War of Numbers (4 page)

“Who’s Pierre Mulele?” I asked my new boss, Dana Ball. “Damned if I know,” he said. “But you better write up this Kwilu ruckus before it gets out of hand. How about doing a quick piece for tomorrow’s Bulletin?”

By “Bulletin,” he meant the Central Intelligence Bulletin, put out each morning except Sunday at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. That’s where we were, agency headquarters, in one of a row of sunlit cubicles on the sixth floor. Dana was chief of the Southern Africa Branch, which I had just joined. He was short, with salt-and-pepper hair, a tweed suit, and a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins. His father had run a hardware store in New Hampshire.

I set to work. First I checked the National Geographic map scotch-taped to the partition wall next to my desk to see exactly where Kwilu was; it was a province whose seat was 247 miles east of Leopoldville, the Congo’s capital. Then I phoned Biographic Register downstairs to find out what they had in their dossier on Mulele: a good deal—he’d trained as a guerilla in communist China before becoming the Congo’s minister
of education and fine arts. Next I got from the Congo desk’s built-in safe drawer the Leopoldville Station’s latest aardwolf on the Congo’s prospects; the prospects were grim, the aardwolf said—“aardwolf” being the agency’s code word for a think piece from the field. And finally I wrote out an article in longhand on a single sheet of legal-size yellow paper.

The aardwolf set the tone of the piece, which put forth the basic facts of the revolt, such as I could make them out, and concluded that the Congo government—whose main backer was the United States—was so shaky and inept that even a small rumble in a far off place like Kwilu “would probably be difficult to contain.” The branch secretary, Colleen King, a pretty twenty-one-year-old from North Dakota, typed it up, and I handed it to Dana.

“Close enough for government work,” he told me after he’d crossed out several words with his fountain pen. “Now you call up State and Defense to see what they have to say. Bet you a dollar State’s going to weasel. It’s a fact of life around here you might as well get used to. The department doesn’t like climbing out on limbs.”

Checking Bulletin articles with the State Department and Pentagon was standard procedure, because the Bulletin was supposed to be fully agreed upon before it left the CIA building early the next morning. At that time special couriers rushed it to the top hundred or so people in the government, including President Johnson, so they could read it before breakfast. I picked up the telephone on Dana’s desk and began dialing.

“OK by me,” said the woman who handled the Congo for the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon. “I’m only surprised Leopoldville didn’t go down the tubes a couple of months ago.”

“I think you ought to tone it down,” said the Congo analyst at State. Leopoldville aardwolfs were often alarmist, he explained, and besides, the Congolese were always holding little revolts that never got anywhere.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“Fix the conclusion. The conclusion’s too strong,” he said. We talked it over for the next five minutes or so, and finally changed the phrase that the rebellion would “probably be difficult to contain” to it “may well prove hard to handle.”

“What’d I tell you?” Dana said. “You could predict sunrise tomorrow morning, and State would want to explain why it might not. But no real harm done, I guess. Run it on down to the PA.” I left Southern Africa, walked past Southeast Asia (the next cubicle down the line), and entered a carpeted office with a sign on the door that read Production Assistant.

“Christalmighty,” said the PA, when he saw the article was about the Congo. “Here we go again.” I went back to my desk to answer the telephone.

The phone rang constantly for the rest of the afternoon as the Kwilu piece went from office to office. The map section called to find out if the article needed a map. (“Yes, it does. I’ll be down right away.”) The Asia-Africa area chief called to ask whether the Russians were involved. (“Not yet, Mr. Dubberstein, as far as I can tell.”) A man from the front office on the seventh floor wanted to know how to pronounce Mulele. (“Mu-lay-lay, sir, accent on the second syllable.”) And so on. I left work at the regular hour, four-thirty.

When I got back to headquarters the next morning at just after eight, I stopped by Colleen’s desk to see if my Kwilu piece had actually made the Bulletin. “Howdy, Sam,” she smiled, as she handed me the latest edition, which was labeled “Top Secret.” I opened it up and almost collapsed. My piece was the lead item!

“Home run first time at bat,” I crowed. It was phenomenal luck. Most new analysts in the CIA’s research department—called the Deputy Directorate of Intelligence, or DDI for short—spent upwards of a year before they got in the Bulletin. Others, like the Swiss analyst, never made it at all. Here I’d been on the job only eight days and already the president of the United States was reading my stuff before anyone else’s. I grinned at Colleen, expecting her congratulations. But she had her
head buried in the
Washington Post.
And when I walked into Southern Africa, nobody there mentioned my achievement either.

Of course on reflection it came to me why everyone was so blasé. Congo disasters were the branch’s meat and potatoes. My forebears at the desk—among them Dana, before he made branch chief—had written so many Congo pieces that its “country book” (the blue loose-leaf notebook where the articles collected) was thicker than all the rest of Southern Africa’s combined. In fact it was one of the fattest in the whole DDI.

There were many causes for the book’s size. The main one was the Congo’s problem of being both rich and weak at the same time. Its wealth came from minerals—cobalt, zinc, and vast amounts of copper, mostly in Katanga, the country’s southernmost province. Its weakness came from the fact that Belgium, which had granted the Congo independence just three and a half years before, had done almost nothing to get the place ready for self-government. Of the Congo’s fifteen million people on independence day, less than twenty were college graduates. The highest rank the Belgians had allowed a black to reach in its colonial army was sergeant. And to many of the country’s two-hundred-odd tribes, the word
Congo
was only a figure of speech, foisted on them by outsiders.

I’d read through the country book as a way to learn about the Congo’s recent history. Its first page was dated 30 June 1960, the day of independence. For weeks after it had almost daily entries—5 July, for example, when the Congo army mutinied; 11 July, when Katanga Province seceded with the copper mines; and so forth, one crisis after another, culminating in early 1961 with the assassination of the Congo’s first prime minister, the left-wing nationalist, Patrice Lumumba.
¹
Lumumba’s body was scarcely cold when a rebel regime invoking his name and backed by the Russians set up shop in Stanleyville, a city in the interior. The Stanleyville government was even shakier than the one in Leopoldville, however, and it lasted less than a year.
²
Then in December 1962, an American-financed army of United Nations soldiers invaded Katanga to
end its secession. By July 1963, the U.N. had won, and since then the Congo had enjoyed six months of unaccustomed quiet—that is, until Kwilu erupted. Still in the Congo, the U.N. troops were scheduled to leave in June.

“Damn Mulele’s jumped the gun,” said Dana.

I spent the rest of January and the first part of February adding Bulletin items to the country book as the Kwilu rebels tore up the rest of the province. Leopoldville sent its best unit, an Israeli-trained parachute battalion, to try to stop them. Instead the battalion beat up the locals and stole chickens, and in revenge the rebels killed the priests and nuns. By mid-February, most tribesmen had gone into hiding, and the idea of rebellion had grown contagious. Colleen began dropping cables in my in-box which said that people in other provinces hankered to join the fray. Among them were reports that Chinese and Russian diplomats in nearby African countries were setting up smuggling nets to run guns to the rebels. The Russian “diplomats” belonged to the Soviet KGB, the Chinese ones to Peking’s Ministry of Public Security. In those days, these organizations were the agency’s chief rivals.

By late February, the Congo situation had gotten so bad that the Leopoldville Station wrote another aardwolf. The new aardwolf said that signs of unrest had become so widespread that a general revolt was now a distinct possibility. Even the State Department analyst had grown worried, but he wasn’t half as uneasy as I was.

My main problem was that I knew so little about the Congo. I’d learned about imperialism at Harvard, from which I had graduated in 1955. And I had written a short paper on the Congo economy after joining the agency in early 1963. But since then I’d spent most of my time in training, much of it on the “Farm,” the CIA’s boot camp near Williamsburg, Virginia.
³
The Farm had courses on how to hire spies, pick locks, and steam open envelopes, but not on how to analyze the Congolese. I’d have to pick that up as I went along. Getting ready for the rebellion was like cramming for an exam. The first thing to do was guess the main questions. The most urgent of these, I reckoned, were
which people had become rebels, and which were about to. To deal with the subject systematically, I fetched from supply downstairs a stack of three-by-five index cards and a small black cardboard box to put them in. When I got back to my office, I printed the word “Rebels” on a gummed label, stuck the label on the lid of the box, and began to fill out three-by-fives.

In the upper right-hand corner I wrote “MULELE, Pierre,” and below that the date, what he was up to, who his henchmen were, and which outside diplomats he had applied to for guns. Then I filed the card in the box. Cards on “GBENYE, Christophe,” and “SOUMIALOT, Gaston” shortly joined Mulele’s, until I had three-by-fives on almost seven hundred insurgents. Some rebels had several cards. The one with the most by far was “TSHOMBE, Moise.”

Moise Tshombe was not your normal rebel. He had led the Katangan secession before the U.N. chased him out of the province, and whereas most other Congo insurgents claimed that they were “marxist” or “third world,” he said he was “pro-western” or “anti-communist.” In fact he had once owned a hotel, several stores, and some plantations, and during the breakaway he had taken money from the Belgian businessmen who still ran Katanga’s big copper mines. With part of the money, he had hired white mercenaries. With another part, he had financed (or so people suspected) the murder of Lumumba.
⁴
Naturally most African governments assumed Tshombe was a front man for European mining interests and therefore hated him. Washington went along with the prevailing view, and our policy toward the Katangan was to avoid him at all costs. My first three-by-five entry on Tshombe indicated he was in exile in Spain. The next half dozen showed that the State Department wished he’d damn well stay there.

Dana’s attitude toward the growing revolt was abnormally calm. Instead of leaning over my shoulder to supervise—the natural inclination of an old hand towards a new one during periods of excitement—he left me increasingly to my own devices. After a while he even stopped editing my Bulletin pieces. But he continued to offer advice. One piece he kept repeating.

“Keep your eye on the tribes,” he said. “The pols in Leopoldville are windbags almost as big as the ones in Washington. But there’s a difference. In the Congo, nobody gives a hoot what they say. Over there it’s the tribes that count. How far this revolt gets depends on how the tribes line up.” Once he’d gone on to explain that in other African countries tribal power waned as central governments grew stronger. “But that’s not true in the Congo. Not yet.”

I took Dana’s advice. By the end of March, I had three-by-fives on each of the Congo’s two hundred or so ethnic groups, and had filed the cards alphabetically (Azande, Babwe, Bafulero, etc.) in a box marked “Tribes.” Then on a weekend when I had the duty and the Congo was fairly quiet, I cross-indexed the tribes and the rebels. It was a big help. By Sunday afternoon I had formed what were to become three strong convictions.

The first was that Dana was right about the tribes. Looked at through their eyes, the Congo’s troubles became much clearer. For example, some rebels were really people who had had run-ins with a local chief. Others were tribesmen kept out of the provincial courthouse by rival tribes from up river. And although the Congolese politicians sometimes described themselves by Western terms (such as “radical syndicalist”), their disputes were local. The one opinion most people agreed on was that the Leopoldville government—bumbling, corrupt, but armed with Belgian-made automatic rifles—ought to stay out of tribal business.

The second conviction was that any big revolt was bound to be fragmented. The Congolese spoke too many languages. Villages ten miles apart might be as distinct, say, as the Italians are from the Swedes. To expect large numbers of them to point their guns or spears in the same direction seemed highly unlikely.

The third conviction—unlike the first two, which were widely shared—came as a surprise. It was that Moise Tshombe was a lot more than a front man for European businessmen. His tribal lineage showed why. Although many people knew that Tshombe was a Lunda (Katanga’s dominant tribe), it was less well known that he had relatives who were Yeke (another big one), or that his family tree had branches
throughout the province. Furthermore he had organized his Katangan political party along strict ethnic lines. The only other big-time Congolese politician to have done so was Joseph Kasavubu, the Congo’s president since independence. It was no coincidence that Kasavubu’s tribe was the Bakongo, the one around Leopoldville.

In early May, my crash course in Congolese anthropology came to an abrupt halt. The rebellion rapidly began to widen.