The day of the leopard

One point in Robert Mugabe’s favour, despite the Zimbabwean patriarch’s brutally protracted autumn, is that he was never planted in power by a CIA-supported coup d’état. As Larry Devlin’s self-congratulatory yet revealing memoir makes clear, the same cannot be said of Zaire’s esteemed dictator, Joseph Désiré Mobutu, otherwise known as Mobutu Sese Seko. Army chief of staff in the newly independent Congo in 1960, when Mobutu decided to ‘neutralise’ both the elected President and the elected Prime Minister (the ill-fated Patrice Lumumba), he turned to the CIA’s new Chief of Station in Leopoldville, none other than Larry Devlin, who duly handed over the required $5,000, a modest sum given that the CIA authorised him to spend up to $100,000 at his own discretion. According to Devlin, Mobutu told him that he would not go ahead, overthrow his Prime Minister, and purge the country of the Soviet and Chinese personnel who had been arriving by the hour — unless Washington backed him.

Devlin, a slim, dapper figure in tight Sixties outfits and with a cigarette permanently in hand and a gun usually in pocket, did just that. This first Mobutu putsch should not be confused with the subsequent one when he assumed the supreme power he was to cling to for 30 years. Devlin writes: ‘I have been credited in numerous books and articles with having organised and supported Mobutu’s 1965 coup d’état.’ Not true — although we are told that the next day Mobutu discussed each potential member of the new government with Devlin, and ‘took my advice when I suggested two changes’. On this and on all other occasions only the crudest Cold War logic prevailed. Devlin remains proud of it. Hell, the cynical Soviets were moving in on Africa, hunting for ‘pawns’, weren’t they? Mobutu was America’s man, right? He and Devlin had breakfast together ‘several times a week’.