MI6 killed late Congolese PM Patrice Lumumba: UK peer
A British peer has, in explosive revelations, said that London’s spy agency MI6 murdered the first democratically-elected Prime Minister of Congo, once described as “the most important assassination of the 20th century”. - Lord David Edward Lea made the disclosure in a letter to the editor in the March 21 edition of the London Review of Books (LRB) in response to a question made in a new book published in January. The question is made by Calder Walton in his book Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire. Walton writes: “The question remains whether British plots to assassinate Lumumba … ever amounted to anything. At present, we do not know”. Sir Lea wrote in his letter that
“actually, in this particular case, I can report that we do” know that Britain plotted to kill Lumumba. “It so happens that I was having a cup of tea with Daphne Park… She had been consul and first secretary in Leopoldville, now [capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo] Kinshasa, from 1959 to 1961, which in practice (this was subsequently acknowledged) meant head of MI6 there,” Sir Lea said. “I mentioned the uproar surrounding Lumumba’s abduction and murder, and recalled the theory that MI6 might have had something to do with it. ‘We did,’ she replied, ‘I organised it’.”