Reviewing The Lumumba Plot (April 2025)

The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and Cold War Assassination (2023) by Stuart A. Reid, senior editor at Foreign Affairs, a publication of the Council of Foreign Relations an influential foreign policy centre in the U.S., retells the story of Patrice Lumumba’s rise to power and his having suddenly been murdered not long after the Congo declared independence from Belgium. Reid attributes the belated publication to the dearth of preserved Congolese documents from the period and U.S. delays in declassifying its own documents, in particular those detailing the CIA’s covert operations against Lumumba. It is at this point that Reid asserts that “Democracies are defined by openness, accountability, and free inquiry,” and asks rhetorically, “More than six decades after Patrice Lumumba’s murder, what could possibly be worth hiding, and from whom?”

If the reader expects a case closed investigative report, they will be disappointed. However, a reader curious about certain dark chapters of American interference in the sovereign affairs of other countries will find compelling evidence of American hypocrisy. On the one hand, America, as the leader of the free world, proclaims itself the champion democratic governance. On the other, the means by which the U.S. has promoted democracy has often compromised the entire project. All countries prioritize their own national interests. That is the nature of international politics. Yet, Reid maintains that where U.S. foreign policy has failed, as he claims it did in the Congo, the black boxes must be opened up and studied. The obvious, albeit unstated premise, is that we can do better than this.

In 1960, 17 newly-independent African countries joined the United Nations, beginning a decisive change in the demographic makeup of the General Assembly. Some 75 years after European leaders met in Berlin to carve up the African continent into European colonies. The Congo was Belgium’s loss, but Congolese independence did not come easily, and the period from 1960-1961 was a torturous separation. From 1958, the Congolese independence movement was led by the young, articulate and tenacious nationalist, Patrice Lumumba. By 1959 the Belgium King was announcing the end of the Belgian Congo.

The object of our presence in the Dark Continent was thus defined by Leopold II: to open these backward countries to European civilization, to call their peoples to emancipation, liberty, and progress, after having saved them from slavery, disease, and poverty. In continuance of these noble aims, our firm resolve today is to lead, without fatal evasions but without imprudent haste, the Congolese peoples to independence in prosperity and peace. (1)

Independence came suddenly and quickly—too much so as there was no transition. The Congolese had not been educated and trained in public administration and when the Belgians fled en masse, great gaping holes in the government were haphazardly filled. The Congolese had the desire to be free but not the preparation for self-governance and so much turmoil ensued only to be managed by means of dictatorship. This was a script that played out across many of the former European colonies in the Third World, which we now know, with the demise of the U.S.S.R. and its East European satellite countries, as the Global South. From mercantilist exploitation and political tutelage, the Congo emerged ill-equipped to create a new country. It was impossible to graft Western ideals of democratic governance and economic freedom onto the old Belgian colonial model. The institutions created by Brussels were never intended to be transferable to an independent African-run state. Corruption, violence and poverty were the predictable consequences of irresponsible colonial rule notwithstanding King Baudouin’s high-sounding words that Belgium had from the start been committed to its African colony’s “emancipation, liberty, and progress.” Much of the world had not forgotten Belgium’s record of atrocities committed by the Force Publique (severed hands being a trademark demonstration of absolute rule) and its abject failure and lack of interest in protecting its colonial charges from the ravages of poverty, famine and disease.

Is it any wonder then that the words of Lumumba spoken across the Congo and recorded in letters created a frenzy of hope? In a letter smuggled out of prison shortly before his murder, Lumumba wrote,

They have corrupted some of our countrymen; they have bought others; they have done their part to distort the truth and defile our independence. What else can I say? That whether dead or alive, free or in prison by order of the colonialists, it is not my person that is important. What is important is the Congo, our poor people whose independence has been turned into a cage, with people looking at us from outside the bars, sometimes with charitable compassion, sometimes with glee and delight. But my faith will remain unshakable. I know and feel in my heart of hearts that sooner or later my people will rid themselves of all their enemies, foreign and domestic, that they will rise up as one to say no to the shame and degradation of colonialism and regain their dignity in the pure light of day.

We are not alone. Africa, Asia, and the free and liberated peoples in every corner of the globe will ever remain at the side of the millions of Congolese who will not abandon the struggle until the day when there will be no more colonizers and no more of their mercenaries in our country. I want my children, whom I leave behind and perhaps will never see again, to be told that the future of the Congo is beautiful and that their country expects them, as it expects every Congolese, to fulfill the sacred task of rebuilding our independence, our sovereignty; for without justice there is no dignity and without independence there are no free men.

While the foregoing presents Lumumba in a favourable light, Reid is not sparing of the criticism leveled against the Congo’s first prime minister, mostly coming from Belgian and American officials. That criticism itself requires some perspective as well: Belgium was keen to retain control of the vast mineral wealth in the Congo, having pretty well exhausted the Congo’s ivory and rubber potential. This was especially the case in the mineral-rich southern province of Katanga, which early on threatened secession from the Congo with considerable encouragement from Belgian interests. For the U.S., it was the domino theory in Africa (the domino theory was already in play in Vietnam). If one country succumbs to the temptations of Soviet communism, then all the rest will follow in a chain reaction.

America’s Cold War obsession with the spread of communism was by no means limited to Africa and Asia. It was global in reach and included South and Central America as well. Recall that President Reagan waged a covert war against the Sandinista Government in Nicaragua, which the International Court of Justice in 1986 judged to be a violation of international law. The U.S. ignored the ruling on the principle that it had the unilateral right (based on relative political, military and economic power) to intervene as it deemed necessary in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere as it had done many times before in Nicaragua and other Latin American countries. U.S. exceptionalism in this part of the world was not a new phenomenon. It is a longstanding claim to supra-sovereignty that dates back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1820 when America was a much younger and much weaker nation.

Reid’s characterizations of the players in the drama surrounding independence and the plot to kill Lumumba do not appear to be unjustly biased against Belgium or the U.S. The basis for his critique of Belgian and American meddling in Congolese affairs has substantial historical support. Nor does Reid’s portrayal of the Africans seem naïvely idealistic. Descriptions of Lumumba’s character, behaviour and actions prevent Reid from being blinded by the man’s charisma and phoenix-like indestructibility. A side-by-side comparison of how Reid portrays Lumumba and Joseph Mobutu (who later adopted the African name, Mobutu Sese Seko), an early ally and late-stage enemy, leaves this reader with the impression that he (Reid) would not have gambled that Lumumba would have turned out much different from the kleptocratic dictator Mobutu became during his 32-year presidential reign of the Congo (as the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1965-1971 and Zaire from 1971-1997). The assassination of Lumumba reads like a Greek tragedy, in part personal but certainly for the nation.

To America’s credit, in 1975, the U.S. Senate established a committee headed by Senator Frank Church (Dem. Idaho) to investigate the nation’s intelligence community. This was during a period of American reckoning with the Executive Branch gone rogue as evidenced by the conduct of the war in Vietnam and the Watergate Scandal.

[T]he committee’s first report covered only the CIA’s assassination efforts, which Senator Church believed would best capture the public’s imagination. On the morning of November 20, 1975, copies of the 349-page document, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, landed on the desks of all U.S. senators. After a last-minute attempt by Republicans to block its release to the public—a futile effort, since many of the findings had already appeared in newspapers over the previous months….

The revelations were explosive. Though the CIA had been unsuccessful in getting to Lumumba itself, its efforts in the Congo had turned into something of a blueprint for subsequent covert interventions in which assassinating political targets was no longer beyond the pale. . . . [T]he details about the Lumumba plot were in many ways the most damning. Of the five cases studied, this was the only one in which the investigators could more or less prove that the initiative had come not from the CIA or local partners in the field but from the White House.

Today’s reader may wonder whether America will one day have another profound reckoning.

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Some may read The Lumumba Plot as a wokeist guilt-trip masquerading as history, but that may be just a reflexive response to uncomfortable facts. But for others the business of history is not as settled and immutable as we may have been given to believe when we were in school or even in college. For those, this book is a valuable source of information, and it need not be authoritative in all respects in order to maintain its worth. Insofar as it facilitates our introspection as a nation to consider our past not with flag-waving numbness on the one hand or irrepressible shame on the other but as the record of our fallibility and a basis for moving forward. It comes down to what kind of country (society) we want to have made.

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Finally, for aficionados of fictional spy thrillers, The Lumumba Plot can also be enjoyed as a nonfiction spy thriller filled with intrigue, suspense, and twists and turns aplenty.