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Real-life le Carre plots in dogfight over 75 per cent pure uranium
A unique, comprehensive coverage of the more recent history of imperialist exploitation of the Congo, writes JOHN GREEN
HELL HOLE: The Shinkolobwe uranium mine during the 1940s
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Spies in the Congo — The Race for the Ore that Built the Atomic Bomb
By Susan Williams
Hurst £16.99
TWO excellent novels have been set in the former Belgian Congo and exposed the CIA’s involvement in the country’s affairs: Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible and Ronan Bennett’s The Catastrophist, set in the Congo just before independence, with the rise and fall of Patrice Lumumba, but to date there has been no comprehensive, non-fiction coverage of the more recent history of imperialist exploitation of the Congo.
Spies in the Congo is the untold story of one of the most tightly guarded secrets of the second world war: the US’s desperate struggle to secure enough uranium to build its atomic bomb.
Here, Williams tells the intricate tale of a special unit of the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, that was set up to purchase and secretly remove all the uranium from the Shinkolobwe mine in the Katanga province of the Belgian Congo that the US could get its hands on.
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