Verisoph story dossier
The killing of Congo’s first prime minister, from the CIA poison plot to the firing squad in Katanga and the acid that destroyed his body.
The killing of Congo’s first prime minister, from the CIA poison plot to the firing squad in Katanga and the acid that destroyed his body.
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In August 1960 CIA Director Allen Dulles cabled Leopoldville that Lumumba’s removal was an urgent objective. The agency’s chemist Sidney Gottlieb was sent with poison to kill him. The Church Committee later documented the plot; the poison was never used.
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After President Kasa-Vubu and Prime Minister Lumumba tried to dismiss each other, army chief Joseph-Désiré Mobutu seized power in a coup and neutralized both. Lumumba was placed under house arrest, guarded by UN and Congolese troops. Western governments, viewing Lumumba as a Soviet-leaning threat, welcomed his removal.
Lumumba escaped house arrest and headed for his supporters in Stanleyville, but Mobutu’s soldiers caught him on 1 December 1960. He was beaten and imprisoned at the Thysville military camp.
On 17 January 1961 Lumumba and two aides were flown to secessionist Katanga, beaten again, and shot by a firing squad in the presence of Belgian officers and Katangan authorities under Moise Tshombe. The 2001 Belgian parliamentary inquiry acknowledged Belgium’s moral responsibility. How far US plotting shaped the final act remains contested among historians.
In the days after the killing the Belgian police commissioner Gerard Soete and his brother exhumed the bodies, cut them apart, and dissolved them in sulfuric acid, scattering what would not dissolve. Soete later described this on the record and admitted keeping two of Lumumba’s teeth. Belgium returned a tooth to the family in 2022.
The US Senate’s Church Committee, investigating CIA activity, confirmed that the agency under Allen Dulles had plotted to poison Lumumba in 1960. It found the poison plan was not carried out and did not establish that the CIA caused his actual death.
After the 2001 parliamentary inquiry, the Belgian government formally apologized in February 2002 for its part in the events that led to Lumumba’s murder.