Quotulatiousness

August 24, 2024

How the CIA eventually got Patrice Lumumba assassinated

Filed under: Africa, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The CIA decided early on that the first democratically elected Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo was being controlled by their Soviet opponents and needed to be killed:

Patrice Émery Lumumba, first Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo on 27 December 1960.
Unknown photographer

I’m still making my way through David Talbot’s 2015 book The Devil’s Chessboard, a history that explores the life of CIA Director Allen Dulles and the sordid history of the agency.

There are too many grisly anecdotes to recount showing how the CIA was involved in unlawful and unethical acts all over the world, but one that sticks out was the book’s treatment of Patrice Lumumba, an African nationalist who served as the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo before he was killed in 1961 — with a shove from the CIA.

Lumumba was a thorn in the side of the agency, and his left-leaning politics led CIA officials to believe he was a stooge for the USSR (he wasn’t, as the CIA later admitted). So it was determined that Lumumba had to go—one way or the other.

First, a coup was arranged to have the democratically-elected Lumumba, who was demanding full independence for the Congolese people, removed from office and placed under arrest. To this end, the CIA tapped a young military colonel named Joseph Mobutu, who was friendly with Belgian intelligence (the Congo had long been under Belgian colonial rule) and would go on to rule for decades until he was ousted himself in a 1997 rebellion.

Then the CIA began exploring options to eliminate the popular Lumumba. Being the CIA, a single method was not chosen. Instead, various methods were explored to take out the Congolese leader and multiple people were tapped, including a pair of hitmen the agency had hired from Europe’s criminal underworld.

Talbot explains how the CIA equipped one of these cutthroats with a tube of poisoned toothpaste. Why toothpaste? Because one Dr. Ewen Cameron, at the behest of the CIA, had analyzed Lumumba and noted his immaculate white teeth. This led him to suggest a simple way to eliminate the troublesome leader: poison his dental products.

“In the end, the CIA did not go through with the toothpaste plot,” writes Talbot, “apparently deciding that poisoning a popular leader while he was under UN protective custody in his own house would be too flagrant a deed—one that, if traced back to the agency, would lead to unpleasant international repercussions.”

Instead, days before the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, the CIA arranged to have Lumumba chartered off on a plane to Katanga, a province that had broken from the Congo and was ruled by factions hostile to Lumumba.

This all but sealed Lumumba’s fate, CIA officials later testified.

“I think there was a general assumption, once we learned that he had been sent to Katanga, that his goose was cooked,” CIA station chief James Devlin, who helped orchestrate Lumumba’s fall, quipped to the Church Committee years later.

Devlin was right. During his flight to Katanga, Lumumba was beaten to a pulp. Then he was driven by jeep to a farm and beaten by members of rival political factions. The men, Talbot makes clear, had clear ties to US and Belgian intelligence.

“Eventually he was killed, not by our poisons, but beaten to death, apparently by men who had agency cryptonyms and received agency salaries,” said CIA agent John Stockwell, who was sent to the Congo in the aftermath of the assassination.

The Soviets managed a propaganda win out of the CIA’s clumsy wet work, renaming the Peoples’ Friendship University of the USSR (primarily used for training non-Soviet citizens from “fraternal socialist” and “unaligned” nations in Marxist-Leninist views) to the Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University.

Hitler’s People by Richard J. Evans

Filed under: Books, Germany, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Critic, Daniel Johnson reviews Richard Evans’ latest book on the history of Hitler’s Germany, Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich:

History records nothing more vile than Hitler and his henchmen. At the height of his power in 1942, Heinrich Himmler boasted that “the Führer has laid this very serious command [extermination of the Jews in occupied eastern Europe] upon my shoulders. No one can take it away from me.” By the end of the Third Reich, Hermann Göring had become a “voluptuary”, wearing lipstick and dressing in a toga, accompanied by a suitcase containing most of the world’s supply of the drug paracodeine. Joseph Goebbels, meanwhile, devoted his brief reign as Hitler’s successor to poisoning his six children.

The word “Nazi” has become synonymous with evil. Inevitably, therefore, it has also lost much of its original meaning — a case of Hegel’s “night in which all cows are black”. There is a danger that new generations will no longer know what made the Nazis and their crimes uniquely heinous.

Professor Sir Richard Evans has gathered a representative sample of “Hitler’s people”, ranging from the monstrous to the grotesque, into a single volume. It’s not a work of original research but a collective portrait of “the faces of the Third Reich”. Their unifying factor is the Führerprinzip — their unquestioning obedience to and adulation for Adolf Hitler.

Hero-worship in this, its most sinister form, is still with us. From Narendra Modi to Donald Trump, from Marine Le Pen to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, democracies are still menaced by demagogues. If we are honest, we have all felt the gravitational attraction of “charisma” — a secularised theological concept coined by Max Weber to denote the political authority exerted by an extraordinary individual. Evil often elevates the ordinary to the extraordinary.

Charisma in this sense is contemporaneous with the emergence of Hitler. His cult of charismatic leadership is indistinguishable from the ideology of National Socialism. Cults of this kind had already been prefigured in his day by those of Mussolini, Lenin and Stalin. But the case of Hitler, who cultivated the phenomenon in its most extreme form, remains the paradigm. Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and other contemporary despots are still in his debt.

Nazi Germany was indeed run by legions of little Hitlers, each demanding obeisance whilst lording it over their frequently competing or overlapping jurisdictions. The Third Reich was, in this sense alone, a diabolical reincarnation of the First, the Holy Roman Empire, with its patchwork of feudal domains. No medieval monarch, though, had the technological means to inflict such mayhem and misery upon humanity.

Operation Downfall – the planned invasion of Japan in 1946

Filed under: History, Japan, Military, Pacific, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Wes O’Donnell talks about the thankfully never-launched invasion of the Japanese home islands at the end of the Second World War:

History often hinges on the narrowest of margins.

Entire nations can rise or fall based on decisions made under the pressures of the moment.

But what if those decisions had gone the other way?

What if Archduke Franz Ferdinand had survived the assassination attempt in 1914?

What if John F. Kennedy had lived to complete a second term?

And most intriguingly, what if the United States had not dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945?

The world would have witnessed Operation Downfall, the Allied invasion of Japan — an operation that, by all accounts, would have been the bloodiest amphibious assault in human history.

Operation Downfall was the codename for the proposed Allied plan for the invasion of Japan near the end of World War II.

The planned operation was abandoned when Japan surrendered following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet declaration of war.

The operation had two parts: Operations Olympic and Coronet.

Set to begin in November 1945, Operation Olympic was intended to capture the southern third of the southernmost main Japanese island, Kyūshū, with the recently captured island of Okinawa to be used as a staging area.

Later, in the spring of 1946, Operation Coronet was the planned invasion of the Kantō Plain, near Tokyo, on the Japanese island of Honshu.

Airbases on Kyūshū captured in Operation Olympic would allow land-based air support for Operation Coronet.

The most troubling aspect of Downfall may have been the logistical problems facing military planners.

By 1945, there simply were not enough shipping, service troops, or engineers present to shorten the turnaround time for ships, connect the scattered installations across the Pacific, or build facilities like air bases, ports, and troop housing.

By this point in the war, the War Department had several military leaders that the government trusted to execute a quick end to hostilities.

Unlike the heavy political influence found in today’s wars, these men were given almost total freedom to plan large-scale military operations – Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs notwithstanding.

Six men of destiny

Responsibility for planning Operation Downfall fell to some of the most prominent American military leaders of the 20th century: Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff — Fleet Admirals Ernest King and William D. Leahy, along with Generals of the Army George Marshall and Hap Arnold, who commanded the U.S. Army Air Forces.

These six men, raised in the relatively stable and predictable world of late 19th-century small-town America, carried with them the values instilled by that era.

Arnold and MacArthur were West Point graduates; King, Leahy, and Nimitz came out of the Naval Academy; while Marshall honed his discipline at the Virginia Military Institute, a school renowned for its toughness, even more so than the service academies.

For these leaders, the concepts of duty, honor, and country were more than just words — they were guiding principles.

They approached their roles without a trace of cynicism, supremely confident in their ability and, crucially, their God-given right to steer the course of history, especially in the chaos of war.

Eating on a German U-Boat in WW1

Filed under: Food, Germany, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published May 7, 2024

Sauerkraut soup served with German black bread, or schwarzbrot

City/Region: Germany
Time Period: 1915

The food aboard a German U-boat could get really monotonous, especially after the first ten days or so, when all of the best and freshest ingredients would have gone bad. This simple soup uses ingredients that would have been available on board, and comes from a German cookbook from WWI. There are actually several variations of this soup in the cookbook, the only difference being swapping out the sauerkraut for other ingredients like pickles, cabbage, or beets.

You need to like sauerkraut in order to enjoy this soup, as there isn’t anything else going on to contribute other flavors. I highly recommend eating it with some schwarzbrot, or black bread. It balances the sourness of the soup and the two go together very nicely.

    Sauerkrautsuppe
    The fat and flour are whisked and the water is slowly added. When the soup has simmered, the sauerkraut is added. Salt and vinegar are added to the soup and seasoned.
    — Kriegskochbuch, 1915.

(more…)

QotD: How did the Romans themselves view the change from Republic to Empire?

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Romans themselves had a lot of thoughts about the collapse of the republic. First, we should note that they were aware that something was going very wrong and we have a fair bit of evidence that at least some Romans were trying to figure out how to fix it. Sulla’s reforms (enforced at the point of a much-used sword) in 82-80 BC were an effort to fix what he saw as the progressive destabilization of the the republic going back to the tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus (133). Sulla’s solutions were hamfisted though – he assumed that if he annihilated the opposing faction, crippled the tribunate and strengthened the Senate that this would resolve all of the problems. Cicero likewise considered reforms during the 50s BCE which come out in his De re publica and De legibus. The 50s were a time of political tumult in Rome while at the same time the last years of the decade must have been loomed over by the knowledge of an impending crisis to come in 49. Cicero was never in a position to enact his idealized republic.

Overall the various Romans who contemplated reform were in a way hindered by the tendency of Roman elites to think in terms of the virtue of individuals rather than the tendency of systems. You can see this very clearly in the writings of Sallust – another Roman writing with considerable concern as the republic comes apart – who places the fault on the collapse of Roman morals rather than on any systemic problem.

We also get a sense of these feelings from the literature that emerges after Augustus takes power in 31, and here there is a lot of complexity. There is quite a lot of praise for Augustus of course – it would have been profoundly unwise to do otherwise – but also quite a lot of deep discomfort with the recent past, revealed in places like Livy’s deeply morally compromised legends of the founding of Rome or the sharp moral ambiguity in the final books of Vergil’s Aeneid. On the other hand, some of the praise for Augustus seems to have been genuine. There was clearly an awful lot of exhaustion after so many years of disruption and civil war and so a general openness to Augustus’ “restored republic”. Still, some Romans were clearly bothered by the collapse of the republic even much later; Lucan’s Pharsalia (65 AD) casts Pompey and Cato as heroes and views Caesar far more grimly.

We have less evidence for feeling in the provinces, but of course for many provincials, little would have changed. Few of Augustus’ changes would have done much to change much for people living in the provinces, whose taxes, laws and lives remained the same. They were clearly aware of what was going on and among the elite there was clearly a scramble to try to get on the right side of whoever was going to win; being on the wrong side of the eventual winner could be a very dangerous place to be. But for most regular provincials, the collapse of the Roman Republic only mattered if some rogue Roman general’s army happened to march through their part of the world.

Bret Devereaux, “Referenda ad Senatum: August 6, 2021: Feelings at the Fall of the Republic, Ancient and Medieval Living Standards, and Zombies!”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-08-06.

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