Independence-era spy chief Adoko is dead

Akena Adoko, the independence-era spy chief who may have played an inadvertent role in the final ascendance of Idi Amin, died in a London hospital on Friday.

He was in his seventies.

Dr Adoko had cancer of the kidneys, Mr Alex Okullo, the chairman of Lango Association, said in a statement availed to Saturday Monitor.

Dr Adoko, who lived in England since the 1970s and was an early critic of Amin’s regime, was Milton Obote’s first chief of intelligence, a position that put him at the heart of some of the crises that shaped Uganda’s immediate post-independence history.

A lawyer by training, Dr Adoko continued to practice law in England, a job far removed from the espionage duties he once played as head of the General Service Unit. Publicly, however, he never had the fearsome reputation of the intelligence chiefs who came after him, and he sometimes fought for the release of people, such as the Obote critic Abu Mayanja, arrested on trumped-up charges. “He was not a soldier, nor had he been involved in intelligence work [prior to his appointment],” said Information and Communications Technology Minister Aggrey Awori, who in the 1960s, as head of Uganda Television, had an office adjacent to Dr Adoko’s. “He spent time on literary pursuits…Other people did [the intelligence work] for him. He didn’t spend as much time [gathering intelligence].”

In April 2009, in a series of articles exploring the fall of Amin, journalist Timothy Kalyegira, citing the statements of an Obote-era military spy, reported that Dr Adoko secretly planned to topple Obote but was upstaged by Amin. According to this account, as told to Mr Kalyegira by Erisa Kanagwa, Dr Adoko, backed by British intelligence, was let down by a careless leak that allowed Amin to stage his own coup, fearing that Dr Adoko’s rise would herald a purge of certain elements in the military. “Amin’s was in fact a counter-coup,” Mr Kalyegira wrote. “This extraordinary new information, provided and verified by Kanagwa, indicates that Akena Adoko, Obote’s cousin and head of the GSU, had planned to overthrow Obote in a coup backed by the British.”

In this version of events, the British backed the man who would be the butcher of Uganda only after Dr Adoko’s plot failed. Dr Adoko was even more reclusive in his later years, rarely giving interviews and referring reporters to his old books. In 2007, when Sunday Monitor contacted him to give an interview for the series What I Know, he politely declined, saying he was fighting cancer.

Born in Akokoro, in the current Apac, Naphtali Akena Adoko excelled in class and was the recipient of several scholarships abroad. A great debater, he was a onetime president of the Uganda Law Society. Dr Adoko is survived by his widow, Imat Santa, and several children.