By CIC Intelligence, Achieve and International Affairs.
ZAMBIAN SENTENCED AS A CIA SPY THE WEBSTER LUNDWE UNTOLD STORY.
Yes, spies are everywhere.
ON April 27, 1982, Webster Lumbwe, 31 years old, a former Zambian intelligence agent, was sentenced to 20 years in prison after his conviction on charges of spying for the United States Central Intelligence Agency. (C.I.A.)
In the 1970s and 1980s Lusaka was the espionage center of Southern Africa and at one stage the Ambassadors of the USA and USSR were high ranking spies.
Webster Lumbwe joined the Zambia Security Intelligence Service as an intelligence officer in February 1971 at the age of twenty years. Sometime in May or June 1976, he attended an External Operations Course organized by the C.I.A.
Lumbwe used his friends in the Zambia Air Force and Zambia Army who gave him information of a military nature which he passed on to the CIA.
It was alleged that Lumbwe gave out the locations of the S-125 surface-to-air missiles and radar equipment around Lusaka, the number of MiG-21 fighter aircraft, tanks and armored personnel carriers. Lumbwe used his cover name of John Dube to spy for the CIA.
In the wake, of the arrest of Lumbwe, the Zambian government declared two American diplomats, John David Finney and Michael Francis O’ Brien, public affairs first secretary and director of the United States International Communications Agency in Lusaka as persona non grata.
They were ordered to leave the country within 48 hours.
Among the four banned Americans was Frederick Boyce Lundahl, a diplomat who had served in Zambia and who was also expelled from Mozambique for alleged C.I.A. activities
Others were Norman Smith, a diplomat, Robert Richard Simpson, a commercial-economist and William Benton Lowethier.
It was alleged that the C.I.A. had “examined the possibility of an alternative leadership in the country.”
It said a combined leadership of a senior army officer and Frederick Chiluba, chairman of the Zambia Congress of Trade Unions, “was discussed in C.I.A. quarters.”
Lumbwe was discovered as a CIA spy by Mr. Obino Richard Haambote, a Director of External Operations in the Zambia Security Intelligence Service.
In 1982, Lumbwe was jailed for 20 years for spying for the CIA.
However, in a scene out of a James Bond movie, in July, 1986, Lumbwe escaped from University Teaching Hospital (UTH) in Lusaka where he went for specialist treatment.
Lumbwe was serving his sentence at Kabwe’s Mukobeko Maximum Security Prison but had to be moved to Lusaka UTH so he could have specialist treatment of a “ailment” he had.
In an inexplicable way, Lumbwe managed to elude the three prison warders who were escorting him to UTH and he vanished.
The United States denied the charges leveled against the diplomats, “We are a bit at a loss to explain the Zambian Government’s action, and we particularly regret this labeling of diplomats as C.I.A. agents,” David Passage, a State Department spokesman, said.
In 1991 Fredrick Chiluba former Zambia National Trade Unions Chairman became the president.
Courtesy of Times of Zambia and The New York Times.
CIC PRESS TEAM
