by Ravi Somaiya
The book counseled the use of terrorism as a weapon of war. Most notably, it advised turning local residents against the state, and making them believe that only the terrorists, or in this case the mercenaries, would protect them. It had worked flawlessly in Katanga. Its residents, mostly white Europeans, occasionally even stopped to cheer outbreaks of fighting, and jeer their enemies, as if they were attending a sporting event.
Trinquier was expelled from Katanga in March 1961. But one of his most avid students, a brilliant soldier, Colonel René Faulques,2 stayed on and became, effectively but without any formal notification, the leader of all mercenary forces in Katanga. Faulques, lean and scarred, had headed the armed branch of French intelligence and became notorious, even admired, for his role at Villa Susini as one of Trinquier’s “specialists.”
By August 1961, he had established a command post, in the middle of Elisabethville, from which he conducted a meticulous campaign against the UN and the forces of reunification. His headquarters was surrounded with sandbags and covered over with camouflage nets. Inside, the walls were covered with large-scale maps of Katanga. Dozens of walkie-talkie radios, on chairs, on the floor, or hanging from beams by a loop, crackled and chattered. It was the nerve center of the battle.
Faulques had at his disposal thousands of mercenaries. Some, like his French colleagues, were well trained. Dick Browne, a former British Special Forces soldier whose brother, Percy, was a conservative member of Parliament, oversaw one group. Its members spoke of looting ivory and killing any passing black Congolese they didn’t like the look of.
Others were cowboys seeking a payday and stories to tell women in bars. They included Hubert Julian, also known as the Black Eagle of Harlem, a fifty-eight-year-old black American adventurer who had once been styled a colonel as the head of the Emperor Haile Selassie’s air force. He was eventually ejected for supplying arms to Tshombe. And at least one, a former Wehrmacht lieutenant named Siegfried Muller, wore his German World War II Iron Cross medal proudly on his chest at all times.
They were armed with Belgian FN rifles, and mortars, and whatever else they could lay their hands on. And all of them, under Faulques’s command, moved fast, in signature jeeps with a Browning .30-caliber machine gun in the back. One had a skull and crossbones mounted to the front, made of real human bones.
The jewel in Faulques’ crown was a Fouga Magister jet fighter with rapier-thin wings and a distinctive V-shaped tail. Nothing the UN had could match it. And so it had become a kind of god in Katanga, omniscient and omnipotent, screaming over the horizon like death from above.
The Congolese government had changed its leader once more. Cyrille Adoula, a moderate approved of by the US, had taken over from Lumumba. In late August, he asked the UN to intercede once and for all, to expel the mercenary forces from Katanga so that he could begin to reunify the Congo.
On August 24, 1961, Hammarskjöld issued an ordinance—a kind of statement of intent—to Tshombe saying that the UN would remove all non-Congolese mercenaries and advisers unless he made arrangements to evacuate them voluntarily.
In response, Radio Katanga, a powerful propaganda force, began broadcasting violently anti-UN rhetoric in an attempt to inflame the locals. It declared “total war against the UN dogs” and advised residents to “look as peaceful citizens in the day” but to “kill UN soldiers one by one” at night. And Katangese officials spread rumors that the UN soldiers would not themselves fight the Katangese, but would instead fly in thousands of lawless and violent Congolese army troops who could be expected to rape and torture.
At 5 a.m. on August 28, 1961, the operation, code-named Rumpunch, commenced. The UN seized Radio Katanga, the headquarters of the Katangese gendarmerie, the post office, and the telephone exchange. They arrested eighty-one foreign mercenary commanders.
But the diplomatic corps in Elisabethville, from Belgium, Britain, France, and other nations, insisted they be allowed to control the process of repatriating their citizens. Instead, the diplomats just let the mercenaries go after “advising” them to leave.
The toughest mercenaries went into hiding. Gordon Hunt, an unofficial British agent in the Congo, met two fugitive French soldiers and wrote an account that was eventually released by WikiLeaks decades later.
“There are between 100-150 of us in this area who have managed to evade the expulsion order of the United Nations,” they told him. They had the blessing of the Katangese leadership, and their advisers in Belgium, the soldier said, for positive action against the UN.
They wanted to ask permission from Rhodesia to establish a series of commando training units. Their aim: “to embarrass the UN by a form of guerrilla warfare, and, if necessary, sabotage.”3
After Operation Rumpunch, the volume of chatter about attacks on the UN and its senior officials increased markedly. A Belgian named André Crémer, who had served for the Katangese under the command of the French mercenaries, sought the protection of the UN after falling out with his comrades. He said that he had been assigned to murder senior UN officials. He had, before his escape, selected twenty-four soldiers—he said he favored the rougher, less educated ones who would express less difficulty with their task.
In early September, a pretty woman with a black eye named Thérèse Erfield had also come to a UN representative in Katanga to seek protection. She said she was engaged in an affair with Henri-Maurice Lasimone, the second in command of the French mercenary group.
Lasimone had beaten her, Erfield said. And then she revealed that his group had planned to attack UN establishments and personnel with plastic explosive and silent weapons. They even had an assassination list.
It was hard to verify the accounts. And Hammarskjöld had realized that Katanga had a strange effect on people. After a few months the place was like a fever dream—urgent, terrifying, arbitrary, and too vivid.
He had appointed Conor Cruise O’Brien, an Irish diplomat and writer, to oversee operations in Katanga. But he had been warned that O’Brien was, though brilliant, prone to both the ego and the strong emotions that afflict writers. And Hammarskjöld began to worry that O’Brien and his other men on the ground might give in to the myriad temptations to retaliate.
His officials were, indeed, both angry and planning a response. A new operation they called Morthor—the Hindi word for “twist and break”—was designed, if necessary, “to create a psychological shock in the population, which will reduce possibilities of armed opposition.”
The UN got warrants from Leopoldville for the arrest of Tshombe and his senior ministers on charges of torture and murder. And they planned to seize not only the same pieces of infrastructure as they had bloodlessly in Rumpunch, but also the Katangese secret police headquarters. Their plan, with the slogan “No half-measures,” was to end the secession in one go. They felt it would take about two hours.
On September 12, 1961, Hammarskjöld himself left New York for the Congo. He departed, on a special plane, shortly before Morthor was scheduled to begin. He hoped to arrive in triumph the next day as the operation wrapped up and the process of healing could begin.
Footnotes
1 It was also gray.
2 The name sometimes appears as Roger Faulques.
3 The British agent passed the proposal on to Sir Roy Welensky, the leader of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. His response is not recorded. But it certainly fit with his priorities.
Chapter 9
“We are all dying”
Violent men present a paradox for those who seek peace. If they cannot be persuaded, then the only way to defeat them is with violence. Which means ceding the moral authority to act in the first place.
It remains unclear whether Hammarskjöld fell victim to this paradox. Under the strain of Katanga, O’Brien noticed, his grave and regal manner sometimes gave way to a startling tension, or anger, as if the mask had slipped to reveal a fevered conscience. He attributed it, at first, to the strains of dealing with such a fraught conflict.
/> But over time he began to suspect that Hammarskjöld could not bear what he asked of himself. “So high and unreal a concept,” O’Brien wrote later, “so tense and exigent a conscience, must have made the realities of flesh and blood and history—and the making of practical political calculations which could not afford to be always so very lofty—something of a torture.”
The record of what Hammarskjöld knew of Morthor and when is muddled. Later, even under pressure, he refused to blame any of his subordinates for what followed, or detail their actions. The official account says that he was aware in general terms that his deputies in Katanga were pushing forward with attempts to end secession, but was not expecting such a violent operation.
Others suggest that, frustrated by the lack of a peaceful solution in the Congo, he resorted to violence himself in the name of justice. He must have known, that argument goes, what Operation Morthor would bring. It is certainly the case that he could have stopped the operation as soon as it began, but did not.
Morthor started at 4 a.m. on September 13, 1961, in the blue dark of the predawn. A company of about a hundred Indian Gurkhas, the elite fighters of the UN forces, tense and precise, moved toward the post office, a white building in the center of Elisabethville that served as a communications hub for all of Katanga. At the same moment, another company was walking quietly but purposefully to the radio station. And two Swedish platoons—or about eighty soldiers—were doing the same outside the home of Godefroid Munongo, Katanga’s interior minister and the official most closely linked to its Belgian advisers. They had Congolese flags ready to run up in a gesture of victory as soon as they had seized these key points.
Tshombe and Munongo had said they would resist any attempts to interfere with Katanga’s communications or military by force. They had said that before, though, and UN troops had found no resistance on the ground. But Faulques was prepared this time. Katangese soldiers, under his command, were already dug in at each key location. He had moved his headquarters from Elisabethville to Kolwezi, a mining town that effectively belonged to Union Minière, and was outside the control of the UN.
The UN soldiers set up portable loudspeakers. Their message crackled into the morning in French and Swahili, the lingua franca of Africa. It was the same at the post office, the radio station, and Munongo’s house. You are surrounded, they said. We do not seek to disarm you, only to take control of these locations.
About thirty Katangese paratroops were fortified into the post office. Their reply was a burst of fire from two machine guns on the roof. The Gurkhas, with armored cars in support, ran into an alley and entered the building. They fought room-to-room, throwing in a grenade, waiting for the shattering jolt and the dust and blood to blow through the door, and clearing each in turn with submachine guns. The New York Times correspondent there, David Halberstam, phoned in to the post office. Someone answered. He said, “We are all dying.”
By 8 a.m., the battle for the key points was over. The Gurkhas had filed Katangese prisoners out of the post office. The building was filled with smashed furniture, abandoned weapons and equipment, and the dead and bleeding bodies of soldiers. The white Europeans of Elisabethville, some former officers in the Katangese army, stood outside jeering the UN.
Skirmishes continued through the day and into the night. Morthor had been planned as a swift bloodless foray that would help end a violent secession. A violation of peace only in principle. But it had quickly devolved to wild and bloody fighting. There were reports that one UN soldier had been killed by sniper fire from the Belgian embassy at a distance of 150 yards. The Belgians denied it.
In the middle of the chaos, reported one mercenary, Faulques would be “grey with fatigue but still completely in charge of the situation.” He would “rush from radio to radio barking orders or gathering information. The radio sets, each on a different frequency, were his link with the key points and mobile fireforces scattered throughout the city.”
His soldiers fought from behind low brick garden walls and hedges, running across manicured lawns as though they were battlefields. They fought from crudely armored cars, their weld lines visible, parked on the empty streets. They fired their guns at UN soldiers from inside workshops and on rooftops, across parks and golf courses. The haze of gun smoke hung in the heavy air, with a strong smell of cordite, until it looked like a thin fog. Above them, in the incongruously cheery blue sky, the Fouga jet fighter, piloted by a Belgian named Magain who insisted he flew best while drunk, strafed and bombed at will.
He bombed UN headquarters. He bombed UN soldiers coming to the aid of an Irish troop that was besieged in Jadotville, which left them isolated, outgunned, for six days.1 His attacks caused one UN plane to crash-land, kicking up clouds of dust and burnt rubber, at a nearby air base.
Jittery and paranoid UN soldiers opened fire on a Red Cross ambulance, wounding a medic in uniform. A reporter for the BBC and a cameraman for NBC were hit by stray bullets, too.
When a car filled with Katangese gendarmes, an informal part of the fighting forces, approached the post office, the UN opened fire. “Two of the policemen had been killed instantly, two more were dying, and a fifth was walking dazedly away, wounded in the arm,” Halberstam witnessed. “Some Europeans followed the wounded man, shouting at him: Why don’t you fight? Why do you leave your men? Fight, coward!”
Life stopped in Elisabethville. The streets were deserted. Between thirty and two hundred were dead, mostly Katangese, and scores more were wounded. Tshombe and Munongo had fled to Rhodesia, under Welensky’s protection. Tshombe said in a statement that the UN had promised not to move against the Katangese government but had tricked him.
Hammarskjöld landed in Leopoldville on September 13, as scheduled, hours after Morthor had begun. The Congolese ministers who greeted him on the tarmac, including the new prime minister Cyrille Adoula, were jubilant, and emphasized that the UN had acted on their wishes. “The Katanga secession is over,” one told a reporter anonymously. “We have fulfilled our promise to reunify the Congo.”
Hammarskjöld himself refused to comment to the gathered press. But he feared as he watched it unfold that the UN had gone too far. Welensky’s Rhodesian Federation had sent troops, armored cars, and planes to the border, and threatened total war with the UN if Hammarskjöld did not withdraw his soldiers. Belgium had compared his peacekeepers to Nazis. A New York Times editorial pondered where his use of force would stop. Would the UN become an international army, making war for peace?
In London, Harold Macmillan had been handed a report on Morthor and its aftermath:
There have been a good many casualties and grave atrocities. Hammarskjöld has either blundered, or his agents have acted without his authority… Unless we and the Americans act quickly and resolutely, we shall have undone in a week all we have done—at huge expense—in a year. Congo will be handed to Russia on a plate. The Union Minière properties will be “nationalized” and run by Russian Communists, and a most dangerous situation created in Africa—as well as great financial and moral blow to the West and especially to European civilization.
It was the worst possible outcome, Macmillan thought. If the Congo collapsed because of the UN, it was eminently possible that one of the Congolese officials who had taken Soviet money and Soviet guns might seize the country. He dropped the report on the green leather desktop and asked to be connected with John F. Kennedy in the White House.
Kennedy, after returning from his daily trip to the White House swimming pool, had just met with his advisers on Africa in the Oval Office when Macmillan’s call reached the Resolute desk. The older man had pulled no punches. And Kennedy decided to defer to his opinion. The two resolved to apply pressure to Hammarskjöld.
The overt message they sent was that Britain and America funded the UN, and could stop anytime they wanted. Macmillan had also decided that he would deny Hammarskjöld’s request for jet fighters to protect UN officials and to help the UN counter the Fouga in Katanga. Hammarskjöld coul
d only guess what the governments had done covertly.2
He sent a message to Washington. “It is better for the UN to lose the support of the US because it is faithful to laws and principles than to survive as an agent whose activities are geared to political purposes.” But he knew that his grand words meant little now.
Hammarskjöld asked for a meeting with Tshombe. If he could isolate the Katangese leader, away from his mercenary advisers, Hammarskjöld hoped Tshombe could be persuaded to agree to a cease-fire. Tshombe agreed to the conference, to be held at a tiny airfield called Ndola, inside Rhodesian territory.
The summit that could end the war would take place in the minute and shabby office of a colonial airport manager, on Sunday, September 17, 1961. In Elisabethville, a plane—a DC-6 named the Albertina—was readied for Hammarskjöld’s mission.
Footnotes
1 The subject of the book and movie The Siege of Jadotville.
2 The UN has no spies.
Chapter 10
“Ja må han leva”
Nobody knows for sure how the Albertina was first attacked. We know it happened the day before it crashed, probably at Elisabethville airfield, a small runway of lit asphalt squares in the middle of empty acres of dark Congolese savanna.
It must have been shortly before 4 a.m. on September 17, 1961, as the stray gunshots of Morthor echoed and the plane departed to pick up Hammarskjöld. And the most likely explanation is a mercenary somewhere in the moonlit scrub, armed with a slim black Belgian FN assault rifle.
Through its telescopic sight, his circle of vision must have caught the UN soldiers dotted across the complex in their matching blue hats, concentrated near the hangars that housed their planes. He would have noted with a grim thrill that there were more of them than usual and, if he shared the common reflex of his mercenary colleagues, he probably began to catalog their races.