Mobutu’s ban on political activity expired with the new year. Soon Kasavubu announced a new prime minister and cabinet while Mobutu remained the strongman. This uneasy coalition prevailed for five years—the figurehead Kasavubu plus a succession of prime ministers—until Mobutu emerged from the shadows with a coup that established his open domination. Cyrille Adoula, most prominent of the cabinet heads, would take the heat for the suppression of Katanga. In typical Congolese fashion, the emergence of Adoula automatically alienated other factions and stimulated more separatist movements.

  The scale of the Congo project necessitated close cooperation between the CIA and the U.S. military. The effort was massive: by May 1961 the air force had lifted 20,000 UN troops and 6,000 tons of equipment; the navy had brought in another 5,000 UN troops while taking home 2,600. Assistance to Leopoldville included eighteen helicopters, ten C-47 aircraft, and five larger C-119s. At its full stride the CIA burned money at a rate of a million dollars a day. Adoula received substantial agency support.

  Washington attained its goal—a friendly government in Leopoldville—but the price amounted to disintegration of the country. With creation of yet another secessionist regime in southern Kasai province there were no less than four “nations” in the Congo. The U.S. role became one of reinforcing Leopoldville until the UN forces or the Congolese army could reunite the land. The UN peacekeeping force came under criticism as a cat’s paw for the Americans.

  Intelligence reporting clearly showed the portents: the Belgians both intransigent and engaged, with their own angle to play; the Mobutu-Adoula faction hoping to divert secessionists with temporary alliances while enlisting the UN to disarm Tshombe, after which Mobutu’s own troops could clean up; the European nations uneasy with the international measures taken. For many months CIA analysts—perhaps kept in the dark by the DO—failed to perceive Mobutu’s power, consistently identifying Adoula as the main Congolese player. In weekly tracking reports on events the analysts followed the separatist “nations,” constantly featuring Adoula as the instigator of Leopoldville’s maneuvers to take them down.

  One element that helped keep Mobutu in the background is that his Congolese National Army would not fight. Or, more properly, that the army was riven by the same crosscutting loyalties of tribe and clan that afflicted Congolese politics, with the result that it was often the instrument of secession rather than the solution to national disintegration. Katanga got most of the attention in the world’s eye while the CIA turned its gaze elsewhere. Specifically the agency feared Antoine Gizenga, who laid claim to the mantle of Lumumba. Gizenga had visited Russia and studied in Prague, impressing Washington as Moscow’s man in Africa. He led a secessionist regime in Orientale province, based in Stanleyville.

  Gizenga’s “nation” fell to a combination of CIA action, the man’s own ineptitude, and Adoula’s maneuvers. The agency soon appreciated that Gizenga’s key weaknesses were money and arms. He bought the loyalty of “Gizengist” units of the Congolese military with weapons and cash, making backing critical. Reports were that Gizenga had the best-paid army in the Congo. The CIA discovered the Russians were sending Gizenga cash—in U.S. dollars—and weapons. Washington deliberated on blocking the flow. On June 8 the Special Group considered an action proposal. Allen Dulles warned of political dangers while State and the Pentagon favored moving ahead. Mac Bundy concluded he had to take the issue to the president. Kennedy approved.

  Gizenga’s arms deliveries were disrupted by the agency cleverly and successfully. The CIA knew that Czechoslovakia had begun sending merchant vessels to the Sudan—unusual in that almost all Soviet Bloc trade had previously gone to West Africa. The CIA also knew that much of the tiny Czech merchant fleet consisted of ships transferred by Beijing, with Chinese crews and possibly secretly under Chinese control. Beijing had taken a very friendly position toward African independence movements, especially in the Congo. The Sudan associated itself closely with Egypt’s Nasser, who the CIA estimated wanted to play a leading role in Afro-Asian circles and favored Gizenga in the Congo. Sleuthing established that a Czech ship, probably one of the Chinese-crewed vessels, was carrying a cargo of arms to the Sudan ultimately bound for Gizenga. Washington considered asking the Sudan to embargo the shipment but, given the Nasser connection, rejected that approach in favor of public exposure. With some judicious payoffs in Port Sudan, the crane unloading the Czech-flag vessel slipped as it carried the second pallet, spilling crates all over the dock. Some broke open to scatter Soviet-made rifles everywhere. The shipment, consigned as Red Cross refugee aid, was revealed as weapons. The Sudanese confiscated all of it, halting Gizenga’s arms supplies.

  Meanwhile in Cairo, where Gizenga maintained an office, the CIA discovered a Russian plan to send the Congolese $1 million in U.S. currency. Agents were able to learn the itinerary of the courier Gizenga sent to pick up the money. Larry Devlin arranged a surprise—again in the Sudan. Thanks to more bribes the courier, carrying a third of the cash in a suitcase, was summoned for customs inspection in Khartoum. Terrified, he contrived to leave the suitcase in a bathroom. The CIA recovered it, making a profit on the operation. Gizenga’s difficulties were greatly magnified. When his soldiers began holding up tribesmen to get their money, “Gizengist” sentiment diminished rapidly.

  Adoula supplied the next maneuver, getting Gizenga to accept the offer of a vice premiership in the government, apparently without thinking through the politics of this deal. This connection with the Leopoldville government tarnished Gizenga’s Lumumbist credentials and enabled Adoula to demand his presence in the capital. Gizenga went on the lam instead, disappearing from Stanleyville, living for weeks in the bush so no official papers could be served on him, virtually halting his political activity. A fall 1961 conference where Gizenga had hoped to form a new national party flopped as a result, and Adoula was able to get the national assembly to vote to summon Gizenga to the capital.

  The next phase of this struggle was overshadowed by events in Katanga. Mobutu’s troops failed in an attempt to take the province outright. In September came an outbreak of fighting between Tshombe’s Katangese troops and UN forces. This led to a forgotten chapter in the sordid story of the Congo, the death of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, who came to mediate. The secretary general, a Swede, worried about events and the degree to which the UN seemed compromised by taking sides in this strife. On one leg of his shuttle, Hammarskjöld was to meet with Moishe Tshombe. Approaching the airfield at Ndola (just across the border, in what is now Zambia) on September 17, the secretary general’s DC-6B aircraft crashed, killing Hammarskjöld and thirteen others. Subordinates believed that Katangese mercenaries shot down the plane. Since the Belgian Union Miniere financed much of Tshombe’s mercenary force at the time, this conclusion again implicates the Belgians. Others insist the aircraft crashed due to mechanical failure and maintenance faults.

  Tshombe had beaten Mobutu’s troops thanks to his Western mercenary force and a jet fighter that gave him aerial superiority over Katanga. President Kennedy reluctantly issued an order that the United States would supply jet aircraft if they could not be gotten elsewhere, but Washington was saved from that escalation when Sweden and India sent planes of their own. Incidents between Tshombe troops and the UN multiplied. An uneasy truce lasted some weeks. Now CIA’s Bronson Tweedy came to Katanga for a personal survey. He and Jim Doyle, longtime friends (their fathers had been at Princeton together), helped put out a fire burning a train filled with ammunition whose explosion might have destroyed much of Elisabethville. A December Special National Intelligence Estimate found that the question of reintegrating Katanga had become so critical as to threaten the Adoula government.

  Almost simultaneously the truce collapsed as the UN went on the offensive. At the critical moment Tshombe was away on a trip to Paris and Brazil, where he went for a conference of the Moral Rearmament movement—unwittingly observed by CIA’s political operatives. Washington sent C-130 transports to move UN reinforcements to Katanga. Tshombe’s troops and mercenaries fought a pitched battle for Elisabethville and were largely driven from the city, but the UN was unable to secure much more than its headquarters, the airfield, and other major installations. A fresh political accommodation would be negotiated among the UN, Tshombe, and Adoula. Tshombe disputed and violated its terms for many months. Amid the horror of Katanga, Mobutu and Adoula took advantage to arrest Antoine Gizenga, whom they sent to jail. The Soviet media protested. In January 1962 UN forces captured Gizenga’s capital at Stanleyville. Within the year, in the topsy-turvy of Congolese politics, the national assembly would be demanding Gizenga’s release.

  In an April 1962 television interview, former CIA director Allen Dulles admitted that his CIA and the United States had overestimated the degree to which the Russians had involved themselves in the Congo. The premise of the entire venture had been mistaken.

  The Katanga stalemate continued for more than a year. A Special National Intelligence Estimate prepared at the agency in May 1962 found the reintegration of Katanga essential to the future of the Congo but the obstacles to action unchanged. That November the State Department’s intelligence unit filed a lengthy research memorandum that made no judgment on the wisdom of military action but warned against abandoning the United Nations. The UN came up with a reintegration plan, but Tshombe stalled, then rejected it. In December, with Kennedy’s National Security Council Executive Committee, the fabled EXCOM, discussing Congo at the same meetings where it considered the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy demanded a fresh assessment of UN military capability in the context of a new U.S. “Operating Plan for the Congo.” Only a week later fighting broke out between UN forces and the Katangese. Tshombe’s secessionist state collapsed. In his turn he too went to prison. But, as Cord Meyer explained to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board on April 15, 1963, the CIA’s project in the Congo continued. The messy Congolese affair boiled on.

  The Cuban operation represented the summit of a certain type of paramilitary action. The Congolese project showcased a new style of combined CIA-military activity. The frantic era of the OPC and the early CIA were gone. Paramilitary plans in Frank Wisner’s time frequently involved grand schemes carried out against foreign governments. Kennedy’s administration brought a shift toward operations in collaboration with established governments, aimed at real or imagined domestic enemies. There were still exceptions, of course, the Guyana project among the most prominent. The failure in Cuba contributed to the change of emphasis, demonstrating anew the resilience of target governments. Yet the change was in the wind before the first frogmen stepped ashore at Playa Girón, propelled by a shift in view at the top level of the U.S. executive.

  National security policy during the Eisenhower administration combined CIA’s active paramilitary campaigns with a “New Look” military strategy that was radical in a different way. Ike’s policy rested upon the enormous power of nuclear weapons, the assumption that future wars would be nuclear, and a desire to maintain the American economy, which Eisenhower felt could not grow in the face of large military budgets. Thus his rigid and often arbitrary ceilings on defense spending. With atomic power emphasized, the ceilings required reductions elsewhere. These could only come from conventional forces. The Eisenhower period witnessed cutbacks in the army and Marine Corps. Many opposed Ike’s policy, especially the army brass. One chief of staff resigned over the issue. With notable exceptions, other army generals also opposed the New Look, but Ike carefully satisfied the navy and air force, appointing Joint Chiefs chairmen who supported him. The army argued in isolation.

  The CIA was the one shop with a common interest in the army’s limited-war capability. Paramilitary operations were limited wars, possible contingencies for the employment of conventional force. As early as 1955 the CIA commissioned a study, Project Brushfire, of the political, psychological, economic, and sociological factors that affected “peripheral wars.” The Center for International Studies, under economist Max Millikan at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, conducted the study. Brushfire became one of a series of research contracts that CIA gave the MIT institute, which it had originally funded. On his copy of an information memo regarding Brushfire, Eisenhower’s Joint Chiefs chairman commented, “I think the answers are so plain that it is a waste of money.”

  When Eisenhower in early 1958 ordered a policy review on limited war versus full-scale conflict, the CIA wanted to be involved. John Foster Dulles sought to discourage brother Allen’s participation, saying the agency should be concerned with intelligence questions, not “operational” ones. Director Dulles allowed himself to be mollified by promises that the CIA would be permitted into operational aspects on some later occasion.

  Further limited-war studies followed, and the CIA contributed, but its interests were scarcely known outside government while army officers trumpeted their opposition to the New Look to whomever would listen. The most prominent army spokesman was chief of staff Gen. Maxwell Taylor. Specifically, Taylor asserted that a strategy of massive nuclear retaliation could not counter “brushfire” wars, and that a strategy of “flexible response” could meet conflict at any level of intensity. At the CIA, which saw paramilitary action as a rung on the conflict ladder, the secret warriors undoubtedly cheered. But at the White House, Eisenhower gave short shrift to Taylor’s views. The general retired to write a book that advocated forces to meet the full spectrum of contingencies, brushfire wars as well as big ones.

  No doubt Tracy Barnes, agonizing over the Bay of Pigs, paid little attention when a letter crossed his desk on the last day of that disaster. From James E. Cross at the Institute for Defense Analysis, the missive commented on what Barnes had said about another CIA initiative, a study group on the deterrence of guerrilla warfare. Cross believed that officials already understood this problem; they had to be told how to make the most of assets in threatened areas. The study group had held a couple of working meetings. A draft paper on limited war, written by the CIA’s Jim Critchfield, already sat on desks at Quarters Eye. Both Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell read it before the landing at Playa Girón, and it received other circulation at CIA as well. One of Critchfield’s recommendations provided for a survey of assets for unconventional warfare and paramilitary operations. All this moved fast precisely because the CIA, in building bridges to the new president’s inner sanctum, had seen Kennedy’s deep interest. Like two comets on intersecting trajectories, the rise of Maxwell Taylor would coincide with JFK’s demand for action on counterinsurgency.

  After the Bay of Pigs failed, the inadequacy of efforts in the field of low-intensity warfare were glaringly evident. Fears that Russia would encourage “wars of national liberation” heightened concerns about the need to deter guerrilla warfare. Kennedy wanted someone to answer a Khrushchev speech on these conflicts and settled on his self-professed man of ideas, Walt W. Rostow, then the deputy national security adviser. By mid-June both the president and NSC staff were working over the proposed text of a presentation Rostow would make at the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Two weeks later President Kennedy approved a directive providing for a government-wide evaluation of paramilitary requirements. This led to a top-secret summer study that combined the themes of deterring guerrilla warfare, limited war, counterinsurgency, and paramilitary operations. Walt Rostow watched this exercise closely. Another sparkplug, the study’s formal chairman, was Richard Bissell.

  In early July a luncheon took place at CIA where Bissell set the direction for his policy review. He told Rostow, and Bissell’s initial overview paper borrowed heavily from Walt’s speech text, very well known once Rostow gave the talk at Fort Bragg. At the Pentagon, Ed Lansdale also prepared a paper, the first of several, which recited in bald numbers the staffing levels in special warfare units. In mid-July Allen Dulles reported that CIA had begun coordinating with Lansdale on future paramilitary requirements.

  Closely watched at the White House, Bissell’s study became almost his swan song with the CIA. In contrast to pre-Cuba days, he now listened hard to what the White House had to say. From the NSC staff, Robert Komer suggested language for portions of the report, while from Maxwell Taylor’s staff Col. Julian Ewell, the general’s éminence grise, soaked up Bissell’s comments and gave back Taylor’s responses. Bissell’s paper grew odd tentacles in successive drafts over the fall of 1961. Presenting an update on covert action procedures to Kennedy’s recreated Killian Board, Bissell suddenly spoke of regaining public confidence in CIA covert action by revealing the existence of the Special Group, much as Eisenhower had once revealed the Killian Board itself.

  At another point Bob Komer did a summary of Bissell’s paper in which he inserted the recommendation to vest high-level authority in the Special Group, which Taylor headed. That measure did not appear in Bissell’s original, which his assistant John Bross distributed on November 21. Although Komer assured Bissell that his summary changed nothing in the paper, he told his boss, McGeorge Bundy, “I took advantage of Walt’s imminent departure [Rostow would leave the NSC staff for the State Department] to press for what I think is the most logical solution, i.e., to tag Taylor and the Special Group with this task.” Bissell let this pass without comment.

  Everyone had an agenda. Walt Rostow wanted to center U.S. thinking about dissident movements and insurgencies within the framework of stages of economic growth. The CIA deputy focused his interest on the agency’s role in such events. As Bissell put it,