http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4049783,00.html

President 'ordered murder' of Congo leader
Martin Kettle in Washington
Thursday, August 10, 2000,

The Guardian (UK) Forty years after the murder of the Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba, evidence has emerged in Washington that President Dwight Eisenhower directly ordered the CIA to "eliminate" him. The evidence comes in a previously unpublished 1975 interview with the minute-taker at an August 1960 White House meeting of Eisenhower and his national security advisers on the Congo crisis. The minute-taker, Robert Johnson, said in the interview that he vividly recalled the president turning to Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, "in the full hearing of all those in attendance, and saying something to the effect that Lumumba should be eliminated".

Mr Johnson recalled: "There was stunned silence for about 15 seconds and the meeting continued." Lumumba, the first prime minister of Congo after its independence from Belgium in June 1960, was forced from office as the country's civil war deepened and was captured by rivals. He was killed on January 17 1961, becoming one of the key martyrs of the African independence struggle. No direct quotations were ever recorded at the national security council meetings, and Mr Johnson only revealed the exchanges in 1975, when he was privately interviewed by staff of the Senate intelligence committee's post-Watergate inquiry into US covert action.

The committee concluded that the US was not involved in the murder, though it confirmed that the CIA had conspired to kill Lumumba, possibly on Eisenhower's orders. Recent Belgian parliamentary inquiries into the murder implicated Belgium but failed to come up with a direct US link. The transcript of Mr Johnson's interview has only come to light because it was included in material sent to the US national archives in connection with the assassination of President John F Kennedy. 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52595-2000Aug7.html

Did Ike Authorize a Murder?
By George Lardner Jr., Washington Post Staff Writer,
Tuesday , August 8, 2000; A23

As president, Dwight Eisenhower laid down strict rules for reports on meetings of the National Security Council: no direct quotations. A memo concerning an Aug. 18, 1960, meeting about the Congo's troublesome first premier, Patrice Lumumba, made public this week at the National Archives after years of gathering dust, suggests the wisdom of the rule--at least as far as Ike was concerned. The official note taker at that meeting, Robert H. Johnson, vividly recalled Eisenhower turning to CIA Director Allen Dulles "in the full hearing of all those in attendance and saying something to the effect that Lumumba should be eliminated." After that, "according to Mr. Johnson, there was a stunned silence for about 15 seconds and the meeting continued."

Johnson made the statements in a conversation with the director of the select Senate intelligence committee on June 10, 1975, in the midst of its investigation of U.S. assassination plots against foreign leaders. However, Johnson was a bit more circumspect when he was called before the committee on June 18. At the hearing, he recalled Eisenhower as saying "something--I can no longer recall the words--that came across to me as an order for the assassination of Lumumba, who was then at the center of political conflict and controversy in the Congo."
 

Nigeria: Dot gate

The poison, however, was never used, and CIA operatives were unable to get to Lumumba before he was eventually captured by Congolese rivals and killed on Jan. 17, 1961. The Church committee concluded cautiously that " it does not appear from the evidence that the United States was in any way involved in the killing." Fresh questions about that have arisen recently in Belgium, the Congo's old colonial master, where a parliamentary inquiry was started in May into the Belgian government's possible involvement in the 35-year-old Lumumba's murder. (The Congo was known later for many years as Zaire.) The investigation was prompted by a book published in Belgium last year that says the Brussels government engineered Lumumba's capture and execution and even helped dispose of the body. It was cut up with a hacksaw and dissolved in sulfuric acid, according to a Belgian police commissioner who went on Belgian TV last year, displaying a bullet and two of what he said were Lumumba's teeth. Whether Washington was involved in or aware of the final scheme remains unclear.

NSC note taker Johnson's Senate testimony on June 18, 1975, was set down and explored at length--along with the differing recollections of other officials present at the 1960 NSC meeting--in the Church committee's 1975 report on assassination plots. But what he said in his June 10 interview remained secret for 25 years. The only reference to it was an ambiguous footnote stating that "one NSC staff member . . . believed that he witnessed a presidential order to assassinate Lumumba." The reason the memo has come to light now, along with thousands of other pages of secret records from the assassination inquiry and a related subcommittee investigation of President Kennedy's murder, is the watchfulness of archivist Steven Tilley, the man in charge of the mountainous collection of JFK records at the archives. After Congress passed the JFK assassination records law in 1992, the Senate intelligence committee yielded up dozens of boxes of documents under the requirement for all records "related" to the president's assassination to be made public.

Looking at the published reports of the Church committee, Tilley found a lot of footnotes to documents that were still missing. He recommended that the JFK review board conduct a fresh search of the committee's holdings. "For some materials, we found microfilm copies, but not the originals," said Ronald G. Haron, the review board's last general counsel. He said some documents were never found in any form. The review board went out of business in September 1998 and the job of securing the documents' declassification was left to Tilley. He said there are a small number of documents still awaiting review by the Justice Department.