Overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana
Ghana’s first President Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown in a military coup in 1966 while he was out of the country.
The CIA in 1966 aided by elements in the Ghana Police and Army, overthrew Nkrumah’s government, using Ivory Coast as the base for its missions.
In a 1978 book In Search of Enemies, former CIA intelligence officer John Stockwell wrote that an official sanction for the coup does not appear in CIA documents, but “the Accra station was nevertheless encouraged by headquarters to maintain contact with dissidents.
“It was given a generous budget, and maintained intimate contact with the plotters as a coup was hatched.”
He said that the CIA in Ghana got more involved and its operatives were given “unofficial credit for the eventual coup”.
A declassified US government document showed awareness of a plot to overthrow Nkrumah.
