Allen Dulles's cable on Lumumba: 'an urgent and prime objective' (August 1960)

Allen Dulles wrote this cable himself. Its four short paragraphs went out as Dir 47587 to the CIA's chief of station in Leopoldville, signed with the director's pseudonym, Ascham, and carrying a typed instruction to the cable secretariat to "limit distribution to Mr. Helms." FRUS dates it 27 August 1960; the Church Committee, working from the CIA's copy in 1975, called it the cable of 26 August^1,2.

The week before

The Congo had been independent since 30 June. On 18 August the Leopoldville station cabled that the embassy and station believed the country was "experiencing classic Communist effort take over government," and proposed backing a Congolese effort to replace Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba; headquarters approved it the next day⁵. At a National Security Council meeting the same day Dulles said Lumumba was in Soviet pay⁴. On 25 August the President's national security assistant, Gordon Gray, told the covert-action Special Group that his "associates" had "extremely strong feelings on the necessity for very straightforward action," and the group agreed not to rule out "consideration" of "any particular kind of activity which might contribute to getting rid of Lumumba"³.

What it says

Paragraph 1 states that "in high quarters here" the conclusion was clear: if Lumumba stayed in high office the result would be chaos at best and a Communist takeover at worst, so "his removal must be an urgent and prime objective." Paragraph 2 gives the station "wider authority" along the lines of earlier cables, "including even more aggressive action if it can remain covert," notes that "targets of opportunity" may arise, and authorizes spending on "crash programs" without consulting headquarters. Paragraph 3 tells the station chief to seek the ambassador's concurrence if the ambassador wished to be consulted, and otherwise to act on his own authority when there was no time to refer back. Paragraph 4 says the message had been "seen and approved at competent level ODACID," the cryptonym for the State Department^1,2.

The sum is withheld in FRUS as "[dollar amount not declassified]." The Church Committee printed it in 1975: up to $100,000^1,2.

How it was read

On its face "removal" could mean removal from office, and the Church Committee said so. But the men who handled the cable read more into it. Richard Bissell, the Deputy Director for Plans, testified that he believed it was a roundabout way of saying the President wanted Lumumba killed. Bronson Tweedy, chief of the Africa Division, said he might have drafted it and called it the "most authoritative statement" of Washington's consensus on removing Lumumba by any means. Within weeks a CIA scientist arrived in Leopoldville with lethal biological material; it was never used². The plot is told on our page on the CIA and the Congo crisis.

Release

Paragraph 1 was quoted in the Church Committee's 1975 interim report on assassination plots, with the rest paraphrased. The full text appeared only in 2013, in the retrospective Foreign Relations volume on the Congo, which still withholds the amount^1,2.