by Ravi Somaiya
About five hours later, a Rhodesian pilot in a Percival Provost propeller plane began slowly advancing to the west of Ndola, in the vicinity of one of the flashes in the sky the night before. As he scanned the flat, green fields, broken up with the occasional patch of darker jungle or tan-colored earth, he noticed a glint and a small burnt area. He descended to five thousand feet, where he could see more clearly. Two engines and a tail fin, smoking. Simultaneously, three charcoal burners reported the wreck at a forestry office. The Royal Ndola Police arrived at the crash site in Land Rovers at 3:55 p.m., about fifteen hours after the Albertina’s scheduled arrival time.
At night, the wreck had a peculiar eeriness, all shadows and flame and suggestion. By day, it was stripped bare by the sunshine, more mundane and more horrific. It looked like dozens of burnt, smoking tree trunks had been scooped by a giant hand into an untidy pile dotted with fragments of metal. The tail was behind that pile, pointing the wrong way.
The inner engines were next to the pile, having screwed themselves into the rubble. The outer engines had spun and tumbled away to the edges of the wreck zone. It smelled like death. And clouds of mopani flies were thick in the air.
The Albertina had crashed into a termite mound, about twelve feet of earth painstakingly turned to cement by millions of insects. It had first hit the tops of the trees, at a height of about seventy feet, about eight hundred feet away from that mound, with its engines under power, its flaps set for landing, and its left side apparently lower than its right.
The trees above had been shredded by the propellers, then crushed by the fuselage, to form a melange of metal and wood fragments in a long strip cut directly through the forest. After it hit the mound, the rest of the plane had cartwheeled 180 degrees around it, a torn shell gushing about twelve hundred gallons of fuel from its ruptured tanks over the wreckage. What had been about forty tons of aluminum alloy, china plates, foldout beds, European novels, and cipher machines, disintegrated.
The fuel had begun to burn, flashing hundreds of feet back along the trail it had left. The fire had been so hot that pieces of fused aluminum glowed red even now.
All of the bodies but two were burned. They no longer looked like people. They had started to decompose quickly in the jungle, and were covered with blankets or pieces of material from the wreckage to ward off the flies. One person was still on fire and had to be extinguished first.
Officers, all white Rhodesians, would have to pry the wedding rings from their blackened fingers in the hope of identifying them by the inscriptions inside. Any black Africans had been asked to search away from the wreck. Americans, too. Reporters who had started to arrive were kept at a distance.
Hammarskjöld was lying slightly away from the carnage. Though he was clearly dead, he looked untouched save for specks of blood on his face. His blue eyes, now lifeless, were still open. He was surrounded by playing cards. One of them, the ace of spades, was on his body.
Nearby, at the edge of the trail of destruction, an officer fanned someone or something. A gravely wounded survivor. Another policeman, with a first-aid kit, rushed over to help. The man was severely burned, and sunburned on his face, back, arms, and legs. He had head injuries and what looked to be a fractured ankle.
All he said was that his pain was drastic, and that he wanted water. The officers injected two ampoules of morphine, gave him water out of a metal container they found in the wreckage (after tasting it to make sure), and loaded him into an ambulance.
A police officer, sitting alongside for the bumpy journey, carefully emptied the man’s charred pockets, for examination and in order to pass on any effects: a wallet, containing a notebook; a comb in a leather case; a thick wad of cash that amounted to 2,860 Belgian Congo francs; and a passport, vehicle licenses, and UN identification in the name of Sergeant Harold Julien, thirty-six years old, formerly of the US Marine Corps and a veteran of the Korean War, now acting head of security for the United Nations Operation in the Congo.
They turned in to the Ndola Hospital, a low, white building with a Red Cross sign and a pristine lawn in front, about forty minutes after the police had first arrived on the scene. The chief surgeon was there to meet them and to rush Julien to a private ward. Forty minutes later, the doctors called in a detective. Despite what appeared to be serious injuries, Julien wanted to speak. So the detective entered his room as a phalanx of doctors and nurses retreated.
Julien kept his eyes closed but asked, “Where am I?”
“You’re in Northern Rhodesia,” the detective replied. “I am a British police officer. Can you tell me anything about what happened?”
Julien recognized that he was being addressed but said nothing. So the detective continued.
“We last heard of you over the runway at Ndola, and we didn’t hear anything more. What happened?”
“It blew up,” Julien said.
“Was this over the runway?”
“Yes.”
“What happened then?”
“There was great speed. Great speed.”
“What happened then?”
“Then there was the crash.” Julien slurred this time.
“What happened then?”
“There was a lot of small explosions all round.”
“How did you get out?”
“I pulled the emergency tab and I ran out.”
“What about the others?”
“They were just trapped.”
He lapsed into unconsciousness.
At around 4 a.m., Julien woke. “I am Sergeant Harold Julien, security officer to UNO,” he said, using an acronym for the United Nations operation. “Please inform Leopoldville of crash. Tell my wife and kids I’m alive before the casualty list is published. My wife is Maria Julien and she’s in Florida. Miami.”
The nurse noted that the precise way he spoke—the vital mission information first, and his personal information second—showed his training.
The nurses contacted Maria, Cuban-born and with a young son, Richard, to take care of. She began the long journey to Ndola.
Chapter 14
“Sparks, sparks in the sky”
The first inquiry into the crash—set up by the Rhodesian Federal Department of Civil Aviation—formally began the next day, on September 19, 1961.
The crash site was first cordoned off, and then surrounded by unforgiving, clinically bright floodlights. A team of thirteen began picking their way through the debris, human and mechanical, meticulously photographing, mapping, and collecting every piece of the wreckage that had not burned. When they were done, each piece was taken to a warehouse in Ndola and painstakingly laid out in its original place.
Only about 20 percent of the plane remained identifiable. The five tons of fused metal that had been recovered was broken, by hammer and steam hammer, into smaller fragments, about eight inches square, for visual and chemical examination.
Each piece of wreckage—“piece of fuselage with navigator’s desk light,” “sink and toilet”—was carefully labeled exactly where it was found. One wing, a rudder, and part of the tailplane were the only parts large enough to merit being drawn on. The bodies were marked with numbered circles.
It was nearly impossible to make sense of the fragments, to differentiate what had been smashed or burned by accident from signs of potential foul play. Over the following decades, the details the Rhodesian forensics team could map—a smear of parts and corpses—would become a resource and an agony for those determined to figure out the crash, the pieces placed together endlessly to form different patterns.
There had been no room in the morgue for all the dead. So a large marquee had been erected on the well-kept grounds of the hospital for pathologists to begin their work. They borrowed extra fridges for the bodies from a local company, Sunspan Bananas.1
Three specialists, using medical and dental records, and telephones and a telegraph machine to gather information, were busy identifying the charred remains, plotted carefully on the nascent map of
the wreck.
Vladimir Fabry, forty, a legal and political adviser, once a resistance fighter against the Nazis in his native Czechoslovakia, had been closest to Julien, at the back right corner of the wreck.
Harald Noork, whose birthday the crew had celebrated before the Albertina took off, was a few yards closer to the plane.
Sergeant Stig Olof Hjelte, one of the soldiers aboard, was found under the wing.
Heinrich Wieschhoff, who had advised the secretary-general on African affairs, lay within the bulk of the wrecked plane itself, as did Bill Ranallo, who had worked his way up from Hammarskjöld’s chauffeur to his head of security, general assistant, and friend.
The flight engineer, Nils Göran Wilhelmsson, and another of the soldiers, Francis Eivers, were discovered at the edges of a large piece of the burnt fuselage that contained the plane’s toilet. They were a few yards from the last soldier, Private Per Edvald Persson.
The flight crew—Captain Nils Erik Åhréus, Captain Lars Litton, and the flight captain, Per Hallonqvist—were found in the wreckage of the cockpit, as one would expect.
Near them, unexpectedly, were Alice Lalande, Linnér’s secretary, who was French Canadian, and a Haitian security official, Serge Barrau. There was no reason that one of them, let alone both, should have been anywhere near the cockpit. The only thing that obviously united the two among those aboard was a fluency in French.
Most of the bodies contained bullets—either 7.62mm NATO or 9mm, matching the ammunition aboard. But they did not bear the rifling marks indicating that they had passed through the barrel of a gun.
The pathologists, in consultation with ballistics experts, decided that the heat of the fire had set off ammunition and that it had exploded in every direction. It explained the holes in pieces of fuselage, too. In total, in the bodies and in the wreckage, they found 201 live rounds, 342 bullets, and 362 cartridge cases.
One of the bodies, that of the radio operator, Carl Erik Gabriel Rosén, was brought in later. It had been hidden under a piece of cabin fuselage. Rosén was also riddled with what appeared to be bullet holes. The officers making the search found a 9mm submachine gun nearby, and surmised that it might have been in his lap, perhaps in preparation for a hostile landing.
The Rhodesians, though professional and experienced, had a profound, and barely disguised, disdain for the UN and the observers it had sent to help. They resented the very suggestion that the crash might have been anything other than an accident.
On September 20, Knut Hammarskjöld, Dag’s nephew, arrived as a representative both of his uncle’s family and of the Swedish government. Knut, then thirty-nine and an executive at the European Free Trade Association, found an atmosphere of “organized disinterest.” It crossed his mind that Hammarskjöld had been an enemy to many Rhodesians—a man said to be taking their way of life.
Lord Alport, the British high commissioner to Salisbury and a staunch Rhodesian ally, had decided he and the Rhodesians needed to grab Hammarskjöld’s briefcase, which had lain next to the secretary-general in the wreckage, apparently unharmed.
He kept it for some time. His stated reason was to ensure that it was given quickly to either a member of Hammarskjöld’s family or a UN official. But when one senior official, Björn Egge, a Norwegian soldier who was the head of military intelligence for the UN in the Congo, drove after Alport’s car to secure it, Alport evaded him.
And Egge recalled another oddity that stayed with him for the rest of his life. In the mortuary at Ndola, a cool, dark room amid the tropical fug, he briefly viewed Hammarskjöld’s body. He swore until his death that he had seen a small, round hole in his forehead. A hole that was missing from pathology images he later received. He could never adequately explain the disparity.
His experience was echoed by Knut Hammarskjöld. Before he left Africa, a Rhodesian police officer took him aside. He handed over a manila envelope and said, “You may find these interesting.” The envelope contained photographs of his uncle’s body. When Knut shuffled through them, curious what the police officer had meant, he was shocked to see head injuries that were not visible on the official images.
Over the next six days, Julien drifted in and out of sedation. Some of the team of twenty-five nurses that took care of him in that time described him as incoherent. Others felt he was lucid, or at least obviously rational, but restless.
He had been through the unimaginable trauma of a plane crash, followed by hours of dehydration and sunburn. His kidneys were failing him. When he spoke, it was to ask for water. But he also seemed aware of what was happening around him. When nurses quietly discussed changing shift, he asked them not to leave.
And he was panicked by the sound of aircraft overhead. “Plane, plane,” he said on Thursday, September 21, three days after the crash, before he was reassured that he was safe.
He told another nurse, Angela McGrath, that he was the only one who got out. That the rest of those aboard were trapped. “We were on the runway when Mr. Hammarskjöld said to go back, then there was an explosion.”
“Sparks, sparks in the sky,” he said to another, on Friday, September 22. And then the name Bob, twice.
Maria arrived on the morning of Saturday, September 23, five days after the crash.
“Honey, take me home,” he said, later that day. “We must get out of here quickly. You will take me home?” She said she would.
He was anxious. “Where’s the book?” he asked. “The book! The book!” Maria did not know what he meant, but she reassured him that she had it, whatever it was. He relaxed.
An hour later Julien, the one person who both knew for sure what had happened to the Albertina and was willing to say, died.
Footnotes
1 It is not recorded, though it could be a matter of concern for banana eaters of the region at the time, whether the fridges were later returned to their original use.
PART TWO
In its purest form, “dead reckoning,” short for “deduced reckoning,” involves picking a compass heading and holding it until you reach the next waypoint, while using elapsed time to calculate your position…
—Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association of America
Chapter 15
“Next of kin”
George Ivan Smith, press representative for the UN and one of Hammarskjöld’s closest confidants, was supposed to have been aboard the Albertina. But by September 1961, he had been away from his family too often, on foreign assignments. So instead he was on vacation, approved by Hammarskjöld, on a road trip across America.
He heard the news on the car radio, on a long road through the bright desert in Arizona. Those who knew Ivan Smith1 well said that there was a George before that moment, garrulous and alpha, and a George afterward, more withdrawn and subdued. Ivan Smith looked, at first blush, the very cliché of a robust Australian. At forty-six, he had an intelligent gaze, a ruddy face under lustrous slicked hair, a thick neck, and an avuncular mustache. He naturally elicited trust and sympathy from others.
He was the son of a prison warden, George Franklin Smith, a former amateur boxing champion of Australia who had pioneered a kinder treatment of prisoners that we would now call rehabilitation. Franklin Smith was a big man, and a thoroughly Victorian father. Ivan Smith joked that until he had died, he had never noticed his father had a bald spot on the top of his head. He had never seen him from that angle.
He demanded that his son, too, become a big man. One of the attractions at the annual agricultural show near his father’s jail in Goulburn, about 120 miles from Sydney, was a boxing troupe, which always featured an aging former national champion. “Is anyone here brave enough,” the barker would call out, “to fight this man?” Ivan Smith knew that if nobody spoke up, he would hear his father’s voice saying, “Yes, here is a challenger—my son.” He realized later in life that he’d been knocked out by more retired champions than nearly anyone else alive.
As a teenager he had become addicted to alcohol, and after a stint i
n recovery had attended Sydney University, near the family home, and then Cambridge University, on the other side of the world. He had been intimidated by the pitiless condescension there, and had felt profoundly alone (signs in pubs and restaurants at the time still read NO AUSTRALIANS as well as NO BLACKS).
Ivan Smith craved action, and to withstand real pressures. But he was also a sensitive soul who read poetry at night, and who medicated bouts of depression with fizzing glasses of gin and tonic, occasionally balanced on the dashboard of his car as he drove.
So he became a journalist—that last refuge of the vaguely talented—for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. He rose to head its foreign arm, Radio Australia, and covered World War II for the BBC, where he developed a friendly acquaintance with George Orwell.
Ivan Smith was appointed the UN’s head of external affairs in 1947. He had a deft and witty way of neither lying, nor revealing anything he didn’t want to reveal, that endeared him to both his colleagues and the press. But he came alive in the job in 1953, when Hammarskjöld became secretary-general. Here, at last, was someone who was both tough and sensitive. “I suddenly realized I was in the presence of a very great man,” he said of their first meeting. “His background I knew nothing about but the presence he carried with him was one of authority and of genius.”
He spent most of his time attempting to correct mistakes in the way the UN and Hammarskjöld were portrayed. He assiduously explained, in letter after letter and meeting after meeting with reporter after reporter, the careful and nuanced steps required for international diplomacy. When they ignored him and printed the sugary story instead, he did it all over again.