Comment on Scott Shane's NYT Week in Review CIA Assassination Article

Comment on Scott Shane's NYT Week in Review CIA Assassination Article

Scott Shane didn't do his homework for his article on CIA assassination projects and he missed the point about the CIA's failure to accomplish assassinations of foreign leaders.

First, he attributes Lumumba's murder to a "rival Congolese group" and states that the CIA failed in its attempt because the would-be American assassin balked. The CIA did not fail because any American hit-man balked. In the multiple CIA assassination projects against Lumumba, there were multiple hit-people and none were American.

The reason why CIA failed is the same reason many CIA projects fail: the CIA offficials who planned the attempts were clueless about the motivations of the other nationals involved and therefore unable to get them to do what they wanted. Since it was a stringent requirement by US leaders that absolutely no US involvement be provable, CIA had to try to get a non-US agent to try to kill Lumumba with the abundant cash and weapons CIA provided, such as poison for his toothpaste and a sniper's gun and ammo. These local Congolese agents and the two European criminals recruited happily took the money but always found some problem that prevented them from carrying out the final deed. This pattern is quite similar to what happened when CIA bribed Congolese members of Parliament to try to get them to make a vote of no confidence against Lumumba. The Congolese politicans, however, gladly took the money and then voted their consciences, and no vote of no confidence against him was made by Parliament despite the CIA efforts.

As for who actually killed Lumumba, it was not, as Shane claims, a rival Congolese group, though that is what the US plotters always hoped people would think.

During the months Lumumba was under the control of Congolese military directed by Congolese politicians, he stayed alive. But only six hours after he was transferred into the hands of White soldiers in Katanga, at the behest of American and Belgian plotters, he was dead, shot by a firing squad composed of Belgian men, led by Belgian officers, who were directed to kill him by Belgian officials, and his body was disposed of by Belgian officers. All the knowledgeable sources of the time state that these men were under the control of and loyal to the Belgian government, not to any Congolese faction.

So, based on this kind of past history, which is only one instance of many, I'd say that the probable reason why the CIA never got to first base in the project to assassinate Al Qaeda leaders is that they never were able to figure out how to get a non-American team of agents to do the deed.