CARLUCCI CAN'T HIDE HIS ROLE IN 'LUMUMBA'
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PACIFIC NEWS SERVICE
Feature Story
Thursday, February 14, 2002
http://www.pacificnews.org/content/pns/2002/feb/0214lumumba.html
By Lucy Komisar, Pacific News Service

When HBO airs "Lumumba" starting this Saturday, viewers won't get the whole
story. That's because former U.S. Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci has
succeeded in getting the film's distributor to bleep out his character's
identity from the film. But hiding the U.S. role in the popular African
leader's assassination, writes PNS contributor Lucy Komisar, won't be so
simple.

NEW YORK--Most people would be thrilled to be a real-life character in a
movie. Not Frank Carlucci. Lawyers for the former U.S. Secretary of Defense
have pressured the film's distributor to remove his character's identity
from the showings of "Lumumba" on HBO this month.

Carlucci doesn't appreciate the attention. Maybe that's understandable. In
1960, he was the second secretary in the U.S. embassy in Kinshasa, the
Congo. That was the time when, according to declassified U.S. State
Department cables and testimony to the Senate's Church committee on
assassinations, the United States plotted with the incipient dictator
Mobutu Sese Seko and the Belgians to bring down Patrice Lumumba, the
popular nationalist leader who'd been chosen prime minister by a Brussels
"roundtable" of Congo leaders. Lumumba's sin was that, when neither the
Americans nor the United Nations would help him against Belgian-organized
plots to destabilize his government, he turned to the Russians.

After an extensive parliamentary investigation, the Belgian prime minister
earlier this month apologized to the Lumumba family for his country's role
in the killing, an apology accepted by Lumumba's son. Carlucci, however,
appears to have no regrets.

The scene he doesn't like shows U.S. Ambassador Clare Timberlake and an
American that the uncensored film identifies as Carlucci in a meeting
plotting Lumumba's murder. The Carlucci character is an oily fellow who
makes a clearly disingenuous comment about how the U.S. doesn't "meddle" in
other countries' affairs.

Carlucci claims he wasn't at that meeting. "The scene in which they
portrayed me was totally inaccurate," he said. Neither, he said, was
Timberlake accurately portrayed. "I was quite close to Timberlake and
served as his interpreter in most of his meetings." (Timberlake didn't
speak French.) "He had no role in it," Carlucci says, repeating that the
United States had "no role whatsoever" in plotting Lumumba's death. He also
said he'd had "no knowledge of the Belgian" role.

"There's no substantiation to that charge in any of the reviews done on
Lumumba's death by the United Nations or the recent Belgian book or Maddie
Kalb's book," Carlucci said. "If you go through the Kalb book, you'll find
no references to me." "The Congo Cables," by Madeline Kalb, was based on
declassified U.S. documents.

Timberlake is dead. Filmmaker Raoul Peck says he had reasons to believe
that what he portrayed in the film was accurate. A Haitian, Peck spent 25
years in the Congo/Zaire after his father fled there as an exile from
Haitian dictator Francois Duvalier. His film has won prizes at festivals in
Los Angeles, Santo Domingo, Milan and Acapulco and was presented at the
Directors Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival.

So let's take Carlucci's advice and look at "The Congo Cables." Kalb wrote
about the efforts by the U.S. Embassy and the CIA to topple Lumumba:
"Whenever Timberlake, accompanied by his French-speaking second secretary,
Frank Carlucci, went to see Kasavubu ... to try to persuade him that
Lumumba was an extremely dangerous man, Kasavubu ... would say nothing. ...
As Timberlake noted in a gloomy cable to Washington, 'I confess I have not
yet learned the secret of spurring Kasavubu to action.'"

Of course you won't find a document from Timberlake saying, "We are
pressing some Congolese to kill Lumumba." Ambassadors don't write such
documents. You will find documents by Timberlake and CIA chief Lawrence
Devlin talking about their desires and efforts to stop Lumumba, and even
Devlin's unhappiness at one leader's refusal to commit murder. The State
Department's official "Analytical Chronology of the Congo Crisis" talks
about a plan "to bring about the overthrow of Lumumba and install a
pro-Western government... Operations under this plan were gradually put
into effect by the CIA."

According to Kalb, Timberlake informed Washington on August 24, 1960, "If
Lumumba and his wired-in communist advisers are not stopped by a policy of
strength, we think this country is headed toward another China by way of
technicians instead of bayonets." On August 24, CIA chief Lawrence Devlin
reported "discouraging news: anti-Lumumba leaders had approached Kasavubu
with a plan to assassinate Lumumba, but Kasavubu had refused, explaining
that he was reluctant to resort to violence and that there was no other
leader of sufficient stature (to) replace Lumumba."

Ludo De Witte, author of "the Belgian book" -- "The Assassination of
Lumumba" -- wrote Peck that "from mid-August (when Eisenhower gave
indirectly the green light for the assassination of Lumumba) till
mid-October, there was a de facto collaboration and exchange of information
between all important personnel in the U.S. Embassy (that is Timberlake,
Carlucci and Devlin included), including on efforts to get rid of Lumumba."

The Eisenhower "green light" is in testimony by NSC staff member Robert
Johnson to the Church committee hearings of 1975-1976. Johnson said he was
astonished to hear that Eisenhower had given an order for the assassination
of Lumumba. The Church committee concluded that testimony permitted a
"reasonable inference" that the plot to assassinate Lumumba was authorized
by the president.

De Witte wrote Peck, "There is another thing: we know that Devlin and other
U.S. personnel in the capital were informed about the transfer of Lumumba
to the Kasai or Katanga (testimony by Colonel Louis Marlière, active in the
entourage of Mobutu). Everybody knew that they were waiting for some
subcontractors to do the dirty job, and, given the rank and the involvement
of Carlucci in Lumumba-related activities from the U.S. Embassy, we may
assume (although it's not proven) that Carlucci knew of what equaled a
death sentence for Lumumba. Once again I turn to the testimony by Colonel
Louis Marlière: nobody opposed the transfer."

Carlucci went on to a stellar career, including posts as ambassador to
Portugal, deputy director of the CIA, assistant to the President for
National Security affairs, and Secretary of Defense, the latter two
positions in the Reagan administration. He is now chairman of the Carlyle
Group, an investment firm.

Emily Russo, co-president of distributor Zeitgeist Films in New York, said
the small company couldn't afford to go to court to defend its right to
tell the story. Curiously, Carlucci sought to alter only the mass-market
version shown on television or sold on videotapes and DVDs. Screenings at
theaters around the United States and the rest of the world keep the
original French track. HBO is showing two versions. One is an HBO dub in
English: no "Carlucci" there. The other, an English-subtitled version, does
not mention Carlucci in the subtitles, and replaces his name on the French
soundtrack with a "bleep."

PNS contributor Lucy Komisar ([log in to unmask]) is a New York journalist
who visited Zaire in the early 1990s to study the impact of U.S. policy
there.

Copyright 2002 Pacific News Service

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