Read Stephen Weissman on the CIA’s role in the 1961 murder of Patrice Lumumba.
One of the world’s largest humanitarian crises is currently playing out in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Conflict between armed militias, rebel groups, and government armed forces in the country’s mineral-rich east has displaced up to seven million people. But the country’s instability goes back decades—perhaps to the pivotal moment in January 1961 when the country’s prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated. In a 2014 essay, the political scientist Stephen Weissman explored the role that the CIA played in his murder and how American intervention in Congo set the country on a course from which it has not yet recovered. Washington’s decision to send the CIA into Congo in 1960 was fueled by the anxieties and paranoia of the Cold War. Lumumba, a charismatic nationalist whose government was the first to be democratically elected since the country gained independence from Belgium, had turned to the Soviet Union for help following a Belgian military reoccupation and the secession of Congo’s richest province, Katanga. Fearing the rise of communism and Moscow’s influence on the continent, Washington carried out a covert operation to replace Lumumba—an endeavor that for decades was portrayed as “a surgical, low-cost success.” But by 2014, new evidence had come to light; and, as Weissman wrote, “it paints a far darker picture than even the critics imagined.” Even though the threat of communism in Congo was quite weak under Lumumba, who was “far more interested in nonalignment,” the CIA “engaged in pervasive political meddling and paramilitary action between 1960 and 1968 to ensure that the country retained a pro-Western government and to help its pathetic military on the battlefield.” The agency’s efforts were extensive and malignant, Weissman wrote—so much so that the CIA’s station chief had “direct influence” over the events that led to Lumumba’s eventual murder, in January 1961. By then, with help from Washington, he had been supplanted by Joseph Mobutu, the pro-Western head of Congo’s army, who “would go on to become one of Africa’s most enduring and venal leaders.” “Clinging to a longtime friendly dictator, even as his flaws become more risky for U.S. interests, is a well-known pathology of U.S. foreign policy,” Weissman wrote. In the case of Congo, the CIA’s legacy of intervention stoked “a long-running spiral of decline, which was characterized by corruption, political turmoil, and dependence on Western military intervention.” Rather than end the struggle for control of Congo, Washington inflamed it—“leaving behind instability that continues to this day.” |
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| Since America’s founding, a system of checks and balances developed in national security policy. In the award-winning National Security Constitution, former dean of Yale Law School Harold Hongju Koh traced the evolution of this constitutional struggle across America’s history. This new edition, with roughly 70 percent new material, brings the story to the present, placing recent events into constitutional perspective. |
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| Since America’s founding, a system of checks and balances developed in national security policy. In the award-winning National Security Constitution, former dean of Yale Law School Harold Hongju Koh traced the evolution of this constitutional struggle across America’s history. This new edition, with roughly 70 percent new material, brings the story to the present, placing recent events into constitutional perspective. Available Now ⟩ |
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