Speaking at a JFK assassination conference at Duquesne University in 2013, David Talbot explained:
During his nearly decade long run as America's intelligence chief from January 1953 to November 1961, Allen Dulles turned the CIA into the most lethal and most secretive agency in Washington. He recruited bright, young, ambitious men from Ivy League backgrounds and he turned them loose on the world. They were "Mad Men" with a "License to Kill."
President Eisenhower gave Dulles and his killing machine a long leash, because he thought that by allowing the CIA to engage in covert proxy wars in the Third World, he was avoiding a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union. But, this cold war calculation inflicted severe collateral damage upon the developing world.
Leaders and political movements that could have lifted their nations out of poverty and suffering were cut down in their prime. Leaders like Patrice Lumumba, the young, charismatic nationalist in the former Belgian Congo.
Lumumba's efforts to lift his people out of the near-slavery imposed on them by their Belgian colonial masters elicited the wrath of U.S. and European mining conglomerates. And, yes, these mining giants were, indeed, represented by the Dulles law firm. Lumumba was inevitably portrayed by the CIA and the agency's assets in the media in the United States and Europe as a reckless communist and he was targeted for elimination.
By the way, i'm speaking here of media assets like the New York Times correspondent in the Congo who covered the sad end of Patrice Lumumba, a man named Paul Hoffmann, who's a familiar byline to many of us who read New York Times foreign coverage for many years. Paul Hoffman was an ex-NAZI who had served U.S. intelligence since (the end of) World War II. This is the man the New York Times sent to cover Patrice Lumumba in his final days.
The CIA also sent its Doctor of Death, Sydney Gottlieb, to the Congo with a tube of toxic toothpaste. When this poison plot didn't work, the agency brought in contract killers from Europe.
Finally, in one of the CIA's first cases of what would become known as extraordinary rendition, Lumumba was captured with the CIA's help and handed over to his mortal political enemies, a gang of killers that included CIA mercenaries.
But, the CIA continues to this day to deny any responsibility -- any direct responsibility for Patrice Lumumba's death. The agency is directly implicated in his savage torture and murder. Lumumba's assassination would lead to decades of dictatorship and social collapse and further misery in the Congo.
It's important to know the timing of Lumumba's murder: January 17, 1961 -- just three days before the inauguration of President Kennedy.
Details: David Talbot’s “The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government”
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-devils-chessboard-david-talbot/1121272921
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