April 2011 - Centre for Civil Society - University of KwaZulu-Natal

A later report in the same paper was even more detailed:
‘It was the height of the Cold War when Sidney Gottlieb arrived in Congo in
September 1960. The CIA man was toting a vial of poison. His target: the
toothbrush of Patrice Lumumba, Congo's charismatic first prime minister,
who was also feared to be a rabid Communist. As it happened, Lumumba
was toppled in a military coup just days before Gottlieb turned up with his
poison. The plot was abandoned, the lethal potion dumped in the Congo
River.’
When Lumumba finally was killed, in January 1961, no one was surprised
when fingers started pointing at the CIA. A Senate investigation of CIA
assassinations 14 years later found no proof that the agency was behind
the hit, but suspicions linger.
But all the evidence suggests that Belgium was the mastermind. According
to ‘The Assassination of Lumumba’, Belgian operatives directed and
carried out the murder, and even helped to dispose of the body.
Belgium had finally got its chance to eliminate Lumumba after Mobutu’s
troops arrested him in December 1960. Belgian officials engineered his
transfer by air to the breakaway province of Katanga, which was under
Belgian control. De Witte reveals a telegram from d'Aspremont Lynden,
that Lumumba be sent to Katanga. Anyone who knew the place knew that
was a death sentence.
Does that mean the CIA didn't play a role? Declassified US cables from the
year preceding the assassination show that Lumumba clearly scared the
daylights out of the Eisenhower administration. When Lumumba arrived in
Katanga, on 17 January, accompanied by several Belgians, he was bleeding
from a severe beating. Later that evening, Lumumba was killed by a firing
squad commanded by a Belgian officer.
A week earlier, Lumumba had written to his wife, ‘I prefer to die with my
head unbowed, my faith unshakable, and with profound trust in the
destiny of my country.’
The next step was to destroy the evidence. Four days later, Belgian police
commissioner Gerard Soete and his brother cut up the body with a hacksaw
and dissolved it in sulphuric acid. In an interview on Belgian television,
Soete displayed a bullet and two teeth he said were saved from Lumumba's
body.
A Belgian official who helped engineer Lumumba's transfer to Katanga told
De Witte that he kept CIA station chief Lawrence Devlin fully informed of
the plan. ‘The Americans were informed of the transfer because they
actively discussed this thing for weeks,’ says De Witte.
Final proof of the CIA’s hand in the murder is given by the fact that when
the CIA officer in Elizabethville saw that Lumumba had been delivered
safely into the hands of his Katangese enemies, he wrote to his
counterpart in Leopoldville:
‘Thanks for Patrice. If we had known he was coming, we would have baked
a snake.’
Whatever the racist sentiments behind the message, its intent was clear:
congratulations for bringing him to us to do as we please with.