Art of Betrayal (22 page)

Lumumba's powers of oratory had not deserted him and on 13 January 1961 there was a mutiny at the paratrooper camp. This led to immediate fears that Lumumba might escape again. He had to be dealt with. ‘I assumed, particularly after the Thysville mutiny, that the government would seek a permanent solution to the Lumumba problem,' said Devlin. ‘But I was never consulted on the matter and never offered advice.'
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He may not have been consulted, but he was told it was going to happen by Victor Nendaka, his man who ran the Security Service, a subtle, largely semantic difference. Devlin would later write a cable to CIA headquarters outlining what would happen next but delayed sending it for reasons that remain unclear.
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The incoming Kennedy administration in Washington was divided over whether to continue the hard line over African nationalists or to appeal to the newly independent countries. There were fears in the CIA that the new administration was going ‘soft'. Kennedy himself
wondered after his election whether or not to ‘save' Lumumba and to work with him. Devlin had cabled Washington just before the mutiny desperately trying to maintain a firm line by providing the most alarmist possible take on the situation. ‘PRESENT GOVERNMENT MAY FALL WITHIN FEW DAYS,' Devlin said. ‘RESULT WOULD ALMOST CERTAINLY BE CHAOS AND RETURN LUMUMBA TO POWER … REFUSAL TO TAKE DRASTIC STEPS AT THIS TIME WILL LEAD TO DEFEAT OF UNITED STATES POLICY IN CONGO.'
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The Belgians also made clear that they wanted Lumumba transferred to Katanga and delivered into the hands of his enemies. The job had to be finished quickly.

Just before dawn on 17 January, Lumumba was taken from his cell by Victor Nendaka, his former comrade and now Devlin's man as head of the Security Service. He was brought to a plane. On board his goatee beard was torn out and he was forced to eat it.
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A debate had been held within the Congolese Commission on how to end the instability. A collective decision was reached to send Lumumba to Elisabethville, the Katangan capital. Among those taking the decision was Damien Kandolo, a member of the College of Commissioners, Daphne Park's man, as well as Devlin's man Nendaka. On arrival, Lumumba was dragged out and thrown on to a jeep under watching Belgian eyes. A small Swedish detail of six UN troops at the airport also witnessed him being driven away. Lumumba was conveyed to a colonial villa, owned by a Belgian, where he was beaten again. The UN knew he had landed but did nothing to intervene. Katangan ministers, including Moise Tshombe, joined in the beatings at the villa.
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That night he was led to a clearing in the wood. With Katangan ministers and a number of Belgians present, Lumumba was put up against a tree and executed by a firing squad (the squad included Belgians, who were either mercenaries or working for the Katangan gendarmerie). The corpses of Lumumba and two aides were hacked to pieces and plunged into a barrel of acid by two Europeans. ‘We were there two days,' recalled one of the men years later. ‘We did things an animal wouldn't do. And that's why we were drunk, stone drunk.'
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A few days later it was announced to the world that Lumumba and
two aides had escaped from custody and then been killed by villagers. A Katangan minister held a press conference at which he produced a death certificate. It read ‘died in the bush'. ‘There are those people who accuse us of assassination,' he said. ‘I have only one response – prove it.'
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No one believed the story. Demonstrations erupted in many countries and Belgian embassies were attacked. The crowds may not have known the detail but they understood that Belgian complicity ran deep. Lumumba became a martyr, his death a cause célèbre around the world which Moscow adeptly exploited, even establishing its own university named after him to train and recruit African leaders of the future. ‘It was Belgian advice, Belgian orders and finally Belgian hands that killed Lumumba on that 17 January 1961,' according to one detailed study of events.
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Mobutu, once Lumumba's ally and trusted friend, almost certainly knew of the killing of the comrade he had betrayed. ‘I can't believe he wasn't involved,' confessed Devlin. ‘But it was just one of those questions you didn't ask at the time.'
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Did the CIA know? No direct link to Larry Devlin or the CIA was ever proven, although it is clear that those who ordered the killing were close to both the CIA and MI6 in the Congo. Oddly, one disaffected CIA man claimed that during his training in 1965 another officer had described driving around with Lumumba's body in the boot of his car. When, a decade later, the disaffected officer again encountered the man who had made the claim, that man went to the bathroom twice during dinner to spend fifteen minutes scrubbing and drying his hands, cleaning his fingernails and staring at himself in the mirror. No evidence has emerged to back up the man's claim and the issue of who pulled the strings remains obscure.
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Mobutu's rise to power was complete in 1965 as he launched his final coup. Devlin was there in the background, advising him on whom to appoint.
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‘He had shuffled new governments like cards, finally settling on Mobutu as president,' according to one former CIA officer.
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Colonel Mobutu eventually mutated into Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, ‘the all-powerful warrior who goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake', a strange leopardskin-clad character who began to retreat from reality. He was the archetypal African ‘big man'. Again the Congolese saw nothing of their country's wealth, as it ended up in Swiss bank
accounts.
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The Congo – or Zaire as it was renamed – was a key US ally, a base for a covert CIA war in Angola, and Mobutu was supported personally with money, guns and intelligence from Devlin's successors. His regime received something like a billion dollars over three decades.
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When the Cold War ended in the 1990s, Mobutu was quickly abandoned. As in so many other countries, the superpowers came to the Congo, played out their conflict and then left, leaving nothing of value behind.

Devlin says he was haunted by the assassination plan which he never carried out. One of the problems for him was that it became public in the mid-1970s when the US Congress unearthed the CIA's secret assassination programmes to kill foreign heads of government, including the schemes to poison Lumumba and to use the mafia to kill Fidel Castro at around the same time. The CIA emerged from the process chastened and circumscribed, at least for a few years until President Reagan unleashed it again. Sidney Gottlieb tried to atone for his past by helping young children with speech impediments and volunteering at a hospice.
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For Devlin, the exposure proved difficult. At parties, there would be whispers and people would edge away from him. At one point he was even warned that Carlos the Jackal wanted to kill him to avenge Lumumba. He grew tired of accusations that he was a murderer. But he never really left the Congo. He completed a second tour and then became head of the CIA's Africa division. In 1974 he retired but went on to work for a financier who was investing in the Congo's mineral resources, and he remained close to Mobutu.

Daphne Park left the Congo in 1961. On her last night Kandolo came to dinner at her house. He fidgeted throughout the meal before asking her whether she really did not see Africans as different from white people. She did not, she explained. Some she loathed and some she loved. Park, who would always be fascinated by the riddle of power, went on to spend three years as station chief in Lusaka, working closely with Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia. MI6, like Britain, struggled with post-colonial Africa, and among a certain breed of officers, though not Park, there was a sense that they could not quite come to terms with the end of the Empire. Rhodesia proved a particularly painful chapter, with much sympathy among some old-school officers for the white settlers. Africa remained important for
MI6 as a place where it found it easier to target Soviet bloc officials than it was on their home turf, and so it became an important testing ground for the best new officers to learn the ropes. It also became a place in which MI6 did much work in countering Soviet ideology by supporting academics, trade union leaders and journalists. While operations in the Soviet bloc would become the dominant strand of MI6 work in the coming years and the field where ambitious officers headed, Africa, like the Middle East, would remain an important sub-culture within the office in which specialists operated and a more buccaneering style, evidenced by Park, persisted just beneath the surface.

As the 1960s progressed, Daphne Park moved across to the next hot spot of the Cold War as consul general in Hanoi, North Vietnam, during the country's struggle against the United States. Her movements were highly restricted (when told she could not even have a bicycle she offered to ride a tandem with a Vietnamese officer), but the intelligence she supplied on her trips out of the country was almost the only source that the US and UK had on what was happening in the North and her work brought her many friends in Washington.
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Asia was becoming another crucial zone of conflict in the intelligence war. Maurice Oldfield had become Controller for Asia and had taken MI6 into Indonesia and Indo-China in the 1950s to fight Communism, working closely with the Americans. Graham Greene paid the occasional visit to Indo-China during Oldfield's time, still it seems doing the odd bit of intelligence work while writing. His Europe of
The Third Man
was now giving way to the Asia of
The Quiet American
, charting the flow of the Cold War east and with it Greene's, and Britain's, unease with American power. Not everyone was convinced by the quality of MI6 work in Asia. A new recruit to cover the region was Gerry Warner. Fresh from St Peter's College, Oxford, he had been invited to see an admiral at Buckingham Gate who recruited for MI6. He found the service a disappointing place. He had learnt Mandarin and so was able to compare the reports coming in from the service's top agent in Hong Kong with those available in the local newspapers. The correlation was obvious but the revelation that Our Man in Hong Kong was a fabricator was not well received by the office. Posted to Burma, Warner found an ineffective station chief (with a taste for skinny-dipping parties) who
was fighting the last war by burying radio sets in villages and not recruiting agents or collecting intelligence. He decided he wanted to return home and quit.

Daphne Park eventually rose to become a controller at MI6. If it had not been for the sexism that pervaded the organisation, some say, she would have risen to the next level up, to become a director, or perhaps even have reached the summit as Chief or C. It would not be until the next century that a woman would rise to director level. Park retired from MI6 in 1979 but not from public life, as she became principal of Somerville, one of the last all-women colleges at Oxford University, and a member of the House of Lords where she retained the habit of speaking her mind irrespective of what she was supposed to say. She never married. ‘I had four or five love affairs,' she recalled. ‘But only one that really mattered, and that ended in death, unfortunately.'
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There was a loneliness to Park that her colleagues understood and which was sublimated in her work and in her professional friendships. She remained close to Larry Devlin, talking frequently with him on the phone until they both died within a year of each other.

The Congo crisis also played its part in the ongoing debate within the service over covert action versus intelligence gathering. Chief Dick White disliked the type of political action which involved removing governments and wanted to focus on recruiting agents and collecting information. But one section of officers – particularly those who worked in Africa and the Middle East (the so-called Camel Corps) – argued that the two had to go together. For Daphne Park and those like her, intelligence was about building relationships with people, including top politicians, not spending countless months looking for a disaffected fourth secretary or cipher clerk with a drink problem in an embassy. The former kind of work, which many officers relished, offered a chance to understand the wider strategic direction of a country and to sway or even manipulate it. This in turn, they argued, provided intelligence. Only by supporting activists in their political goals would you learn about a country and what might happen. ‘Unless we show we're prepared to help influence events, we won't get intelligence and it is questionable if it is worth operating,' the first Controller for Africa argued.
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Others in the Secret Service, especially those targeting the Soviet Union and its
allies, favoured a more purist approach to intelligence gathering, focusing on the collection of information rather than the influencing of events. Back in London, only three months after Lumumba had been killed, a Russian was to offer the service the opportunity to begin rebuilding its capacity and its confidence for recruiting agents against the hardest target and its main enemy. He would pay with his life.

4

MOSCOW RULES

I
t was just before ten in the evening when the door to Room 360 swung open. A taut, straight-backed man with deep-set eyes and red hair flecked with grey walked in and sat down across a coffee table from two Britons and two Americans. They introduced themselves with false names.
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Apprehension and expectation hung in the air at the Mount Royal Hotel in London's Marble Arch as the Russian guest lit a cigarette to calm his nerves. It was 20 April 1961 and the Cold War threatened to flare hot.

The man had many identities. His first was as a Soviet official leading a trade delegation to London. His second was an intelligence officer, there to collect technical secrets for the Soviet Union. But as he sat down he embarked on a third, brief and fateful life as a reckless and driven spy, betraying his country. The five men around the coffee table would go on to spend 140 hours in each others' company. The intense and forceful Russian would become the most important spy for the West in the early Cold War and would help the British Secret Service kick the worst habits of its past.