what did did he die in 97 and that's how he left power? So he, um. It wasn't like an uprising?

Uh, the, no, it's the other way around. So there was a, in 90, in the first half of 97 or late 96 maybe, um, basically his regime collapsed altogether. He had, you know, it was getting weaker and weaker. Cold War was over he was no longer getting much american support anymore because he had outlived his usefulness um and it collapsed and then there was a rwandan-led invasion and you know all these

other countries sort of teamed up invaded what was then zaire what year was that that was 96 97 so this is post rwandan genocide yes interesting um and then he's uh he flees into exile and then dies of prostate cancer shortly thereafter but it's a real ignominious end to this long rule and they change it back to democratic republic of congo and he's out okay yeah you know it's really fascinating to me like the concept of how i'm gonna try to explain this right but how like how much of the world becomes a pawn to the key powers throughout history? It's just the nature of it, right? So the power vacuum starts at the top, goes on down to the bottom,

and those who kind of play right into it, they have to play by the rules of the people who set the rules. But, you know, I'm from the United States. I love this country. I think it's an awesome place. I don't think we do everything right, but I'd also like to think I'm a realist about how some things go. And looking at the Cold War after World War II, you have this instant – no opposite pun intended – but heating up of this looming crisis of two nuclear powers, Soviet Union, United States, opposite generalized political beliefs.

And, you know, Churchill put it very well with the image of the Iron Curtain descending upon Eastern Europe and how the Soviets were taking alliances with a lot of those countries or straight up owning them. And then that kind of trickles down to the rest of the world and so in the defense of you know the u.s government or the cia and stuff as dirty as it looks when you're fucking around and overthrowing a government or getting involved in who's in charge of other places through dirty backroom type things as much as that is very uncomfortable, I also try to look at it in the context of history and say, well, what were they supposed to do? If you have on the other side a nuclear threat who's willing to do all these things,

do you have to kind of be the pig with them and and and play in the mud because that's what it is i mean in in your time doing a lot of reporting on africa you go through a lot of history of these countries and this is one continent where you see a ton of this where there's other governments of more powerful places coming in and giving influence like how do you how do you rectify or judge how the U.S., like what their complicity in doing bad things to these places or some of these places Soviets were not really playing in the mud in Africa, and that they viewed it as this peripheral concern. The time I'm writing about the Soviet Union was still quite weak. It didn't have a capability to project much military power thousands of miles away into Africa. And so the United States sort of, you know, saw these phantom Soviet influences where there in fact were none. And all the Congolese, and this applies to other African populations as well, all they wanted was to be independent and develop their own political system. They, you know, the concept of the Cold War was imported to them, and it was not how they viewed the world.

Lumumba himself was, you know, constantly talked about, I don't care about East versus West. I'm neutral. I just want to help my country. And they certainly, him and other African leaders, had enough domestic problems to worry about before thinking of Cold War politics. So the right policy, in my view,

would have been to just step back and not be so paranoid and allow these countries to take their own natural course. Would they become firm pro-American allies backing America at every decision? No. But they certainly weren't going to, having just thrown off their colonial masters, they weren't going to then suddenly start answering to Moscow and taking orders, substituting one form of domination for another. So there was this false sense that the Soviets – that the alternative to what happened in a place like Congo was a Soviet-dominated state.

And that was just not backed up by the evidence of what you could have foreseen. And in fact, Mobutu himself, as I mentioned, was hardly a 100% reliable friend. He expelled the American ambassador at one point for showing insufficient respect. In the height of irony, he once accused the CIA of plotting a coup against him. He expelled the American ambassador at one point for showing insufficient respect. In the height of irony, he once accused the CIA of plotting a coup against him.

So what America got for its intervention was not some pliant, perfect ally at all. And as I mentioned, the real cost was paid by the Congolese people. thing but think of like the world right the soviets were getting a lot of influence in eastern europe they were getting influence in cuba and some south american countries that you know there were pockets all over the place so maybe the better way to put it would be that the united states could have and i'm not defending all their actions here obviously but they could have been looking at it like wherever there is a country that's up for grabs and it is a lower tier gdp country but that has some influence or some resources somewhere we need to get it because the soviets are collecting countries all over the place do you think that rather than focusing on africa itself that that is some logic that could defend the idea that they wanted to intervene in some ways there.

I mean, that was certainly what was driving them. You're accurately describing this sort of domino theory containment worldview, which is that you have to push back against Soviet influence wherever it appears. One problem, I think, is that in the Congo case, and there are certainly other cases, the United States didn't sufficiently distinguish between core interests and peripheral interests. It's one thing to care about what's happening in Berlin and the heart of Europe, but it's a bit more of a stretch to say it really matters exactly what the leader of Congo is like or what the leader of name any other country in what was then called the third world. So I think there was this misguided sense that you had to

push back everywhere. And if you look at the record of containment, it, you know, the, what ended up winning the Cold War was less America's successful pushing back everywhere than the Soviet Union's own collapse and the contradictions in its own system. Right. Yeah, that's fair to say. Well, as someone who's reporting on all kinds of African issues, are there some major developments or stories that you're seeing on the continent today that are largely being ignored or unknown that you think more people should know about? Yeah, I mean, one thing I've been thinking a lot about because I've been writing this book is today there's sort of now with the Wagner group, there's once again talk about Russian influence in Africa.

And I think there's sort of an interesting parallel here. In the same way that Soviet influence was overblown in Congo and the rest of Africa in the Cold War, I think also today people are probably making too much of Russian influence in Africa. The Russians have zero military bases in Africa. So, you know, there's a lot of hyperventilating about, oh, you know, the Wagner groups in Niger and their Russian flags in the streets of Burkina Faso or whatever. But I think what you're probably going to see going forward is Africans tiring even more of Russia and, you know and its influence is less than meets the eye, I'd say. So those are more like economic symbolic deals than anything, it sounds like. I mean, specifically with the Wagner Group, it's really just like an act of desperation where, you know, the Central African Republic will hire a bunch of mercenaries to help fight rebels and protect the president. But it's, you know, I think the Wagner Group is only in

four countries out of Africa, which has 54 countries. So that's one of the developments I'm keeping an eye on. Very cool, man. Well, there's a lot of shit going on out there. I can't keep up with all of it. It's a complicated world. And the crazy thing, especially when you have conversations like this, even on something that was 50 years ago, we're making history right now with all the things that are happening, and you're only ever going to know 1-2% of it. But this is a wild story. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the book. It is the Lumumba Plot. You can get it on Amazon, anywhere you get your books, right? Yep.

It's on audiobook as well. Indeed. So go get it. I will have the links in the description congrats on the first one and doing a great job with that do you have any idea what you want to do next with a book no clue i'm just you know exhaling after having finally finished this one but um would love to write another one at some point well i hope you do man and shout out to emily over at penguin random house for helping organize all this she did a great job but go get the book down in the description everybody everybody. Stu, thanks for being here, man. Thanks so much for having me. This is fun. Awesome. All right, everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me.

Peace. Thank you for watching the episode, everybody. Please don't forget to hit that subscribe button before you leave and that like button on the video as well. Much appreciated to everyone who does that. Our next episode on the show is going to be part two of our sit down from last week that appeared on the Danny Jones podcast. You say, what is this? Last week, Danny Jones and I did an episode with Andrew Bustamante, former CIA spy and FBI special agent Jim DiIorio. It was like a six hour, five and a half hour sit down.

We put the first part out on his channel. The second part is on mine. If you're watching this video right now and that episode is already out, you can click the link right here.