PUBLISHED in paperback last year, Susan Williams’s book White Malice: The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa tells the story of how the independence and democratic yearnings of Ghana and the Congo were strangled at birth by the US.
 
Dr Williams, a senior research fellow in the School of Advanced Study, University of London, talks to Ian Sinclair about the CIA’s covert intervention, Britain’s role, and how these two nations are currently obstructing a UN investigation into the death of the UN secretary-general in 1961.
 
What was the extent and outcome of the CIA covert interventions in the Congo and Ghana during the 1950s and ’60s?
 
A thick web of CIA operations and dirty tricks wrecked the hopes and vision of the newly independent Congo and Ghana. Only ten weeks after the Congo’s freedom from Belgium on June 30 1960, the government of Patrice Lumumba — the nation’s first democratically elected prime minister — was overthrown by the army, led by Joseph-Desire Mobutu.

Full credit for the coup was later claimed by Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief. Devlin also led a plot to assassinate Lumumba, who was to be savagely murdered on January 17 1961. In Ghana in 1966, Kwame Nkrumah, the nation’s first president and a prominent proponent of Pan-Africanism, was toppled from power in a CIA-backed military coup.

All over Africa, the CIA sought to advance the US’s aims: through sowing conflict between political groups, targeting trade unionists, bribing African representatives at the UN, and surveillance. CIA fronts were established and funded through a range of conduits. Proprietary airlines operated undercover and fighter jets were delivered to Katanga, illegally seceded from the Congo.