Plot to assassinate Patrice Lumumba (Congo)

Patrice Lumumba was thirty-five years old when he became the first prime minister of the newly independent Democratic Republic of the Congo on June 30, 1960. Eleven weeks later, the CIA station chief in the capital, Larry Devlin, received a cable from Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles authorizing his removal.

The instruction came from the top of the United States government. The Church Committee, in its 1975 report on alleged CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders, found evidence that President Eisenhower had personally directed Dulles to arrange Lumumba's death during a National Security Council meeting on August 18, 1960. Eisenhower and his advisers believed Lumumba was drifting toward the Soviet Union and that his removal was a matter of Cold War urgency. The committee was careful to note that no signed presidential order survived; the conclusion was reached from witness testimony.

Within weeks, Sidney Gottlieb, the head of the CIA's Technical Services Staff, flew to the Congo carrying a kit of biological toxins. The plan, according to Gottlieb's 1975 testimony, was to introduce the poison into Lumumba's food or toothpaste. Devlin later said he stalled. The kit was eventually disposed of in the Congo River.

Lumumba was killed without the CIA pulling the trigger. After a coup led by Joseph Mobutu, in which the agency provided money and political support, Lumumba was arrested in early December 1960. He was transferred against his will to the secessionist province of Katanga on January 17, 1961, and shot the same night by a firing squad commanded by Katangan officers and supervised by Belgian advisers. His body was later dissolved in acid.

The CIA did not fire the shots. It had, however, sought his life and helped engineer the political conditions that produced his killers. The Family Jewels memorandum treats the case as a foreign assassination plot that proceeded, in the United States government's intent, from the highest levels.