The JFK assassination files which have just been declassified cover a wide range of topics including murder plots, coups and dirty tricks the world over.
The declassified CIA files also expose the early steps the CIA took to murder Patrice Lumumba of the Congo. The initial plan was to poison him.
The newly released CIA file (the transcript of the secret questioning of a CIA officer by the Church Committee) can be downloaded here:
Lumumba was eventually killed in a joint CIA-MI6 operation in 1961. He had to endure a gruesome orgy of torture and violence that lasted for five or six hours before he finally expired. A harrowing account of it appears in the international bestseller, ‘The Devil’s Chessboard’ (2016), a biography of Allen Dulles of the CIA. While the book and the declassified files focus on the CIA’s involvement, MI6 played a significant part in it too.
Howard Frank Trayton Smith, who served as Britain’s intelligence supremo in Northern Ireland, 1971-1972, was a pivotal figure in the murder. He later became Ambassador to Moscow and, in 1978, D-G of MI5.
In 1960 Smith was a senior official at the Foreign Office with responsibility for the Congo. Daphne Park was serving as the MI6 Head of Station in the Congo. Park reported to Smith that Lumumba was allegedly trying to take his country into the Soviet camp. This was utter nonsense. Nonetheless, on 28 September, 1960, Smith circulated a memo to the Foreign Office where it was digested by a number of highly-placed powerbrokers including the future Prime Minister Ted Heath who was then a junior minister there. In it Smith nonchalantly explained he could see “only two possible solutions” to the situation: ‘The first is the simple one of ensuring Lumumba’s removal from the scene by killing him. This should in fact solve the problem, since so far as we can tell, Lumumba is not a leader of a movement within which there are potential successors of his quality and influence. His supporters are much less dangerous material”.
In 1971 Heath appointed Smith as the UK Representative to the Unionist government at Stormont. As such, he oversaw British intelligence operations in NI for two years.
Smith was in NI when MI5, MI6 and British military intelligence was running the first phase of collusive murder with proxy Loyalist assassins.
He was in charge of MI5, 1978-81, during the MI5-RUC shoot to kill programme that was later probed by John Stalker of the Manchester police.
Smith also oversaw the Kincora Boys’ Home child sex abuse ‘honey trap’ operation.
Daphne Park was deeply involved in the Lumumba murder plot. Like Smith, she was also deeply immersed in MI6’s Anglo-Irish machinations. She was a governor of the BBC (where she interfered with broadcasts about NI).
She was also a friend of Garret FitzGerald (through her management role in the British-Irish Association).
In the 1970s Park served as the Head of MI6’s Western Hemisphere division where – at a minimum – she had knowledge of the MI6-CIA Gladio death squads active in Europe at the time.
She must have been involved in the spreading of smears about Charles Haughey, John Hume and others through MI6-CIA-controlled news agencies.
Park was an unapologetic colonialist. When she was interviewed by the Daily Telegraph in April 2003 she stated that the “The [British] Government is too worried about speaking out [against Mugabe] because they think they will be accused of being colonialist. Well I don’t think that’s such a terrible crime”. Before her death, Park also acknowledged that: “Yes, I have been involved in death, but I cannot speak about that”.
Interested readers should purchase a copy of the fascinating ‘Queen of Spies’ (2015) by the Dublin writer and intelligence expert, Paddy Hayes. One of the more interesting quotes in it is that of John de St Jorre of MI6 who worked with Park in Leopoldville: “I always thought of Daphne as a blend of Margaret Rutherford, the bosomy and beloved actress, and Rosa Klebb, the cold-eyed KGB dragon-lady with a poisonous blade in her shoe”.
This website contains an article which tenders 60 plus reasons to believe Lyndon Johnson and the CIA masterminded the plot. See JFK.
David Burke is the author of four books published by Mercier Press.
