1967 – British peer reveals MI6 role in Lumumba killing

For more than 50 years, rumours have swirled over allegations of
British involvement in Lumumba’s brutal murder in 1961, but nothing has ever
been proved — leaving the CIA and its Belgian peers alone to take the rap for
what a Belgian writer has described as “the most important assassination of the
20th century.” Now, in a dramatic revelation, a senior British politician has
claimed that he got it from the horse’s mouth that it was MI6 that “did” it.

In a little noticed letter to the editor in the latest issue of
the London Review of Books (LRB), Lord David Edward Lea responded to the claim
in a new book on British intelligence, Empire of Secrets: British
intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire by Calder Walton, that
the jury is still out on Britain’s role in Lumumba’s death. “The question
remains whether British plots to assassinate Lumumba … ever amounted to
anything. At present, we do not know,” writes Walton.

Lord Lea retorted: “Actually, in this particular case, I can
report that we do. It so happens that I was having a cup of tea with Daphne
Park… She had been consul and first secretary in Leopoldville, now Kinshasa,
from 1959 to 1961, which in practice (this was subsequently acknowledged) meant
head of MI6 there. I mentioned the uproar surrounding Lumumba’s abduction and
murder, and recalled the theory that MI6 might have had something to do with it.
‘We did,’ she replied, ‘I organised it.’”

According to Lord Lea, she contended that if the West had not
intervened, Lumumba would have handed over Congo’s — now called Democratic
Republic of Congo — rich mineral deposits to the Russians. When contacted by
The Hindu, Lord Lea confirmed the contents of his letter to the LRB and
that the conversation over tea took place a few months before Ms. Park died in
2010. “That’s the conversation I had with her and that’s what she told me. I
have nothing more to add,” he said when asked if he had any other independent
confirmation of Ms. Park’s claim.

Ms. Park was a career intelligence officer who served in Kinshasa
(then Leopoldville) between 1959 and 1961. On retirement, she was made a Life
peer as Baroness Park of Monmouth. Her fellow peers in the House of Lords
referred to her as a spokesperson for the Secret Intelligence Service. She was
also briefly head of Somerville College, Oxford University.

There has been no comment from MI6 on Lord Lea’s revelation. “We
don’t comment on intelligence matters,” an official said.

Lumumba, hailed as “the hero of Congolese independence” from
Belgium in 1960, was shot dead on January 17, 1961 after being toppled in a
US-Belgian backed military coup barely two months after being in office.

Lumumba had been sheltered by Rajeshwar Dayal — the Indian
diplomat who was the UN Secretary General’s representative in the Congo — for
several days but was captured and killed soon after he chose to leave the
compound. “This heinous crime was a culmination of two inter-related
assassination plots by American and Belgian governments, which used Congolese
accomplices and a Belgian execution squad to carry out the deed,” wrote Georges
Nzongola-Ntalaja, a specialist on African and Afro-American studies and author
of The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People's History.

Declassified American documents from the time have established
Washington’s role in covert assassination plots — the most famous being a CIA
plot to poison Lumumba’s toothbrush by smuggling poisoned toothpaste into his
bathroom.

“The toothpaste never made it into Lumumba’s bathroom. I threw it
in the Congo River,” Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief in Leopoldville, later
said.

Not much is publicly known about UK role. But, in 2000, the BBC
reported that in the autumn of 1960 — three months before Lumumba was murdered —
an MI5 operative in the British embassy in Leopoldville suggested “Lumumba’s
removal from the scene by killing him.”