Lawrence Raymond “Larry” Devlin, 86, a CIA station chief in Africa who said he refused a 1960 order to assassinate a government official, died Dec. 6 of emphysema at his home in Locust Grove, Va., according to Found and Sons Funeral Chapels.
Devlin said he was the CIA station chief in the Congo when he received the order to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the country’s ousted prime minister, The Washington Post reported. The CIA determined that the nation’s first democratically elected prime minister had the potential to be an African Fidel Castro and had to be eliminated.
Devlin, in an interview with The New York Times this year, said killing Lumumba would have been disastrous worldwide.
Devlin, who was born in Concord, N.H., served in the U.S. Army during World War II and was in the CIA from 1949 to 1974.
A. Carl Kotchian, 94, a former head of Lockheed Aircraft Corp. who admitted in the 1970s to paying millions of dollars in bribes in an international scandal that brought down Japan’s prime minister, died Dec. 14 in Redwood City, Calif., said his son, Robert Kotchian.
Kotchian’s testimony before the U.S. Senate in 1976 sparked laws that prohibited U.S. companies from giving kickbacks abroad. Resulting investigations led to imprisonment of Japan’s prime minister and upheaval in the Netherlands, Colombia, Italy and West Germany.
