Mobutu's Fortune
This is just a detail, a footnote, but I think an interesting and important one. Regular listeners to the EP podcast may recall that when I talked with Larry Devlin, former CIA Chief of Station in the Congo, we had an exchange to do with Mobutu's "fortune." We agreed that, at a popularly estimated $500 million (or more) it had been vastly exaggerated, that it was probably in the lower tens of millions, and that much/most of that was in European real estate.
How did I know? Well, I didn't know. When I was the chief macro-economist at the U.S. Embassy in Kinshasa we had no hard information about it, but I reckoned that most of Mobutu's theft from his country must have gone to bribe/pay off his supporters. Just a hunch. And looking at what was known about his European fortune (so far as anyone knows that's the only place he put his loot), the press reported on quite a bit of fancy real estate, but not much else. Larry, who followed events in Congo/Zaire quite closely even after he left the Agency, concurred. No way to know exactly, ever, but a good indicator emerged yesterday with the Swiss saying they would return to the Congo the total that Mobutu had had stashed in Swiss banks: all $6.6 million of it.
The moral of the story, worth repeating, is that what "everybody knows" and what the press "always reports" often is untrue. One must sort through the muck for oneself, as best one can.
Posted by George Kenney on July 18, 2007 6:01 AM 
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Comments
Well, that makes me feel so much better about the CIA's support of "strong" leaders, Mobutu's torture and public hangings of his political enemies, and even of Nixon and how he saved us from the red menace by supporting people like Mobutu while sending Henry to Beijing to sell out our sons in Vietnam. Good to know Mobutu only stashed away tens of millions rather than hundreds, like, I don't know, Marcos?
A corpse by any other name would smell.
Posted by: Pandabonium | July 20, 2007 6:23 AM