Of all the charges of wrongdoing by the Central Intelligence Agency, the most disturbing are those that implicate the agency in plots to assassinate foreign rulers who were deemed inimical to U.S. interests. Among the putative targets were Congolese Nationalist Leader Patrice Lumumba and Dominican Republic Dictator Rafael Trujillo, who were assassinated in 1961; South Viet Nam President Ngo Dinh Diem, who was murdered in 1963; and Cuban Premier Fidel Castro. The allegations are being investigated by a Senate committee, which last week continued to question past and present CIA officers about the alleged plots. At TIME'S request, Charles J. V. Murphy, a former editor and Washington correspondent of FORTUNE, talked with his long-time sources in the U.S. intelligence field about the charges and sent this report:
The suspicion is that two Presidents—Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy —authorized or condoned foul plots by the CIA to do in several foreign leaders. Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho, who heads the Senate investigating committee, has claimed to have "hard evidence" of the agency's complicity but nothing that would implicate any President. Still, in the singular relationship of the agency to presidential authority, evidence of a CIA assassination plot would seem to implicate one President or the other, even both, unless, of course, the CIA had become a law unto itself. What the Rockefeller commission report revealed was "in all likelihood just the tip of the iceberg," according to Church. The real likelihood is that so far as the actual assassinations are concerned, there was never much more to this floating body than a deceptively shimmering tip. Castro, however, was another matter. The agency version of the charges is this:
TRUJILLO. Former senior officers of the CIA maintain that neither the agency nor Presidents Eisenhower or Kennedy had anything directly to do with the dictator's death. Officials in the American embassy had tried to persuade Trujillo to resign to end the domestic unrest that the U.S. feared might make the country ripe for Communism. They had also been gingerly in touch with leaders of the political opposition and as a token of the American interest in seeing a change, had provided one faction with three rifles. A group of seven or eight men ambushed Trujillo on the road from his house to the presidential palace. Whether any of the U.S.-supplied rifles were used in the killing has never been determined to the senior CIA men's satisfaction.
LUMUMBA. The Soviet Union supported him with money and arms in the contest to take the former Belgian Congo out of the West's orbit. While the CIA supported President Moïse Tshombe of Katanga against Lumumba, it had no part in Lumumba's arrest and murder by Katanganese soldiers. He was a casualty of African tribal politics.