In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz by Michela Wrong Page A

rather less humour. For the target of the botched assassination attempt, staged at the orders of an aspiring Congolese politician with Soviet contacts, was Colonel Joseph Désiré Mobutu, who had just taken over the running of the country. If the white man in question—Larry Devlin—had not intervened, who knows what route the country would have followed?
    But then, interference, whether muscular or subtle, was always something of a forte of Mr Devlin’s. His role in the traumatic events of Congo’s post-independence period was to leave him one of the most notorious CIA men in history, an example of just how far the United States was willing to go in that epoch to sabotage the Soviet Union’s plans for global communist expansion.
    Mr Devlin’s life had been one of commotion: a bête noire for a generation of Africans still fuming over the way superpower intervention dictated events on the continent during the Cold War, he had been accused by conspiracy theorists of engineering the murder of Patrice Lumumba—Congo’s first, inspirational prime minister. Grown fragile and snowy-haired in his seventies, he had survived wars (two), uprisings (two), crash landings (four), heart attacks (several), beatings and assassination attempts (many) and a medical death sentence (two months to live, delivered, mistakenly, in 1984 when doctors spotted what they thought was an inoperable brain tumour).
    It had not all been pain and suffering. He learned to dance in Leopoldville’s sweaty nightclubs, argued politics into the small hours with the young men who were to become Congo’s movers and shakers and got tipsy on the sun-baked sandbanks of the Congo river.
    But it had all taken its toll, leaving him unsteady on his feet, floating above the pavement with the uncertain grace of a fifteenth-century schooner setting out on its first journey to the New World, an old-fashioned gentleman who opened car doors for a lady, gently insisted on paying and who dressed with a studied elegance wholly appropriate for a man who once, during some bizarre career interlude, ghosted articles for French fashion designer Jacques Fath.
    The consultancy work Devlin continued doing on Africa from his home in Virginia did not take up all his time and in retirement he had grown chatty. Two instincts were warring within him. On the one hand, he had been attacked too many times by the press as the kingmaker who put Mobutu in power, starred as the ruthless secret agent in too many thinly fictionalised accounts of the Congo crisis, not to be wary. On the other hand, with time on his hands and as the kind ofman who clearly enjoyed female company, this was a not entirely unpleasant opportunity to set the record straight.
    His voice had the gravelly timbre of a man who smoked three packets of cigarettes a day until a brush with open-heart surgery. His hands—creased by a million experiences, the wedding ring so deep-set in the flesh it seemed welded to the bone—would give a palm-reader pause for thought. But the brain was as keen and irreverent as ever. And with his defiant insistence that he regretted nothing about the CIA’s support for Mobutu, Larry Devlin was a reminder that whatever happened in the end, there was a time when Mobutu was not just the hope of interfering Americans obsessed with domino metaphors, but of a population exasperated by the dithering, squabbling and tribalism of its civilian leaders.
    â€˜What you must never forget is that there were many periods to Mobutu. You saw the pitiful end. But he was so different at the start. I can remember him as a dynamic, idealistic young man who was determined to have an independent state in the Congo and really seemed to believe in all the things Africa’s leaders then stood for.’
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    They first met in Brussels in early 1960, when members of Congo’s embryonic political establishment found themselves negotiating independence terms with their