In the summer of 1960, the Congo crisis was front-page news. The newly independent country in central Africa was internally fracturing, and the government of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba seemed incapable of restoring calm and stability. Amid escalating Cold War tensions, top decision-makers in the Eisenhower administration mistakenly believed Lumumba was a Kremlin tool seeking to foist Communism on the Congolese.
Fearing the potential loss of the Congo to the Soviet Union, President Eisenhower in August 1960 instructed the CIA to assassinate Lumumba, who was the country’s first democratically elected leader after the end of Belgian colonial rule. Over the next several months, three CIA would-be assassins never got close enough to Lumumba to murder him, but the covert agency did back his ouster by the Congolese army officer Joseph Mobutu on Sept. 14. Lumumba’s domestic political enemies put him in front of a firing squad in January 1961.
In this episode of History As It Happens, Stuart Reid, an executive editor at Foreign Affairs and the author of “The Lumumba Plot,” recounts this largely forgotten chapter of the Cold War. It was a transformative period not only for Africa as 17 states threw off the yoke of European colonialism in 1960 alone, but also for the United Nations as it struggled to contain Congo’s chaos, and for the CIA, whose leaders tried to eliminate a democratic leader in the name of stopping the spread of Communism.
“The trade-off America made in the Congo was for short-term stability over long-term stability. In the narrow Cold War logic, the operation in the Congo made sense. You had gotten rid of a potentially ’pro-Soviet’ leader and replaced him with an [American-backed] autocrat. What’s not to like? But when you broaden the time horizon just a bit, you see just how disruptive that was for the Congolese people and the region, given what happened with the civil war in the ’90s. It was disastrous,” Mr. Reid said.
Lumumba lasted only 67 days as prime minister. From his first moments in office, one crisis after another undermined his government’s ability to establish Congolese sovereignty. But, at the time, the American public was unaware of Eisenhower’s role in wrecking Lumumba’s rule.
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