A Colourable Integer of JB Danquah Being a CIA Agent and a Traitor

Nana Joseph Kwame Kyeretwie Boakye Danquah, the man illustriously known as the  “doyen of Gold Coast politics” was a Ghanaian freedom fighter, Pan-Africanist, Statesman, prolific scholar, historian, poet, journalist and a member of Ghana`s famous “Big Six” who were the architects of Ghana`s independence. Dr Danquah was a protege of the celebrated and iconic God-father of West African nationalism and the pioneer Pan-Africanist, Joseph Ephraim Casely-Hayford. In his own words, it was at the feet of the lionized nationalist, “Ekra Agyeman, otherwise known as Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford, that I was brought up, like St Paul under Gamaliel, and it was from Ekra Agyeman that I learned selfless politics as the sacrificing of one’s self totally for one’s own country. I sat under his feet from 1915 to his own death in 1930.” J. B. as he was longingly regarded by his disciples and contemporaries participated a salient capacity in pre- and post-colonial Ghana as the founder of United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), pro-independence and the maiden political party in Ghana, which Dr. Kwame Nkrumah was at one-time a General-Secretary.

The Watson Commission of Inquiry into the 1948 Accra frenzies hailed Dr. J.B. Danquah as the “doyen of Gold Coast politicians ; the man at the back of practically all political manoeuvres ; the man from a venerable chiefly family, who but for accident of birth, might have been a notable chief himself.” The report went further thus: “the man has great intelligence but suffers from a disease not unknown to politicians throughout the ages and recognised under the generic name of expediency.”

Indeed, though it could be said that he was master of expediency, what was uniformly striking about him was his zestful intelligence and his boundless commitment to the course of liberal democracy. These were the paradigms, which installed him unwaveringly as advocate of a liberal democratic political lore in the politics of Ghana.

It was Danquah, who fought for the establishment of the Cocoa Marketing Board (CMB) in 1947.  It was Danquah, who strenuously canvassed the people of Asante and the then Northern Territories to glue the Gold Coast Colony to become what we know today as modern Ghana.  Of course, Nkrumah also did a handsome by using the 1956 Plebiscite to annex Trans Volta Togoland to become modern day Volta Region of Ghana.

During J. B`s political career, he was one of the primary opposition leaders to Ghanaian president and independence leader, Kwame Nkrumah. His fervid demurral to Nkrumah and falling afoul to the Nkrumah`s obnoxious Preventive Detention Act induced to his incarceration at the Nsawam Maximum Security Prison intermittently.

In Ghana, many objectors of UGCC or UP tradition inculpate J B of being CIA implant, who was used  to discompose Nkrumah`s government and that his arrests and detention were very legal. But the dinkum oil of the matter is, J. B. was a liberal democrat who espoused capitalist ideas. He was a pragmatist who reckoned that, Ghana needed “independence within a shortest possible time,” whilst, Nkrumah was a radical socialist with imperishable conviction that, Ghana needed “Self-Government Now.” Nkrumah had his support from Russia and communist states and Danquah had his endorsement from the West also.  Dr. Danquah saw in the American or Western model the path to Ghana’s luxury. For evidence, he wrote, “there is to hand the incontestable fact that the three great nations which have achieved an industrial marvel after World War II, namely Western Germany, Italy and Japan, did so not on a Socialistic or State Capitalist economy, but on the basis of individual initiative and free enterprise, guided by the free and intelligent hand of their respective governments.”

J. B. Danquah wasn’t and hadn’t been neither CIA agent nor a traitor until his demise. Of course, some people are impulsive to make quotations and references from Mahoney’s book captioned, JFK Ordeal in Africa, but what eludes these individuals is that, Mahoney was antagonist to J. B. Danquah, who in several ways tried to traduce him to Dr. Kwame Nkrumah to the extent that, he made the weirdest imputation to Dr. Kwame Nkrumah that, J. B. Danquah wanted to instigate coup against him, when it was a mere subterfuge from him. Mahoney was the implicit CIA agent, tasked by the US to deprecate the reputational identity and influence of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah through victimization of J. B. Danquah for the institution of Coup, because J. B. Danquah was a heavyweight then, and on top of that, a resolute, spirited and dogged person towards the auspicious course of the country. So, one shouldn’t expect the same man, who ached to soil the probity of J. B. Danquah to Dr. Kwame Nkrumah but sunk, to preach good – will messages about him, in a book, which he had authored.

Declassified National Security Council and Central Intelligence Agency documents provided compelling, new evidence of United States government collusion in the 1966 overthrown of Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah. The coup d’etat, structured by dissident army officers, toppled the Nkrumah government on Feb. 24, 1966 and was promptly vaunted by Western governments, including the U.S. The documents appeared in a collection of diplomatic and intelligence memos, telegrams, and reports on Africa in Foreign Relations of the United States, the government’s executed official history of American foreign policy. Prepared by the State Department’s Office of the Historian, the latest volumes reflected the overt diplomacy and covert actions of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration from 1964-68. Though purveyed in November 1999, what they divulged about U.S. complicity in the Ghana coup was only recently noted.

Allegations of American entanglement in the putsche arose virtually immediately because of the well-known belligerence of the U.S. to Nkrumah’s socialist orientation and pan-African activism. Nkrumah, himself, implicated the U.S. in his overthrown, and counselled other African nations about what he grasped as an emerging pattern. “An all-out offensive is being waged against the progressive, independent states,” he wrote in Dark Days in Ghana, his 1969 account of the Ghana coup. “All that has been needed was a small force of disciplined men to seize the key points of the capital city and to arrest the existing political leadership.” “It has been one of the tasks of the C.I.A. and other similar organisations,” he noted, “to discover these potential quislings and traitors in our midst, and to encourage them, by bribery and the promise of political power, to destroy the constitutional government of their countries.”

While charges of U.S. collaboration were not novel, support for them was inadequate until 1978, when anecdotal evidence was provided from an inconceivable source – a former CIA case officer, John Stockwell, who chronicled first-hand corroboration in his memoir, ‘ In Search of Enemies ‘ : A CIA Story. “The inside story came to me,” Stockwell wrote, “from an egotistical friend, who had been chief of the [CIA] station in Accra [Ghana] at the time.” (Stockwell was stationed one country away in the Ivory Coast).” Subsequent investigations by The New York Times and Covert Action Information Bulletin recognized the station chief as Howard T. Banes, who operated undercover as a political officer in the U.S. Embassy. This was how the ouster of Nkrumah was handled as Stockwell related. The Accra station was stimulated by headquarters to perpetuate contact with dissidents of the Ghanaian army for the percentage of mustering intelligence on their activities. It was given a princely budget, and conserved intimate contact with the plotters as a coup was hatched. So close was the station’s involvement that, it was able to coordinate the recovery of some classified Soviet military equipment by the United States as the coup unfolded.

According to Stockwell, Banes’ sense of initiative knew no bounds. The station even proposed to headquarters through back channels that, a squad being on hand at the moment of the coup to storm the [Communist] Chinese embassy, liquidated everyone inside, nobbled their secret records, and blown up the building to cover the facts. Though the proposal was quashed, inside the CIA headquarters, the Accra station was given full, if unofficial credit for the eventual coup, in which eight Soviet advisors were dispatched. None of this was sufficiently reflected in the agency’s records, Stockwell wrote.

While the newly-released documents, written by a National Security Council staffer and unnamed CIA officers, had affirmed the burning outlines set forth by Nkrumah and Stockwell, they also provided additional, and chilling details about what the U.S. government knew about the scheme, when, and what it was composed to do and how to assist it. On March 11, 1965, almost a year before the coup, William P. Mahoney, the U.S. ambassador to Ghana, participated in a candid discussion in Washington, D.C., with CIA Director John A. McCone and the deputy chief of the CIA’s Africa division, whose name was withheld. Markedly, the Africa division was part of the CIA’s directorate of plans, or dirty tricks component, through which the government pursued its covert policies.

According to the record of their meeting (Document 251), topic one was the “Coup d’etat Plot, Ghana.” While Mahoney was content that, popular opinion was running robustly against Nkrumah and the economy of the country was in a precarious state, he was not persuaded that, the coup d’etat, being designed by Acting Police Commissioner Harlley and Generals Otu and Ankrah, would necessarily take place. Nevertheless, he assertively-and accurately, as it turned out-predicted that one way or another, Nkrumah would be out within a year. Having aired the depth of embassy knowledge of the conspiracy, Mahoney referred to a recent report which mooted that, the top coup conspirators were scheduled to meet on 10 March at which time they would determine the timing of the coup. However, he exhorted, because of an inclination to procrastinate, any specific date they set should be embraced with reservations. In a reversal of what some would assume were the traditional roles of an ambassador and the CIA director, McCone queried Mahoney who would most likely displace Nkrumah in the event of a coup. Mahoney again unerringly forecast the future: Ambassador Mahoney expounded that initially, at least, a military junta would take over.

But Mahoney was not a prophet. Rather, he represented the commitment of the U.S. government, in coordination with other Western governments, to expedite Nkrumah’s conquest. Firstly, Mahoney recommended knocking back Ghana’s forthcoming aid plea in the interests of further incapacitating Nkrumah. He felt that, there was little prospect that either the Chinese Communists or the Soviets would in adequate measure had come to Nkrumah’s financial liberation and thus, the British would continue to adopt a hard nose attitude towards providing further assistance to Ghana. At the same time, it appeared that, Mahoney spurred Nkrumah in the off – beam belief that, both the U.S. and the U.K. would come to his financial bail out and projected maintaining current U.S. aid levels and programs, because they would weather and be recalled long after Nkrumah had gone. Secondly, Mahoney perceived to have conjectured the responsibility of climbing the pressure on Nkrumah and exploiting the probable results. This could be seen in his 50-minute meeting with Nkrumah three weeks later.

According to Mahoney’s account of their April 2 discussion (Document 252), “at one point Nkrumah, who had been holding face in hands, looked up and I saw he was crying. With difficulty he said I could not understand the ordeal he had been through during last month. Recalling that there had been seven attempts on his life.” Mahoney did not endeavor to dispirit Nkrumah’s terrors, nor did he characterize them as unfounded in his report to his superiors. “While Nkrumah apparently continues to have personal affection for me,” he noted, ” he popped up as convinced as ever that, the US were out to get him. From what he opined about assassination attempts in March, it emerged he still suspected US involvement.” Of course, the U.S. was out to capture him. Moreover, Nkrumah was keenly conscious of a recent African precedent that made the notion of a U.S.- organized or sanctioned assassination plot plausible-namely; the fate of the Congo and its first prime minister, his friend Patrice Lumumba.

Nkrumah believed that, the destabilization of the Congolese government in 1960 and Lumumba’s assassination in 1961 were the work of the “Invisible Government of the U.S.,” as he wrote in Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, later in 1965. When Lumumba’s murder was trumpeted, Nkrumah told students’ at the inauguration of an ideological institute which bore his name that, this vile slaying should school them, the diabolical profundity of degradation to which these twin-monsters of imperialism and colonialism could descend. In his conclusion, Mahoney observed: “Nkrumah gave me the impression of being a badly frightened man. His emotional resources seem be running out. As pressures increase, we may expect more hysterical outbursts, many directed against US.” It was not requisite to have included that, he was aiding to apply the pressure, nor that any hysterical outbursts by Nkrumah played into the West’s projection of him as an unstable tyrant, thus justifying his ousting.

On May 27, 1965, Robert W. Komer, a National Security Council staffer, briefed his boss, McGeorge Bundy, President Johnson’s special assistant for national security affairs, on the anti-Nkrumah campaign (Document 253). Komer, who first had joined the White House as a member of President Kennedy’s NSC staff, had worked as a CIA analyst for 15 years. In 1967, Johnson tapped him to head his hearts-and-minds pacification program in Vietnam. Komer’s report established that, the effort was not only interagency, sanctioned by the White House and supervised by the State Department and CIA, but also intergovernmental, being supported by America’s Western allies. ‘FYI,’ he admonished, “we may have a pro-Western coup in Ghana soon. Certain key military and police figures have been planning one for some time, and Ghana’s deteriorating economic condition may provide the spark.” “The plotters are keeping us briefed,” he noted, “and the State Department thinks we’re more on the inside than the British. While we’re not directly involved (I’m told), we and other Western countries (including France) have been helping to set up the situation by ignoring Nkrumah’s pleas for economic aid. All in all, it looks good.”

Komer’s reference to not being apprised if the U.S. were directly comprehended in the coup plot was revealing and quite likely a wry nod to his CIA past. Among the most deeply ingrained aspects of intelligence tradecraft and culture was plausible deniability, the habit of mind and practice designed to shield the U.S., and predominantly, the president from duty for that particular sensitive covert operations. Komer would have known that, ordered such as the dissolution of Nkrumah would have been conveyed in a witting vague, opaque, allusive, and indirect fashion, as Thomas Powers noted in The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA. It would be impolitic to bicker that, the U.S. were not squarely involved when it created or exacerbated the conditions that favored a coup, and did so for the express purpose of bringing one about.

As it turned out, the coup did not occur for another nine months. After it did, Komer, the then acting special assistant for national security affairs, wrote a congratulatory assessment to the President on March 12, 1966 (Document 260), his assessment of Nkrumah and his successors was telling. “The coup in Ghana,” he crowed, “is another example of a fortuitous windfall. Nkrumah was doing more to undermine our interests than any other black African. In reaction to his strongly pro-Communist leanings, the new military regime is almost pathetically pro-Western.” In this, Komer and Nkrumah were in accord. “Where the more subtle methods of economic pressure and political subversion have failed to achieve the desired result,” Nkrumah penned from exile in Guinea three years later, “there has been resort to violence in order to promote a change of regime and prepare the way for the establishment of a puppet government.”

In the light of this, J. B. Danquah and Dr. Nkrumah`s feud,therefore, was a sheer product of their ideological differences, more than personal animosity between each other as a section of individuals have conceptualized. J. B. Danquah was a patriot, liberal democrat, freedom fighter and critique of despotic government.

 

By Prof. Dinkum.

(The Buzzing Rapine Of Erudition)

E – mail : dinkumchoice@gmail.com