Tue17Jan61 - CONGO - Patrice Lumumba assassinated by CIA/MI6

[Skeptic]

CIA reveals decades of plots, kidnaps and wiretaps

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2109513,00.html

· 693-page dossier covers 1950s to early 70s
· Contents caused panic in Ford White House

Simon Tisdall in Washington
Saturday June 23, 2007
The Guardian


The CIA is to declassify secret records detailing operations including illegal domestic surveillance, assassination plots and kidnapping, undertaken from the 1950s to the early 1970s, at the height of the cold war and the Vietnam conflict.
The records were compiled in 1973 at the behest of the then CIA director, James Schlesinger, and collected in a 693-page dossier known as the "family jewels". Although some of its contents have been leaked, the CIA has refused until now to put the full dossier in the public domain.

Mr Schlesinger acted after discovering that veteran CIA officers whose burglary of a Washington hotel room triggered the Watergate scandal, had received the agency's cooperation in carrying out "dirty tricks" for President Richard Nixon.
According to the National Security Archive at George Washington University, Mr Schlesinger directed his officials to collate details of any other current or past agency activity that "might fall outside CIA authority" - that was, in other words, illegal. The results of the internal trawl were breathtaking. But within months of finalising the dossier, William Colby replaced Mr Schlesinger as CIA chief.

When the New York Times published a report on the CIA's domestic surveillance operations in December 1974, apparently based in part on the dossier, panic erupted inside the administration of President Gerald Ford, who had succeeded Nixon. At a damage-limitation meeting in January 1975 with James Wilderotter, the deputy attorney-general, Colby laid bare the "skeletons" in the dossier.

Minutes of the meeting, obtained by the National Security Archive and posted at gwu.edu yesterday, list the skeletons one by one.

Domestic operations include the illegal detention and interrogation of a Russian defector, the wiretapping of columnists Robert Allen and Paul Scott, and the surveillance of other journalists including the late Jack Anderson. Several illegal break-ins are also listed.

In the minutes, Colby says some US citizens had been subjected to "unwitting" CIA drug experiments to induce "behaviour modification". The CIA also illegally amassed 9,900 files on Americans involved in anti-war activities.

The minutes state that the CIA "plotted the assassination of some foreign leaders including [Fidel] Castro, [Patrice] Lumumba [Democratic Republic of Congo] and [Rafael] Trujillo [Dominican Republic]." They go on: "With respect to Trujillo's assassination on May 30 1961, the CIA had 'no active part' but had a 'faint connection' with the groups that in fact did it."

In an official record of a White House meeting with President Ford the next day, on January 4 1975, a rattled Henry Kissinger, the secretary of state and national security adviser, argues that the existence of the "family jewels" dossier, and its partial leaking, may turn into a major scandal - with the FBI investigating the CIA.

"What is happening is worse than in the days of McCarthy. You will end up with a CIA that does only reporting, not operations ... What Colby has done is a disgrace," Mr Kissinger tells Ford. "All these stories are just the tip of the iceberg. If they come out, blood will flow. For example, Robert Kennedy [the former attorney-general] personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro."

Announcing the decision to release the dossier next week, plus 11,000 pages of "hard target" intelligence gathered about the USSR and China from 1953-73, General Michael Hayden, the CIA director, said they offered a "glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency".

[Stefan]

Michael Hayden, the CIA director, said they offered a "glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency".

ROTFLMAO

There's that old "line drawn between history and present", still just as illosory.

The sad thing is whatever this dossier shows it wont change most peoples perception of what the CIA does today it'll be accepted, as it has been presented, as a sign of how the times has changed.

Right, well when did the CIA suddenly change? This is from up to the 70's right? So what year was it they transformed into a moral organisation? 81? 87? 92? 99? Last Tuesday?

[outsider]

Could it be that the CIA is just too busy on 'extraordinary renditions' and delivering suitcases full of dosh to Gordon Brown, Angela Merkal, Sarkosi etc. to b* and burgle their way around the U.S.? Perhaps they should be allocated more money, to top up their drug receipts.

[TonyGosling]

MI6 killed late Congolese PM Patrice Lumumba: UK peer
Apr 2013 8:23AM GMT
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/296019.html
A British peer has, in explosive revelations, said that London’s spy agency MI6 murdered the first democratically-elected Prime Minister of Congo, once described as “the most important assassination of the 20th century”.
Lord David Edward Lea made the disclosure in a letter to the editor in the March 21 edition of the London Review of Books (LRB) in response to a question made in a new book published in January.
The question is made by Calder Walton in his book Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire .
Walton writes: “The question remains whether British plots to assassinate Lumumba … ever amounted to anything. At present, we do not know”.
Sir Lea wrote in his letter that “actually, in this particular case, I can report that we do” know that Britain plotted to kill Lumumba.
“It so happens that I was having a cup of tea with Daphne Park… She had been consul and first secretary in Leopoldville, now [capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo] Kinshasa, from 1959 to 1961, which in practice (this was subsequently acknowledged) meant head of MI6 there,” Sir Lea said.
“I mentioned the uproar surrounding Lumumba’s abduction and murder, and recalled the theory that MI6 might have had something to do with it. ‘We did,’ she replied, ‘I organised it’,” he added.
Lea also said that Park had told him the reason behind the assassination was that Lumumba was a leftist and ready to hand over rich Congolese resources to the Russians.
“We went on to discuss her contention that Lumumba would have handed over the whole lot to the Russians: the high-value Katangese uranium deposits as well as the diamonds and other important minerals largely located in the secessionist eastern state of Katanga,” he said.
Park served in Kinshasa (then Leopoldville) between 1959 and 1961, while also serving as an intelligence officer in Hanoi, Moscow and Zambia.
She was made a peer in 1990 after retirement from MI6 and served as the Special Forces semi-official spokesperson until she died in 2010.
Lumumba was the central figure in the Congolese fight for independence from Belgium in 1960 and was assassinated by gun shots on January 17, 1961.
He only served two months in office before being ousted in a US-backed military coup.
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/296019.html

Patrice Lumumba was the first Prime Minister of the Congo, but was overthrown and assassinated less than a year into office.

Link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrcX3XUm7eA

Patrice Lumumba
Political leader
Patrice Émery Lumumba was a Congolese independence leader and the first democratically elected Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo after he helped win its independence from Belgium in June 1960. WikipediaBorn: July 2, 1925, Katakokombe
Assassinated: February 11, 1961, Lubumbashi
Spouse: Pauline Lumumba
Party: Mouvement National Congolais
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrice_Lumumba

#
MI6 and the death of Patrice Lumumba
By Gordon Corera
Security correspondent, BBC News
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-22006446

A member of the House of Lords, Lord Lea, has written to the London Review of Books saying that shortly before she died, fellow peer and former MI6 officer Daphne Park told him Britain had been involved in the death of Patrice Lumumba, the elected leader of the Congo, in 1961.

When he asked her whether MI6 might have had something to do with it, he recalls her saying: "We did. I organised it."

During long interviews I conducted with her for the BBC and for a book that in part covered MI6 and the crisis in the Congo , she never made a similar direct admission and she has denied that there was a "licence to kill" for the British Secret Service.

But piecing together information suggests that while MI6 did not kill the politician directly, it is possible - but hard to prove definitively - that it could have had some kind of indirect role.

Daphne Park was the MI6 officer in the Congo at a crucial point in the country's history. She arrived just before the Congo received independence from Belgium in the middle of 1960.

'Elimination'

Congo's first elected prime minister was Patrice Lumumba who was immediately faced with a breakdown of order. There was an army revolt while secessionist groups from the mineral-rich province of Katanga made their move and Belgian paratroopers returned, supposedly to restore security.

Lumumba made a fateful step - he turned to the Soviet Union for help. This set off panic in London and Washington, who feared the Soviets would get a foothold in Africa much as they had done in Cuba.

In the White House, President Eisenhower held a National Security Council meeting in the summer of 1960 in which at one point he turned to his CIA director and used the word "eliminated" in terms of what he wanted done with Lumumba.

The CIA got to work. It came up with a series of plans - including snipers and poisoned toothpaste - to get rid of the Congolese leader. They were not carried out because the CIA man on the ground, Larry Devlin, said he was reluctant to see them through.

Murder was also on the mind of some in London. A Foreign Office official called Howard Smith wrote a memo outlining a number of options. "The first is the simple one of removing him from the scene by killing him," the civil servant (and later head of MI5) wrote of Lumumba, who was ousted from power but still considered a threat.

MI6 never had a formal "licence to kill". However, at various times killing has been put on the agenda - but normally at the behest of politicians rather than the spies.

Anthony Eden, prime minister at the time of Suez, had made it clear he wanted Nasser dead and more recently David Owen has said that as Foreign Secretary, he had a conversation with MI6 about killing Idi Amin in Uganda (neither of which came to anything).

But in January 1961, Lumumba was dead.

Did Britain and America actually kill him? Not directly. He went on the run, was captured and handed over by a new government to a secessionist group whom they knew would kill him.

The actual killing was done by fighters from the Congo along with Belgians- and with the almost certain connivance of the Belgian government who hated him even more than the American and the British.

Powerful enemies

The comments attributed to Daphne Park by Lord Lea are subtler than saying that Britain killed Lumumba.

Lord Lea claims Baroness Park told him that Britain had "organised" the killing. This is more possible.

Among the senior politicians in the Congo who made the decision to hand Lumumba over to those who eventually did kill him were two men with close connections to Western intelligence.

One of them was close to Larry Devlin and the CIA but the other was close to Daphne Park. She had actually rescued him from danger by smuggling him to freedom in the back of her small Citroen car when Lumumba's people had guessed he was in contact with her.

Do these contacts and relationships mean MI6 could have been complicit in some way in the death of Lumumba? It is possible that they knew about it and turned a blind eye, allowed it to happen or even actively encouraged it - what we would now call "complicity" - as well as the other possibility of having known nothing.

The killing would have almost certainly happened anyway because so many powerful people and countries wanted Lumumba dead.

Whitehall sources describe the claims of MI6 involvement as "speculative". But with Daphne Park dying in March 2010 and the MI6 files resolutely closed, the final answer on Britain's role may remain elusive.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-22006446