In the early days of his second term, President Donald Trump picked up on a promise he had made on the campaign trail. In January 2025, he issued an executive order for the declassification and release of all remaining documents relating to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The order also called for the declassification and release of the records pertaining to the 1968 killings of Senator Robert Kennedy and civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King.

The new batch of documents also contains fascinating insights into CIA and United States surveillance and war operations across Africa. In 1972, members of the Black Liberation Army hijacked a Delta Airlines flight and commandeered its crew to land in Algeria. After a ransom was paid and the passengers and plane released, US government agencies searched for the hijackers who had vanished. One of them was found living in an apartment complex in Dar es Salaam that the Tanzanian government had intended for advisors from China. The informant who provided the tipped off the US agencies had tried to travel to Uganda, where he hoped to meet Idi Amin, but was refused entry at the border in an incident he felt was humiliating. He had hoped to propose to Amin the establishment of economic relations with black Muslims in the US. Back in Tanzania, the informant participated in a protest following the killing of Amilcar Cabral in January 1973 in Guinea-Bissau.

The Nairobi chief of station also filed a report on Vida Mae Gaynor, an American national who worked for the Tanzanian government as an accounts assistant at the National Development Corporation. Gaynor grew up in New York and had been active within civil rights groups such as the Jamaica Rifle Club which taught Afro-Americans to shoot rifles. Gaynor was an admirer of Malcolm X and attended his funeral with the widow of Martin Luther King. She helped one of her sons escape the draft and, in Tanzania, where she had lived for almost two years, she provided housing and contacts for Afro-Americans coming to Dar es Salaam. One was a young man, a technical expert who met President Nyerere and promised to develop a prototype of an M-16 rifle to display at a trade fair. The report mentions that Gaynor was frustrated with the slow pace of the revolution in Tanzania, which she said needed more experts from China and North Korea.

South African liberation movements were also systematically monitored from Tanzania. CIA officers established contacts with representatives of the African National Congress (ANC) and Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) in Dar es Salaam to gain intelligence on their organisations’ activities and learn the names of their colleagues who were based in Europe for possible recruitment by the CIA.

Surveillance of visiting civil rights activists also took place in Ethiopia. A source attended a talk in Ethiopia given by Hosea Williams, who had worked alongside Martin Luther King. Williams spoke to around 50 Ethiopians, sharing his views that the CIA had arranged the assassination of Dr King and suspicion that the organisation had been involved in the killing of Malcolm X. Williams hoped to visit Peking (Beijing) to organise a united front of people of colour to fight racial discrimination worldwide but sensed that China was not keen as he was having trouble obtaining a visa into the country. Also, Williams’ interactions with Ethiopians and Southern Sudanese during his travels had opened his eyes to the problem of individual freedoms for Africans as compared to those for Black Americans. 

In July 1968, the CIA also requested the Addis Ababa duty station to look up reports in their files on William Wayne Dalzell, who had been in Addis Ababa in 1956. He had now become a person of interest to Jim Garrison, a US District Attorney in New Orleans who was investigating the assassination of President Kennedy. The Addis Ababa station, which was instructed to only check its records, and not make enquiries outside the station, found no further trace of Dalzell. 

The declassified documents also have a memo on Ethiopia from February 1998. It reports conversations and meeting reports with an Egyptian diplomat in Addis Ababa who provides information on the activities of visitors and delegations from Egypt, Sudan, Russia, and Israel. The diplomat patronises top nightclubs and cheats on his wife but seems valued despite his indiscretions. He is probably in the JFK records database for telling the source of his theory that Israel had killed President Kennedy.

Other records precede the presidency of John F. Kennedy. One is an interesting diplomatic incident involving the United Arab Republic – a union ofEgyptand Syria after 1958. The UAR ambassador to the US contacted Senator Fulbright, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to complain about a speech that then Senator John Kennedy had delivered to a Zionist Congress on solutions to the Arab-Israel dispute. The ambassador said it contained fallacies and disparaged the rights of the people of the UAR. Fulbright got in touch with Kennedy and returned with an apology, explaining that Kennedy had made the speech for political expediency – to secure Jewish, Catholic and Negro votes to compensate for the loss of Protestant votes that opposed him because he was a Catholic. The assurance that the speech was not going to formulate party or government policy if Kennedy won seemed to reassure the ambassador, who reasoned that exaggerating such speeches was part of a Zionist policy to create a breach between the UAR and other governments. 

Kenya does not feature much in the new releases, but they do reveal that a Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board that had met a few weeks after the death of JFK approved an unspecified political operation in Kenya. The vague meeting notes on Kenya also mention that British services were cooperative and conclude that Jomo Kenyatta could be persuaded to support the West more actively.

A November 1963 note mentions concerns that the Soviet bloc would soon have an important propaganda outlet in East Africa in Nairobi once the new Kenyan government had set up a state-controlled news agency following the country’s independence. It would come under Communications Minister Achieng Oneko who had well-developed contacts within the Soviet bloc. TASS (Russia News Agency) had agreed to equip the new agency. Kenya was also in talks with Prague and Moscow regarding technical and financial assistance, and Kenyan journalists who were training in Prague would, on their return, find ready employment with the new agency. 

This ties in well with another of the documents released, an extensive study by the CIA on the use of radio as a means of “aggressive psychological warfare” during the Cold War. The study found that Western powers lagged behind the USSR, China, and their satellite states in the number of radio broadcasting hours across the “free world”. Communists increased this advantage even further by jamming signals and penalising citizens listening to foreign broadcasts. 

There were other methods of collecting intelligence in Africa. In 1968, a US magazine investigated 145 tax-exempt organisations that it suspected were being funded or were cooperating with the CIA. One of them was the Phelps-Stokes Fund of Manhattan that had provided cover to an individual posing as an official of the fund to visit Kenya and East Africa in 1963. The organisation processed two grants for which it was reimbursed.  

In 1974, Algeria expressed concern about the increasing number of US nationals in the country because of increased business ties with the US and suspected that many of them were intelligence agents. A foreign ministry official told this to an American businessman, claiming that they had identified six individuals who were under close surveillance. 

Another CIA memo notes the use of journalists like Charles Wiley for espionage. Wiley, whose travel expenses were reimbursed by the CIA, travelled extensively in Africa, Europe, and Asia, placing articles in publications like Reader’s Digest. He provided the CIA with information on individuals at youth festivals and communist activities and also made arrangements for clandestine anti-communist teams to visit Algiers. 

However, Congo is the African country with the largest number of intelligence files in the newly released batch. The new files reveal awareness of coup and assassination plots hatched at various times against leaders in Congo, including Prime Ministers Patrice Lumumba, Cyrille Adoula and Moïse Tshombe, as well as Colonel Joseph Mobutu, a plot which the CIA tipped Mobutu about in time for him to thwart it.

There are multiple memos about Lumumba, and while some have been revealed in the past, just how high the communications and discussions about dealing with him went has never been so explicitly revealed. The newly released documents include unredacted reports, memos, transcripts, and personnel files that had been filed with the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) and the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations and Intelligence Activities (Church Committee). The latter published a report on alleged US involvement in assassination plots that targeted the leaders of Third World countries with no great political or military strength: Castro in Cuba, Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, René in Chile, Diệm of South Vietnam, and Lumumba in Congo.

The Léopoldville (now Kinshasa) station chief, who testified before the Church Committee, had done so under an alias as he still operated a private business in Zaire and would be in jeopardy if linked to the stories. When he was assigned to Congo in June 1960, his pre-travel briefings did not indicate a plan to assassinate Lumumba. But that appears to have changed after Lumumba, the new Prime Minister of the young Congo nation, made his international debut by leading a delegation to the United States and the United Nations in July 1960. While there, his interactions with US officials and other diplomats in New York and Washington, DC, convinced CIA officials in Washington that he was not in a well-balanced mental state. One meeting notes that, after receiving a report about Lumumba’s activities, US President Dwight Eisenhower turned to CIA chief Allen Dulles and said that the man should be eliminated. 

Memos to Léopoldville conveyed the urgency in Washington about Lumumba’s charismatic appeal and his Soviet Union leanings. They cautioned that Lumumba had demonstrated an uncanny ability to reestablish an advantage when faced with a challenge, and that given the opportunity, he could again sway events in his favour. When Mobutu seized power in a coup on 14 September, Lumumba received the protection of UN forces. In the same month, senators in Congo requested a small quantity of arms to enable a small group of men to take action. The opposition politicians told US officials that Lumumba out of office was just as dangerous and that by being in UN custody, Lumumba had placed himself in a stronger position to operate behind the safety of the UN forces. 

Dulles wrote to the Léopoldville chief of station that Lumumba’s continued stay would lead to chaos and an eventual communist takeover of the Congo, which would be disastrous for the UN and the interests of the free world. His removal was a prime objective and should receive the highest priority of covert action. The station chief was authorised to take even more aggressive action if it could remain covert. He was authorised to incur expenditure of up to US$100,000 if he did not have the opportunity to consult headquarters. 

The memos imply that the US ambassador in Congo preferred to remain uninformed and they authorised the chief to act on his own; the ambassador would have plausible deniability of US involvement if the plot was uncovered. 

CIA agents considered sending a silenced hunting rifle by diplomatic pouch. The chief of station was later supplied with poisonous substances to slip into food, drink, toothpaste, or anything Lumumba might ingest. The station chief had no prior training and was not equipped to handle the poisonous items. He locked them away in a safe and disposed of them by burying them near the Congo River only after Lumumba was removed.

When the Chief of Station had received the poison, he had questioned his superiors about the source of the authority and his instructions to carry out the directive. The answer in the cables was that the directive had come from the top and implied that when agency head Dulles spoke of higher quarters sanctioning these operations, he was referring to the president. The chief of station later destroyed all records relating to the assassination attempts before leaving Congo.

The memos highlight the presence of special agents brought in by the CIA. One, a safecracker and burglar code-named QJ/WIN, was recruited in November 1960 in Frankfurt to carry out a risky one-shot operation in Belgian Congo. Because the operation presented great personal risk and he would be separated from his business in Europe, the agent would be paid 1,000 dollars per month plus expenses for a period of between one and two months. The mission was later cancelled and the agent remained in Europe. Had the agent’s mission been to poison Lumumba when the station chief failed to find someone else in Congo to do it?

Another agent, code-named WI-ROGUE and now identified as Ernest G. Maycrink, was a German whom the CIA brought to Congo under an Austrian passport with an altered serial number and a false name. Maycrink got into financial difficulties and started free-wheeling, which troubled his handlers who saw this as a security risk that could lead him to work for other “services”. They considered options such as terminating his services and how to retrieve the false documentation, threatening to turn him loose if he did not fall back into line. An internal assessment found that Maycrink was a nefarious individual who engaged in extra-legal activities. Maycrink was terminated in September 1961 with a cash payment but, two weeks later, he was back in Léopoldville.

Maycrink resurfaced in Europe in 1962, claiming that the Congo government had hired him to investigate whether the Congolese officials who had been sent to Europe to buy military aircraft at steeply inflated prices had instead embezzled the money. Maycrink also said he was trying to help the government obtain military aircraft from other Western countries.