“A thick web of CIA operations and dirty tricks”: Susan Williams interview

“A thick web of CIA operations and dirty tricks”: Susan Williams interview
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
9 May 2024

Published in paperback last year, Susan Williams’s book White Malice: The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa tells the story of how the independence and democratic yearnings of Ghana and the Congo were strangled at birth by the United States.

Dr Williams, a senior research fellow in the School of Advanced Study, University of London, talks to Ian Sinclair about the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) covert intervention, the UK’s role, and how these two nations are currently obstructing a United Nations (UN) investigation into the death of the UN Secretary-General in 1961.

What was the extent and outcome of the CIA covert interventions in the Congo and Ghana during the 50s and 60s?

A thick web of CIA operations and dirty tricks wrecked the hopes and vision of the newly independent Congo and Ghana. Only ten weeks after the Congo’s freedom from Belgium on 30 June 1960, the government of Patrice Lumumba – the nation’s first democratically elected Prime Minister – was overthrown by the army, led by Joseph-Désiré Mobutu. Full credit for the coup was later claimed by Larry Devlin, the CIA Station Chief. Devlin also led a plot to assassinate Lumumba, who was to be savagely murdered on 17 January 1961. In Ghana in 1966, Kwame Nkrumah, the nation’s first President and a prominent proponent of Pan-Africanism, was toppled from power in a CIA-backed military coup.

All over Africa, the CIA sought to advance America’s aims: through sowing conflict between political groups, targeting trade unionists, bribing African representatives at the UN, and surveillance. CIA fronts were established and funded through a range of conduits. Proprietary airlines operated under cover and fighter jets were delivered to Katanga, illegally seceded from the Congo.

Also in the mix were soft power initiatives, including the secret creation and infiltration of educational organisations, cultural centres, and publishers. The American Society of African Culture, a CIA front based in New York and Paris, for example, organised a music festival in Lagos in 1961, featuring Nina Simone and other musical artists. Not one of them knew it was sponsored by the CIA. When [Nigerian writer] Wole Soyinka discovered that he had been unwittingly funded by the CIA, he was outraged. “Nothing, virtually no project, no cultural initiative,” he said bitterly, “was left unbrushed by the CIA reptilian coils”.

What was the UK’s role in the Congo and Ghana during this period?

The UK largely shared the aims of the US and has been described as its junior partner. Official UK documents reveal that in September 1960 a senior official in the Foreign Office advocated “Lumumba’s removal from the scene by killing him.” A colleague agreed, wishing that “Mobutu can get him arrested and executed promptly.” Daphne Park, the head of MI6 operations in the Congo, shared Devlin’s antipathy towards Lumumba and the UN.

In Ghana, which became independent from Britain in 1957, the UK conducted a propaganda campaign to pursue regime change against Nkrumah. As shown by a recent article by Mohamed Elmaazi in Declassified UK, it aimed to replace Nkrumah with a “more Western-oriented government.” The publication in 1965 of Nkrumah’s book, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, led to an escalation of covert British attacks on his reputation.

Nkrumah’s book analysed the impact on Ghana of British and American “neo-colonialism”: when a state is independent in theory, with “all the outward trappings of international sovereignty”, but its economic system and political policy are directed from outside. And this, argued Nkrumah, was driven by ruthless business and strategic interests. His analysis was swiftly vindicated after the overthrow of his government: Ghana’s state corporations were privatised and state-run projects were abandoned. Foreign multinationals took control.

The US government frames their intervention as part of the Cold War – to stop the Soviet Union gaining influence in Africa. In contrast, William Blum, author of Killing Hope: US military and CIA interventions since World War II, argues “the thread common to the diverse targets of American intervention” is “a policy of ‘self-determination'”. What drove US intervention in the Congo and Ghana?

This question goes to the heart of any assessment of America’s role in Africa in the period of decolonisation. Nkrumah and like-minded leaders believed that the way forward for African nations was not a case of choosing between US capitalism and Soviet communism, but of following their own path. This was the aim of the All African People’s Conference in Accra in 1958: “Hands Off Africa! Africa Must Be Free!” But the policy of nonalignment did not please the US, which took a wholly US‑centred position: if you are not with us, you are against us.

And there was an additional factor: racism. At a meeting of the National Security Council in January 1960, Vice President Richard Nixon asserted: “Some of the peoples of Africa have been out of the trees for only about fifty years.” A senior official then said he had “formed the impression that many Africans still belonged in the trees.” No one at the meeting—including President Eisenhower — challenged these deeply offensive characterizations.

Nixon argued that America should associate with “the strong men” in Africa. “We must recognize, although we cannot say it publicly,” he said, “that we need the strong men of Africa on our side”. In some cases, he added, it might be necessary to “develop military strong men”. Eisenhower agreed.

America was working strenuously to present itself as the world champion of democracy. But there was a tragic disconnect between this image and the reality.

You argue the premature deaths in the 1960s of several prominent men involved in Africa’s struggle for freedom – Nkrumah, Frantz Fanon, George Padmore and Richard Wright – means “it is reasonable to ask questions” about the CIA. What evidence and context lies behind this claim?

In 1975, a US Senate committee chaired by the Democrat Senator Frank Church investigated the intelligence activities of the US government. The Committee’s fourteen reports include Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, which records America’s role in assassination plots in five countries: against Fidel Castro in Cuba; Lumumba in the Congo; Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic; General Rene Schneider in Chile; and Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam. The Church Committee also found evidence of CIA involvement in plans to assassinate President Sukarno of Indonesia and ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier of Haiti.

Stephen Kinzer’s book Poisoner in Chief documents the sinister experiments of the chemist Sidney Gottlieb, the head of the CIA’s MK-Ultra mind control project. Gottlieb was part of a ‘Health Alteration Committee’, which came together in 1960 “as a response to President Eisenhower’s renewed conviction that the best way to deal with some unfriendly foreign leaders was to kill them.” Gottlieb produced toxins of disease which could kill without a trace.

Given the scale and extent of these plots, it seems not only reasonable – but necessary – to ask questions about the premature deaths of those who were perceived by the CIA as enemies of America.

Earlier this month the Guardian reported “The US and UK have been accused by university researchers of obstructing a United Nations inquiry into the 1961 plane crash [in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia] that killed the UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld”, noting your 2011 book Who Killed Hammarskjöld? contributed to the reopening of the UN investigation. Why do you think the US and UK are impeding the inquiry?

Initial investigations into the 1961 crash were conducted under the conditions of British colonialism and white minority rule, so that the crucial testimony of Black witnesses was dismissed. The Rhodesian inquiry identified pilot error as the cause, but without any actual evidence.

After the reopening in 2015 of the earlier UN investigation, Member States with potential information were asked to identify all relevant records in their intelligence, security, and defence archives. The majority of these states, including Belgium, Sweden and Zimbabwe, responded in a serious manner.

But neither the US nor the UK has disclosed any significant information since 2017, according to Justice Mohamed Chande Othman, who was appointed by the UN Secretary General to lead the inquiry. Othman reported in 2022 that in the case of the UK, “not a single document has been disclosed in that period. The US provided one document in 2018/19 and a further document in 2021, both of which were publicly available.”

This lack of compliance by the US and the UK is consistent with their decision in late 2022 not to co-sponsor the recent UN General Assembly Resolution authorising the continuation of the investigation. This is significant, since the US and the UK are two of the five permanent members of the Security Council. But their position did not impede the passage of the Resolution, which was co-sponsored by 142 Member States (out of 193).

There is now a global momentum to seek out the truth. Since 2015, Justice Othman has obtained new information and reviewed earlier evidence. It appears plausible, he states, “that an external attack or threat may have been a cause of the crash.” But without the cooperation of the US and the UK – which “must be almost certain to hold important undisclosed information” – the investigation cannot be properly concluded.

White Malice: The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa is published by Hurst, priced £17.99.

Book review. The Climate Majority Project: Setting the stage for a mainstream, urgent climate movement co-edited by Rupert Read, Liam Kavanagh and Rosie Bell

Book review. The Climate Majority Project: Setting the stage for a mainstream, urgent climate movement co-edited by Rupert Read, Liam Kavanagh and Rosie Bell
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
6 May 2024

“We haven’t yet exceeded the bounds of viable human civilisation, but we’re getting close,” top climate scientist Professor Michael Mann warned last year. “If we keep going [with carbon emissions], then all bets are off.”

This is why, in 2021, the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called for “immediate, rapid and large-scale” cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

How large? According to a December Guardian report, the UN Environment Agency estimates that for the world to have a shot at keeping below 1.5oC of global heating, emissions would need to fall by nine per cent every year. For context, emissions fell by 5.4 per cent when the pandemic brought the world to a halt in 2020.

It’s deeply frightening facts like these that lead Rupert Read, Liam Kavanagh and Rosie Bell – the co-editors of this volume – to conclude “the climate crisis is too vast, complex and multi-faceted to be addressed adequately without mass public mobilization.”

They explain how The Climate Majority Project has been established “to help catalyse” a “shift towards mass citizen action the world now urgently requires to support systems change.”

According to the authors, the Project is working for “the same degree of deep societal transformation” as radical climate activists “albeit by more accessible means.” Read sees the workplace, where people spend so much of their time and often wield considerable power, as a key site of mobilisation, with trade unions in particular in a unique position to help build a climate majority.

While the Project explicitly builds on the 2019 public opinion-shifting actions of Extinction Rebellion, the authors do not believe radical activism on its own will engender the political, economic and social revolutions now required. Indeed, the book includes an interesting conversation between Anthea Lawson and Read which explores “the possibility that the very idea of ‘activism’ is putting some people off getting involved”, and therefore may be one reason the climate movement has struggled to achieve its aims.

The Project’s intellectual foundations seem to be based on Read’s recent works, such as 2019’s This Civilisation Is Finished and Why Climate Breakdown Matters published in 2022. However, the book – and no doubt the Project too – is very much a collective effort. Joolz Thompson’s chapter on setting up the Community Climate Action in Suffolk is particularly inspiring, while Kavanagh’s deep dive into the “inner work” involved in climate action raises questions often ignored in mainstream discourse.

By grappling with arguably the biggest threat the UK and the rest of humanity has ever faced, and offering up ideas of how a powerful majority devoted to action on climate action can be assisted into being, this is an important read for, yes, climate activists – and also anyone interested in a liveable planet.

Book review. White Malice: The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa by Susan Williams

Book review. White Malice: The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa by Susan Williams
by Ian Sinclair
Peace News
June-July 2024

At over 650 pages, White Malice may look daunting but is actually written in such an engrossing journalistic style that it sometimes reads like a spy thriller.

Dr Susan Williams, a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, focuses on US covert intervention in the Congo and Ghana in the late 50s and early 60s. In particular, she writes about the fate of two popular politicians – Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of what was called the Republic of the Congo after Belgium was forced out in 1960, and Kwame Nkrumah, who led the struggle that won independence from the British for Ghana in 1957.

In the Congo, the principle US interest was the huge deposits of high grade uranium (which were essential to the Manhattan Project) and other minerals, including cobalt, copper, industrial diamonds and tin. However, in the heightened atmosphere of the Cold War, Lumumba’s Pan-African, anti-colonial, nationalist politics meant he was considered a threat to Western access and control of his nation’s resources.

So though US President Eisenhower publicly supported the autonomy of the Congo at the United Nations, US foreign affairs specialist Stephen Weissman notes from 1960-68 US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) activity in the Congo ‘ranked as the largest covert operation in the agency’s history’.

Williams summarises what this entailed: ‘assassination, overthrowing elected governments, sowing conflict between political group and bribing politicians, trade unionists and national representatives at the UN’.

Following a coup, Lumumba was killed in January 1961. Nkrumah’s increasingly authoritarian government was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup five years later, with the then president forced into exile. While we know Eisenhower authorised the assassination of Lumumba, the exact role of the US (and, to a lesser extent, the UK) in Lumumba’s death is still unclear, with a fascinating chapter about how the incomplete historical record – likely incomplete for a reason, of course – hampers those trying to get to the truth.

Nonetheless, Williams’ colossal research effort leads to a conclusion noting ‘America’s deliberate violation of democracy in African nations where people had struggle against all odds to free themselves from colonial occupation and to achieve majority rule.’

Peace News readers will be interested in passing mentions of nonviolence. After he headed a nonviolent campaign that secured independence for Ghana, Nkrumah shifted his position after Lumumba’s murder, writing in 1969 that ‘armed struggle is the only way through which African revolutionaries can achieve their objectives’. Whether a mass nonviolent movement could have protected the Congo and Ghana from clandestine Western intervention will never be known, and is not explored in the book.

More than 60 years on from the events depicted in White Malice, and the dark days of the Congo in the early 1960s are still making headlines. Last month the Guardian reported ‘the US and UK have been accused by university researchers of obstructing a United Nations inquiry into the 1961 plane crash [in the Congo] that killed the UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld.’ The article quotes

Williams, whose 2011 book Who Killed Hammarskjöld? contributed to the reopening of the UN inquiry, as saying the US and UK are ‘global outliers’.

‘The most recent general assembly resolution to renew the investigation was co-sponsored by 142 UN member states out of 193 – but not by the US and the UK,’ Williams noted.