by Ravi Somaiya
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 by Ravi Somaiya
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Somaiya, Ravi, author.
Title: The golden thread : the Cold War mystery surrounding the death of Dag Hammarskjöld / Ravi Somaiya.
Other titles: Cold War mystery surrounding the death of Dag Hammarskjöld
Description: First edition. | New York : Twelve, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019058754 | ISBN 9781455536542 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781455536535 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Hammarskjöld, Dag, 1905–1961—Death and burial. | United Nations—Congo (Democratic Republic) | Congo (Democratic Republic)—History—Civil War, 1960–1965. | Africa—Foreign relations—1945–1960. | Africa—Foreign relations—1960– | Cold War.
Classification: LCC D839.7.H3 S63 2020 | DDC 341.23092—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019058754
ISBNs: 978-1-4555-3654-2 (hardcover), 978-1-4555-3653-5 (ebook)
E3-20200523-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Select Characters
Author’s Note
Epigraph
Introduction: “When they killed him”
PART ONE
Prologue: “Godzilla”
1. “That’s independence”
2. “Swindled, cheated and abused”
3. “The galaxy of good and evil talents”
4. “The inevitable result will at best be chaos”
5. “You there! I am a witch”
6. “Very straightforward action”
7. “Stateless soldier of fortune”
8. “No half-measures”
9. “We are all dying”
10. “Ja må han leva”
11. “Overhead Ndola, descending, confirm”
12. “A light pinkish red”
13. “The ace of spades”
14. “Sparks, sparks in the sky”
PART TWO
15. “Next of kin”
16. “Why, if it isn’t that nice Mr. Smith”
17. “It was not a normal flying accident”
18. “Black hole”
19. “Position L”
20. “Other and more logical explanations”
21. “I have never been hit so hard in my life before”
22. “Oh my God, they’ve done it!”
23. “I need your help desperately on this”
24. “The truth about the events”
25. “Mr. X”
26. “If you refuse we have orders to use force”
27. “Cornered on a patch of gold”
28. “We are going to teach them”
29. “The page is gone”
30. “A state secret”
31. “Never believe anything until it is officially denied”
32. “I’ve hit it. There are flames”
33. “Kaleidoscope”
34. “Operation to be known as Celeste”
PART THREE
35. “For repair of your tumble drier. Phone Nick on 970890”
36. “We did it”
37. “Flail chest”
38. “Buzzed”
39. “Other interference”
40. “He would return and attack again”
Epilogue
Photos
Acknowledgments
Discover More
About the Author
Source Notes
For Caroline
And for my parents, Raj and Hershi
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Select Characters
(in alphabetical order)
Cyrille Adoula—prime minister of the Congo, 1961–64.
Beukels—a Belgian pilot who says he flew as a mercenary for Katangese forces.
Larry Devlin—the Central Intelligence Agency’s Leopoldville chief of station, 1960–67.
Colonel René Faulques—a French soldier who led Katangese rebel forces.
Dag Hammarskjöld1—the second secretary-general of the United Nations, 1953–61.
George Ivan Smith—a UN press representative and close friend of Hammarskjöld.
Harold Julien—an American soldier, acting head of security for the United Nations Operation in the Congo.
Joseph Kasavubu—the first democratically elected prime minister of the Congo.
Claude de Kemoularia—a French former assistant to Hammarskjöld and diplomat turned adviser and executive.
John F. Kennedy—president of the United States of America, 1961–63.
Nikita Khrushchev—leader of the Soviet Union, 1953–64.
King Leopold II—a Belgian royal who colonized, then brutalized, the Congo.
Patrice Lumumba—the first democratically elected president of the Congo.
Harold Macmillan—prime minister of the United Kingdom, 1957–63.
Joseph Désiré Mobutu—head of the Congolese army who eventually seized power and installed himself as a dictator.
Godefroid Munongo—interior minister of Katanga, in close contact with Katanga’s Belgian advisers.
Conor Cruise O’Brien—an Irish diplomat, politician, and writer who was Hammarskjöld’s representative in Katanga.
Mohamed Chande Othman—a Tanzanian jurist appointed in 2015 by the United Nations to reexamine the Hammarskjöld case.
Daphne Park (later Baroness Park of Monmouth)—the British Secret Intelligence Service’s head of station in Leopoldville, 1959–61.
QJWIN—a safecracker named Jose Mankel employed by the CIA for assassination recruitment and related activities in Leopoldville.
Bengt Rösiö2—a Swedish diplomat and investigator.
Charles Southall—a US naval pilot seconded to the National Security Agency.
Jean-François Thiriart—a Belgian optometrist and a fascist ideologue and recruiter.
Harry S Truman—president of the United States of America, 1945–53.
Moïse Tshombe—a Katangese businessman appointed leader of the breakaway state.
Bo Virving—a Swedish pilot and investigator.
Roy Welensky—the last prime minister of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.
Susan Williams—a British academic, author, and investigator.
WIROGUE—a forger and former bank robber turned CIA agent in Leopoldville.
Real name either David Tzitzichivili or David de Panasket.
Footnotes
1 Pronounced, roughly, ham-ar-heuld.
2 Pronounced, roughly, reu-scheu.
Author’s Note
All narrative is a kind of benevolent lie. In telling a story so it’s intelligible, an author must, of necessity, leave some things out and focus on others. I have certainly done so here, and I apologize in advance to anyone who feels that their role in the story of Dag Hammarskjöld’s life and death has been omitted or underplayed.
In an effort to mitigate that, I have worked to place things in context and to credit those who have worked so assiduously before me to unearth original materials. I have used dialogue only where it was precisely recalled and noted by the participants themselves. All descriptions are drawn from the recollections or accounts of those present or from contemporaneous photographs and video.
This is a story with so many twists, and so many duplicitous characters, that unraveling it drove me nearly to madness. But as with all enduring puzzles, it has at its heart a simple question: What happened to Hammarskjöld’s plane in the skies over what is now Zambia in the few minutes between its last contact with the control tower and its fatal crash landing?
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending
—T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages,” Four Quartets
Introduction
“When they killed him”
On the morning of Tuesday, September 19, 1961, Harry S Truman woke before the sun was up. He made himself breakfast, lost in thought, then bathed and dressed in a dapper gray suit, a dark-blue tie, and a gray felt hat.
He picked up his cane, pulled the door shut quietly behind him, and set out through his hometown, now home again, Independence, Missouri, on the outskirts of Kansas City.
Truman, moving slowly against the rising morning light, was seventy-seven. He had been out of the Oval Office for eight years, and had grown into the role of former president. Living quietly with his wife on a modest pension, in the peaceful Victorian home their daughter had been born in thirty-five years earlier, suited him.
He had visited the White House again several times in recent months, at the invitation of its new incumbent, John F. Kennedy. He was gratified to have been taken into his confidence.
But he visibly preferred his freedom to the constraints of high office. The eyes behind his thick glasses, amused and sharp, had come alive since his retirement. A Midwestern tendency toward bluntness had been elevated to a principle.
That morning, as he took his usual turn around the town’s peaceful square, past the red-brick courthouse topped with a white clock tower, and toward Bundschu’s department store, he looked unusually grave.
Truman had been sworn into office in 1945. He had helped found the United Nations that same year, as a bulwark against the kind of war that he never wanted to see again. And then he had watched as his grand hopes for peace had turned to global suspicion, antipathy, and scheming.
Few understood better how the Cold War worked. And on that morning he could not shake the idea that it had taken a particularly evil turn.
He arrived at his presidential library, a modernist complex built on a hill overlooking the Kansas City skyline. It was home to exhibits that included a replica of his old desk, complete with the little sign that said THE BUCK STOPS HERE. He climbed the broad staircase, passed through a colonnade of elegant white pillars and a set of glass doors, and made for his office. He had thinking to do, and calls to make.
Later in the day, he emerged for a formal ceremony. Soldiers of the Thirty-Fifth Infantry Division, Truman’s old World War I unit, had raised $6,903.10 to donate to the library. Truman stood next to the division’s major general, both men behind a podium and in front of a blue curtain, as the press photographers’ magnesium bulbs flashed. He was transparently touched to collect the check, along with a flag that the division had paraded in November 1945 after the war.
He also looked, for all the world, angry. Unprompted, as he drew the ceremony to a close, he expressed his sorrow at the death of Dag Hammarskjöld, the second secretary-general of the United Nations, who had died a day or so previously while attempting to mediate a savage war in the Congo.
But he could not restrain himself there. As the soldiers and reporters began to disperse, he made a side remark.
“Mr. Hammarskjöld was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said ‘when they killed him.’”
The journalists pressed him to explain further.
“That’s all I’ve got to say on the matter. Draw your own conclusions.”
One reporter, likely aware of Truman’s connection with Kennedy, asked whether he had any inside information. Truman walked away, ignoring the question, thinking perhaps that he had already said too much.
He had little to fear. His aside made only the bottom paragraphs of a short United Press International wire report. The local Independence Examiner primly elided the incident.
At around the same time in the Sarek National Park in the north of Sweden, an otherworldly landscape of gray-brown mountains reflected in icy blue lakes, an indigenous Swedish child, Laila, of the Sami people, was visiting the community store.
As soon as she and her parents stepped inside the building, a sturdy hut, painted red, that still smelled of sawn timber, she froze and stared at a shelf of newspapers and magazines. She saw pictures, on each front page, of the man she had met earlier in the year when she was playing outside her family kåta—a conical tent made from peat moss and long branches.
It had been a frosty morning, and he had walked past, hiking under the cold blue sub-Arctic sky, and asked her about herbs growing in the area. She talked in an excited babble, and he looked amused. She liked the man. He could see things, she felt, and he really listened when she talked. He had danced, terribly, swaying, his legs all over the place, to show her how the children danced in Africa, where he had been recently.
Before he left, he said that she and her family should visit him at his work in New York, where she could meet children from across the world. And a letter had arrived a few weeks later, inviting them all to the United Nations. But her parents had been too busy tending the family’s reindeer, and they could not go immediately.
Now the headlines all said versions of the same thing: DAG FOUND DEAD IN PLANE. DAG HAMMARSKJÖLD KILLED IN THE CONGO. HAMMARSKJÖLD DEAD. And each pictured, in black-and-white halftone that turned to dots when she looked closer, the wreckage of his plane, the Albertina.
About five thousand miles away, in the Congo, as a guard of honor escorted Hammarskjöld’s coffin across the airport for transportation back to his native Sweden, hundreds of black Congolese stood in massed ranks to pay tribute. They were, in a nation marked by near-constant noise and color utterly silent.
In the days that followed, the Congolese protested in the streets, decrying Britain and its prime minister, Harold Macmillan, and America and Kennedy, whom they felt sure were behind the death.
The new Congolese prime minister, Cyrille Adoula, had his own theory. Hammarskjöld, he said, had “fallen victim to the shameless intrigues of the great financial powers of the West” and their thirst for his country’s boundless mineral riches.
“How ignoble is this assassination,” he said, “not the first of its kind perpetrated by the moneyed powers. Mr. Hammarskjöld was the victim of certain financial circles for whom a human life is not equal to a gram of copper or uranium.”
Outside the United Nations building, a monolithic skyscraper overlooking the East River on Manhattan’s East Side, a smaller group of protesters had gathered. Their fury was undimmed by the miserable rain pelting from a mutinous gray sky. Their placards asked, WHO SHOT DOWN DAG’S PLANE? and answered themselves with a reference to the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev: DIAL K FOR MURDER.
> Inside, thirty-eight floors above the bedraggled protesters, Hammarskjöld’s staff had gathered in his elegant suite of offices, decorated with paintings and sculptures that he had chosen himself. Some discussed the mocking invitations they had received from wealthy white Europeans living in Africa to attend lavish parties they were throwing to celebrate his death.
Others reflected, in a kind of impromptu vigil, on the rarity of Hammarskjöld’s awareness that humankind had a tendency to get stuck in ridiculous and destructive predicaments of its own making, and his certainty that there were always solutions to those predicaments.
They knew he would have considered the tributes to his life and work inappropriate and unseemly. But also that none really captured him. Because Hammarskjöld was, fundamentally, an honest man. And honest men are difficult to define.
In upstate New York, at the modest house Hammarskjöld had kept for hiking weekends, his colleagues found papers filled with his neat, urgent handwriting. A diary of sorts. In the early 1940s, years before he was to think in any meaningful way about the Congo, he had written: “There is only one path out of the steamy dense jungle where the battle is fought over glory and power and advantage—one escape from the snares and obstacles you yourself have set up. And that is—to accept death.”
Two official inquiries, conducted shortly after the plane crash, ruled it was likely an accident. Pilot error or an act of God. Hammarskjöld was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the same year he died—one of only two occasions on which it has been awarded posthumously.1
And that is where this story might have rested, a neat bow tied on top, his name remembered for the Manhattan plaza that would be named in his honor. Except for the work of a band of ingenious devotees who never believed the official verdict, and who kept digging for information. This book draws on their accounts, and archives in America, Britain, Sweden, and elsewhere.
It is also built on the experiences of the diplomats, soldiers, spies, and ordinary Congolese people who lived the very peculiar, very bloody, forgotten war that seized the Congo for five years between 1960 and 1965.