by Ravi Somaiya
Ivan Smith was one of the few who accompanied Hammarskjöld on both his diplomatic missions and his long walks. In pictures, the two men often mirror each other’s body language. When they arrived in Cairo for a summit, one newspaper described Ivan Smith as Mr. Fluid, and Hammarskjöld as Mr. Flexible, because they both often used the words in press conferences. They adopted the nicknames in correspondence to each other.
When the BBC asked Ivan Smith for background on Hammarskjöld for a documentary, Ivan Smith wrote a lyrical note, explaining that Hammarskjöld saw the world in his own way. For him, music, painting, literature, diplomacy, and war were all of a piece—different expressions of the same humanity. After he sent it, Ivan Smith began to worry that it was too personal. So he showed it to the secretary-general. Hammarskjöld sat silent. Ivan Smith worried he was about to be fired. Eventually he said, “You are the first person who has understood this about me.”
After Hammarskjöld’s death, Ivan Smith returned immediately to work in New York. While Hammarskjöld had been alive, many at the UN had resented his relationship with the secretary-general. Now they showed their disdain in frosty gestures and quiet contempt.
Others were more generous. He found a spate of letters, from those who understood his loss, on his desk. “Somehow you have always seemed to me to be the SG’s next of kin,” read one. “You must feel it so very much,” it concluded. “I sincerely hope you will find some consolation in the many fond memories you have of him,” ended another.
But consolation can never be found in memories alone. He wrote a flurry of letters—to the prime minister of Sweden, to the BBC and the Times of London—to defend Hammarskjöld’s legacy, arrange memorials and donations, and correct errors.
Ivan Smith collected press clippings. Among them was a torrent of tributes from world leaders, their frustrations forgotten. Macmillan described him as “a world servant who has pursued his duty with courage, single-mindedness and devotion.” Kennedy ordered all flags on US government buildings and installations to be flown at half-mast.
The American president spoke, too, at the UN. “We meet in an hour of grief and challenge,” his address opened. “Dag Hammarskjöld is dead. But the United Nations lives on. His tragedy is deep in our hearts, but the task for which he died is at the top of our agenda. A noble servant for peace is gone. But the quest for peace lies before us.”
In the New York Herald Tribune, Walter Lippmann concluded that Hammarskjöld had been a peculiarly pioneering figure. He appeared docile, Lippmann wrote, but had taken extravagant risks to prevent a race war in Katanga from becoming entangled with the burgeoning Cold War. “If the world is not ready for what Hammarskjöld felt compelled to try in the Congo, it is also true, I hate to say, that this present world is not ready for the kind of man Hammarskjöld was,” he wrote.
Peace negotiations with Katanga did, in fact, go ahead despite the crash, out of a fear that Hammarskjöld’s death might escalate an already bloody war. A tentative cease-fire was agreed to on September 21.
When Hammarskjöld’s body was brought back to Uppsala, one hundred thousand Swedes lined the streets to welcome him home for the last time. They marched to the mournful sound of drums. Some held flaming torches aloft to light the way. Reporters described a strange hush, as though the entire nation had fallen silent. He was buried next to his father and mother, in a quiet graveyard near the castle in which he had grown up.
Ivan Smith also began to piece together what was known of the crash. He had to be able to answer questions from the press in New York about what was quickly becoming an international mystery.
A Democratic lawmaker from New York had introduced a bill in the US Senate that offered a $50,000 reward for information “leading to the identification of any person or group subsequently shown to have been responsible for the death of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld.”
Newspapers around the world puzzled over the delay in beginning a search for the Albertina. They wondered in print why Hammarskjöld had been forced to fly without fighter plane protection and aired wild accusations of plots by the British and others. One official told reporters that “nobody within the UN believes the theory that the crash was caused by an accident.”
Stories that would not have been news previously—like two UN planes being fired on in Katanga—were suddenly worth the column inches. Kennedy’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger, refused to divulge what the president had been told about the crash, and he would not comment on the reports that sabotage might have been a factor.
The Rhodesians, meanwhile, were briefing reporters in Ndola that the crash did not look like an act of aggression. They also anonymously dismissed reports of Julien’s hospital statements that alleged there had been an explosion. “The uninformed insistence in overseas newspapers that Hammarskjöld’s death is a result of foul play is causing considerable bitterness here,” a Rhodesian government spokesman said.
Ivan Smith, with eyes relatively fresh to Katanga, had begun to notice things himself as he worked through the clippings and received briefings from within the UN. He found out that Union Minière’s communication systems—the most sophisticated in the country—were being used by the Katangese mercenaries. And that the mercenary fighters had been given access to the company’s sophisticated workshops in order to build and repair equipment. He began to suspect that the company and the mercenaries were connected, like a political party and a terrorist group.
“I have such strong and curious feelings about it all,” he said in one letter, “that after very careful thoughts I have decided to transfer from this work here and to move to work for the UN in Africa. In the first instance I am going to the Congo.”
Ivan Smith was appointed head of civilian operations in Katanga. He said a temporary goodbye to his wife, Mary, at their home in upstate New York. Both had children from previous marriages that were only recently into adulthood, and they had planned this time as a belated honeymoon. Instead he departed for the most chaotic spot on earth, just a few days after Hammarskjöld had died.
Footnotes
1 Both names made up his last name, without hyphen.
Chapter 16
“Why, if it isn’t that nice Mr. Smith”
A few days after he arrived in Elisabethville, Ivan Smith and some UN colleagues were assigned to accompany a visiting American senator to a reception at the American consulate. As dusk fell on an evening in late September 1961, they approached the consulate, an elegant house draped in dense pink bougainvillea, in a convoy of cars.
The senator, Thomas Dodd, a former Nuremberg prosecutor and FBI agent with patrician white hair, was a staunch supporter of Tshombe. He felt the Katangese leader was a true warrior against Communism.1 As a token of his appreciation, Tshombe had instructed dancers to hide in the yard of the house to greet the special guest and his wife.
As the cars pulled up, the women emerged from the gloaming and began to sway and chant. Their vividly colored cotton dresses and headdresses dipped in and out of the shadows, and their voices formed a mesmeric swirl.
Inside the house the guests, dressed in their most formal attire, circulated to and fro through French doors, between a buffet and a space for dancing. Ivan Smith was preoccupied with attempts to persuade Dodd that the UN was not supporting Communism. But as they entered, he noticed something that stopped him short.
As well as the dancers, Tshombe was represented by a group of European mercenaries, some with terrifying facial scars. They were staring. A UN military adviser approached Ivan Smith. “You should be extremely careful,” he said. “Those people are pointing you out too much. You should get out of here.”
The UN group and the senator were scheduled to go to another party, a reception arranged for them by the local representative of Mobil Oil, at his equally opulent home nearby. They decided it was safest to leave earlier than planned. Dodd could follow on later.
As they drove away, Ivan Smith battled a growing feeling of unease. It was justifi
ed as they pulled up to the house, and his car’s headlights revealed a dirty green troop-carrying truck parked outside. A group of Katangese soldiers in camouflage uniforms jumped from it and surrounded them.
One knocked on the car’s front window. He asked for documents. When a UN guard handed over his identification, the soldier threw it on the ground and began stamping on it. It was clear to Ivan Smith that the whole group of soldiers were suffused with marijuana and beer, and out of control.
Getting out of the car into the cloud of directionless rage would have been fatal. The key was to wait until they got bored. Bored Katangese soldiers often lost the stomach for arbitrary violence.
So they waited, tense and watchful, inside the car. Eventually an American with red hair emerged from the party to tell the soldiers that this was an evening to honor a friend of their president. That Tshombe himself might even attend. The troops reluctantly allowed the group to step from the car and walk as quickly as dignity would allow into the house.
They came into a large, open hallway. It adjoined an even larger drawing room, with French windows and a grand piano, to form an L-shape. A dozen or so people, including the British consul, were already milling around the conjoined rooms in full evening dress.
Ivan Smith and his group were restoring themselves with a cocktail when another group of Katangese soldiers burst through the front door of the house, this time led by two white men.
Ivan Smith hoped it was just another show of force. That it would pass as quickly as the incident outside.
And then one of the soldiers raised his gun and jabbed its heavy wooden butt into the face of a senior UN official, Brian Urquhart.2 He put his hand up to his broken nose, and a vivid torrent of blood began gushing through his fingers. The rest of the soldiers set upon him.
Behind Ivan Smith, another group of soldiers came through the French windows. The danger was real. But his response was drawn from childhood: to put the piano between himself and the attackers as though they were playing a spirited game of tag.
It didn’t work. There were too many of them. They seized him and forced him to the ground. He covered his head with his arms as they pummeled the air from his body with their guns. When they stopped he found he could draw breath only in ragged, painful jags.
He lay still. The men standing over him were unsure of what to do next. They kept loading and unloading their guns. He hoped that they might be placated by the attack and move on. But yet another group of Katangese soldiers entered, visibly older and angrier.
They pulled Ivan Smith roughly to his feet and grabbed Urquhart, bruised and covered in sticky dark-brown blood. One of his trouser legs and his shirt had been torn off, but he still had his tie knotted neatly around his neck. When a Belgian banker3 tried to intervene to stop them marching the two UN officials from the room, the soldiers grabbed him, too. They dragged the three men outside and across the yard into the road. They ushered and pushed them up onto the oily steel bed of the truck, underneath a canvas canopy.
It was empty except for two low metal benches. The soldiers told them to lie down. The other two men began, reluctantly, to lower themselves. Ivan Smith knew that his chances of survival would drop precipitously if the truck was allowed to drive into the night. He felt compelled, by what he later felt was a primal stubbornness, to refuse.
He pushed his back against the cab of the truck and began kicking out as the soldiers moved toward him. Other soldiers, behind them, began stomping and kicking the other two men, and beating them once more with swinging rifles.
The scene was suddenly illuminated by headlights. Senator Dodd’s car, a huge black Dodge provided by Tshombe, flanked with motorcycle outriders in plumed helmets, had pulled up behind them.
The soldiers looked up. Ivan Smith felt a chance. He pushed their guns away, and shoved and ran and jumped out onto the dirt road toward the Dodge’s grinning chrome visage. He saw the US consul, Lew Hoffacker, leap from the car and move toward him. He heard Senator Dodd’s wife say, incongruously, from the backseat, “Why, if it isn’t that nice Mr. Smith,” before someone told her to get down.
Ivan Smith felt Hoffacker grab him and pull him toward the safety of the motorcade. He saw the door of the Dodge open and clambered in. Hoffacker went away and came back with the Belgian banker, who jumbled in with them, crouching in the back on the white leather seat.
Hoffacker left again. Ivan Smith heard a debate, a negotiation for the last man. He heard the soldiers outside the window cock their guns to load bullets into the chambers. There was a pause. Then he felt Hoffacker dive on top of them at speed and the rumbling V-8 engine gun underneath them all, before the car peeled away in a whir of tires and dust.4
As Ivan Smith lay awkwardly in the car, looking across at the terrified senator and his wife, he suspected through increasingly painful breaths that his ribs were broken. And slowly the traumas of that night began to sift themselves into conclusions.
The mercenaries knew the UN was approaching a reconciliation with Tshombe. That meant they would lose their paychecks and, more important, their fight. They had wanted hostages tonight, Ivan Smith decided, to use as leverage.
His mind flashed to Hammarskjöld. What if they had attempted to abduct his plane with him on it? To talk it down on the radio, or force it to another airfield with their own jet fighters. What if it had all turned to violent farce like tonight’s raid, and Hammarskjöld’s plane had been shot down, or crashed in the chaos?
It made little sense as a military strategy.5 But mercenaries, he came to realize, were men who habitually fished in troubled waters. They were not academics or clerics. In fact, many of them were obviously psychotic, or at least unstable to the point that a formal diagnosis made no difference.
And they were more inspired by their Katangese leaders than under their direct control. Nobody could call them off—only wind them up, set them off, and semi-legitimately deny any involvement in the destruction that followed. The realization set Ivan Smith on a lifelong quest to solve what he now considered a murder.
Footnotes
1 It did not hurt that Tshombe’s Washington lobbyists were friends. Dodd was among the first senators ever formally censured for improper use of his position to raise money.
2 Also a close confidant of Hammarskjöld, he subsequently wrote the definitive biography of his time at the UN.
3 Who turned out to be the president of the Bank of Congo.
4 The final man, Urquhart, was subsequently rescued, though not before he suffered further injury, when Tshombe himself intervened.
5 Though, in fact, the cease-fire deal brokered with Katanga after Hammarskjöld died was a generous one that effectively allowed some European soldiers to remain.
Chapter 17
“It was not a normal flying accident”
Ivan Smith decided to visit the scene of the crime: the patch of charred forest eight miles from the Ndola airport where the Albertina had been found. He arrived on a hot day in late summer 1961, and picked his way through the ragged bush, humid and hostile.
When he stepped into the artificial clearing he could still see, despite the tramplings of the departed forensics team and nature’s best efforts to reclaim the land, where the Albertina had cut into the trees in a long curve.
The site felt holy, he decided. Like an impromptu memorial. The tops of the trees, which usually blocked out the sun, were gone, and he felt the weight of the blue sky, with a bright ball of sun piercing from behind a single cloud. The damaged foliage had been cauterized into strange shapes. It reminded him of climbing a mountain with Hammarskjöld in New Zealand, and the delight his friend had felt at the unfamiliar plants there.
He went, next, to the airfield itself, and climbed the steps to the control tower to see Williams, the airport manager. They spoke, with a sweeping view of Ndola stretched out on all sides around them, for an hour. Williams was polite, but obviously reticent and very formal.
Ivan Smith asked him question after question
. Each was dismissed. When he asked how it was that the tower had not seen the fire after the crash, for example, Williams said that it was the time of year for bush fires anyway. And that in any case he had grown very busy at around that time, and had not looked out beyond the airport.
Ivan Smith had seen news, in the papers in Leopoldville and Elisabethville, of a Rhodesian public inquiry that would follow the technical examination. It was being conducted by the Rhodesian chief justice, Sir John Clayden, a silver-haired and thoroughly establishment character who favored dark, double-breasted suits even in the tropical heat. Clayden had been appealing for witnesses on the radio, for a public portion of the inquiry. But he had already been privately interviewing those known to have important information.
Ivan Smith realized, as he spoke to Williams, that the airport manager must have been questioned as part of both the technical examination and the new public inquiry. He would have had those two sworn accounts in his mind to keep straight. Finally, as he sensed the interview drawing to a close, Ivan Smith grew frustrated. I am not a formal inquiry, he said. I knew the men who died. This is personal.
Williams, nervously, opened up. His tone changed. “You are right to inquire,” he said. “It was not a normal flying accident.” In his conversations with the crew, Williams said, they had mentioned there were things they wanted to discuss with him when they were on the ground. “It is very mysterious,” Williams concluded.
To Ivan Smith it sounded like an admission.
In January 1962, several months after the crash, the Clayden inquiry began to call witnesses at the high court in Ndola, an imposing red-brick building with four white columns surrounding its entrance.
The mystery it confronted was far more confounding than any modern plane crash. There were no global positioning satellites that tracked planes moment-to-moment. Black box recorders—which store vital flight information for recovery after a crash—were not ubiquitous. The wreckage, and witness accounts, were virtually all anyone had to go on.