07 01 14 Secrecy News – Two-Decade Review Yields History of Covert Action in Congo

“The U.S. Government provided advice and financial subsidies…. These
funds were to be channeled in such a way as to conceal the U.S.
Government as a source.”

“At the same time, based on authorization from President Eisenhower’s
statements at an NSC meeting on August 18, 1960, discussions began to
develop highly sensitive,
tightly-held plans to assassinate Lumumba. After Lumumba’s death at the
hands of Congolese rivals in January 1961, the U.S. Government
authorized the provision of paramilitary and air support to the new
Congolese Government….”

“In addition, the covert program included organizing mass
demonstrations, distributing anti-Communist pamphlets, and providing
propaganda material for broadcasts,” the editorial introduction said.

The new publication
supplements previously published official histories of U.S. policy
during the Congo Crisis, which were harshly criticized by historians and
others for withholding documentary evidence of U.S. covert action.

By excluding CIA covert action, the 1994 FRUS volume on the Congo Crisis “omitted vital information, suppressed details concerning US intervention, and generally provided a misleading account of the Congo crisis,” wrote David N. Gibbs, a political scientist at the University of Arizona in a review entitled “Misrepresenting the Congo Crisis” (African Affairs: Journal of the Royal African Society, vol. 95, no. 380, pp. 453-459, 1996).

In another 1995 paper on Secrecy and International Relations,
Prof. Gibbs said the persistent classification of the Congo covert
action exemplified the use of secrecy to evade the democratic process.

“According to this approach, governments seek to conceal potentially
controversial activities or ones that could generate public opposition,”
he wrote. “In
the Congo case secrecy successfully concealed government activities
(such as the efforts to assassinate Lumumba) that were potentially very
controversial.”

Historian Philip Zelikow told his colleagues on the State Department Historical Advisory Committee in 1999 that by refusing to admit the role of covert action, the earlier Congo volume “did enormous damage to the credibility of the Foreign Relations series and of the CIA.”

The current Historian of the State Department, Dr. Stephen P.
Randolph, acknowledged that the earlier FRUS volumes “did not… contain
documentation of the U.S. covert political action program. There were
also no records in the two volumes concerning U.S. planning and
preparation for the possible assassination of Patrice Lumumba.”

“This volume consists of a selection of the most significant of those
previously unavailable documents,” Dr. Randolph wrote in the Preface to
the new FRUS volume.

The first part of the new volume “contains numerous CIA cables to and
from the Station in Leopoldville, which documents the chaotic nature of
the Congo crisis and the pervasive influence of U.S. Government covert
actions in the newly independent nation,” he wrote.

The second part “documents the continuation of the U.S. covert
political action programs and their role in providing paramilitary and
air support to the Congolese Government in an effort to quell provincial
rebellions.”

Astonishingly, “The declassification review of this volume began in
1994 and was finally completed in 2013.”  Even so, it resulted in a
number of redactions, some of which are not very credible.

The Central Intelligence Agency insisted on censoring cost figures
for its covert action programs, even when they are half a century old.
So, for example, document 170 in the new collection states that “To date
covert support of Adoula’s government has cost a total of [dollar
amount not declassified].”

A helpful editorial note (at p. 5), however, supplies some of the
missing information: “The Special Group/303 Committee-approved aggregate
budget for covert action in the Congo for the years 1960-1968 totaled
approximately $11,702,000 (Political Action, $5,842,000; Air Program,
$3,285,000; and Maritime Program, $2,575,000).”

The State Department Historical Advisory Committee, composed of
non-governmental historians, advised and supervised the preparation of the final manuscript, and ultimately recommended its publication.

Even with the remaining redactions, the Committee said it “assesses
the volume as a reliable guide to the trajectory of U.S. policy toward
the Congo from 1960 until 1968 and an exceptionally valuable addition to
the historical record.”