The other key player is, of course, one of the most famous station chiefs in CIA history: Larry Devlin, posted in Leopoldville, as Kinshasa was known, during those years. When I was researching my 2000 book on Mobutu, Devlin was one of my first interviewees, and years later, I would occasionally pick up the phone and hear his instantly recognizable, wheezing voice on the other end. Once a heavy smoker, he eventually died of emphysema.
Devlin did not believe that Lumumba himself was a Communist—“He was just a poor jerk who thought, I can use these people,” he told me—but was convinced that his readiness to flirt with the Soviet Union placed Congo in acute danger of falling into Moscow’s control. And if Congo went Communist, its nine neighboring countries might well do the same—or so the argument went.
That scenario was used to justify an extraordinarily energetic campaign of political subversion and manipulation, in which Devlin handed out one bribe after another. During those years, barely a cabinet decision was reached, an election held, or a “spontaneous” demonstration staged in Congo that didn’t bear his fingerprints. And if he decided against slipping the poison he’d been given by the CIA’s master chemist, a man known simply as “Sid from Paris,” into Lumumba’s food, Devlin was nonetheless instrumental in ensuring that the former prime minister got on the fateful flight.
We can all think of several other occasions in which well-informed and supremely capable Western officials somehow managed to convince themselves that a country of only tangential relevance threatened their own society’s very existence, justifying muscular intervention. If Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, with its never-found “weapons of mass destruction,” was the most recent example of hyperventilating wishful thinking, the Vietnam War represented another case of disastrous groupthink. Devlin, tellingly, also played a part in that quagmire.
Reid rejects the entire Cold War premise. The beleaguered Lumumba certainly turned to Russia for military help, but the eventual opening of Soviet archives revealed that Moscow was never as interested in Congo as Washington assumed. “I think we overrated the Soviet danger, let’s say, in the Congo,” he quotes Allen Dulles, the former CIA chief and Cold Warrior, later admitting.
That miscalculation, Reid argues, was based on a misunderstanding of Lumumba: “The idea that he would simply ditch his ardent anticolonialism and let his country fall under Soviet dominion struck him as preposterous, and so it should have struck everyone else.”