[CTRL] Dodd and Dulles vs. Kennedy in Africa

[Kris Millegan]

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>From the January-February 1999 issue (Vol. 6 No. 2)

Dodd and Dulles vs. Kennedy in Africa

�In assessing the central character ...
Gibbon�s description of the Byzantine general
Belisarius may suggest a comparison:
�His imperfections flowed from the contagion of the times;
his virtues were his own.��
� Richard Mahoney on President Kennedy

By Jim DiEugenio

As Probe has noted elsewhere (especially in last year�s discussion of Sy
Hersh�s anti-Kennedy screed, The Dark Side of Camelot), a clear strategy of
those who wish to smother any search for the truth about President Kennedy�s
assassination is to distort and deny his achievements in office. Hersh and
his ilk have toiled to distort who Kennedy really was, where he was going,
what the world would have been like if he had lived, and who and what he
represented. As with the assassination, the goal of these people is to
distort, exaggerate, and sometimes just outright fabricate in order to
obfuscate specific Kennedy tactics, strategies, and outcomes.

This blackening of the record�disguised as historical revisionism�has been
practiced on the left, but it is especially prevalent on the right. Political
spy and propagandist Lucianna Goldberg�such a prominent figure in the current
Clinton sex scandal�was tutored early on by the godfather of the anti-Kennedy
books, that triple-distilled rightwinger and CIA crony Victor Lasky. In fact,
at the time of Kennedy�s death, Lasky�s negative biography of Kennedy was on
the best-seller lists. Lately, Christopher Matthews seemed to be the
designated hitter on some of these issues (see the article on page 26).
Curiously, his detractors ignore Kennedy�s efforts in a part of the world far
from America, where Kennedy�s character, who and what he stood for, and how
the world may have been different had he lived are clearly revealed. But to
understand what Kennedy was promoting in Africa, we must first explore his
activities a decade earlier.

The Self-Education of John F. Kennedy

During Kennedy�s six years in the House, 1947-1952, he concentrated on
domestic affairs, bread and butter issues that helped his middle class
Massachusetts constituents. As Henry Gonzalez noted in his blurb for Donald
Gibson�s Battling Wall Street, he met Kennedy at a housing conference in 1951
and got the impression that young Kennedy was genuinely interested in the
role that government could play in helping most Americans. But when Kennedy,
his father, and his advisers decided to run for the upper house in 1952, they
knew that young Jack would have to educate himself in the field of foreign
affairs and gain a higher cosmopolitan profile. After all, he was running
against that effete, urbane, Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge. So Kennedy
decided to take two seven-week-long trips. The first was to Europe. The
second was a little unusual in that his itinerary consisted of places like
the Middle East, India, and Indochina. (While in India, he made the
acquaintance of Prime Minister Nehru who would end up being a lifelong friend
and adviser.)

Another unusual thing about the second trip was his schedule after he got to
his stops. In Saigon, he ditched his French military guides and sought out
the names of the best reporters and State Department officials so he would
not get the standard boilerplate on the French colonial predicament in
Indochina. After finding these sources, he would show up at their homes and
apartments unannounced. His hosts were often surprised that such a youthful
looking young man could be a congressman. Kennedy would then pick their minds
at length as to the true political conditions in that country.

If there is a real turning point in Kennedy�s political career it is this
trip. There is little doubt that what he saw and learned deeply affected and
altered his world view and he expressed his developing new ideas in a speech
he made upon his return on November 14, 1951. Speaking of French Indochina he
said: "This is an area of human conflict between civilizations striving to be
born and those desperately trying to retain what they have held for so long."
He later added that "the fires of nationalism so long dormant have been
kindled and are now ablaze....Here colonialism is not a topic for tea-talk
discussion; it is the daily fare of millions of men." He then criticized the
U. S. State Department for its laid back and lackadaisical approach to this
problem:

One finds too many of our representatives toadying to the shorter aims of
other Western nations with no eagerness to understand the real hopes and
desires of the people to which they are accredited.

The basic idea that Kennedy brought back from this trip was that, in the
Third World, the colonial or imperial powers were bound to lose in the long
run since the force of nationalism in those nascent countries was so
powerful, so volcanic, that no extended empire could contain it indefinitely.
This did not mean that Kennedy would back any revolutionary force fighting an
imperial power. Although he understood the appeal of communism to the
revolutionaries, he was against it. He wanted to establish relations and
cooperate with leaders of the developing world who wished to find a "third
way," one that was neither Marxist nor necessarily pro-Western. He was trying
to evolve a policy that considered the particular history and circumstances
of the nations now trying to break the shackles of poverty and ignorance
inflicted upon them by the attachments of empire. Kennedy understood and
sympathized with the temperaments of those leaders of the Third World who
wished to be nonaligned with either the Russians or the Americans and this
explains his relationships with men like Nehru and Sukarno of Indonesia. So,
for Kennedy, Nixon�s opposition toward Ho Chi Minh�s upcoming victory over
the French in Vietnam was not so much a matter of Cold War ideology, but one
of cool and measured pragmatism. As he stated in 1953, the year before the
French fell:

The war would never be successful ... unless large numbers of the people of
Vietnam were won over from their sullen neutrality and open hostility. This
could never be done ... unless they were assured beyond doubt that complete
independence would be theirs at the conclusion of the war.
To say the least, this is not what the Dulles brothers John Foster and Allen
had in mind. Once the French empire fell, they tried to urge upon Eisenhower
an overt American intervention in the area. When Eisenhower said no, Allen
Dulles sent in a massive CIA covert operation headed by Air Force officer
Edward Lansdale. In other words, the French form of foreign domination was
replaced by the American version.

Kennedy and Africa

Needless to say, the Eisenhower-Nixon-Dulles decision on Indochina had an
epochal ring that can be heard down to the present day. But there was another
developing area of the world where Kennedy differed with these men. In fact
it is in the news today because it still suffers from the parallel pattern of
both Indochina and Indonesia, i.e. European colonialism followed by American
intervention. In 1997, after years of attempted rebellion, Laurent Kabila
finally ousted longtime dictator Joseph Mobutu in the huge African state of
Congo. But Kabila�s government has proven quite weak and this year, other
African states have had to come to his aid to prop him up. In late November,
the new warring factions in that state tentatively agreed to a cease-fire in
Paris brokered by both France and the United Nations. The agreement is to be
formally signed in late December. If not, this second war in two years may
continue. As commentators Nelson Kasfir and Scott Straus wrote in the Los
Angeles Times of October 19th,

What Congo so desperately needs and never has enjoyed is a democratic
assembly, one that can establish a constitution that will allow the country�s
next president to enjoy sufficient legitimacy to get started on a long
overdue development agenda.

There was a Congolese leader who once could have united the factions inside
that country and who wanted to develop its immense internal resources for the
Congolese themselves: Patrice Lumumba. As with Achmed Sukarno of Indonesia,
Lumumba is not talked about very much today. At the time, he was viewed as
such a threat that the Central Intelligence Agency, on the orders of Allen
Dulles, planned his assassination. Lumumba was killed just before President
Kennedy was inaugurated.

Yet, in the media commentaries on the current crisis, the epochal changes
before and after Kennedy�s presidency that took place in the Congo are not
mentioned. As with Indonesia, few commentators seem cognizant of the breaks
in policy there that paved the way for three decades of dictatorship and the
current chaos. One thing nobody has noted was that Mobutu came to absolute
power after Kennedy�s death in a policy decision made by the Johnson
administration. This decision directly contradicted what Kennedy had been
doing while in office. Kennedy�s Congo effort was a major preoccupation of
his presidency in which many of his evolving ideas that originated in 1951
were put to the test and dramatized in a complex, whirring cauldron. The
cauldron featured Third World nationalism, the inevitable pull of Marxism,
Kennedy�s sympathy for nonaligned leaders, his antipathy for European
colonialism, and the domestic opposition to his policies both inside the
government and without. This time the domestic opposition was at least partly
represented by Senator Thomas Dodd and CIA Director Allen Dulles. This
tortured three-year saga features intrigue, power politics, poetic idealism,
a magnetic African revolutionary leader, and murder for political reasons.
How did it all begin?

Kennedy Defines Himself

In 1956, the Democrats, always sensitive to the charge of being "soft on
communism", did very little to attack the Eisenhower-Nixon-Dulles foreign
policy line. When they did, it was with someone like Dean Acheson who, at
times, tried to out-Dulles John Foster Dulles. Kennedy was disturbed by this
opportunistic crowd-pleasing boilerplate. To him it did not relate to the
reality he had seen and heard firsthand in 1951. For him, the nationalistic
yearning for independence was not to be so quickly linked to the
"international Communist conspiracy." Kennedy attempted to make some speeches
for Adlai Stevenson in his race for the presidency that year. In them he
attempted to attack the Manichean world view of the Republican
administration, i.e. that either a nation was allied with America or she was
leaning toward the Communist camp:

the Afro-Asian revolution of nationalism, the revolt against colonialism, the
determination of people to control their national destinies....In my opinion,
the tragic failure of both Republican and Democratic administrations since
World War II to comprehend the nature of this revolution, and its
potentialities for good and evil, has reaped a bitter harvest today�and it is
by rights and by necessity a major foreign policy campaign issue that has
nothing to do with anti-communism. (Speech in Los Angeles 9/21/56)

This was too much even for the liberal Stevenson. According to author Richard
Mahoney, "Stevenson�s office specifically requested that the senator make no
more foreign policy statements in any way associated with the campaign." (JFK:
 Ordeal in Africa p. 18)

Kennedy objected to the "for us or against us" attitude that, in Africa, had
pushed Egypt�s Gamel Abdul Nasser into the arms of the Russians. He also
objected to the self-righteousness with which people like Dulles and Nixon
expressed this policy. John Foster Dulles� string of bromides on the subject
e.g. "godless Communism", and the "Soviet master plan", met with this
response from Senator Kennedy: "Public thinking is still being bullied by
slogans which are either false in context or irrelevant to the new phase of
competitive coexistence in which we live." (Mahoney p. 18)

Kennedy on Algeria

Kennedy bided his time for the most fortuitous moment to make a major
oratorical broadside against both political parties� orthodoxies on the
subject of Third World nationalism. He found that opportunity with France�s
colonial crisis of the late 1950�s: the struggle of the African colony of
Algeria to be set free. By 1957, the French had a military force of 500,000
men in Algeria committed to putting down this ferocious rebellion. The war
degenerated at times into torture, atrocities, and unmitigated horror, which
when exposed, split the French nation in two. It eventually caused the fall
of the French government and the rise to power of Charles De Gaulle.
On July 2, 1957, Senator Kennedy rose to speak in the Senate chamber and
delivered what the New York Times was to call "the most comprehensive and
outspoken arraignment of Western policy toward Algeria yet presented by an
American in public office." (3/13/57) As historian Allan Nevins wrote later,
"No speech on foreign affairs by Mr. Kennedy attracted more attention at home
and abroad." (The Strategy of Peace, p. 67) It was the mature fruition of all
the ideas that Kennedy had been collecting and refining since his 1951 trip
into the nooks and corners of Saigon. It was passionate yet sophisticated,
hard-hitting but controlled, idealistic yet, in a fresh and unique way, also
pragmatic. Kennedy assailed the administration, especially Nixon and Dulles,
for not urging France into a non-military solution to the bloody crisis. He
even offered some diplomatic alternatives. He attacked both the United States
and France for not seeing in Algeria a reprise of the 1954 Indochina crisis:

Yet, did we not learn in Indochina ... that we might have served both the
French and our own causes infinitely better had we taken a more firm stand
much earlier than we did? Did that tragic episode not teach us that, whether
France likes it or not, admits it or not, or has our support or not, their
overseas territories are sooner or later, one by one, inevitably going to
break free and look with suspicion on the Western nations who impeded their
steps to independence. (Ibid p. 72)

The speech ignited howls of protest, especially from its targets, i.e.
Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles, Acheson, and Nixon. The latter called it "a
brashly political" move to embarrass the administration. He further added
that, "Ike and his staff held a full-fledged policy meeting to pool their
thinking on the whys underlying Kennedy�s damaging fishing in troubled
waters." (Los Angeles Herald-Express 7/5/57) Mahoney noted that, of the 138
editorials clipped by Kennedy�s office, 90 opposed the speech. (p. 21) Again,
Stevenson was one of Kennedy�s critics. Jackie Kennedy was so angry with
Acheson�s disparaging remarks about the speech that she berated him in public
while they were both waiting for a train at New York�s Penn Central.

But abroad the reaction was different. Newspapers in England and,
surprisingly, in France realized what the narrowly constricted foreign policy
establishment did not: Kennedy knew what he was talking about. The speech was
a mature, comprehensive, and penetrating analysis of a painful and
complicated topic. As one French commentator wrote at the time:

Strangely enough, as a Frenchman I feel that, on the whole, Mr. Kennedy is
more to be commended than blamed for his forthright, frank and provocative
speech.... The most striking point of the speech ... is the important
documentation it revealed and his thorough knowledge of the French milieu.

As a result, Kennedy now became the man to see in Washington for incoming
African dignitaries. More than one commented that they were thrilled reading
the speech and noted the impact it had on young African intellectuals
studying abroad at the time. The Algerian guerrillas hiding in the hills were
amazed at its breadth of understanding. On election night of 1960 they
listened to their wireless radios and were alternately depressed and elated
as Nixon and Kennedy traded the lead.

Ike and the Congo

Once in office, Kennedy had very little time to prepare for his first African
crisis. It had been developing during the latter stages of the Eisenhower
administration and like Laos, Vietnam, and Cuba it was a mess at the time
Kennedy inherited it. With John Foster Dulles dead and Eisenhower embittered
over the U-2 incident and what it had done for his hopes for d�tente, Allen
Dulles and, to a lesser extent, Nixon had an increasingly stronger pull over
National Security Council meetings. This was even more true about subject
areas which Eisenhower had little interest in or knowledge about.

In June of 1960, Belgium had made a deliberately abrupt withdrawal from the
Congo. The idea was that the harder the shock of colonial disengagement, the
easier it would be to establish an informal yet de facto control afterward.
Before leaving, one Belgian commander had written on a chalkboard:

Before Independence = After Independence

As hoped for, the heady rush of freedom proved too much for the new Congolese
army. They attacked the Europeans left behind and pillaged their property.
The Belgians used this as a pretext to drop paratroops into the country. In
response, the democratically elected premier, Patrice Lumumba and President
Joseph Kasavubu asked United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold for
help. At his request, the United Nations asked Belgium to leave and voted to
send a peacekeeping mission to the Congo.

At this point, the Belgians made a crucial and insidious move. Realizing
Hammarskjold would back the newly elected government against the foreign
invaders, Belgium began to financially and militarily abet the secession of
the Congo�s richest province, Katanga, in the southeast corner of the state.
There was a primitive tribal rivalry that served as a figleaf for this split.
But the real reason the Belgians promoted the break was the immense mineral
wealth in Katanga. They found a native leader who would support them and they
decided to pay Moise Tshombe a multimillion dollar monthly bounty to head the
secessionist rebellion. As Jonathan Kwitny has noted, some of the major media
e.g. Time and the New York Times actually backed the Belgians in this act.
Yet, as Kwitny also notes:

Western industrial interests had been egging Tshombe on toward succession,
hoping to guarantee continued Western ownership of the mines. They promised
to supply mercenaries to defend the province against whatever ragtag army
Lumumba might assemble to reclaim it. (Endless Enemies, p. 55)

In spite of the Belgian plotting and Tshombe�s opportunistic betrayal, Allen
Dulles blamed Lumumba for the impending chaos. His familiar plaint to the
National Security Council was that Lumumba had now enlisted in the Communist
cause. This, even though the American embassy in Leopoldville cabled
Washington that the Belgian troops were the real root of the problem. The
embassy further stated that if the UN did not get the Belgians out, the Congo
would turn to someone who would: the Russians. Further, as Kwitny and others
have noted, Lumumba was not a Communist:

Looking at the outsiders whom Lumumba chose to consult in times of trouble,
it seems clear that his main socialist influence in terms of ideas ... wasn�t
from Eastern Europe at all, but from the more left-leaning of the new African
heads of state, particularly, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. (p. 53)

As Mahoney makes clear in his study, Nkrumah was a favorite of Kennedy�s who
the new president backed his entire time in office.

Eisenhower Turns on Lumumba

At this inopportune moment, July of 1960, Lumumba visited Washington for
three days. Eisenhower deliberately avoided him by escaping to Rhode Island.
Lumumba asked both Secretary of State Christian Herter and his assistant
Douglas Dillon for help in kicking out the Belgians. The response was
purposefully noncommittal. Meanwhile, the Soviets helped Lumumba by flying in
food and medical supplies. Rebuffed by Washington, Lumumba then asked the
Russians for planes, pilots, and technicians to use against Katanga. This was
a major step in sealing his fate in the eyes of Allen Dulles. Larry Devlin,
the CIA station chief in Leopoldville (then the capital of the Congo), wired
CIA headquarters that the Congo was now experiencing "a classic Communist
effort" to subjugate the government. Within 24 hours, Dulles, apparently with
Eisenhower�s approval, set in motion a series of assassination plots that
would eventually result in Lumumba�s death. Ironically, on the day the plots
originated, Lumumba made the following radio address to his citizens:

We know that the US understands us and we are pleased to see the US position
in bringing about international peace.... If the Congolese place their
confidence in the US, which is a good friend, they will find themselves
rewarded. (Mahoney, p. 44)

What the unsuspecting Lumumba did not know was that Eisenhower�s advisers had
already made up their mind about him. As Douglas Dillon told the Church
Committee, the National Security Council believed that Lumumba was a "very
difficult, if not impossible person to deal with, and was dangerous to the
peace and safety of the world." (Kwitny, p. 57) Imagine, the newly elected
premier of an undeveloped nation whose army could not even stop an internal
secession was now threatening the safety of the world. But, to reiterate,
there is little evidence of Lumumba even being a Communist. As Kwitny notes,
"all through his brief career ... he had publicly pledged to respect private
property and even foreign investment" (p. 72). (Kwitny also could have noted
that Dillon was hardly an unbiased source. As revealed in the book Thy Will be
 Done, Dillon was a co-investor with his friend Nelson Rockefeller in
properties inside the Belgian Congo and therefore had an interest in it
remaining a puppet state.)

Lumumba wanted the UN to invade Katanga. Hammarskjold refused. At this point
Lumumba made his final, fatal error in the eyes of the Eisenhower
establishment. He invited the Russians into the Congo so they could expel the
Belgians from Katanga. Simultaneously, the Belgians began to work on Kasavubu
to split him off from, and therefore isolate, Lumumba. The CIA now begin to
go at Lumumba full bore. The CIA station, led by Devlin, began to supersede
the State Department policy-making apparatus. Allen Dulles began to funnel
large amounts of money to Devlin in a mad rush to covertly get rid of
Lumumba. At the same time, Devlin began to work with the Belgians by
recruiting and paying off possible rivals to Lumumba i.e. Kasavubu and Joseph
Mobutu. This tactic proved successful. On September 5, 1960 Devlin got
Kasavubu to dismiss Lumumba as premier. But the dynamic and resourceful
Lumumba got the legislative branch of government to reinstate him. When it
appeared Lumumba would reassert himself, Dulles redoubled his efforts to have
him liquidated. (The story of these plots, with new document releases plus
the questions surrounding the mysterious death of Hammarskjold will be
related in the second part of this article.)

With a split in the government, Hammarskjold was in a difficult position. He
decided to call a special session of the UN to discuss the matter. At around
this time, presidential candidate Kennedy wired foreign policy insider
Averill Harriman a query asking him if Harriman felt Kennedy should openly
back Lumumba. Harriman advised him not to. Since he felt that there was
little the US could do unilaterally, he told the candidate to just stay
behind the United Nations. (Interestingly, Harriman would later switch sides
and back Tshombe and Katanga�s secession.) Kennedy, whose sympathies were
with Lumumba, took the advice and backed an undecided UN. In public,
Eisenhower backed Hammarskjold, but secretly the CIA had united with the
Belgians to topple Lumumba�s government, eliminate Lumumba, and break off
Katanga. Lumumba�s chief African ally, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, made a speech
at the UN in September of 1960 attacking Western policy in the Congo. Kennedy
now made references in his speeches to Nkrumah which�not so subtly�underlined
his split with Eisenhower over the Congo.

The Death of Lumumba

As of late 1960, the situation in the Congo was a chaotic flux.
Hammarskjold�s deputy on the scene, Rajeshwar Dayal of India, refused to
recognize the Kasavubu-Mobutu regime. Dayal went further and decided to
protect Lumumba and his second in command, Antoine Gizenga, from arrest
warrants made out for them by this new government. The American ambassador on
the scene, Clare Timberlake, was now openly supporting the pretenders,
Kasavubu and Mobutu. His cables to Washington refer to Lumumba as a Communist
with ties to Moscow. With Timberlake�s sympathies now clear, and the Belgians
pumping in more war supplies to Katanga, Lumumba�s followers decided to set
up their own separatist state in the northwest Congo, the province of
Orientale with a capital at Stanleyville.

In November of 1960, Dayal rejected the Kasavubu-Mobutu government and blamed
them for playing a role in murder plots against Lumumba. Following this
declaration�and exposure of covert action�the US openly broke with
Hammarskjold on Congo policy. The State Department issued a press release
stating (incredibly) that it had "every confidence in the good faith of
Belgium." (Mahoney, p. 55) The White House further warned the UN that if
Hammarskjold tried any compromise that would restore Lumumba to power, the U.
S. would make "drastic revision" of its Congo policy. As Kwitny notes, this
clearly implied that the US would take unilateral military action to stop a
return to power by Lumumba.

Dayal had tried to save Lumumba�s life against Devlin�s plots by placing him
under house arrest, surrounded by UN troops in Leopoldville. On November
27th, Lumumba tried to flee Congo territory and escape to his followers in
Stanleyville. Devlin, working with the Belgians, blocked his escape routes.
He was captured on December 1st and returned to Leopoldville. (There is a
famous film of this return featuring Lumumba bloody and beaten inside a cage,
being hoisted by a crane, which Timberlake tried to suppress at the time.)
Enraged, Lumumba�s followers in Stanleyville started a civil war by invading
nearby Kivu province and arresting the governor who had been allied with the
Leopoldville government.

At this juncture, with his followers waging civil war, the Congolese
government not recognized by the UN, and Lumumba still alive, the possibility
existed that he could return to power. On January 17th, Lumumba was shipped
to Kasai province which was under the control of Albert Kalonji, a hated
enemy of Lumumba. There he was killed, reportedly on orders of Katangese
authorities, probably Tshombe, but surely with the help of the CIA. As author
John Morton Blum writes in his Years of Discord, the CIA cable traffic
suggests that Dulles and Devlin feared what Kennedy would do if he took
office before Lumumba was gone (p. 23). Kwitny also notes that the new regime
may have suspected Kennedy would be less partial to them than Eisenhower was
(p. 69). He further notes that Kasavubu tried a last minute deal to get
Lumumba to take a subordinate role in the government. Lumumba refused. He was
then killed three days before JFK�s inauguration.

Although he was murdered on January 17th, the news of his death did not reach
Washington until February 13, 1961.

Kennedy�s new Policy

Unaware of Lumumba�s death, Kennedy requested a full-scale policy review on
the Congo his first week in office. Kennedy had made an oblique reference to
the Congo situation in his inaugural address. He had called the UN, "our last
best hope" and pledged to support "its shield of the new and the weak". Once
in office he made clear and forceful those vague insinuations. On his own,
and behind the scenes, he relayed the Russians a message that he was ready to
negotiate a truce in the Congo. Ambassador Timberlake got wind of this and
other JFK moves and he phoned Allen Dulles and Pentagon Chief Lyman Lemnitzer
to alert them that Kennedy was breaking with Eisenhower�s policy. Timberlake
called this switch a "sell-out" to the Russians. Upon hearing of the new
policy formation, Hammarskjold told Dayal that he should expect in short
order an organized backlash to oppose Kennedy.

On February 2nd, Kennedy approved a new Congo policy which was pretty much a
brisk departure from the previous administration. The new policy consisted of
close cooperation with the UN to bring all opposing armies, including the
Belgians, under control. In addition, the recommendation was to have the
country neutralized and not subject to any East-West competition. Thirdly,
all political prisoners should be freed. (Not knowing Lumumba was dead, this
recommendation was aimed at him without naming him specifically.) Fourth, the
secession of Katanga should be opposed. To further dramatize his split with
Eisenhower and Nixon, Kennedy invited Lumumba�s staunch friend Nkrumah to
Washington for an official visit. Even further, when Nehru of India asked
Kennedy to promise to commit US forces to the UN military effort and to use
diplomatic pressure to expel the Belgians, Kennedy agreed. But although his
policies were an improvement, Kennedy made a tactical error in keeping
Timberlake in place.
The Republican Timberlake now teamed with Devlin and both ignored the new
administration�s diplomatic thrust. They continued their efforts to back the
increasingly rightwing Kasavubu-Mobutu government with Devlin also helping
Tshombe in Katanga. When Congo government troops fired on the newly
strengthened and JFK-backed UN forces, Timberlake stepped over the line. In
early March of 1961 he ordered a US naval task force to float up the Congo
River. This military deployment, with its accompanying threat of American
intervention, was not authorized by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, let alone
Kennedy. Coupled with this was another unauthorized act by Devlin. The CIA,
through a friendly "cut-out" corporation, flew three French jet trainers into
Katanga. Kennedy was enraged when he heard of these acts. He apologized to
Nkrumah and recalled Timberlake. He then issued a written warning that the
prime American authority in countries abroad was the ambassador. This
included authority over the CIA station.

Enter Thomas Dodd

At this point, another figure emerged in opposition to Kennedy and his Congo
policy. Clearly, Kennedy�s new Congo policy had been a break from
Eisenhower�s. It ran contra to the covert policy that Dulles and Devlin had
fashioned. To replace the Eisenhower-Nixon political line, the Belgian
government, through the offices of public relations man Michael Struelens,
created a new political counterweight to Kennedy. He was Senator Thomas Dodd
of Connecticut. As Mahoney notes, Dodd began to schedule hearings in the
senate on the "loss" of the Congo to communism, a preposterous notion
considering who was really running the Congo in 1961. Dodd also wrote to
Kennedy�s United Nations ambassador Adlai Stevenson that the State
Department�s "blind ambition" to back the UN in Katanga could only end in
tragedy. He then released the letter to the press before Stevenson ever got
it.

One of the allies that Dodd had in his defense of the Katanga "freedom
fighters", was the urbane, supposedly independent journalist William F.
Buckley. As Kwitny wittily notes, Buckley saw the spirit of Edmund Burke in
the face of Moise Tshombe. Dodd was a not infrequent guest on Buckley�s
television show which was then syndicated by Metromedia. Buckley�s supposed
"independence" was brought into question two decades ago by the exposure of
his employment by the CIA. But newly declassified documents by the
Assassination Records Review Board go even further in this regard. When House
Select Committee investigator Dan Hardway was going through Howard Hunt�s
Office of Security file, he discovered an interesting vein of documents
concerning Buckley. First, Buckley was not a CIA "agent" per se. He was
actually a CIA officer who was stationed for at least a part of his term in
Mexico City. Second, and dependent on Buckley�s fictional "agent" status, it
appears that both Hunt and Buckley tried to disguise Buckley�s real status to
make it appear that Buckley worked for and under Hunt when it now appears
that both men were actually upper level types. Third, when Buckley "left" the
Agency to start the rightwing journal National Review, his professional
relationship with propaganda expert Hunt continued. These documents reveal
that some reviews and articles for that journal were actually written by
Hunt, e. g. a review of the book The Invisible Government.

In other words, the CIA was using Buckley�s journal as a propaganda outlet.
This does much to explain that journal�s, and Buckley�s, stand on many
controversial issues, including the Congo crisis and the Kennedy
assassination. It also helps to explain the Republican William F. Buckley
allying himself with Democrat Tom Dodd in defending the Katanga
"freedom-fighters."

The Death of Hammarskjold

In September of 1961, while trying to find a way to reintegrate Katanga into
the Congo, Hammarskjold was killed in a suspicious plane accident (to be
discussed in part two of this article). At this point, with Hammarskjold
gone, Timberlake recalled, and Dodd carrying the propaganda battle to him,
Kennedy made a significant choice for his new ambassador to replace
Timberlake in the Congo. He chose Edmund Gullion for the job. As Mahoney
writes:

Kennedy�s selection of Edmund Gullion as ambassador was of singular
consequence to Congo policy. In the President�s view, Gullion was sans pareil
among his Third World ambassadors�his best and brightest. There was no
ambassador in the New Frontier whose access to the Oval Office was more
secure than his. (p. 108)

Gullion had been one of Kennedy�s early tutors on foreign policy issues and
the pair had actually first met in 1948. Later, Gullion was one of the State
Department officials Kennedy sought out in his 1951 visit to Saigon. He had
been important in convincing Kennedy that the French position in Vietnam was
a hopeless one. In 1954, when Kennedy began attacking the Eisenhower
administration�s policy in Indochina, he had drawn on Gullion as a source.
The White House retaliated by pulling Gullion off the Vietnam desk. As
Mahoney states about the importance of Gullion�s appointment by Kennedy:

In a very real sense, the Congo became a testing ground of the views shared
by Kennedy and Gullion on the purpose of American power in the Third World.�
Both Kennedy and Gullion believed that the United States had to have a larger
purpose in the Third World than the containment of communism. If the US did
not, it would fall into the trap of resisting change.... By resisting change,
the US would concede the strategic advantage to the Soviet Union. (p. 108)
What Gullion and Kennedy tried to do in the Congo was to neutralize the
appeal of the extremes i.e. fascism and communism, and attempt to forge a
left-right ranging coalition around a broad center. This policy, and
Kennedy�s reluctance to let Katanga break away, was not popular with
traditional American allies. When British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan
questioned Kennedy�s intransigence on Katanga, Kennedy wrote back:

In our own national history, our experience with non-federalism and
federalism demonstrates that if a compact of government is to endure, it must
provide the central authority with at least the power to tax, and the
exclusive power to raise armies, We could not argue with the Congolese to the
contrary. (Ibid. p. 109)

This precarious situation, with both domestic and foreign opposition mounting
against him, seemed to galvanize the usually cool and flexible Kennedy. He
went to New York to pay tribute to Hammarskjold�s memory. He then moved to
supplement Gullion inside the White House. George Ball was appointed as
special adviser on the Congo. Even in 1961, Ball had a reputation as a
maverick who was strongly opposed to US intervention in Vietnam. Ball agreed
with Kennedy and Gullion that a political center had to be found in the
Congo. The administration concentrated their efforts on the appointment of
Cyrille Adoula as the new premier. Adoula was a moderate labor leader who,
unfortunately, had little of the dynamism and charisma of Lumumba. By the end
of 1961 he had moved into the premier�s residence in Leopoldville.

But there was one difference between Ball and Gullion on American Congo
policy post-Hammarskjold. Ball seemed willing to compromise on the issue of
Katanga�s autonomy; perhaps even willing to negotiate it away for a
withdrawal of all mercenary forces from the Congo. But it seems that
Kennedy�s visit to New York for Hammarskjold�s wake at the UN stiffened his
resolve on this issue. Before the General Assembly, Kennedy had stated: "Let
us here resolve that Dag Hammarskjold did not live or die in vain." He then
backed this up by allowing Stevenson to vote for a UN resolution allowing the
use of force to deport the mercenaries and advisory personnel out of Katanga.

Dodd in Katanga

One week after the November 24, 1961 UN resolution, Senator Dodd was in
Katanga. Moise Tshombe had already labeled the resolution an act of war and
had announced he would fight the deployment of the UN force. Dodd was at
Tshombe�s side when he toured the main mining centers of Katanga attempting
to drum up support for the anticipated conflict. Dodd later did all he could
to intimidate Kennedy into withdrawing U. S. support for the mission by
telling him that Tshombe�s tour had elicited a "tremendous" popular response
amid "delirious throngs" of both blacks and whites.

While in Katanga, a curious event occurred in the presence of Thomas Dodd.
Dodd was being feted at a private home in Elizabethville when Katangese
paratroopers broke into the house. They took hostage two UN representatives,
Brian Urquhart and George Ivan Smith. A State Department employee, Lewis
Hoffacker, bravely attempted to stop the kidnapping and managed to get Smith
away from his abductors. But he couldn�t get Urquhart away. Under heavy
threats from the UN military commander, Colonel S. S. Maitro, Urquhart was
released shortly afterwards, albeit in badly beaten condition. The event is
curious because it poses some lingering questions: 1) How did the
paratroopers know about the location of the private party? 2) Dodd was not
molested. Were the soldiers advised not to touch him? 3) Unlike Hoffacker, it
does not appear that Dodd used his influence to intervene in the abduction.
If so, why not?

Whatever the odd circumstances surrounding this event, and whatever Dodd�s
actions in it were, it proved to be the causus belli in the war for Katanga. S
hortly afterwards, Katangese tanks blockaded the road from the UN
headquarters to the airport. The UN troops attacked the roadblocks and heavy
fighting now broke out. Supplemented by U. S. transport planes, the UN effort
was logistically sound. So the Katangese had to resort to terrorist tactics
to stay even. They used civilian homes, churches, and even hospitals to
direct fire at UN troops. The troops had no alternative except to shell these
targets. Kennedy and the UN began to take a lot of criticism for the civilian
casualties. But when the new Secretary General, U Thant, began to waiver ever
so slightly, Kennedy gave him the green light to expand the war without
consulting with the other Western allies who were not directly involved with
the military effort. When Secretary of State Dean Rusk relayed the allies� com
plaints over the expansion of the war, Kennedy replied that "some of our
friends should use their influence on Tshombe." (Mahoney p. 117) He further
told Rusk that there would be no consideration of a cease-fire until Tshombe
agreed to talk to Adoula.

The Propaganda War over Katanga

Once the shooting started in earnest, the propaganda war also began to heat
up. A full page ad appeared in the New York Times. It compared Katanga to the
Soviet client state of Hungary in its 1956 crisis. One of the signers for the
ad was Buckley�s young conservative group, the Young Americans for Freedom. Ti
me magazine placed Tshombe on its cover. Kennedy fought back by getting
Eisenhower to issue a statement in support of his policies. He also sent an
emissary to break up any attempted alliance between Dodd and southern senator
Richard Russell of Georgia. When the same State Department officer tried to
get in contact with Nixon, the former vice-president told him not to waste
his time.

In December of 1961, Tshombe sent word to Kennedy that he wanted to
negotiate. Tshombe was in a weak position as fighter jets were strafing his
palace. Kennedy sent Gullion and former UN official Ralph Bunche to mediate
the talks. The session did not go well. Tshombe, in the middle of the talks
wished to leave to consult with other dignitaries from his government.
Gullion would not allow it but he did get Tshombe to recognize the Congo�s
constitution and place his soldiers under Kasavubu�s authority. He would then
be allowed to run for the Congolese parliament. This would have been enough
for Ball to agree to a cease-fire. But immediately upon his return to
Katanga, Tshombe denounced the bargain and the violence was renewed.
Tshombe�s ploy almost worked. Adoula�s leftist followers lost faith in him
and began to leave for Stanleyville. Britain and France defected from the
mission. Congress did not want to refinance the UN effort to put down the
revolt. Even Ball advised Kennedy to cut his losses and leave. It appears
that it was Gullion who decided to press on in the effort to break Katanga
and it seems it was his advice, and his special relationship with Kennedy,
that kept the president from losing faith.

Kennedy�s Economic Warfare

In 1962, Kennedy decided to hit Tshombe where it hurt. A joint
British-Belgian company named Union Miniere had been bankrolling the Katangan
war effort in return for mineral rights there. Kennedy, through some British
contacts now attempted to get the company to stop paying those fees to
Tshombe. Union Miniere refused. They replied that they had billions wrapped
up in Katanga and could not afford to risk the loss. Kennedy now went through
the American ambassador in England to the Belgian representatives of the
company. He told them that unless a good part of the stipend to Katanga was
curtailed, he would unleash a terrific attack on Katanga and then give all of
Union Miniere over to Adoula when the Congo was reunified. This did the
trick. The revenues going to Tshombe were significantly curtailed. The
cutback came at an important time since Tshombe had already run up a
multimillion dollar debt in resisting the UN effort.
To counter these moves, Dodd forged an alliance with Senator Barry Goldwater,
the ultraconservative senator from Arizona. Their clear message to Tshombe
was that he should hold out until the 1964 presidential election in which
Goldwater had already expressed an interest in running. Kennedy countered by
bringing Adoula to both New York and Washington. In his speech at the United
Nations, Adoula paid tribute to "our national hero Patrice Lumumba" and also
criticized Belgium. (Mahoney, p. 134) At his visit to the White House, Adoula
pointed to a portrait of Andrew Jackson and told Kennedy how much he admired
Old Hickory. Remembering his history, and clearly referring to Tshombe and
Katanga, Kennedy made a toast to Adoula quoting Jackson�s famous reply to
secessionist John Calhoun, "Our federal union; it must be preserved." Two
months after the visit, Kennedy wrote a letter to Adoula:

These three months have been trying for us. I am searching for an agreement
to end the armaments race and you are searching for an agreement to reunite
your country.... You may be assured that we will spare no effort in bringing
about this end. (Ibid p. 135)
The supporters of Tshombe needed to retaliate for the success of the Adoula
visit. Tshombe�s press agent, Michel Struelens arranged for him to appear on
a segment of Meet the Press, a rally at Madison Square Garden, and a press
conference at the National Press Club in Washington. Dodd invited Tshombe to
testify before his subcommittee. In the face of all this advance fanfare,
Kennedy made it clear that he was considering not granting Tshombe a visa
into the country. Gullion and Stevenson argued that it was not a legal
necessity since Tshombe was not a real representative of the Congolese
government. Kennedy�s legal adviser, Abram Chayes argued against the denial.
In the end, Kennedy again sided with Gullion and denied the visa. Again,
Kennedy took a barrage of criticism for this maneuver. His father�s old
friend, Arthur Krock, accused the administration of evasion and of denying
Tshombe his right to be heard. The John Birch Society now formally entered on
Katanga�s side. Even Herbert Hoover lent his name to pro-Katanga statements.

The Last Round

Denied access to the US, Tshombe now set about rearming his military. Kennedy
decided to push for economic sanctions followed by a blockade. But Kennedy
tried one last time to open negotiations with Tshombe. But by October of 1962
these had proved futile. Moreover, Adoula misinterpreted Kennedy�s
negotiation attempt as backing out on his commitment to the Congo. Adoula now
turned to the UN and the Russians in hopes of one last knockout blow against
Tshombe. On November 2, 1962 the first clashes began. Gullion worked overtime
to get Adoula to stop courting the Russians. Kennedy then wrote to Rusk and
Ball that he wanted both men to come to a conclusion on what the American
role should be in the renewed hostilities. Finally, Ball decided on the use
of force, even if it meant the direct use of American air power.

On December 24, 1962 Katangese forces fired on a UN helicopter and outpost.
The UN now moved with a combined land and air strike code-named Operation
Grand Slam. By December 29th, Elisabethville, the capital of Katanga was
under heavy siege. By the second week of January, the UN advance was
proceeding on all fronts. By January 22nd, Katanga�s secession effort was
over. As Stevenson said later, it was the UN�s finest hour. Kennedy wrote
congratulatory notes to all those involved. To George McGhee, special State
Department emissary on the Congo, Kennedy wrote that the task had been
"extraordinarily difficult" but now they were entitled to "a little sense of
pride." (Mahoney p. 156)

The Congo: 1963

A few months after Katanga had capitulated and Tshombe had fled to Rhodesia,
the UN, because of the huge expense of the expedition, was ready to withdraw.
Kennedy urged U Thant to keep the force in the Congo; he even offered to
finance part of the mission if it was held over. But the UN wanted its forces
out, even though it looked like Adoula�s position was weakening and the
Congolese army itself was not stable or reliable. Kennedy had a difficult
choice: he could quit the Congo along with the UN, or the US could try to
stay and assume some responsibility for the mess it was at least partly
responsible for. Kennedy chose to stay. But not before he did all he could to
try to keep the UN there longer. This even included going to the UN himself
on September 20, 1963 to address the General Assembly on this very subject:

a project undertaken in the excitement of crisis begins to lose its appeal as
the problems drag on and the bills pile up.... I believe that this Assembly
should do whatever is necessary to preserve the gains already made and to
protect the new nation in its struggle for progress. Let us complete what we
have started.

The personal appearance and the speech were enough to turn the UN around. The
body voted to keep the peacekeeping mission in place another year. Adoula
wired Kennedy his sincere gratitude.

But in October and November things began to collapse. President Kasavubu
decided to disband Parliament and this ignited an already simmering leftist
rebellion. Gizenga�s followers called for strikes and army mutinies. They
tried to assassinate Mobutu. Kennedy followed the new crisis and wanted a
retraining of the Congolese army in order to avert a new civil war. But there
was a difference between what Kennedy wanted and what the Pentagon delivered.
By October of 1963, Mobutu had already become a favorite of the Fort Benning
crowd in the Army, the group that would eventually charter at that military
site the School of the Americas, an institution that would spawn a whole
generation of rightwing Third World dictators. Kennedy had wanted the
retraining carried out by Colonel Michael Greene, an African expert who
wanted the retraining to be implemented not just by the US but by five other
western countries. Kennedy also agreed with U Thant that there should be
African representation in the leadership of that program. Yet Mobutu, with
the backing of his Pentagon allies, including Army Chief Earle Wheeler,
managed to resist both of these White House wishes. In November, Kennedy
ordered a progress report on the retraining issue. The Pentagon had done
little and blamed the paltry effort on the UN.

1964: LBJ reverses Kennedy�s policies

In 1964, the leftist rebellion picked up strength and began taking whole
provinces. President Johnson and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy
decided that a weakened Adoula had to be strengthened with a show of American
help. The CIA sent Cuban exile pilots to fly sorties against the rebels. When
the UN finally withdrew, the US now became an ally of Belgium and intervened
with arms, airplanes and advisors. Incredibly, as Jonathan Kwitny notes,
Mobutu now invited Tshombe back into the Congo government (p. 79). Further,
Tshombe now blamed the revolts on China! To quote Kwitny:

In a move suspiciously reminiscent of a standard US intelligence agency ploy,
Tshombe produced what he said were some captured military documents, and a
Chinese defector who announced that China was attempting to take over the
Congo as part of a plot to conquer all of Africa. (p. 79)

With this, the Mobutu-Tshombe alliance now lost all semblance of a
Gullion-Kennedy styled moderate coalition. Now, rightwing South Africans and
Rhodesians were allowed to join the Congolese army in the war on the
"Chinese-inspired left". Further, as Kwitny also notes, this dramatic
reversal was done under the auspices of the United States. The UN had now
been dropped as a stabilizing, multilateral force. This meant, of course,
that the tilt to the right would now go unabated. By 1965, the new American
and Belgian supplemented force had put down the major part of the rebellion.
General Mobutu then got rid of President Kasavubu. (Adoula had already been
replaced by Tshombe.) In 1966, Mobutu installed himself as military dictator.
The rest is a familiar story. Mobutu, like Suharto in Indonesia, allowed his
country to be opened up to loads of outside investment. The riches of the
Congo, like those of Indonesia, were mined by huge western corporations,
whose owners and officers grew wealthy while Mobutu�s subjects were mired in
abject poverty. As with the economy, Mobutu stifled political dissent as
well. And, like Suharto, Mobutu grew into one of the richest men in the world.
 His holdings in Belgian real estate alone topped one hundred million dollars
(Kwitny p. 87). Just one Swiss bank account was worth $143 million. And like
Suharto, Mobutu fell after three decades of a corrupt dictatorship, leaving
most of his citizenry in an anarchic, post-colonial state similar to where
they had been at the beginning of his reign.

The policies before and after Kennedy�s in this tale help explain much about
the chaos and confusion going on in Congo today. It�s a story you won�t read
in many papers or see on television. In itself, the events which occurred
there from 1959 to 1966 form a milestone. As Kwitny writes:

The democratic experiment had no example in Africa, and badly needed one. So
perhaps the sorriest, and the most unnecessary, blight on the record of this
new era, is that the precedent for it all, the very first coup in
post-colonial African history, the very first political assassination, and
the very first junking of a legally constituted democratic system, all took
place in a major country, and were all instigated by the United States of
America. (p. 75)

Whatever Kennedy�s failures as a tactician, whatever his equivocations were
on taking quick and decisive action, he realized that nationalism would have
to have its place in American foreign policy. As Mahoney concludes, Kennedy
did what no other president before or after him had done. He established "a
common ground between African ideals and American self-interest in the midst
of the Cold War." (p. 248) As Kwitny notes, this was the basis of Lumumba�s
(undying) appeal:

Lumumba is a hero to Africans not because he promoted socialism, which he
didn�t, but because he resisted foreign intervention. He stood up to
outsiders, if only by getting himself killed. Most Africans ... would say
that the principal outsider he stood up to was the United States. (p. 72)

Mahoney relates an anecdote which helps explain why Kennedy understood the
appeal of Lumumba. It has little to do with his 1951 trip to Saigon, although
it may help explain why he sought out the people he did while he was there.
The vignette illuminates a lot about the Kennedy mystery, i.e. why the son of
a multimillionaire ended up being on the side of African black nationalism
abroad and integration at home. In January of 1962, in the midst of the Congo
crisis, Kennedy was talking to Nehru of India when, presumably, the great
Indian leader was lecturing him on the subject of colonialism. Kennedy
replied:

I grew up in a community where the people were hardly a generation away from
colonial rule. And I can claim the company of many historians in saying that
the colonialism to which my immediate ancestors were subject was more
sterile, oppressive and even cruel than that of India.
Kennedy, of course, was referring to the conquest and subjugation of Ireland
by the British. A colonization that has now lasted for 800 years. Clearly,
Kennedy never forgot where his family came from.

It is also clear that in his brief intervention in the politics of the newly
liberated continent of Africa, its new progressive leaders realized Kennedy�s
sensitivity to their painful and precarious position. They also seem to have
realized what Kennedy the politician was up against, and what may have caused
his death.

Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana�a clear leftist who Kennedy had backed against heavy
odds and who was perhaps the greatest of that period�s African leaders�was
overcome with sadness upon hearing of the young American president�s death.
In a speech at that time, he told his citizens that Africa would forever
remember Kennedy�s great sensitivity to that continent�s special problems.
(Mahoney, p. 235) Later, when the American ambassador handed Nkrumah a copy
of the Warren Report, he thumbed through it and pointed to the name of Allen
Dulles as a member of the Warren Commission. He handed it back abruptly,
muttering simply, "Whitewash."

In part two, Lisa Pease will explore the covert action underlying the plots
against Lumumba and new evidence which has surfaced regarding the mysterious
death of Dag Hammarskjold.�Eds.

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