#Congo

People (3)

• Larry Devlin Larry Devlin was the CIA Station Chief in Leopoldville from 1960 to 1967 who received assassination orders against Patrice Lumumba including poison delivered by Sidney Gottlieb, claims he refused to execute the order, and became the primary CIA sponsor of Mobutu Sese Seko's rise to power.
• Mobutu Sese Seko Mobutu Sese Seko was the CIA-installed dictator of the Congo (renamed Zaire in 1971) from 1965 to 1997, whose seizure of power was facilitated by CIA station chief Larry Devlin in 1960, who received enormous U.S. Cold War support as an anti-communist anchor in Central Africa while extracting an estimated $4-5 billion from his country, and who served as the base for CIA Angola operations in the 1970s and 1980s.
• Patrice Lumumba Patrice Lumumba was the first democratically elected Prime Minister of the independent Congo (June 1960), deposed and delivered to Katangan forces by a CIA-backed conspiracy involving Joseph Mobutu within months of independence, and killed on January 17, 1961 - a case the Church Committee found involved CIA assassination planning, making him the emblematic victim of Cold War CIA intervention in African decolonization.