Stuart Reid is author of The Lumumba Plot, a rip-roaring read about the CIA plan to assassinate the newly independent Congo’s charismatic prime minister Patrice Lumumba in 1960.

Stuart is a Senior Fellow for History and Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has written for many publications including The New York Times and Bloomberg Businessweek, and interviewed world leaders for Foreign Affairs, including former Congo president Joseph Kabila, African billionaire mobile phone entrepreneur Mo Ibrahim, and French far-right leader Marine Le Pen.

In this podcast we discuss:

* Congo’s independence, Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, Belgian military intervention, and the Katanga secession

* The misreading of Lumumba’s Soviet outreach and Cold War paranoia

* Eisenhower’s assassination order

* The poison plot

* The torture and assassination of Lumumba, and the destruction of his body

* The return of Lumumba’s tooth to the Congo

* Mobutu’s three decades of U.S.-supported rule and its legacy

* The Congo today

* A pattern of failed American-sponsored regime change

* Blowing up boats in the Caribbean and the history of failed U.S. covert actions

For more on the Congo, listen to our episode Mobutu: The dictator who wanted to make Zaire great again, with scholar Pedro Monaville.

The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and Maria Repnikova, and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Paper Boy, composed and performed on the guzheng by Wu Fei. Our closing music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.

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