Larry Devlin, 86; CIA Chief of Station, Congo

The only noise he heard was the explosive laughter from the soldiers, who treated him to a shot of whiskey, escorted him to his hotel and "went off to look for more fun."

That was in July. In September, he received a message advising him to expect an important visit from "Joe from Paris," the code name, it turned out, for Sidney Gottlieb, the agency's poisons expert. (Gottlieb later gained public attention for his involvement in CIA mind-control experiments with LSD.)

Gottlieb told Mr. Devlin the Lumumba assassination had been approved by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, although he admitted he had not seen the presidential orders. The spiked toothpaste, he explained, was chosen to make it appear that Lumumba had died from natural causes.

"Morally I thought it was the wrong thing to do," Mr. Devlin told the Times. "And I thought it was a very dangerous thing to do. If I screwed up and brought in the wrong person and it got out that the United States had done this, I had visions of even Africans who didn't like Lumumba wiping out every white man they could find."

He said he assumed that if he refused the order outright, the agency would simply call him back to Washington and send someone else to do the deed. He hid the poisons in his office safe and scribbled a warning -- "just in case someone got in and tried the toothpaste."

After three years in Congo, during which he and his family were regularly targeted for murder, he became chief of station in Vientiane, Laos, at the height of the Vietnam War. With 300 officers at the time, Vientiane was among the largest CIA stations in the world.

After retiring in 1974 as chief of the CIA's Africa division, Mr. Devlin worked in the diamond business for Maurice Tempelsman, a Belgian-American diamond importer who became a companion of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

In recent years, Mr. Devlin split his time between his Lake of the Woods residence and his house in the village of Grillon, France.

Mr. Devlin met his first wife, Colette Porteret, during World War II, when she was an ambulance driver in the French forces; later, she was a recipient of the Croix de Guerre. She died in 1984.

Survivors include his wife of 23 years, Mary Rountree Devlin of Lake of the Woods; a daughter from his first marriage, Maureen Devlin Reimuller of Great Falls; two stepchildren, Meredith Rountree of Austin, Tex., and Ashley Rountree of Paris; three grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.