by Ravi Somaiya
He told the Swedish officials that his work had begun outside of the courthouse in January 1962, when he had spoken with one of the key witnesses, Simango. “Undoubtedly he had seen two aircraft,” Virving said. And Simango had added a new and crucial detail. “Amongst other things he said that the flash he saw was moving fast like a fire arrow pointing slightly downwards and almost immediately thereafter came the crash.”
That flash had pushed Virving to concentrate on one theory out of the possibilities, he explained: that a mercenary plane had attacked or attempted to divert the Albertina before it landed.
Hammarskjöld’s plane had departed Leopoldville at 1751 Ndola time. The Rhodesians had presumed that because it filed a fake flight plan, none of its enemies could possibly have known where it was going, and when it might arrive—crucial information for any attack. (Even a bomb planted in the hold would require timing for a midair explosion.)
But it was broadly known in Congolese political circles, not noted for their discretion, that Hammarskjöld was scheduled to meet with Tshombe. And that he would fly on the Albertina. It was entirely plausible, Virving said, that intelligence about the flight was sent directly from Leopoldville to Katanga by one of many Katangese sources on the ground.
Even presuming perfect secrecy on takeoff, Virving explained, did not justify the Rhodesian theory that the Albertina had appeared out of nowhere in Ndola like an apparition. Because at 2200 Ndola time, the Albertina had received a request for information from flight controllers in Salisbury, the Rhodesian capital.
“SE-BDY from Leopoldville for Ndola,” it replied, giving its estimated time of arrival, or ETA, as “2235 [0035 Ndola time] aircraft DC6.” Six minutes later it confirmed its position over Lake Tanganyika, and continued communicating with Salisbury and Ndola. At 2331 it updated its ETA to 0020. All of this communication was easy to overhear by radio from Katanga, Virving noted, in plenty of time for Katangese intelligence to send aircraft to intercept.
The Katangese air force was held to be deeply limited; no more than two dozen planes, only half of them suitable for attack, and two helicopters. Its pilots were reputed to be erratic, and its equipment antiquated. Tshombe had wanted to improve it but was banned from buying more planes on the international market while he was at war with the Congolese central government and the UN.
But Virving presented the ministry with a copy of a secret UN intelligence assessment of Katangese and mercenary airpower that gave a very different picture. UN intelligence officers found that Union Minière’s technicians, with a company foundry at their disposal, had been modifying Katangese transportation and utility planes so they, too, boasted machine guns and racks full of aerial bombs.
One of the Katangese planes had been fitted with an advanced radio compass, which would have made precise interception much easier. There was evidence that the mercenaries had installed, or planned to install, airfield lighting to enable them to take off and land at night.
The Rhodesians had suggested that only one Fouga Magister jet fighter had been operational. But Tshombe had been a canny black-market dealer. In collaboration with the governments of Angola, South Africa, and Rhodesia itself, he had secretly bought more than a dozen planes. Among them was at least one other Fouga Magister.
At around the time of the crash, one of the Katangese Fougas was used for interceptions. Its job was to wait for a radio signal from military intelligence, scramble to a location, climb to high altitude, and circle to wait for a second signal in order to dive down and attack UN aircraft.
Virving told the officials that he had pored over the thick sheaf of original witness statements—the long dialogues between investigators and witnesses that had been reduced to quotes and dismissals in the official report.
He felt that witnesses could be relied upon to know what they saw and heard in broad terms. But they could not reasonably be expected, as the Rhodesian investigators had asked, to recall precisely the location of the lights on a moving plane, differentiate various types of engine, or give time or direction with any great precision. So he focused on leaving aside their interpretations and extracting only what they themselves had seen.
And he realized that the investigators had missed a crucial trick. He took beautiful, large-scale maps of the area around Ndola, and several sheets of clear celluloid film. He laid one sheet of celluloid at a time over the map. On each he plotted, using thick pens, the location of one witness at around midnight on September 17, 1961, the direction that witness was facing, and what they had described happening in the skies. When he lay them on top of each other, one set of intersecting lines formed a picture of the last known route of the Albertina. Another set of clustered lines showed the potential path of an attack aircraft.
Next, he plotted the speed and range of the available mercenary aircraft on new transparencies. If the mercenaries had overheard the Albertina’s communications with air traffic control at 2200 and 2241, Virving estimated they could have dispatched a plane from one of their airfields by 2245 on a mission to attack or divert it.
If he estimated that attack plane’s speed at a very conservative 155 miles per hour, which allowed for either one of the Fougas or a propeller plane like a de Havilland Dove, he found that it would have arrived just south of Ndola an hour later, or about fifteen minutes before the Albertina.
That matched the moment that several witnesses, plotted carefully on Virving’s maps, had heard a plane overhead. He marked a range for that plane—a line of a couple of miles to represent a holding pattern—and marked it with the letter M.
Witness testimony placed the Albertina at the western end of the runway, traveling at about 185 miles per hour, at virtually the same time, shortly after midnight. He marked that as position L. It was the place, and the moment, at which the Albertina changed from a plane coming in to land to one that was crashing. The midair scene of the crime.
One witness between M and L had described a roar there and then, tracking from south to north. Virving felt he knew that sound. When one plane attempts to intercept another, the pilot nearly always misjudges the exact distance from the target, falls short, and needs to push the throttle to catch up.
Then, Virving theorized, the attacking plane dropped two bombs, or two grenades, toward the Albertina. The flashes that six of the witnesses, plotted in a little circle around position L, saw in the sky timed and located precisely with two bombs detonated at altitude. But, Virving said, they did not hit, or at least did not damage the plane.
Hammarskjöld and the others aboard must have heard and felt the explosions, and seen them out of the plane’s windows. It would explain, Virving said, Harold Julien’s statement that Hammarskjöld had said to “go back.” He might, on seeing they were in danger, either have ordered the pilots to turn the plane back, or asked the passengers to get to the back of the cabin where they’d be slightly safer in the event of a crash.
The captain, Per Hallonqvist, whose fear of attack had been realized, might have attempted a quicker landing. That would have explained why he didn’t have time to alert the tower or turn off his navigation lights. It would also explain Julien’s recollection of the great speed that followed.
The attacking plane must have broken left after it had dropped its bombs, on a westerly course, to see what effect its attack had. It likely turned back just as the Albertina was making its final turn for landing and, with another bomb, caused the pilots to lose control and crash into the forest.
In total eight witnesses provided evidence of sounds or lights that Virving believed tracked with his theory. The incident had been most clearly seen, he believed, by the two men he had interviewed outside the court—Mazibisa and Simango, the latter of which had described “a white flash” followed by “an explosion.”
When he plotted the attacking plane’s likely path to Ndola from mercenary airfields, he found that it followed railroad tracks on the ground. UN investigators had found Katangese air force maps that advised its pilots to navigate
by doing exactly this, and had marked the routes of the tracks in pen to make it easier.
Virving had one piece of information left to reveal to the foreign ministry officials. One he felt proved his case beyond doubt. The watches of the passengers on board the plane had been disabled not by the impact of the crash, but by the heat from the fire that followed it, Virving explained. That would have taken about a minute.
If the timing of his reconstruction was correct it would mean that they should have stopped, on average, at nine minutes past midnight and twenty-five seconds. When he analyzed the data from the watches, he found that the time matched exactly.
Virving had hoped for excitement. For recognition. For a team to begin work re-examining the crash. He was met with Scandinavian reserve, and the creeping sense—tantamount to death in Swedish culture—that he had embarrassed himself. Eventually someone from the ministry suggested, tactfully, that it might be better if he left the issue of the crash of the Albertina alone.
Von Rosen presented a similar case to the UN. When he emerged from the meeting, he was shaken. He had been told, he said, that re-opening the crash of the Albertina risked a global war and that he should drop the matter.
Chapter 20
“Other and more logical explanations”
The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland had hoped that its investigations into the crash of the Albertina would draw precisely the reaction Virving had received from the Swedish government: Pilot error. Nothing to see here.
It was an eminently plausible conclusion. Flying in Africa was a dangerous business in 1961. Planes went down all the time. When they did, their loss was often cloaked in the kind of mystery inevitable on a huge, sparsely populated landmass with inconsistent aviation infrastructure.
But the report had not examined any of the groups in and around the Congo with an interest in Hammarskjöld’s movements on the night of the crash. The white supremacist Katangese mercenaries. The French Special Forces soldiers who led them. The spies from Britain, America, Russia, and elsewhere. The companies Union Minière and Tanganyika Concessions.
It was fertile territory. And in the weeks and months after the Federation’s report was released, fragments of both real evidence and outlandish notions emerged from it.
In January 1962, a Danish journalist floated the “seventeenth man” theory. His story posited that a hijacker had crept aboard the Albertina, and that the crash happened when he had tried to wrestle control of the plane from its pilots. Some Rhodesians believed that Hammarskjöld had been working covertly on behalf of the Swedish and American governments to secure mining interests in Katanga, and they had killed him to keep the secret.
Ivan Smith, meanwhile, had uncovered his own theory. He had sparked up a friendship—one that would last a lifetime—with Conor Cruise O’Brien, the UN and Hammarskjöld’s former representative in Katanga. And he began to visit the Elephant and Castle bar in Ndola, the informal club for the leadership of the Katangese military. It was owned by the former mayor of Ndola and his brother, the official executioner for the area. (His party trick was sizing people up for hanging.) There he got to know the flamboyant, deadly soldiers, pilots, and miscellaneous eccentrics who had been fighting the UN by any means they could think of, as long as the paychecks kept arriving from Tshombe.
Among them was an all-purpose fixer and sometime journalist named Roger Asonong. Asonong told him that a group of far-right European soldiers, led by a white mercenary named Van Rooy, had been involved in Ivan Smith’s kidnapping. It heightened his sense that the same group, or a similarly motivated one, had also targeted Hammarskjöld.
Another source had told him that, during September 1961, those same mercenaries had maintained a helicopter connection between their Elisabethville operations and Ndola. It suggested, circumstantially, that the soldiers had at least been focused on the meeting between Hammarskjöld and Tshombe. And it chimed with information Ivan Smith had received from Hammarskjöld’s nephew, Knut.
He told Ivan Smith that Colonel Faulques, the brutal and ascetic French commando who had essentially run the Katangese guerrilla operation, had been based in Ndola himself that month, with three other senior operatives.
The Federation had simply never looked into such leads. Its investigators had barely gone beyond the wreckage. In fact, its government had quietly tried to stop the UN mounting its own investigation to avoid further scrutiny. But its pressure and persuasion had failed.
A specialist UN team re-examined the site of the crash and sifted the wreckage once more. It interviewed nearly a hundred witnesses. They included many of those who had seen the plane in its last moments, air traffic control crew and airport staff, the police officers who had first reached the scene, and the medical personnel who had cared for Harold Julien. A quarter of them had not given evidence before. And in April 1962, it released its report. It was a moment of hope for Ivan Smith, Virving, and others who did not believe the official account.
The UN investigators dismissed the “seventeenth man” theory. Nobody had seen or heard anything to indicate that a hijacker might have sneaked on board the plane. Besides, no extra body had been found in the wreckage.
The report did note that a saboteur would theoretically have been able to access the Albertina’s hydraulic compartment, heating system, or undercarriage without detection as it waited unattended on the tarmac in Leopoldville before embarking.
But there was no evidence that the plane had been damaged deliberately. It was flying perfectly before the crash. And anyone trying to plant a bomb, the UN decided, would have needed to know that the Albertina was flying a longer route—five hours, not four—in order to time a detonation.
The only planted explosive that might have worked would be one specially—and expensively—designed to detonate by connection with the undercarriage, flaps, lights, or anything else that was activated at landing. There had been no evidence of an explosion, the UN report reiterated. But several witnesses had seen a flash or flames.
The UN had re-created the crash, as seen from the ground, by placing each of the key witnesses in their positions that night and flying test planes along the route of the Albertina. That exercise was calculated to help consider the idea that another plane had shot, or forced, the Albertina down.
No radar was operating around Ndola that night, so the possibility of an unannounced plane in the sky could not be ruled out. And the UN investigation had found two new witnesses who had seen another aircraft.
But the UN, like the Rhodesian investigators, did not trust those witnesses. They must have been mistaken, the report said. Perhaps they had compressed in their memories events that happened over a longer time period. Some of them expressed anti-federation feeling, and so their statements might have been colored by politics, too. Virving’s theory, the investigators felt, was simply too complex. The events he documented were “susceptible of other and more logical explanations.”
The most likely cause, the UN report concluded, lay in the landing charts given to the pilots. These were usually marked with terrain contours and spot heights where significant, so pilots could consider the topography before landing. But on the Ndola chart, the report found, neither contours nor elevations had been marked at the point the Albertina had crashed.
The British Foreign Office, aligned with the Rhodesian Federation, had pressured the UN to attribute the crash to pilot error. But, instead, it returned an open verdict. That meant that, should new evidence emerge, it was willing to re-assess.
The first book on the crash, which came out that August, reached a similar conclusion.
The Mysterious Death of Dag Hammarskjöld, by a veteran diplomatic correspondent, Arthur Gavshon, pointed out that the inquiries conducted so far had utterly failed to take the broader context of the conflict in Katanga into account. The book cemented the crash, one reviewer noted, in the “realm of myth and mystery.”
One of the UN’s investigators, Hugo Blandori, a dashing former FBI agent who
smoked a spectacular curved pipe, had put together his own narrower but far more detailed report. Eleven typewritten pages, detailing the new facts he had gathered. One section stands out. It centers on a visit to one of Harold Julien’s doctors, Mark Lowenthal, at his home.
Lowenthal had given evidence that Julien had been lucid after the crash. But the doctor’s account had been dismissed by the Rhodesians. Lowenthal was simply not credible, the authors of the Rhodesian report had felt. And so Lowenthal wanted to clarify, to Blandori, two points about the soldier’s last days.
As soon as Julien had arrived at the hospital, Lowenthal said, he had personally administered a plasma transfusion into his right arm. Doctor and patient had been very close to each other, a moment of peace in the crash’s aftermath. Julien did not have to strain either to talk or to listen. And so their conversations were quiet, and calm, and not overheard by any of the hospital staff.
The Rhodesians presumed Julien had given his abstract recollections of the crash after being administered pethidine, a powerful opioid painkiller that acts quickly but can induce delirium. This was not the case, Lowenthal told Blandori. Julien was not administered pethidine until after Lowenthal had given the plasma infusion. His recollections were colored by pain and trauma, but not powerful drugs.
Ivan Smith had used his new connections to secure a tape of Julien’s interview with the Rhodesian police. He felt that Julien could not be dismissed as delirious even after the drug was administered. There was something about the clear and detailed way he gave his name, address, and telephone number that made it seem, to Ivan Smith, as though he was absolutely coherent.
Most gallingly, for Ivan Smith and the others who had known those aboard, the report detailed the missed opportunities to find the Albertina before daybreak. It also found that, contrary to the Rhodesian accounts, Hammarskjöld’s death was probably not mercifully instantaneous. He had grasped at the grasses and plants growing underneath him. Ivan Smith knew, at last, that his friend had died alone in the forest between midnight and 3 p.m. the next day.