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href="#ulink_b8cadefa-ea5a-506c-bf79-c87fe997ac19"> Birth of the Leopard

      ‘Politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.’

      CHARLES DE GAULLE

      There was a moment in 1960, when, if a white man had stayed his hand and decided not to get involved, the newly independent Congo’s history would have taken a very different course. It was the split second when a young CIA station chief who had crossed a tense capital walked around a corner at one of Leopoldville’s military camps and surprised a man in civilian clothing taking aim at a figure walking away.

      ‘I guess I was a Boy Scout too long, because without thinking I jumped at the man with the pistol. Then I was sorry, because it turned out he was very strong,’ he recalled. ‘We rolled around in the dirt and I finally remembered something I’d learnt in army training. He had his hand in the trigger guard and I pulled it back until the bone snapped.’ The scuffle attracted the attention of the intended victim’s bodyguards who, misunderstanding the situation, promptly started beating up the Good Samaritan. ‘All I could think about,’ he chuckled, ‘was why the hell did I get involved?’

      A generation of Zaireans might today ask themselves the very same question, but with a greater degree of asperity and rather less humour. For the target of the botched assassination attempt, staged at the orders of an aspiring Congolese politician with Soviet contacts, was Colonel Joseph Désiré Mobutu, who had just taken over the running of the country. If the white man in question – Larry Devlin – had not intervened, who knows what route the country would have followed?

      But then, interference, whether muscular or subtle, was always something of a forte of Mr Devlin’s. His role in the traumatic events of Congo’s post-independence period was to leave him one of the most notorious CIA men in history, an example of just how far the United States was willing to go in that epoch to sabotage the Soviet Union’s plans for global communist expansion.

      Mr Devlin’s life had been one of commotion: a bête noire for a generation of Africans still fuming over the way superpower intervention dictated events on the continent during the Cold War, he had been accused by conspiracy theorists of engineering the murder of Patrice Lumumba – Congo’s first, inspirational prime minister. Grown fragile and snowy-haired in his seventies, he had survived wars (two), uprisings (two), crash landings (four), heart attacks (several), beatings and assassination attempts (many) and a medical death sentence (two months to live, delivered, mistakenly, in 1984 when doctors spotted what they thought was an inoperable brain tumour).

      It had not all been pain and suffering. He learned to dance in Leopoldville’s sweaty nightclubs, argued politics into the small hours with the young men who were to become Congo’s movers and shakers and got tipsy on the sun-baked sandbanks of the Congo river.

      But it had all taken its toll, leaving him unsteady on his feet, floating above the pavement with the uncertain grace of a fifteenth-century schooner setting out on its first journey 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,

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