Larry Devlin has written about his years as a C.I.A. station chief in Africa. In 1960 or 1961, left, and today at age 85.

By SCOTT SHANE

LOCUST GROVE, Virginia - Larry Devlin is 85 now, his Central Intelligence Agency career long behind him. But he recalls with clarity the day in Congo nearly half a century ago when he was handed a packet of poisons, including toxic toothpaste, and ordered to carry out a political assassination.
“I was totally taken aback, said Mr. Devlin, sitting in his den, looking out on a small lake in the Virginia countryside. He uttered a mild profanity, he recalled, and asked, “ ‘Isn’t this unusual?”
It was 1960, and Mr. Devlin, the C.I.A.’s young station chief, was in the middle of a political maelstrom as Congolese factions fought for control of the newly independent nation and the United States jostled with the Soviet Union for influence and control over deposits of critical metals.
Mr. Devlin had no problems with bribery, blackmail or other varieties of covert operations - “all part of the game” for the C.
I.A. at the height of the cold war, he said. But he thought the order to kill Patrice Lumumba, the charismatic Congolese politician the Eisenhower administration feared would become an African Fidel Castro, was both wrong and stupid, a desperate plan that could easily go awry and devastate American influence in Africa.
So he stalled. And Lumumba’s political rivals eventually killed him without the C.I.A.’s help.
Today, Mr. Devlin’s story has new resonance amid a renewed debate about the proper limits of C.I.A. actions to counter a different global threat . The C.I.A.’s destruction of videotapes of harsh interrogations is under criminal investigation. Congress has been reviewing the C.I.A.’s secret detention program and the transfer of terrorism suspects to countries that practice torture, though so far no inquiry has approached the sweep of the Church Committee in the Senate in the 1970s, whose reports quote Mr. Devlin under a pseudonym, Victor S. Hedgeman.
“I think there’s an eerie and disturbing correlation between that era and this one,” said John Prados, an intelligence historian and the author of “Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the C.I.A.”
Mr. Prados said the historical record supported Mr. Devlin’s account of his actions, which he described last year in an autobiography, “Chief of Station, Congo: Fighting the Cold War in a Hot Zone.”
Mr. Devlin, who was station chief in Congo and in Laos during the Vietnam war and retired from the agency in 1974, said he never used force during interrogations and worried that endorsing such methods might put Americans at greater risk of mistreatment. But he has watched the tribulations of a younger generation at the agency with sympathy.
“I can put myself in the shoes of the people who did the waterboarding and who thought they’d get information to save lives,” Mr. Devlin said. “I’ve often wondered: How would I react if I thought I had the man who knows about a bomb?”
The son of an Army colonel and a schoolteacher in San Diego, Mr. Devlin served in combat in North Africa and Europe during World War II and then went to Harvard to pursue a Ph.D. One Sunday afternoon, he was summoned by a professor, William Y. Elliott, a historian and longtime adviser to presidents. Waiting for him was McGeorge Bundy, who went on to be the national security adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Mr. Bundy urged him to join the recently formed C.I.A.
At the age of 38, he landed in the tumult of Congo, where he would be jailed, beaten and narrowly escape death on several occasions. In September 1960, Mr. Devlin received a cable advising him that he would get an important message from “Joe from Paris.” The envoy turned out to be Sidney Gottlieb, the agency’s poisons expert .
Mr. Gottlieb said that the assassination had been approved by President Eisenhower but admitted that he had not seen the presidential orders.
“Morally I thought it was the wrong thing to do,” Mr. Devlin said. “And I thought it was a very dangerous thing to do. ”
Such episodes aside, he defends the C.I.A’ s achievements in Congo, including support for the rise of Mobutu Sese Seko, who would become a symbol of corruption in his 32-year rule.
“We prevented the Soviets from taking over a very large part of Africa,” he said.