In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo. Michela Wrong

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СКАЧАТЬ to the New World, an old-fashioned gentleman who opened car doors for a lady, gently insisted on paying and who dressed with a studied elegance wholly appropriate for a man who once, during some bizarre career interlude, ghosted articles for French fashion designer Jacques Fath.

      The consultancy work Devlin continued doing on Africa from his home in Virginia did not take up all his time and in retirement he had grown chatty. Two instincts were warring within him. On the one hand, he had been attacked too many times by the press as the kingmaker who put Mobutu in power, starred as the ruthless secret agent in too many thinly fictionalised accounts of the Congo crisis, not to be wary. On the other hand, with time on his hands and as the kind of man who clearly enjoyed female company, this was a not entirely unpleasant opportunity to set the record straight.

      His voice had the gravelly timbre of a man who smoked three packets of cigarettes a day until a brush with open-heart surgery. His hands – creased by a million experiences, the wedding ring so deep-set in the flesh it seemed welded to the bone – would give a palm-reader pause for thought. But the brain was as keen and irreverent as ever. And with his defiant insistence that he regretted nothing about the CIA’s support for Mobutu, Larry Devlin was a reminder that whatever happened in the end, there was a time when Mobutu was not just the hope of interfering Americans obsessed with domino metaphors, but of a population exasperated by the dithering, squabbling and tribalism of its civilian leaders.

      ‘What you must never forget is that there were many periods to Mobutu. You saw the pitiful end. But he was so different at the start. I can remember him as a dynamic, idealistic young man who was determined to have an independent state in the Congo and really seemed to believe in all the things Africa’s leaders then stood for.’

      They first met in Brussels in early 1960, when members of Congo’s embryonic political establishment found themselves negotiating independence terms with their colonial master. Five years earlier, a Belgian expert had triggered an uproar at home by putting forward a thirty-year programme for a pull-out. Most Belgians believed they had another 100 years to go, plenty of time to train up and educate their eventual replacements. Subsequent events had exposed how out of touch even that supposedly accelerated schedule really was: riots in Congo’s major cities, increasingly vocal demands by the country’s ‘evolués’ and France’s and Britain’s disengagement from their own African possessions had forced Belgium to realise decolonisation was due.

      Having accepted the principle, Brussels set about formalising its withdrawal with indecent haste. But while Belgium was pulling up the colonial drawbridge, other powers were becoming interested in the new opportunities the postwar configuration was throwing up. The two sessions of round-table talks in Brussels provided a rare chance for their representatives to size up the future leadership of the Congo, whose size, geographical position and huge resource base made it the natural linchpin of central Africa.

      Devlin was working in Brussels at the time. He was a young man who already had a lifetime’s experience behind him. A committed anti-Nazi, he had interrupted his college studies to sign up as a private in the US Army, had served in Italy and been injured. Returning to college, he had been recruited by a Central Intelligence Agency no doubt impressed by his war record, his sharp mind and his mastery of several languages. His speciality was Soviet operations and he had become skilled at ‘turning’ Soviet bloc officials, a process he remembered now as being ‘better than an orgasm’ when successfully pulled off.

      But he had angered a superior in the process and his career had fallen into something of a slump when the Congolese negotiations opened and he began picking up alarming signs of Soviet activity in Brussels: ‘I noticed that Soviets were contacting one by one every member of the various delegations at the round table conference. I got curious as to what they were doing and why. What I found was that they were essentially spotting, assessing and trying to recruit. It was a classic effort on their part. The Russians wanted to use the Congo as their stepping stone into Africa.’

      The Soviets knew they had a potential ally in Patrice Lumumba. A public speaker with a near-miraculous ability to win round his audience, this former post office employee had become the spearhead of Congo’s independence campaign. Inspired by the pan-Africanism of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Guinea’s Sekou Touré, he was a flamboyant, erratic figure, bubbling with ideas. Released from jail to attend the Brussels meeting, he was brimming with resentment over Western imperialism in Africa.

      The Soviet contacts with the delegations from Leopoldville were enough to ensure the US embassy in Brussels got involved. The American ambassador threw a reception for the Congolese and Devlin and his embassy colleagues launched themselves in a very deliberate bout of networking. ‘Each of us drew up a list of 10 or 12 people we had to meet and afterwards we all got together to discuss our impressions. One name kept coming up. But it wasn’t on anyone’s list because he wasn’t an official delegation member, he was Lumumba’s secretary. But everyone agreed that this was an extremely intelligent man, very young, perhaps immature, but a man with great potential. They were right, because that was Mobutu.’

      The next time Devlin met Mobutu was in the Congo Republic – his new posting – as all hell broke loose. Less than a week after independence on 30 June 1960, Belgium’s haste was having inevitable consequences. Told there were to be no immediate moves to ‘Africanise’ an army exclusively commanded by Belgian officers, Congo’s troops mutinied, whites were beaten and raped and the Belgian technicians who ran the country’s administration headed en masse for the airport.

      Prime Minister Lumumba appointed Mobutu army chief of staff. Touring the country’s military bases, playing up his own army experience, Mobutu persuaded the soldiers to return to barracks. But the mutiny was not Lumumba’s only problem. Belgian paratroopers had landed in what the Congolese assumed to be a second colonial takeover. The new state seemed doomed to break up as, encouraged by a former colonial master bent on ensuring continued access to Congo’s mineral wealth, first copper-producing Katanga and then diamond-rich Kasai seceded.

      The UN responded to the crisis with extraordinary speed. Its reaction time, like the hordes of journalists who flooded into Congo to cover those years, was a measure of the enormous hopes the West was pinning on Africa during those years. Impossible as it is to imagine in the year 2000, when the renewed threat of national fragmentation raises barely a flicker of international interest, the Congo of the 1960s was one of the world’s biggest news stories.

      The first UN troops landed in Leopoldville the day after Lumumba and President Joseph Kasavubu called on the UN Security Council for protection from foreign aggression. But Lumumba, who had hoped they would help snuff out the secession movements in the south, was bitterly disappointed by their limited mandate, which barred them from interfering in Congo’s internal conflicts.

      Feeling betrayed by the West, -Lumumba turned to the Soviet Union for help, requesting transport planes, trucks and weapons to wipe out the breakaway movements in Kasai and Katanga. Nikita Khrushchev obliged. The military aid arrived too late to prevent a bloody debacle in Kasai, where the Congolese army lost control, slaughtering hundreds of Luba tribespeople. But for Washington what mattered was that this was the first time Moscow had intervened militarily in a conflict so far from its own borders. It represented a dangerous ratcheting up of the Cold War game.

      ‘I had a little Congolese sitting at the airport counting any white man who came off a Soviet aircraft in batches of five. Roughly 1,000 came in during a period of six weeks. They were there as “conseillers techniques” and they were posted to all the ministries,’ recalled Devlin. ‘To my mind it was clearly an effort to take over. It made good sense when you stopped to think about it. All nine countries surrounding the Congo had their problems. If the Soviets could have gotten control of the Congo they could have used it as a base, bringing in Africans, training them in sabotage and military skills and sending them home to do their duty. I determined to try and block that.’

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