by Ravi Somaiya
A cast of characters linked together by the crash drifted in and out of the stuffy wooden courtroom over several days. They included those who had seen the last moments of the Albertina, the officials who had discovered the plane, and the doctors and nurses who had treated the last survivor, Harold Julien, and had noted his statements about explosions and sparks in the sky.
Every day a tall, bespectacled man, with a precise air and shirtsleeves rolled up in the tropical heat, sat on one of the benches at the back, watching attentively. Bo Virving was a seasoned Swedish pilot, who had flown every kind of plane across every kind of African terrain.
He was the protégé of Count Carl Gustaf von Rosen, a Swedish nobleman and a professional stunt pilot. Von Rosen’s aunt had married the Nazi leader Hermann Göring a decade before World War II. He despised his uncle-by-marriage, who headed the German air force, and after the war broke out he quit the flying circus to wage a one-man aerial campaign against fascism. He flew first in Europe and Russia, but later moved to Africa. He sustained mustard gas burns while flying guerrilla-style, in makeshift warplanes, against Mussolini’s air force.
Virving had lived alongside von Rosen in Ethiopia for a decade after the war as the two attempted to establish an airline there. He had lost count of the hours they had flown over hostile and unmapped terrain, the landings at makeshift dirt airfields, the close shaves as they evaded thunderstorms, flocks of birds and anti-aircraft guns over a wild continent racked with conflict.
He was a seasoned African bush pilot, comfortable clearing warthogs or ostriches from the runway before takeoff, and buzzing low before landing to scare away herds of elephants or giraffes. He knew how to fly without radar, without help from air traffic controllers, without weather alerts, tuned in only to his own instincts and the feel of the plane. He knew well that many of the presumptions the Rhodesians made were driven, at best, by a lack of knowledge of flying on the edge in Africa.
By 1962, Virving was a senior official for the Swedish air company, Transair, that had supplied Hammarskjöld’s plane. Two days after the crash, he had received a call at his home in Malmö, in the south of Sweden: Transair and the Swedish government wanted him to observe the Rhodesian investigation in Ndola. He left his wife and three children and arrived days later to attend the tense examination of the smashed metal that had once been the Albertina.
He was not an overtly political man, nor one motivated by a grand sense of moral justice. But he had a quiet attachment to what was right, or more precisely what was correct, that he would never have dreamed of identifying as notable or unusual. It was simply how life had to work.
So he balked at seeing white officials give terse orders to the black Africans who were sifting the residue of the plane in the hot tent. And they were no less terse with him. Virving had known the pilots of the Albertina well. They were experienced, and had navigated the treacherous skies of the Congo repeatedly. He could not imagine a scenario in which they pulled off the complex maneuvers and evasions necessary to get Hammarskjöld above Ndola and then made an obvious mistake while landing and planted the plane in a forest.
And so he, with von Rosen, focused on other explanations. He asked the Rhodesian officials, at every turn, about the possibility that a bullet, a shell, explosives, or a fire might have caused the crash. They felt the questions were offensive. It had clearly been an accident. And such loose talk, one official suggested, might even sway the malleable minds of the black African witnesses.
In court Virving watched those same black witnesses, mostly the charcoal burners who had been the last to notice the plane in the sky before the crash, give evidence. White witnesses had been scrupulously referred to as Mr. or Mrs. The charcoal burners were instead called “African,” so that Davidson Simango, who had distinctly remembered two planes in the sky that night, became “African Simango.”
Virving knew that most of them were appearing against their better judgment. It was lore among black Africans that no good came of trying to help their white counterparts. If you reported a car crash, you’d be accused of stealing from the wreck.
Virving was shocked that there was no interpreter to help them. They were rushed through questions by a panel of four lawyers—one from Sweden, one from Britain, one from the federation, and another from the UN—and forced to give a plain yes or no to sum up issues Virving knew to be profoundly complex.
Timothy Kankasa, a high-ranking official in a black African township, and an air force signalman with extensive aviation experience,1 was one of seven black Africans who testified that he had noticed a smaller plane flying above the Albertina.
Geoffrey Lawrence, the lawyer for the federation, was described in one magazine as a “puckish, mousy little man with a mind as orderly as a calculating machine.” He had become famous after securing the acquittal of a doctor suspected of murdering hundreds of his elderly patients in Britain.
“What you have told us,” he said to Kankasa, in the clipped and dismissive tones that British lawyers use to suggest that witnesses are laughably stupid, “is completely unacceptable. You made a mistake.”
Virving’s disappointment was more than casual. He had been developing a theory of his own about the crash. He had hoped the hearings might answer a key question. But it was clear to him that the intention of the inquiry was merely to tuck the issue of Hammarskjöld’s death away as quickly as possible.
So one day he waited outside of the court. He watched the door for two of the witnesses in particular, Davidson Simango and Farie Mazibisa. Both were charcoal burners, and both had, from different vantage points, recalled two planes in the sky that night. They had also mentioned other details—flashes and bangs, mostly—that were incongruous or strange if taken in isolation. But Virving believed he had a way of making sense of them.
When the two men emerged, they looked nervous. A white police officer was standing near them, and their eyes kept returning to him. Virving walked over and asked to talk to them. They were reluctant to explain again, in the presence of the police officer. But they repeated their stories with remarkable consistency. In doing so they provided the confirmation Virving needed for his theories.
Footnotes
1 He later became a state minister in Zambia.
Chapter 18
“Black hole”
On January 23, 1962, the Rhodesian Commission of Inquiry report was released in freshly printed piles. It was bound in blue, with a thick cover of cream card stock, and it contained the final results of the most comprehensive report on the crash that would ever be completed.
It opened by explaining its methodology. The investigation—centered on the remains of the Albertina in the tent in Ndola—was exhaustive, whatever the biases of its instigators. It had taken statements from 130 people and gathered reams of fresh, firsthand forensic and other evidence. About 120 witnesses had also given testimony in hearings. Even the Rhodesians did not quite understand the mass of data they had gathered.
It was divided into eleven parts, and began with the basics. On September 17, 1961, a Transair Douglas DC-6B, identifier SE-BDY, known as the Albertina, flew from Leopoldville in the Congo to Ndola, a small town in the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. It carried the secretary-general of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld, nine other UN staff, and six crew.
It took off at around 4 p.m. local time. Shortly after it was scheduled to land, six hours later at around midnight local time, it crashed in a forest of hardwood trees and bush grass. All sixteen aboard died—fifteen at the scene, and one, Sergeant Harold Julien, later in hospital after giving cryptic statements that described the crash.
The three pilots, the report said, had nearly twenty thousand hours of flying experience among them—two thousand of them in the DC-6. The weather was clear, with a slight haze and visibility between five and ten miles.
The Albertina itself was well maintained and in prime condition. It had suffered no ill effects from the bullet that had been lodged in its engine. N
or did it show any other signs of mechanical difficulty. It had been left unattended, but there was no way to say for sure whether anyone had planted an explosive aboard.
Because the plane had deliberately flown in stealth mode, Captain Per Hallonqvist had not filed a flight plan, and had navigated by what is known as dead reckoning. Instead of communicating with radio beacons at airfields on the route, which guide the plane but log movements, Hallonqvist, a chief navigator for the airline, had flown using landmarks like the giant Lake Tanganyika, dark blue-black below him in the night. By calculating from these known locations using his speed and bearing, he could plot his own route without ever alerting anyone.
“We express no opinion on whether security measures justified these actions,” the report said, thereby raising the question in the first place.
At around midnight, the plane had overflown Ndola airport, at the correct height of six thousand feet, on the correct bearing of 280 degrees. Thirty seconds after it picked up Ndola’s radio beacon—a signal to landing planes—it had turned right, as expected, at the same height, then turned back again on a bearing of one hundred degrees and dropped a thousand feet in a textbook preparation for landing.
Then it disappeared. Airport staff, aware of the need for secrecy, presumed that it had its own purposes for going silent, or that Hammarskjöld had changed his mind about meeting with Tshombe.
Dozens of witnesses saw the plane in the sky. Seven of them saw two planes. Its angle of descent was less than five degrees, its flaps set to thirty degrees—appropriate for an approach. Its engines were under power and its landing gear was down. Its controls, communications equipment, and gauges were working correctly, according to forensic analysis.
There was evidence that at least six of those aboard were wearing their seat belts when it crashed, five minutes after it was expected, nine and a half miles from Ndola. The ferocity and spread of the subsequent fire showed it had not been brought down by a lack of fuel.
Fourteen were either killed by the impact, or knocked mercifully unconscious to burn to death. Hammarskjöld was thrown clear to die nearby. Medically speaking, Harold Julien had died of renal failure, but ultimately the cause was burns across 55 percent of his body, and the effects of fifteen hours of exposure before he was found. He had a compound fracture of one of his ankles, which suggested that he must have crawled from the wreckage rather than run. Had he been found sooner, he would likely have survived.
The delay in sending help was partly a result of the chaotic political situation, the report said. It was plausible in the minds of airport staff that Hammarskjöld might have chosen to fly elsewhere. Two groups of police officers had, on their own initiative, begun searches in the night. Had they been aided by the resources, including spotter planes, that were brought to bear hours later, they would doubtless have found the wreckage, and with it the truth from a less grievously injured Julien.
But they did not, and the report went on—at great length—to absolve them of any responsibility for this decision, and to set Julien’s own testimony aside. It went through each line Julien had spoken, describing an explosion and sparks in the sky, and made the argument that he could not possibly have meant what he said. One of his doctors, Mark Lowenthal, had testified that Julien was “lucid and coherent.” But the report did not mention Lowenthal’s view, and took instead the word of a more senior surgeon who felt otherwise.
The blood of the pilots contained no alcohol, and analysis for carboxyhemoglobin—which indicates carbon monoxide in the blood and can show whether a person was exposed to fire before death—revealed nothing significant. That ruled out, for the Rhodesians, that they might have perished in an explosion before the crash itself, or that a fire had spontaneously broken out inside the Albertina.
About 20 percent of the plane was salvageable for forensic analysis. In that small section, only one hole was found that could plausibly have been a bullet hole. Spectrography indicated no traces of metals commonly associated with bullets.
The flotsam and jetsam of the wreckage had yielded other clues. Pilots used what were known as manuals—books that contained updated information on the precise approaches for different airports—before landing. There was evidence that they had used the correct chart for Ndola.
But another manual found in the wreck, intriguingly, had fallen open to the page for Ndolo, a totally different airport with a similar name. It meant the pilots could have caused the crash by setting the plane incorrectly for landing.
There were even notes on that particular page. But when the handwriting was analyzed, it did not match that of any of the pilots. And in any case the plane had been making a correct descent, using visual cues like lights on the runway that were not subject to any manual.
The puzzle boiled down to a silent period between the Albertina’s last communication with the tower at Ndola, at ten minutes past midnight, and the crash itself a few minutes later. The report, which called the crash an accident in its title, was keen to dismiss the idea, suggested by seven different witnesses, that this period had included another plane.
“At the outset we would say that no reason was suggested, and we cannot think of one, why anyone who might have been able to attack this aircraft from the air should ever have wanted to attack it as it carried Mr. Hammarskjöld on the mission he was then undertaking,” it said. “We have investigated the position of aircraft capable of offensive action not because of suggestions that there was such action but to eliminate any known aircraft within range.”
If the plane had been attacked, it said, it should have communicated that with the tower. It did not. And it suggested that no pilot would have been able to find and target the Albertina, given the short window of time it had to do so.
It then listed a cursory survey of fighter aircraft available in the area, and said that in the most likely case—the single Fouga available to the mercenaries—its pilot had told them repeatedly he had not been up that night, and that they trusted him.
Trust seems to have been an important quality for the Rhodesians sifting this mountain of evidence. They went to great lengths to dismiss the character and recollection of each of the seven witnesses who had seen something different.
“This witness was completely unreliable,” the report’s authors said of William Chappell, a local resident who had heard two planes. “He contradicted himself again and again, and gave evidence in a most unconvincing manner.”
The three charcoal burners who had first seen the wreck, Moyo, Daka, and Banda, “were unsatisfactory. Apart from that finding, their evidence discloses so improbable an attack that it could carry no weight.” The former air force signalman, Kankasa, must have mistaken the Albertina’s own tail for another plane, it said.
Yet another witness, Buleni, was dismissed as not reliable. Mazibisa and Simango, whom Virving had questioned again outside the courthouse, had both said they had seen another plane. But Mazibisa “was not impressive,” it said. The explosions he heard must have been the cartridges popping in the fire that followed the crash. Simango was “very vague” and had also likely mistaken the tail of the Albertina for a second plane.
It laid out a conclusion that its authors felt was far more plausible. After the Albertina had passed the lights of Ndola and turned back toward it, the topography of the area at night dictated that the pilots would have seen only blackness ahead.
“This is what is known in the language of the air as a ‘black hole,’” it explained. “And if in the course of the turn the aircraft came far too low the slight rise in the ground between the place of the crash and the airport would obscure the lights of the runway, and of Ndola.”
The authors of the report had been urged to consider other causes, they wrote. But “the conclusion to which we are forced is that the aircraft was allowed by the pilots to descend too low so that it struck the trees and was brought to the ground.”
Chapter 19
“Position L”
The Swedish foreig
n ministry is a rectangular box of a building with large windows framed by ornate pillars. Its grand, arched entrance, surrounded by flagpoles, overlooks a cobbled Stockholm plaza and a statue of the legendary Swedish king Gustav II Adolf.
In 1962, a few months after the Rhodesian report had been released, Bo Virving waited anxiously inside, under the cold gloom of double-height ceilings. He heard steps on the stone floor, and a polite functionary led him from the lobby, through a maze of paneled corridors, up narrow wooden stairs, and into an elaborately decorated office built on the scale of a small cathedral.
He placed a sheaf of papers on the table, sat down, and began to present an argument he felt sure would move the Swedish government to bring its resources to bear in the case of Hammarskjöld’s murder.
Virving had grown obsessed with finding a theory to explain the blank spot at the heart of the Rhodesian report: the silent minutes before the Albertina crashed. And after endless hours of work, his living room covered in maps, marker pens, and sheets of acetate, he had come upon one.
His task had been made easier by the fact that the top-secret underlying evidence the Rhodesian report had been based on—reams of typewritten paper, maps, and confidential intelligence reports—was held in two places. One copy was locked up safely in Salisbury, the capital of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. The other was spilling out of an increasingly tired and sagging white cardboard box, which had originally contained fifteen packages of instant macaroni and cheese, in Virving’s house in Sweden.
He had begun to gather it in Ndola. Sifting it all was a problem that he came to see as partly very human and partly mathematical. A puzzle that had to reconcile each known factor: the perspective of each witness, the bursts of radio communication the Albertina had shared with air traffic controllers, the statements of Harold Julien, and the technical capabilities of both the DC-6 and any other planes that might have been in the sky that night.