Welcome to Spycast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum.

I'm your host, Sasha Ingber, and each week I take you into the shadows of espionage,

intelligence, and covert operations across the globe.

In our last episode, author Stuart Reed peeled back the curtain on the Lumumba plot,

the CIA's plan to assassinate Patrice Lamumba, the first democratically elected prime

minister of the Congo.

Central to the CIA's 1960 assassination plot was station chief Larry Devlin. He never

had to carry it out, but Lumumba was later killed in another plot that Devlin knew about,

according to diplomatic cables released in 2013. Today, we'll share more of our conversation with Stuart Reed.

But first, we're going back in the archives to bring you Devlin in his own words.

In 2007, a year before he passed away, Devlin sat down with the International Spy Museum's

founding director Peter Ern, to talk about his

time in the Congo. I'd like to begin asking you how you were recruited to go into the CIA.

I know it was at the time of you had, were in school, you had been involved in the Mediterranean operations of the U.S. Army.

You had distinguished yourself there. You had returned to the states and you were planning and going to Harvard to obtain a doctorate.

What derailed you? What happened? How did you get recruited?

Well, I might say first, I was, I'm not sure that I, in fact,

I can quite seriously say that I did not cover myself with Lori. I was just one of many millions

of soldiers fighting in the Mediterranean area. I started my career in Tunisia, just at the end of the Tunisian campaign,

I arrived for the last two weeks. From there, it was Sicily, Salerno, Anzio, and then Corsica, Sicily, and then Corsica.

And then I went with the French into Elba, and then I landed with the American troops

in south of France, which was literally a picnic after Salerno and Anzio.

...