Congo, Cold War murder, and a cup of tea
By Daniel Nelson
It started with a comment in the London Review of Books that “The question remains whether British plots to assassinate Lumumba … ever amounted to anything. At present we do not know.”
This prompted former British trade unionist David Lea, a member of the House of Lords, to write to the editor to say, “Actually, in this particular case, I can report that we do.”
He recalled that over a cup of tea with the late Daphne Park, the consul and first secretary (and thus, he said, the local head of MI6, Britain’s secret intelligence service) in what is now Kinshasa… “I mentioned the uproar surrounding Lumumba’s abduction and murder [also in 1961], and recalled the theory that M16 might have something to do with it. ‘We did,’ she replied. ‘I organised it.’”
She reportedly said the motive for the killing was fear that Lumumba would hand the Congo’s uranium, diamonds and other minerals to the Russians.
This drew a scathing response from another letter to the editor in the next issue of the magazine that said: “A member of the House of Lords tells another, over a cup of tea, that she had organised an abduction and murder. Three years later, her fellow member of this august body writes to the London Review of Books about it. How civilised.”
But there’s more.
Lea’s letter provoked another reply, from Glen Newey, who quoted several senior British officials at the time as wishing Lumumba dead, but commented, “Even so, British involvement seems unlikely, if only because no other evidence has emerged”. The assassination, he claimed, “was a Belgian-Katangese job with US facilitation”.
Newey, however, also suggested that, as an MI6 operative, Park may have helped engineer Hammarskjold’s death. He claimed in his letter that documents from South Africa’s truth and Reconciliation Commission had implicated the CIA and British intelligence in a plot to remove the Swedish Secretary-General, because they believed he stood against the secession of Congo’s Katanga’s region – rich in minerals and a buffer against possible communist incursion.
Lea, added Newey, “might also, in the interests of clarity, tell us what else Park told him: it’s hard to believe that he left the conversation at that.”
A quiet scoop for the London Review of Books, and a tantalising – and perhaps unfinished – glimpse into an important piece of African history.
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