in their efforts against Lumumba, although there is no evidence that aid was ever provided for the specific purpose of assassination.18

Fearing for his life, Lumumba was on the run. For a while he was protected from Mobutu by the United Nations, which, under considerable international pressure, had been forced to put some distance between itself and Washington.19 But on 1 December, Lumumba was taken into custody by Mobutus troops. A 28 November CIA cable indicates that the Agency was involved in tracking down the charismatic Congo leader. The cable spoke of the CIA station working with the Congolese government to get the roads blocked and troops alerted to close a possible escape route of Lumumbas.20

The United States had also been involved in the takeover of government by Mobutu-whom author and CIA-confidant Andrew Tully described as having been discovered by the CIA.21 Mobutu detained Lumumba until 17 January 1961 when he transferred his prisoner into the hands of Moise Tshombe of Katanga province, Lumumbas bitter enemy. Lumumba was assassinated the same day.

In 1978, former CIA Africa specialist John Stockwell related in his book how a ranking Agency officer had told him of driving around with Lumumbas body in the trunk of his car, trying to decide what to do with it .22 What he did do with it has not yet been made public.

During the period of Lumumbas imprisonment, US diplomats in the Congo were pursuing a policy of deploring his beatings and trying to secure humane treatment for him, albeit due to considerations of international opinion and not from tender feelings toward him .23 The immediate and the long-term effect of Lumumbas murder was to make him the martyr and symbol of anti-imperial ism all over Africa and elsewhere in the Third World which such American officials had feared. Even Mobutu later felt compelled to build a memorial to his victim.

Without a clearcut communist enemy like Lumumba, the Kennedy administration, which came to power on 20 January 1961, was very divided on the Katanga question. Although the United States wound up supporting-in the name of Congolese stability-the UN military operation in the summer to suppress the secession, Tshombe had outspoken support in the US Congress, and sentiment amongst officials at the State Department and the White House mirrored this division. The sundry economic and diplomatic ties of these officials appear to have been more diverse and contradictory than under the Eisenhower administration, and this is reflected in the lack of a unified policy. However, according to Kennedy adviser and biographer, Arthur Schlesinger, opinions on both sides of the issue were expressed in terms of hindering supposed malevolent Soviet/communist designs in the Congo.24

In an even more marked policy division, US Air Force C-130s were flying Congolese troops and supplies against the Katangese rebels, while at the same time the CIA and its covert colleagues in the Pentagon were putting together an air armada of heavy transport aircraft, along with mercenary units, to aid the very same rebels.25 (This marked at least the third instance of the CIA acting in direct military opposition to another arm of the US government.)26

Washington officials were more in unison when dealing with another prominent leftist-Antoine Gizenga, who had been Vice-Prime Minister under Lumumba. Following the latters dismissal, according to the Church committee, the CIA station chief in the Congo, Lawrence Devlin, urged a key Congolese leader (presumably Mobutu) to arrest or undertake a more permanent disposal of Lumumba, Gizenga, and Mulele. (Pierre Mulele was another Lumumba lieutenant.)27 Gizenga was in fact

arrested shortly after Mobutu took power, but a UN contingent from Ghana, whose leader, Kwame Nkrumah, was Lumumbas ally, intervened and freed him.28

In the continuous musical-chairs game of Congolese politics, the first of August 1961 found Gizenga as the Vice-Prime Minister under one Cyrilie Adoula. By the end of the month, Gizenga was as well, and simultaneously, the leader of a rebel force that had set up a regime in the Stanleyville area which it proclaimed as the legitimate government of the entire Congo. He fancied himself the political and spiritual successor to Lumumba.

The Soviet Union may have believed Gizenga, for apparently they were sending him arms and money, using Sudan, which borders the Congo on the north, as a conduit. When the CIA learned that a Czech ship was bound for Sudan with a cargo of guns disguised as Red Cross packages for refugee relief in the Congo, the Agency turned to its most practiced art, bribery, to persuade a crane operator to let one of the crates drop upon arrival. On that day, the dockside was suddenly covered with new Soviet Kalashnikov rifles. Through an equally clever ploy at the Khartoum (Sudan) airport, the CIA managed to separate a Congolese courier from his suitcase of Soviet money destined for Gizenga.29 The State Department, meanwhile, was, in its own words,

urging Adoula to ... dismiss Gizenga and declare him in rebellion against the national government so that police action can now be taken against him. We are also urging the U.N. to take military action to break his rebellion ... We are making every effort to keep Gizenga isolated from potential domestic and foreign support ... We have taken care to insure that this [US] aid has been channelled through the central government in order to provide the economic incentive to encourage support for that government.30

The CIA was supplying arms and money to Adoulas supporters, as well as to Mobutus.31 Adoula, who had a background of close ties to both the American labor movement and the CIA international labor movement (via the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions-see British Guiana chapter), was chosen to be prime minister instead of Gizenga by a parliamentary conference during which the parliamentarians were bribed by the CIA and even by the United Nations. A subsequent CIA memorandum was apparently paying tribute to this when it stated: The U.N. and the United States, in closely coordinated activities, played essential roles in this significant success over Gizenga. 32

In January 1962, United Nations forces with strong American backing ousted Gizenga and his followers from Stanleyville, and a year later finally forced Tshombe to end his secession in Katanga. These actions were carried out in the name of uniting the Congo , as if this were a matter to be decided by other than Congolese. Never before had the UN engaged in such offensive military operations, and the world organization was criticized in various quarters for having exceeded its charter. In any event, the operations served only to temporarily slow down the dreary procession of changing leaders, attempted coups, autonomous armies, shifting alliances, and rebellions.

Adding an ironic and absurd touch to the American Congo policy, three months after the successful action against Gizenga, Allen Dulles (thanks to the Bay of Pigs, now the former Director of the CIA) informed a Television audience that the United States had overrated the danger of Soviet involvement... It looked as though they were going to make a serious attempt at takeover in the Belgian Congo, well it did not work out that way at all. 33

Nonetheless, by the middle of 1964, when rebellion-by the heirs of Lumumba and Gizenga-was more widespread and furious than ever and the collapse of the central government appeared as a real possibility, the United States was pouring in a

prodigious amount of military aid to the Leopoldville regime. In addition to providing arms and planes, Washington dispatched some 100 to 200 military and technical personnel to the Congo to aid government troops, and the CIA was conducting a paramilitary campaign against the insurgents in the eastern part of the country.34

The government was now headed by none other than Moise Tshombe, a man called Africas most unpopular African for his widely-recognized role in the murder of the popular Lumumba and for his use of white mercenaries, many of them South Africans and Rhodesians, during his secession attempt in Katanga. Tshombe defended the latter action by explaining that his troops would not fight without white officers.35

Tshombe once again called upon his white mercenary army, numbering 400 to 500 men, and the CIA called upon its own mercenaries as well, a band which included Americans, Cuban-exile veterans of the Bay of Pigs, Rhodesians, and South Africans, the latter having been recruited with the help of the South African government. Bringing in our own animals was the way one CIA operative described the operation. The Agencys pilots carried out regular bombing and strafing missions against the insurgents, although some of the Cubans were reported to be troubled at being ordered to make indiscriminate attacks upon civilians.36 Looking back at the affair in 1966, the New York Times credited the CIA with having created an instant air force in the Congo.37

When China protested to the United States about the use of American pilots in the Congo, the State Department issued an explicit denial, then publicly reversed itself, but insisted that the Americans were flying under contract with the Congolese government . The next day, the Department said that the flights would stop, after having obtained assurances from other arms of the [U.S1 Government , although it still held to the position that the matter was one between the Congolese government and civilian individuals who were not violating American law.38

The Congolese against whom this array of military might was brought to bear were a coalition of forces. Some of the leading figures had spent time in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union or China and were receiving token amounts of arms and instruction from those countries; but they were never necessarily in the communist camp any mote than the countless Third Worlders who have gone to university in the United States and have been courted afterwards ate necessarily in the Western/capitalist camp. (This does not hold for professional military officers who, unlike students, tend to be a particularly homogeneous group-conservative, authoritarian, and anticommunist.)

Africa scholar M. Crawford Young has observed that amongst the coalition leadership, The destruction of the [Leopoldville] regime, a vigorous reassertion of Congolese control over its own destiny, and a vague socialist commitment were recurrent themes. But at bottom it appeared far more a frame of mind and a style of expression, than an interrelated set of ideas. 39 The rebels had no revolutionary program they could, or did, proclaim.

Co-existing with this element within the coalition were currents of various esoteric churches, messianic sects, witch-finding movements, and other occult inspirations as well as plain opportunists. Many believed that the magic of their witch doctors would protect them against bullets. One of their leaders, Pierre Mulele, was a quasi-Catholic who baptized his followers in bis own urine to also make them immune to bullets. The insurgents were further divided along tribal lines and were rent by debilitating factionalism. No single group or belief could dominate.40

Rebel success created the image of unified purpose and revolutionary promise, wrote Young. Only in its subsequent phase of decay and disintegration did the coalitions dramatic lack of cohesion and disparity in purpose and perception