Carlucci Can't Hide His Role in 'Lumumba'

"Most people would be thrilled to be a real-life character in a movie. Not Frank Carlucci. Lawyers for the former U.S. Secretary of Defense have pressured the film's distributor to remove his character's identity from the showings of 'Lumumba' on HBO this month," Pacific News Service contributor Lucy Komisar writes. "Carlucci doesn't appreciate the attention. Maybe that's understandable. In 1960, he was the second secretary in the U.S. embassy in Kinshasa, the Congo. That was the time when, according to declassified U.S. State Department cables and testimony to the Senate's Church committee on assassinations, the United States plotted with the incipient dictator Mobutu Sese Seko and the Belgians to bring down Patrice Lumumba, the popular nationalist leader. ... Lumumba's sin was that, when neither the Americans nor the United Nations would help him against Belgian-organized plots to destabilize his government, he turned to the Russians."