Twas a night in November at your pal's Christmas party when an elf arrives.

Oh, with a toffee night latte!

Hey everyone, who wants a Starbucks?

Ooy! Same one for me!

Get the group together for Starbucks festive favorites. It's IRL season.

At a Starbucks, near you.

Ahem.

Subject of aid with tea while stocks last. You're going to go. We're back with another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jaczynski,

culture editor here at the Federalist as always. You can email the show at radio at the Federalist.

Follow us on Twitter at FDR LST. Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts and if you want to support our work you can go to the premium

version of our website sign up there as well. Today we're joined by author Stuart Reed.

He's an executive editor of Foreign Affairs. He's written for The Atlantic, The New York Times,

the Washington Post, Political Magazine, Slate, and Moore.

And he's the author of a fascinating, massive new book

called The Lumba Plot, the secret history of the CIA and a cold war assassination.

Stuart, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

Now, if we could start just by talking a little bit about why you wanted to tackle the

Lamumba assassination in this book, that would be awesome.

What drew you to this project in particular?

So I had the chance to travel to Congo in 2014 and that got me reading up on the country's history.

And the more I read, the more I realized there was this amazing, tragic, fascinating moment in 1960, where the country became independent from Belgium and then sort of all hell broke loose very quickly.

...