Tom Zoellner Read online

  Fatal accidents are all too common in the illegal mining trade of the Congo. Abandoned mines such as this one are scattered all over the southern savanna, and most of them are still being picked over by local farmers hoping to boost their income by selling a few bags of minerals on the side, usually copper and a smattering of cobalt.

  Shinkolobwe was different. This was the pit that, in the 1940s, had yielded most of the uranium for the atomic bombs the United States had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  But this was more than a historical curiosity. Shinkolobwe had been a menace for years. The mine shafts were sealed tight with concrete plugs when the Congo became an independent nation more than four decades ago. Yet local miners had been sneaking into the pit to dig out its radioactive contents and sell them on the black market. The birthplace of the first atomic bomb was still bleeding uranium, and nobody was certain where it was going.

  Shinkolobwe is in the midst of a pleasant savanna of hills and acacia trees in a region called Katanga, where people have been farming for more than two thousand years with tools made from wood and copper picked from the ground. This place, and the rest of the Congo, had been the private preserve of King Leopold II of Belgium, who claimed the territory for himself when European powers were beginning to plant their flags around Africa in the 1870s.

  Leopold had enlisted the help of an adventurer named Henry Morton Stanley, a former staff writer for the New York Herald, already famous for his publicity stunt of “finding” the lost missionary Dr. David Livingstone. Stanley set off on a five-year journey to sign land treaties with local chiefs across central Africa, promising liquor, clothing, and some toiletries in exchange for lumber and ivory, in addition to the limitless physical labor of the natives. Within twenty years, Stanley had claimed for King Leopold an estate that was seventy-five times larger that the nation of Belgium. He called it Congo Free State, a corruption of “Kongo,” the name of one of the ancient native kingdoms that had signed itself away. Leopold promised to run “this magnificent African cake” for the charity and benefit of the natives.

  The Congo instead became a gigantic forced-labor camp. The Africans were threatened with brutal beatings and the amputation of their hands and even beheadings if they failed to collect enough ivory tusks or lumber to satisfy the quotas of Belgian managers. A blanket of rubber trees covered the region, and King Leopold was in an excellent position to fill the demands of the newborn automobile industry, as well as the need for bicycle tires, electrical insulation, telephone wires, gaskets, and hoses. By the turn of the century, more than six thousand tons of rubber sap was leaving the Congo, all of it tapped by Africans threatened with beatings, imprisonment, kidnapping, murder, and systematic rape. Those deemed lazy had their hands and forearms hacked off by members of Leopold’s security organization, the Force Publique, who sometimes collected baskets of severed hands to prove to their supervisors they had been diligent in encouraging the harvest.

  As stories of the abuses leaked out, the Congo became a symbol of greed. Among Leopold’s many critics was Joseph Conrad, who had taken a job on a steamship responsible for moving a load of railroad ties up the Congo River. What he saw there disgusted him. In his novel Heart of Darkness, he wrote of a rapacious company modeled after some of Leopold’s concessionaries. “To tear treasure out of the bowels of the earth was their desire,” he wrote, “with no more moral purpose at the back of it than burglars breaking into a safe.”

  Leopold died of an intestinal blockage in 1909, having extracted from the Congo a personal fortune exceeding $1 billion. He never once visited it. The government of Belgium took over the estates and was only slightly more merciful than the king, moderating but not ending the reign of the Force Publique and preserving the system of forced labor under the rule of monopoly companies. The largest was a mining giant called Union Minière du Haut Katanga, which started exploiting copper in the southern tail section. Leopold hadn’t much cared about mining (it was too expensive; rubber was much easier), but the company discovered what he had missed: generous quantities of bismuth, cobalt, tin, and zinc at shallow depths. Under a rug of grass, a golden floor.

  Delighted executives called it un scandale géologique—a “geological scandal”—and built an empire of mills, furnaces, and rails in the bush. Locals were paid the equivalent of 20 cents a day to break rocks and push carts. It amounted to a version of debt slavery: Taxes were kept purposefully high, and workers were not permitted to select their own occupations. The men slept eight to a hut in settlements ringed with barbed wire to prevent them from leaving before their contracts were up. Typhoid and dysentery were rampant, and about one miner out of every ten died every year from disease, malnutrition, rock collapses, or beatings administered by the Belgian managers. “The food of the workers is awful,” reported one observer. “They are only fed during the week with flour or corn.”

  One of these sites had been Shinkolobwe, where patches of high-grade uranium had been found in 1915. Radium was the most valuable substance on earth at that time; American doctors were calling it a miracle cure for cancer, and some were counseling their patients to drink a weak radium solution sold under the name Liquid Sunshine. A gram of it could fetch $175,000, thirty thousand times the price of gold.

  Union Minière tore apart the hill and started tunneling underground, forcing more than a thousand African laborers to dig into what would turn out to be the purest bubble of uranium ore ever found on the earth. The workers were made to carry sacks of the velvety black stone more than twenty kilometers to the railhead, where the sacks were sent to port and then shipped by ocean steamer to Belgium. The uranium-rich leftovers, known as tailings, were simply thrown away. Uranium was interesting only because it hosted tiny bits of radium. By itself, it was considered worthless: a trash rock.

  When the Nazis invaded Belgium in 1940, Union Minière moved its headquarters to New York. War was lucrative, and the United States would soon become the world’s largest user of Congo cobalt, an important metal for the manufacture of aircraft engines. American consumption would rise by a factor of ten before the end of the war, and the Congo mines started operating around the clock.

  But there was something of much greater value than copper that the United States would need. On the afternoon of September 18, 1942, a U.S. Army colonel named Kenneth D. Nichols paid a visit to Union Minière. He wore a coat and tie for the occasion. Nichols had just been hired to help administer the Manhattan Project, the top-secret effort to build the atomic bomb, and he was there to buy the waste uranium from Shinkolobwe, which was one of the only known sources of the mineral.

  Nichols left the office thirty minutes later with some figures on yellow scratch paper that formed the basis of a secret contract between the United States and Union Minière. The mine would go on to supply nearly two-thirds of the uranium used in the bomb dropped over Hiroshima, and much of the related product plutonium that went into the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The pit was deepened and widened, and the ebony vein of uranium would go on to feed the massive American buildup of nuclear weapons after the war.

  “A freak occurrence in nature,” Nichols called it. “Nothing like it has ever again been found.”

  For the next two decades, Shinkolobwe enjoyed a mystique as the number one producer of the most powerful substance on earth. Access to the site was forbidden, and the closest a visitor could get was to view the giant block of pure uranium the company put on display in the nearby city of Elisabethville. “As big as a pig, its color was black and gold, and it looked as if it were covered with a green scum,” reported one observer. Visitors were warned not to get too close with their cameras, lest their film be fogged and ruined. A sign said: ATTENTION.BLOC RADIOACTIF!

  The Belgians had expected to rule their colony for more than a century, but increasing violence in the capital convinced them to step aside and grant the Congo its independence in 1960. They left behind not so much a country as a plantation. There were only seventeen university graduates
left to run a new nation of sixteen million people. With American backing, a twenty-nine-year-old army officer named Joseph-Désiré Mobutu seized power in a coup and would, over time, set himself up as a secular messiah even as he looted the nation as systematically as had King Leopold. The currency, the major river, and the entire country itself were renamed Zaire. New parents were discouraged from giving their children European names, with the president setting the example by renaming himself Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, which officially meant the “Warrior who knows no defeat because of his endurance and inflexible will and is all powerful, leaving fire in his wake as he goes from conquest to conquest.” (A translation in a related dialect is “Fierce warrior and a cock who jumps on any chicken that moves.”) He took a cut from virtually every business in his country, siphoning off $4 billion and building luxurious marble palaces for himself all over his wretchedly poor nation. The once-promising economy went into a tailspin. Roads fell apart. Farms dehydrated in the equatorial sun. Union Minière’s property was nationalized and then looted.

  But not Shinkolobwe. The ore was already running low when the colonial era came to an end in 1960, but the managers feared that such a lethal substance would fall into the wrong hands. They poured concrete into the shafts and carted off the equipment. Scavengers tore the metal from the uranium warehouses. The workers’ village was evacuated and sealed off, and weeds began to sprout inside the shells of brick town houses. Mango trees drooped, nodded, and eventually toppled onto the deserted streets. Shinkolobwe crept back, day after day, into a state of nature.

  In the confusion of the Belgian retreat from the Congo, the CIA’s station chief, Larry Devlin, received an unusual cable from his bosses. Could he go out to the campus of the University of Léopoldville and take the uranium fuel rods out of the nuclear reactor? The CIA further instructed him to find a deserted spot in the African countryside to bury the rods until the rioting calmed down.

  Devlin was at a loss. He had no training for handling hot radioactive goods. And as for sneaking out to the jungle to bury them, “I could not think of a way to do that in a country where a white man stood out like a cigar store Indian,” Devlin recalled in his memoirs.

  This reactor owed its existence to Shinkolobwe. A priest named Luc Guillon, the founder of the Congo’s only university, had argued that the colony had done a patriotic service by allowing its uranium to be acquired by the Manhattan Project, and therefore deserved its own piece of the nuclear future. Guillon was allowed to buy an experimental reactor from the U.S. company General Atomics and install it on the edge of campus. Africa’s first reactor went critical in 1959, to local fanfare. But one year later, the Congo was a newborn independent nation in a state of war, with uranium fissioning behind a flimsy fence while gun battles flared outside.

  Devlin sought gamely to carry out his order. He drove out to the university through uneasy streets, passing three roadblocks on the way, and explained his mission to Guillon, who told him that hiding the uranium in the jungle was “a crazy idea.” The rods were safer just left in place. And there they remained.

  Mobutu loved the reactor—it was a source of national prestige—and he made sure to attend all its ceremonial functions. But the facility grew shabbier with each passing year as the economy decayed. The cooling water is now said to be filthy, and the power is switched on only once a week, to ensure that it still functions. At only one megawatt, the plant is a toy by world standards (by contrast, the Indian Point station outside New York City has a capacity of two thousand megawatts), but its presence in such an unstable country has long been a worry. A meltdown would not destroy the city; the facility is too small for that. But an accident or sabotage could kill hundreds of people and leave the neighborhood toxic for decades. Guillon’s sense of topography was also poor. The reactor is on sandy soil about a hundred yards from a hill that tends to crumble and slide in the rain.

  Security here has been a long-standing joke. When the British journalist Michela Wrong visited the facility, she found “no carefully monitored perimeter fences, guard dogs, or electric warning systems. Only a small sign—one of those electrons-buzzing-around-an-atomic-core logos that once looked so modern and now look so dated—alerts you to the presence of radioactive material.”

  The facility is guarded by a low fence sealed with a padlock. Two of the uranium rods in the facility were stolen in the 1970s without anybody realizing they had disappeared. One of them eventually turned up in Rome in the possession of members of a Mafia family, who were offering it for sale to “Middle Eastern buyers” who turned out to be undercover Italian police officers. Only at this point was the long-ago burglary discovered. The other rod has never been found.

  For the Congolese, this was just another sour joke; another application of the catchall term Article Fifteen, which is a supposed unwritten clause to the constitution that allows a certain amount of dishonesty in one’s personal affairs.

  Article Fifteen is how the Congolese squeeze out a living by any method possible: by selling cigarettes in the nightclubs after work, by smuggling copper into neighboring Zambia, by printing up school diplomas with a forged signature, by renting out the boss’s car as a taxi before he finds out. The phrase, according to Wrong, seems to have originated in the early 1960s when the leader of a breakaway republic in south Kasai grew weary of the pleas for shelter and food from the refugees flooding into his region. He gave them this imperial retort: “It’s your country, so fend for yourself.” This statement was repeated so often, and with such amusement, that some said it ought to be posted as a motto in government buildings. In the wreckage of an economy that is the Congo, this is how things get done.

  Mobutu was overthrown by a rebel army in 1998, shortly before he died of prostate cancer. The nation was renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the flag of Zaire was replaced with a blue banner with a gold star in the middle—a flag that bore a strange resemblance to King Leopold’s flag. The new government promised better roads and schools. But the culture of graft known as Mobutuism is still pervasive. Diplomas and government contracts are still for sale to those who ask. A request for sucre, or “a sugared drink,” is the usual euphemism for a bribe.

  Occasionally the request can be blatant. I once had a brief and inconsequential conversation with one of the top officials at the Ministry of Mines in a southern city. I had met him in his crumbling office building, where the hallways were dark and the lights were broken. When I made motions to leave, he said, out of the blue, “So, don’t you have something there in your pocket for me?”

  This was really nothing out of the ordinary: only a customary application of Article Fifteen. In a country raped so long and so badly by those who sought its riches, this is the way many official things are done. It is also the governing principle in the uranium ruins.

  Shinkolobwe does not appear on most local maps, but is not a difficult place to find. I hired a translator named Serge, and we rented a Toyota Land Cruiser for a few hundred dollars in the city of Lubumbashi, once called Elisabethville, the principal railhead for most of the ore trains that used to run to the Atlantic. The city’s weak economy still thrives on minerals, both legal and bootleg. Chinese companies have established a presence as buyers of the copper and cobalt picked out of the open pits.

  We left the city at dawn and headed north on a potholed national highway that faded into dirt, through forests of eucalyptus and acacia. Ore furnaces lined the road near the town of Likasi, and the road was dusted black with cobalt. Serge turned onto a rutted sidetrack in the hilly country north of Likasi, and we soon got bogged down in the mud. He gunned the engine while I got behind the Land Cruiser and pushed. A group of local farmers happened down the road at that moment, all of them wearing T-shirts and carrying machetes. They joined me in the pushing.

  One of them was a man in his thirties with calloused hands and a red jersey. He told us his name was Alphonse Ngoy Somwe and that he had worked as a miner at Shinkolobwe, where cop
per was usually the big thing. There had been at least one time, however, when he had looked for uranium.

  A few years ago, he recalled, some white men had come to buy their ore and had waved electronic devices over the rocks. This would not have been unusual in itself, as the cobalt ore is sometimes vetted for radioactivity, but the men seemed to be looking for uranium specifically. This surprised Somwe. It had previously been considered garbage, a nuisance.

  He said he didn’t want to do mining anymore—“it kills”—but after we pushed the Toyota loose, he agreed to show us the way.

  We bounced past a Pentecostal church made out of poles and grass and, shortly thereafter, came to a spot where the road took a plunge into a rocky valley, too precipitous for the Land Cruiser to handle. Somwe told us the mine was about four miles farther. Serge pulled the vehicle off to the side. I shouldered my pack, and we all started walking.

  A substantial amount of uranium has been smuggled out of the Congo in the last decade, and the source is almost certainly Shinkolobwe.

  In October 2005, a customs official in Tanzania made a routine inspection of a long-haul truck carrying several barrels labeled columbite-tantalite, otherwise known as coltan, a rare metal used in the manufacture of laptop computers and cell phones. But he found a load of unfamiliar black grit instead.

  One of his bosses later recalled the scene to a reporter: “There were several containers due to be shipped, and they were all routinely scanned with a Geiger counter. This one was very radioactive. When we opened the container, it was full of drums of coltan. Each drum contains about fifty kilograms of ore. When the first and second rows were removed, the ones after that were found to be drums of uranium.”