War of Numbers (5 page)

The first place to kick over the traces was nowhere near Kwilu, but seven hundred miles away, Kivu Province on the Congo’s eastern frontier. The local tribe was the Bafulero. I consulted the B’s in the tribal box, and through cross-indexing found that a Bafulero chief was in contact with the secret police of Burundi, the small country next door; that Burundi’s king, Mwami Mwambutsa IV, had lately admitted some Chinese communist diplomats; and that the Chinese had checked into Burundi’s main hotel, the Paguidas, only ten miles away from the Bafulero’s main tribal grounds in the Congo. Scarcely had I sorted out this information when reports came in to the effect that tribes to the Bafulero’s south, along the shores of Lake Tanganyika, were shouting a new revolutionary slogan. “Hail Mulele,” they said. “We are the Simbas.” (
Simba
is the Swahili word for lion.) “Also the name of the local beer,” said Dana.

By the end of May, the whole eastern Congo was aboil. Province bureaucrats began not showing up for work, telephones went dead, and the American Consulate in Stanleyville—there since the rebel regime went under in early 1962—fired off a cable that the local Congo army garrison was about to go over the hill. The consulate had five staffers, of whom four belonged to the CIA.
^*

In Leopoldville, the U.S. ambassador, an African specialist named G. McMurtrie Godley, had closeted himself with President Kasavubu to
advise him how to head off the revolution. “You ought to broaden your political base,” said Godley, and suggested replacing the nobody then prime minister with someone more charismatic. Godley telephoned a long list of possibilities to Washington, marking off the further-out Marxists and of course the Katangan exile and pariah of Africa, Moise Tshombe. Fortunately, as other State dispatches pointed out, Kasavubu would never be so wrongheaded as to pick Tshombe as prime minister.

Dana and I were considering the same problem back on Langley’s sixth floor. “How’s Leopoldville going to pull this one out of the hat?” I asked him.

“What you’ve got to try to do,” said Dana, “is think like Kasavubu. The one thing that hasn’t changed since independence is that wily old bastard’s still president. He’s a smart man, and remember, his neck’s the one on the block, not Godley’s.”

Once again, I followed Dana’s advice. I tried to look at the Congo from Kasavubu’s vantage point instead of Godley’s. The more I thought, the closer I came to a disturbing conclusion. I tried it out on Dana the next morning.

“If I were Kasavubu,” I said, “I’d appoint Tshombe premier. Maybe black Africa can’t stand him, and neither can Godley, but Tshombe has more to offer Kasavubu than anyone else.” I listed Tshombe’s assets: best of all, his solid tribal base in Katanga, but also access to money, and even a small army he’d marched to nearby Angola after the Kantangan secession failed. “Finally,” I said, “he’s more dangerous as an out than an in.”

“Probably so,” said Dana. “Why don’t you write it up for the Bulletin? Before you commit yourself to paper, however, you better check it out with the other side of the house. For all I know, the DDP’s trying to keep Tshombe out of Leopoldville. We’d look like damn fools if we said he’d become premier, and the spooks had him tied to a chair in Madrid.”

DDP stood for the Deputy Directorate of Plans, then the official euphemism for the CIA’s clandestine services.
⁵
DDI analysts normally referred to it as “the other side of the house” because the DDP occupied
the CIA building’s other main wing. From it the DDP ran the agency’s secret operations via its “stations,” such as the one in Leopoldville. Besides recruiting spies, the stations’ job was to conduct “covert operations,” which in this instance could mean preventing Tshombe from becoming prime minister. I hurried down the sixth floor’s long office-lined corridor between the two wings to see what plans, if any, the DDP had regarding the Katangan.

“Tshombe?” asked the DDP Congo desk chief, arching his brows. He turned to his deputy. “Number two, what was the word that State Department gentleman used to describe Tshombe at the Congo meeting this morning?”

“Anathema,” said the deputy.

“Exactly. Anathema. You know what that means. Can’t touch him with a ten-foot pole. We don’t mess with anathemas in this office, son,” he told me. I thought he might be evading my questions so I kept at him for twenty minutes. Finally he said flat out that they had nothing going on Tshombe one way or another. I hustled back to Southern Africa to write my Bulletin piece.

It was short. It said that pressures from the growing rebellion would soon convince President Kasavubu to name Moise Tshombe—loathed in Africa, but strong in Katanga—as the Congo’s next premier.

“Now the fun begins,” said Dana. “Remember we’ve got to coordinate this item with State.” I read the article to the State analyst over the phone.

“You don’t really believe that, do you?” he groaned. I did, and told him why. We argued back and forth for more than an hour, the department analyst saying that Kasavubu had enough problems without taking on a hot potato like Tshombe. Finally Dana waved at me to stop. “To hell with it,” he said. “Let State take a footnote.”

“Dana Ball says for you to take a footnote,” I told the analyst.

“You mean it’s come to that?” he answered unhappily.

“I’m afraid it has,” I said. He read out a short statement disputing my article. I copied it down and stapled it to the bottom of the draft.

“Let’s go,” said Dana rising from his seat. “We’ve got to clear it with the front office.” Footnotes to the Bulletin were extremely rare. They came only when two agencies of the so-called intelligence community fundamentally disagreed over what they felt was an important issue. The State man and I both thought the issue was important. If Tshombe became premier, we agreed, black Africa would explode with anger, and the United States would be over a barrel on whether to support him or not.

Dana and I went up to the the seventh floor to tell the top three men of the Office of Current Intelligence—the shop that ran the Bulletin—about State’s footnote. The trio were R. Jack Smith, the chief of OCI, and his two main deputies, Richard Lehman and James Graham. One of them, I forget which, telephoned the head of the DDI, Ray Cline. Fine, they all said. If we felt strongly about our prediction and were sure of the facts, they’d back us to the hilt. Go ahead with the article. Screw State.

The piece appeared in the Bulletin the next morning roughly as I’d drafted it. The State Department footnote was underneath. “We’ve stuck our necks out this time,” Dana said. I was worried too.

Over the first half of June the pressures on Kasavubu increased. Simbas grabbed villages all over the eastern Congo, Stanleyville reported that the city’s garrison had begun to drift away, and for the first time a cable mentioned Antoine Mandungu. It said that Mandungu was the chief Congolese expediter and bagman for the Soviet KGB, a fact I underlined on his three-by-five. An embassy cable said Kasavubu was near the end of his rope.

Then it happened. On 26 June Moise Tshombe flew from Spain to the Congo, brandishing an invitation from Kasavubu. Two weeks later, to drumrolls and flourishes, the Congolese president swore in the exsecessionist from Katanga as the Congo’s new prime minister.

“Kasavubu’s a smart cookie,” I beamed at the AP ticker that announced the appointment. It was a great moment. Dana was all smiles, a stream of DDI analysts from other areas stopped by Southern Africa to snigger at State’s footnote, and there was even a solemn call of
congratulations from the DDI front office. Later that afternoon the State analyst (whom I actually admired because he knew so much about the Congo) telephoned to ask me to dinner. The only person to omit praise was Colleen, deep into the latest issue of
Mademoiselle
magazine.

There was little time to savor my triumph. As expected, cables swarmed in from all over Africa crying bloody murder over Tshombe’s appointment. Some claimed it was a CIA plot, which as far as I could tell, it wasn’t. Others complained it would only make things worse. For whatever reasons, over a third of the Congo had slipped from Leopoldville’s control by late July.

On 5 August the rebellion took another lurch forward. The signal was a rap on my desk by Colleen, looking unaccustomedly worried. Instead of dropping the usual load of paper in my in-box, she shoved a cable under my nose. “You’d better read this, Sam.”

It was from Stanleyville. Through a window in the consulate, the chief DDP man had just watched the arrival of Simbas. They were stark naked and waving palm fronds, according to the cable, marching single file down Stanleyville’s main street. Congo Army soldiers were firing in their direction, but to no avail. Perhaps black magic was at work, the cable suggested; witch doctors had put out the story that bullets shot at rebels doubled back, and the Congo garrison appeared to be shooting over the Simbas’ heads.

That was the message from the city. Stanleyville fell, and with it the consulate, the consulate staff (including the four DDP-ers) and over a thousand white civilians, mostly Belgian plus a few American missionaries. In short order a rebel spokesman got on Stanleyville Radio—which American intelligence monitored from listening posts farther away—to appeal for help from the Russians.

The fifth of August was a busy day. I wrote up two special memos before lunch, and didn’t get around to the Bulletin piece until late afternoon. Stanleyville’s fall was such big news that I expected it to be the Bulletin’s lead item the next morning. To my surprise it was the second. The lead piece was about bombing raids against North Vietnam
launched by the U.S. Seventh Fleet. Apparently the raids were in retaliation for some North Vietnamese PT-boat attacks a short while before against the U.S. destroyers
Maddox
and
Turner Joy
in the Gulf of Tonkin. The Southeast Asia Branch had written the article in the cubicle next door.

Despite the rivalry from over the partition, Stanleyville’s capture put the Congo on the front burner. Ambassador Godley, in a catatonic fit since Tshombe’s swearing-in ceremony, now radioed his judgment that we had no choice but to support the Katangan—after all, Tshombe’s appointment was legal—and the time had come to take drastic measures to scotch the rebellion.

The U.S. government ground into action. Additional planeloads of munitions skidded into Leopoldville’s municipal airport, Belgium reluctantly agreed to send more advisors to calm the now-horrified Congolese army, and the seventh floor sent down word—which it seldom did about covert operations—that the DDP had added to its small contingent of pilots in the Congo. The pilots were Miami Cubans who flew converted training planes called T-28s. The T-28s’ wings were mounted with machine guns and painted with the colors of the Congolese air force.

At about this point, Prime Minister Tshombe decided to set off his first big bomb. It detonated in the form of a want ad carried in several Rhodesian and South African newspapers, including the
Johannesburg Star:

Any fit young man looking for employment with a difference at a salary well in excess of 100 pounds a month should telephone 838-5202 during business hours. Employment initially offered for 6 months. Immediate start.

“White mercenaries,” Dana explained, “same as in Katanga.” Black Africa erupted like a volcano. Foggy Bottom was aghast. A Department spokesman tried to explain that since Tshombe was now the Congo’s legitimate premier, his taking on “soldiers of fortune” was an “internal
Congolese affair.” Nobody heard him for the din. To add to State’s problems, the newspapers began calling the head mercenary, Michael Hoare, “Mad Mike.” Even worse, Hoare held a South African passport.

A short while later, Dana called me to his desk to say that the director wanted a Congo wrap-up every morning by eight. That meant I’d have to show up for work by 3:00
A.M.
“Sorry,” he said, “but you have to include overnight cables, and there’s no other way to get it done by eight.” The wrap-up would be called the Congo Situation Report, he explained. Situation reports were SOP during times of crisis. Everybody called them “Sitreps.”

“But don’t feel bad,” Dana added. “The Southeast Asians are in the same fix. Ed Hauck told me they’re cranking up a Sitrep on Vietnam. It’s because of the PT boats.” Ed Hauck was the chief of the Southeast Asian Branch over the partition.

The Congo Sitrep was only a few days old when one morning at about ten Colleen shouted in from her desk in the hall: “Hey, Dana. Phone. Front office.” He was out. I picked up the telephone instead.

“We need a Congo analyst at the director’s right away,” the caller said. “Get somebody there pronto.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. I tried to find Dana, couldn’t, then grabbed a stack of my latest three-by-fives and tore up to the seventh floor. Moments later I was in the director’s conference room.

Some thirty people were there, seated in leather chairs around a large mahogany table. From photographs I recognized most of the agency’s higher-ups: Ray Cline, chief of the DDI, roly-poly, with crinkly red hair; Richard Helms, head of the DDP, looking, I thought, like a Mississippi riverboat gambler dressed in a business suit; and at the head of the table, John McCone, the director. He had white hair, steel-rimmed glasses, and piercing eyes. Next to McCone was a big map of the Congo on an easel.

I didn’t sit at the table, already full, but on a chair near the door. The meeting was underway. They were talking about Laos rather than the Congo, so I studied my index cards, waiting for my country to be
mentioned. A few minutes passed before I heard someone say “Congo.” I looked up. It was the director.

“Now who are the rebels here,” McCone asked, pointing to a spot just above Lake Tanganyika, “and where are they getting their guns?” Papers shuffled around the room. Then there was silence.

Good God, I said to myself; I know the answer to that one. I raised my hand slightly and cleared my throat. Ray Cline saw me and wagged his head in encouragement.