The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination - Stuart A. Reid
Published in 2023 by Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, NY
624 pages
ISBN: 9781524748814
LCCN: 2023003992
LCC: DT658.22.L85 R45 2023
During the mid-twentieth century, the process of African decolonization spread like wildfire across the continent. Consumed by immense debt and tasked with rebuilding in the aftermath of World War II, the former dominant imperial powers of Europe could no longer financially sustain the continued possession of African colonies. The Axis powers of Italy and Japan were stripped of their colonies, while Germany’s were redistributed after the First World War. African citizens demanded that the Allies adhere to the Atlantic Charter, issued by the US and Great Britain in 1941, which, in its vision for a post-war world, affirmed the right of self-determination for all peoples.
A litany of liberation movements emerged throughout the continent, as African workers, peasants, women, intellectuals, and guerrilla fighters began to fracture the colonial order from both within and without. Armed liberation movements were vital in contexts where settler colonialism and racial hierarchies were most entrenched, such as in Algeria, where the National Liberation Front (FLN) waged a protracted guerrilla war against French rule from 1954 to 1962. In Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, movements such as the MPLA, FRELIMO, and PAIGC, often supported by the socialist bloc, challenged Portuguese colonialism through protracted armed struggles. Mass mobilizations and labor resistance disrupted colonial economic structures through strikes and protests in cities like Accra, Lagos, and Durban. Finally, Pan-Africanism, revitalized by figures such as Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, and Amílcar Cabral, among others, envisioned liberation as necessarily a continental and transnational endeavor.
African decolonization was also deeply entangled in Cold War geopolitics. While some movements aligned with the Soviet bloc, others sought a non-aligned path rooted in Afro-Asian solidarity. The 1955 Bandung Conference and the Tricontinentalism of the 1960s offered alternative visions of global justice and anti-imperial solidarity. These decolonization efforts, whether explicitly pro-Soviet or not, were also viewed with fear and skepticism among the dominant Western powers, who feared that Africa could “turn Red” and offer a foothold for the spread of Communism. Thus, neocolonial forces threatened to undo or stall the radical potential of decolonization.
In particular, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1961 marked a violent interruption of a genuinely radical postcolonial project in the Congo, signaling just how far Western powers would go in fomenting instability in the region. In his 2023 book, The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination Stuart A. Reid (editor at Foreign Affairs) delves into the covert operations orchestrated by the United States and its allies in the 1960s surrounding the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Leveraging newly declassified CIA materials, interviews, and state archives, Reid explores the complex geopolitical context of the Cold War, wherein the U.S. feared the spread of communism in Africa, leading top officials to organize the assassination of a key figure in African politics. By doing so, Reid offers another example of a disturbing yet all-too-familiar tale: a radical leader from the Global South attempts to chart an independent course, is deemed intolerable by Western powers, and is ultimately removed by any means necessary, most often through violence.
Overview:
Born into poverty, Patrice Lumumba rose from a postal clerk and beer seller to become the Congo’s charismatic nationalist leader after independence from Belgium on June 30, 1960. The newly independent state quickly descended into chaos, as it faced a series of crises including army mutinies, secessionist rebellions in Katanga and South Kasai, and Belgian intervention. Reid follows Lumumba’s struggle to assert authority amid these internal fragmentations and international hostilities. Scrambling for aid, Lumumba sought support from the UN, but its limited mandate hampered its effectiveness in the region. Frustrated, he turned to the USSR for help, escalating U.S fears of Communist influence. His bold anti-colonial rhetoric and appeal to the Soviets amid the Congo Crisis alarmed Western powers, who saw him as a communist threat as they increasingly feared Soviet influence in Africa.
Reid recounts in meticulous detail how the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), alongside Belgian interests, played a key role in undermining Lumumba. He provides a detailed account of the CIA’s involvement, the complex political machinations of the time, and the resulting betrayal of Lumumba, leading to his eventual capture and assassination in 1961. Reid combines archival research, interviews, and analysis of declassified documents to offer a comprehensive and compelling narrative of the conspiracy behind Lumumba’s tragic end.
For example, President Eisenhower and senior CIA officials, including Allen Dulles, authorized covert plans to eliminate Lumumba. CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb reportedly traveled with poison intended for assassination via toothpaste or food, though the plot failed to materialize as planned. CIA station chief Larry Devlin in Leopoldville was charged with getting rid of Lumumba, though he questioned the origin of these orders and expressed moral reservations and practical reservations about the assassination.
Meanwhile, the CIA funneled support to Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, Lumumba’s former ally, and a clique known as the "Binza Group," setting the stage for a coup that deposed Lumumba. Lumumba escaped house arrest briefly, but was recaptured by Mobutu’s forces as he refused to leave his wife and child behind on the other side of the Sankuru River. Reid documents how the U.S. facilitated Joseph Mobutu’s seizure of power and permitted the transfer of Lumumba to the secessionist Katanga region. There, in January 1961, Lumumba was brutally tortured and unceremoniously executed by a Katangan firing squad with Belgian involvement.
Alongside CIA involvement, the book explores the failures of the UN under Dag Hammarskjöld and the complicity of African elites (with strong U.S. backing) in the consolidation of Mobutu's regime, which ruled the country for over 30 years as an authoritarian dictator. Reid highlights the moral and ethical implications of foreign interference, the Cold War rivalry, and how Lumumba’s death shaped the political landscape of Africa by leaving a legacy of instability. The book concludes by tracing the long shadows of Mobutu’s dictatorship and the Western powers’ complicity in the dismantling of Congolese sovereignty.
Commendations:
There are several key strengths to Reid’s account. First and foremost, Reid's narrative is accessible and highly engaging, often reading more like a political thriller than a work of historical non-fiction. From a historical standpoint, The Lumumba Plot is thoroughly researched and draws effectively on U.S. and Belgian archives, CIA internal correspondence, declassified documents, and interviews with participants, such as former CIA station chief Larry Devlin. This level of detail enriches the reader's understanding of the geopolitical dynamics of the time, especially the broader Cold War context in which the U.S. viewed African independence movements as a threat to its global hegemony. The narrative is crisp and well-paced, making the book especially useful for readers new to the subject or for classroom use.
Reid's prose makes a dense and politically fraught history legible to a broad readership as he manages to tell a gripping story without losing the high stakes and depth of what he’s analyzing. He shows us that the Congo was not just a battlefield for competing ideologies, but rather the site of a Black liberation experiment violently interrupted by the forces of the imperial core. I appreciated how Reid critiques the ethical and moral bankruptcy of Western powers in their dealings with Africa. The Cold War's ideological battle is depicted as a farce, where African lives were expendable in the service of ideological and economic interests. Reid’s storytelling prowess helps reintroduce Lumumba to a Western audience that has largely forgotten him, allowing us to emotionally engage with the violence of neocolonialism and Cold War realpolitik.
Importantly, Reid substantiates claims long asserted by radical and African scholars that Lumumba’s murder was facilitated, and arguably initiated, by Western powers determined to preserve access to Congo’s strategic mineral wealth and geopolitical alignment. The work thus joins a lineage of critiques that have long contended that Lumumba’s fate was sealed not by naïveté or poor judgment, but by his unwillingness to capitulate to imperial demands. This popularizes truths long held in the Global South and can be useful for radicalizing liberal readers by exposing the myth of American innocence.
Similarly, Reid’s work contributes to ongoing debates about U.S. imperialism by providing granular, empirically grounded evidence of American involvement in regime change operations in the Global South. Reid does an excellent job detailing how Western powers, particularly the United States and Belgium, interfered in the internal affairs of the Congo. While Reid never outright condemns the U.S. role with forceful clarity, his depiction of the CIA’s bumbling-yet-lethal operations, the hypocrisy of U.S. anti-communist logic, and the instrumentalization of Mobutu all work together to expose the moral rot at the heart of America’s Cold War strategy in the region. The CIA’s role in Lumumba's assassination is a clear example of how imperialist forces sought to suppress African leaders who resisted their control and sought to chart independent, Pan-African futures. As such, the book provides an essential historical account that demonstrates the lengths to which imperialist powers will go to thwart African self-determination.
Furthermore, Reid effectively paints a picture of how Western interference in African affairs, particularly in the Cold War era, contributed to the economic underdevelopment of the Congo and the wider African continent. By supporting pro-Western elites and destabilizing leaders like Lumumba, the West ensured that Africa’s political and economic systems remained subordinated to the needs of imperialist powers. This echoes Walter Rodney’s argument that the underdevelopment of Africa is a direct product of Western imperialism, a theme that Reid amplifies through his detailed examination of the assassination plot.
Additionally, I appreciated how Reid positioned Lumumba within the global Cold War contest without reducing him to a mere Soviet pawn. His depiction of the prime minister’s political isolation, charisma, and defiance captures the fragility and hope of post-independence African leadership. Lumumba’s speeches and letters are quoted at length, lending the text emotional and political resonance. Reid rightly places Lumumba at the intersection of non-alignment and Cold War power games, revealing how his mere refusal to be a client of either bloc made him intolerable, especially to the skittish and hawkish American government. Lumumba emerges as a symbol of Third World sovereignty sacrificed on the altar of bipolar imperialism.
Thus, Reid largely succeeds in humanizing Lumumba without romanticizing him. He presents the leader as personally flawed but politically principled, charismatic and sincere, yet increasingly isolated. Reid’s narrative paints Lumumba as straddling the line of being both a bold political visionary and a wholly pragmatic and opportunistic (if ill-tempered) character. While Reid emphasizes how his fiery personality alienated Europeans, the UN, and even fellow African leaders (all of which contributed to his downfall, alongside external manipulation), Lumumba is portrayed as sincere in his attempts to forge a new path for the Congo beyond its colonialist heritage.
In particular, Reid effectively highlights Lumumba's political vision for a united, sovereign, and independent Africa, free from colonial influence. Reid does well to articulate how his leadership was cut short by both the West and local elites, essentially cutting short the emancipatory potential that loomed on the newly blossomed independent state. The emotional and political weight of Lumumba’s assassination is underscored, making it clear that his death was a tragedy not only for the Congo but for the entire African liberation movement. In this respect, the book contributes meaningfully to the restoration of Lumumba’s legacy, which remains distorted or omitted in Western memory.
Critique:
On the other hand, Reid’s narrative of Lumumba’s rise and fall suffers from several glaring weaknesses. First and foremost, for all its detail, the book is limited by its framing. The assassination is presented as a “tragedy” of Cold War overreach rather than the predictable outcome of imperialist suppression of anti-capitalist, decolonial resistance. Reid falls short of presenting the assassination as the outcome of systemic capitalist imperialism. Reid’s narrative lacks serious engagement with how global capitalism structured postcolonial state formation, and how Lumumba’s radicalism posed a threat not merely because of Soviet ties, but because of his challenge to extractive economic arrangements in Katanga and beyond. Lumumba’s murder was a strategic counter-revolutionary move against a sovereign African nation attempting to exit the orbit of capitalist dependency.
Reid shies away from such an analysis, instead positing the assassination as a “miscalculation” resulting from the contradictory nature of Cold War ideology. By casting the CIA’s actions as simply an overzealous, paranoia-fueled mistake rather than part of a long-standing imperialist project to subvert African sovereignty, Reid flattens the ideological violence inherent in U.S. foreign policy. When one also considers how glowingly this book was reviewed by the CIA (which specifically highlights the anti-revolutionary angle of the work), this is more than enough to raise more than a few eyebrows about the legitimacy of Reid’s attempt to give a balanced account.
Additionally, by relying heavily on declassified CIA memos, State Department communications, and firsthand testimony from American and Belgian bureaucrats and diplomats, Reid privileges the perspectives of U.S. and Belgian officials while marginalizing Congolese voices. There is minimal engagement with Congolese intellectual traditions, grassroots resistance, or the broader pan-Africanist ecosystem that formed the base of Lumumba’s political appeal. Figures such as Kwame Nkrumah, Frantz Fanon, Andrée Blouin, and Thomas Sankara are conspicuously absent, as are connections to broader liberation movements across the continent.
While the lives of Western officials are explored in-depth, African actors are ultimately portrayed as one-dimensional and without much nuance. Reid is often quite paternalistic in his depiction of the Congolese people, echoing the prejudices of Western government officials who saw them as uneducated and violent masses who are easily swayed by charismatic personalities. This is largely a product of the sources Reid employs, as the book largely focuses on the perspectives of U.S. officials, including their often racist assumptions about Africans, who are often regarded by these officials as either violent animals or ignorant children. As such, the autonomy of the Congolese is minimized through this account, and Reid often privileges the perspective of the colonizer over the colonized. This framing replicates what decolonial theorists identify as epistemic violence by telling African history through the paper trails and voices of its suppressors.
Furthermore, the reader does not acquire a robust understanding of what made Lumumba popular in the first place. Reid simply emphasizes that he was a charismatic figure who built upon his experience as a beer salesman to appeal to a populist base, often telling them whatever they wanted to hear in a given moment. Reid reduces Lumumba’s ideology to vague nationalism, neglects his explicit critiques of capitalism, Belgian neocolonialism, and U.S. imperialism, and portrays him as an opportunist who was overwhelmed by the political morass of sectarianism amidst the lack of foreign aid. This is a wholly one-dimensional depiction of Lumbumba, informed more by the gaze of colonial powers and paranoid bureaucrats rather than the Congolese people.
Again, this is not necessarily surprising, considering that most of the descriptions of Lumumba in this work are taken from the impressions of UN and US officials, such as Hammarskjold, Devlin, and Bunch. While Reid acknowledges that this is due to the uneven distribution of sources (as there are much fewer Congolese records that still exist when compared to the records of high-ranking officials from Belgium and the U.S.), it still leads the work to lean heavily toward a Western-centric perspective of the crisis and paints one-dimensional portraits of Lumumba, Kasavubu, and Mobutu. While Reid provides exquisite detail about what U.S. bureaucrats thought about the crisis in Congo, this one-sided perspective was one of the most disappointing aspects of this work.
By contrast, Lumumba was not merely a nationalist statesman but a potential conduit for African socialism and regional unification who was looking for help wherever he could find it, leaving him stuck between the two Cold War powers. While I appreciate Reid's attempt to avoid over-romantizing Lumumba and acknowledge his shortcomings, he largely echoes the perspectives of some of Lumumba’s most ardent (and ignorant) critics, portraying Lumumba as largely ignorant, foolish, tempestuous, and conniving to further his own self-interest. This portrayal ultimately flattens the stakes of the assassination and detaches it from other global liberation struggles occurring at the time. The absence of deeper ideological analysis limits the explanatory power of Reid’s work and mutes the radical aspirations that made Lumumba so threatening to Western powers.
I also noticed that much of Reid’s critique of American and Belgian intervention comes from an idealist perspective, not a materialist one. While Reid critiques U.S. intervention, he does so within a liberal-humanist framework by repeatedly emphasizing that the CIA went “too far,” Mobutu was “corrupt,” and Lumumba was “naïve but idealistic.” As such, this personalizes what is structural and systemic, as the role of resource imperialism is notably underdeveloped. While Katanga’s secession and its mining industry are briefly mentioned, there is little sustained discussion of the political economy of resource extraction, primarily the cobalt, copper, uranium, and rubber, which were essential to both Western industrial powers and Cold War militarization. In ignoring this dimension, the book implicitly separates geopolitics from global capital. Contra Reid, ideology and fear were not the primary drivers of policy in Central Africa; rather, resource control and class collaboration dictated American and Belgian foreign policy.
Moreover, while Reid is excellent at showing the role of external imperialist forces in Lumumba's downfall, it doesn’t sufficiently address the internal dynamics within the Congo itself. Reid’s focus on external manipulation overlooks the internal contradictions within African societies that also contributed to the underdevelopment process. A deeper exploration of the roles played by local elites, regional power struggles, and the failures of the Congolese political elite to fully support Lumumba would have provided a more nuanced view of how underdevelopment is perpetuated from within, not just by external actors. A more comprehensive exploration of the Congolese political context and the role of Lumumba’s domestic allies and adversaries would provide a more nuanced picture. Pan-Africanists believe that Africa must take control of its destiny, and understanding the complex interplay between Lumumba and other Congolese actors is essential to fully appreciate the tragedy of his assassination.
Finally, Reid’s narrow focus on the immediate historical context of Lumumba’s assassination provides a crucial look at the forces behind his death, but it falls short of connecting this moment to the broader Pan-African struggle against imperialism and for self-determination. There is little exploration of Lumumba’s call for African unity and liberation with other African leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana and Ahmed Sékou Touré in Guinea, who emphasized that the continent’s future lies in collective self-reliance and resistance to foreign domination. Reid could have done more to link Lumumba’s death to a larger analysis of the ways in which the assassination fit into the ongoing struggle for African liberation that spans decades, encompassing both political and economic dimensions.
Conclusion:
Overall, The Lumumba Plot is an engaging and heavily documented (though one-sided) work that brings attention to a pivotal moment in African and Cold War history and offers a valuable historical account of the CIA’s involvement in the egregious assassination of Patrice Lumumba. While Reid's account remains bound by liberal historiography, elevates Western sources over Congolese voices, and lacks structural critique, it still remains a valuable resource for anyone wanting to understand the imperial machinations behind one of Africa’s greatest political tragedies. By utilizing recently declassified materials and interviews with surviving intelligence operatives, Reid chronicles the intersection of Cold War paranoia and postcolonial upheaval, making a significant contribution to the public understanding of the Congo Crisis.
As such, this book is especially useful for general audiences unfamiliar with Lumumba's legacy or the structural violence of neocolonial interventions in Africa, particularly in the West, where Lumumba’s story is too often erased or softened. However, for scholars rooted in decolonial history and theory, Reid’s work will feel ideologically muted, as it simply calls out the excesses of Western interventionist foreign policy while leaving the imperial structure intact. Accordingly, this book should be read alongside more radical works that better center African agency, epistemology, and structural critique, such as those by Walter Rodney and Amílcar Cabral.
Lumumba’s assassination was not merely a cautionary tale of Cold War paranoia and hubris. Rather, it was an act of imperial repression against an emergent postcolonial vision of justice, sovereignty, and internationalist solidarity. The Lumumba Plot uncovers the mechanics of the devious plot to overthrow a democratically elected African leader, but does not fully indict the ideological and economic incentives that made such an idea possible. Mid-20th-century African decolonial efforts were not merely about “independence” as defined by Western diplomatic norms. They were revolutionary projects aimed at dismantling the material, psychic, and epistemic architecture of colonialism. These movements sought to create not just sovereign states but liberated subjectivities, where African people could reclaim their histories, give language to their present, and provide the self-determination and framework to build their own futures.
Yet, even in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the struggle continues. Formal independence did not end imperial entanglements, but rather reconfigured and formalized them under the auspices of international trade agreements that facilitate unequal exchange and uneven development. The work of decolonization remains incomplete, and it demands a sustained critique of capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and epistemic injustice in the neocolonial present. As such, Reid’s work serves as a compelling account of how U.S. Cold War overreach intersected with the volatile dynamics of decolonization. It offers a sobering reflection on how the repression of a nationalist movement can reshape a region, and its lessons continue to echo into contemporary debates over foreign intervention.