the last book I ever read (The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination, excerpt three)

from The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination by Stuart A. Reid:

In the end, the agency decided against a full-fledged influence campaign, settling instead for a lighter touch. Although it is not clear whether Lumumba ever received any CIA money, the agency did issue small payments to various politicians it deemed promising and pro-Western. The goal was less to influence the elections per se than to develop sources; the bribery was, in the agency’s words, “in the realm of intelligence acquisition, not political action.” It was too soon to pick winners. “In most cases the political leaders of the Congo today have not matured ideologically,” an internal CIA paper argued. Why permanently alienate some of the Congo’s most important politicians just because they might have taken some francs from Moscow?

Lumumba’s electoral campaign continued to gain steam, and the CIA eventually resigned itself to his victory. At a meeting of the National Security Council in May 1960, the agency’s director, Allen Dulles, told President Dwight Eisenhower that Lumumba was likely to lead the free Congo. Dulles did not hide his dislike of the candidate, describing him as an “irresponsible” embezzler, susceptible to bribery and Communist influence.

Eisenhower already had little faith in the Congo’s prospects. A footdragger on civil rights at home, the president was a skeptic of independence in Africa, too. When Dulles pointed out that some eighty political parties were vying for power in the Congo, Eisenhower quipped that he didn’t realize so many people in the colony could read. (In fact, the Congo’s literacy rate, at more than 40 percent, was among the highest on the continent; for all the deficiencies in secondary and higher education, access to primary school was widespread.) It was not the first time the U.S. president expressed his low regard for Africans. At a National Security Council meeting earlier that year, a White House official fresh from a trip to the Congo had told him that “many Africans still belonged in the trees,” and were thus easily manipulated. To that, the president replied in apparent agreement that “man’s emotions still have control over his intelligence.”