Solving a Cold (War) Case: The U.S Role in the Murder of Congolese Premier Patrice Lumumba

Abstract

Perhaps the history of the Cold War offers “lessons” on how to create “situations of strength” in our current showdown with Russia and China, as Dr. Hal Brands, the Henry A. Kissinger chair at the School of Advanced International Studies, has recently argued.* But the lesson in Stuart A. Reid’s disturbing and important new book, The Lumumba Plot, points to a very different conclusion: to win the Cold War in the Congo in the early 1960s, the U.S. resorted to a host of subversive expedients that included conspiring to murder a head of state. Regime change in the Congo eventually ushered in 32 years of bloody plunder by the CIA’s handpicked strongman, Mobutu Sese Seko.  It is worth understanding how this happened; why, as Reid terms it, “a moment of unprecedented hope gave way to unrelenting tragedy.”

Keywords. The Lumumba Plot; Secret history; Cold war.

JEL. A10; A13; A20.