resisted by outward forces was his disregard for Belgian leadership in the region. "He was dangerous for us," Brassin later said, "in the sense that he wasn't open to the kind of solutions we wanted to apply." Another Belgian and personal friend of Lumumba, Jean Van Lierde, contested that Lumumba was killed because he represented an unpredictable political nature that neither the United States nor the Belgium national government could truly identify and control. Still, others including Belgian Colonel Louis Marliere, accused Lumumba of favoring the Soviet side of the political spectrum. Gerard and Kuklick dismiss the anti-communist rationale for Western intervention against Lumumba. The authors maintain that the governments of Belgium and the United States—including their covert operators—were largely responsible for "this traveling carnival of death." They insist that the West cannot escape accountability for the consequences of its actions by arguing that it was "the locals" who pulled the trigger. Along with their own attempts to deliver the coup de grace, US and Belgian officials more often turned to Lumumba's opponents. The Europeans and Americans goaded the Africans to imprison Lumumba and to secure a capital sentence. The politicians in Leopoldville proved willing to jail him, but were afraid either to bring him to trial or put him to death. Those in Katanga (a Belgian-supported secessionist province) were not afraid, and Belgians, Americans and the Leopoldville group knew that. With Western urging, [President Joseph] Kasavubu and his cohorts sent Lumumba to Elizabethville and his doom. Regarding the US role at the end, they present a very strong circumstantial case. The United States, through the CIA, was demonstrably trying to do Lumumba in—directly and through its cooperating Congolese leaders—from August through November 1960. In January 1961, these same clients gave the station chief advance notice of their plan to ship Lumumba to his bitterest enemies, and he did nothing to discourage them. It was speculated that the Eisenhower administration's motivations to remove Lumumba from power was influenced, in part, by the Belgian Secretary-General of NATO threatening to resign due to insufficient support by the US of the Belgian Security Council. It was also noted that the Congo Station Chief, Larry Devlin, withheld information of a plan by Congolese assets to send Lumumba to his enemies until after Lumumba had been killed. However, Devlin had actually put in a request to pay off a garrison to help restore Lumumba to