by Ravi Somaiya
There were, when all the confusion and misdirection had been pushed aside, four fundamental possibilities left. The first, pushed hard by the Rhodesians, was that the crash of the Albertina had simply been an accident. The second was that something on board the plane—a hijacker, or a bomb—had caused it to crash. The third was that gunfire, or other ground attack, had brought it down. And the fourth was aerial interference; the presence of another plane, perhaps hostile.
Every straight line Ivan Smith had found through the thicket of clues pointed in one direction: the Rhodesian Federation itself. There was, he realized, an essential conflict of interest. The Federation had overseen the inquiries but had also supported the mercenaries and hated Hammarskjöld. It was supported, in turn, by the British, who very much wanted the entire issue to go away.
The Rhodesians simply must have known more than they were saying. And so he began what would become a lifelong relationship with a man who had stood against the UN and Hammarskjöld. Sir Roy Welensky, the prime minister of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.
Chapter 21
“I have never been hit so hard in my life before”
Roy Welensky weighed nearly three hundred pounds. His jaw jutted forward accusingly, his bushy eyebrows bristled, and his receding hair was fashioned into a small quiff, like a question mark floating above him.
His size belied a speed and strength he had developed in his youth, on the way to becoming the national heavyweight boxing champion for Northern and Southern Rhodesia—no small feat in nations well stocked with tough, violent men. He retained a boxer’s ability to get hit and remain calm.
He had grown up poor in Harare, now the capital of Zimbabwe, the seventh child of a Lithuanian Jewish father and a white South African mother. He left school at fifteen, in 1922 (by which time he was already 250 pounds), got a job working on the railways, and joined the union. He proved such an effective negotiator that he transitioned into politics in 1938, founded the Northern Rhodesian Labour Party in 1941, and was elected prime minister in 1956.
In 1961, Welensky’s stated aim was for a transitional white government to ease the way for black governance. It meant that he saw a seceded Katanga, which operated mostly under the control of white advisers, as broadly a good thing—a bulwark, or an ally. Those who sought black African governance as a civil right hated him for it.
He had supported Tshombe, to the extent that he effectively spied for the Katangese, allowed free passage for mercenaries, and helped supply war matériel including planes. In one letter to relatives he compared the UN, and its efforts to remove Tshombe’s mercenaries from Katanga and reunite the Congo, to Hitler and Stalin. “Where is all this leading us?” he asked rhetorically, in one message. “I think there can be only one answer—to a third world war.”
He played dirty, too. He joked in one note to his intelligence chief that the “disappearance” of two teachers who were avowed black nationalists “had the most salutary effect on the rest of the teachers.” He was smart enough to leave the comment at that, in writing at least. But after a while, black Africans in and around Rhodesia began calling anyone mean or violent a “Welensky.”
He maintained connections with a network of white supremacist mercenaries and intelligence operatives, many of them British, and far-right lawmakers of Britain’s ruling Conservative Party. And he was not scared to express his loathing for the UN and Hammarskjöld.
In April 1961, he told the British foreign secretary, Alec Douglas-Home, that he would do anything in his power to stop Tshombe being felled by “Afro Asian pressures masquerading as UN operations,” and that he was willing to face the consequences for those actions.
Welensky was careful not to write down what he had in mind. But he hinted. He spoke of his dislike of Hammarskjöld. He promised to explain to one friend “the extent to which I have gone” in support of Tshombe. And two weeks before the crash of the Albertina, he wrote that he’d be willing to go to “the bitter end” on the issue of the UN and Katanga.
After the UN stepped up its operations against the mercenaries in September 1961, Welensky sent his elite troops, and virtually his entire air force, to the border with Katanga. Hundreds of soldiers, and dozens of planes, had been there on the night Hammarskjöld had died.
In the days after the crash, suspicion had immediately turned toward Welensky, in cahoots with Britain. It had felt, to him, as though black Africa was about to declare war on the Federation. He hotly denied any culpability or inside knowledge.
But privately he had few illusions about Katanga. In a letter the day after the wreckage of the Albertina had been discovered, he told relatives that he felt that “someone may have put a little package on board at Leopoldville.” He never mentioned this theory again.1
Ivan Smith suspected Welensky knew much more than he was saying about Hammarskjöld’s death, if not the whole story. He was an active and well-informed prime minister who did not like to be kept in the dark. He must have been involved from the moments after the Albertina disappeared, through the delayed search—which had been ordered from Salisbury, his base of operations, not from Ndola—and the subsequent investigations. He was also closely linked to the mercenary forces in Katanga, to Union Minière, and to the British government. If there were bodies buried, Ivan Smith felt, literal or metaphorical, Welensky must be persuaded to dig them up.
By 1962, Ivan Smith oversaw the region around the southern tip of the Congo for the UN Technical Assistance Board—a body that provides non-financial help, often in the form of expert guidance on governance. It gave him a good reason to visit the federation and Welensky and begin a painstaking, decades-long fight for information.
After his first trip that year, he wrote Welensky a letter to thank him for his hospitality. “I gather we share a common interest in boxing,” he wrote. He told Welensky of his father’s prowess in the ring, and the fact that he himself had been forced to face a barrage of visiting heavyweights as a boy. And he included a story about the former English boxing champion, Jem Mace, famed in the Victorian era for his technique.
The anecdote came from James Corbett, an American heavyweight champion around the turn of the twentieth century, who had won a fight in London and then gone to see Mace, by then retired and in his ninth decade and running a small pub outside of London.
Mace had taken him down a corridor next to the bar, and unchained a door to reveal a boxing ring inside. He asked Corbett to step into the ring. Corbett, to humor the old man, did so. Mace stepped in after him. He asked Corbett to punch him. “I did,” Corbett said, “and am telling the truth when I say that the next thing I remember was waking up… where a man of 90 could pull a punch of that kind from I have no idea, but I have never been hit so hard in my life before.”
More than raw power, which is an accident of nature, boxers admire superior technique—the kind that allows a ninety-year-old man to knock out a champion. Welensky loved the story. In his reply, he first briefly thanked Ivan Smith for his visit. “Now to come to the part of your letter which is sheer joy to me, the subject of boxing,” he wrote. He went on to talk as one sports fan talks to another, in a barrage of names, assessments, anecdotes, and analyses. He invited Ivan Smith to visit him again, when he could arrange for a private screening of boxing films held in the government archives.
It marked the beginning of Ivan Smith’s last bout with an old heavyweight. Letters between the two show Ivan Smith cajoling Welensky, no mean fighter, toward the corner of the ring in an attempt to break a vital source.
He shared minor confidences, for which he apologized, but added that he was only doing so because he wanted to encourage a full and frank exchange. He appealed to history, or at least the duty to leave behind an accurate record, and implied his aim was only to exonerate Rhodesia and Welensky himself of responsibility for the crash.
Welensky’s letters took on a warmer tone. “My Dear George,” he wrote in November 1962, “I thoroughly enjoyed the lunch the other day,
and if I may say you made quite the impression on my son. I don’t have to tell you that you have whetted our appetites for a bit of sea fishing.”
Both men explained the misconceptions that surrounded them. When Welensky stepped down in 1963, the end of the federation, Ivan Smith sent him a letter praising his dignity and asking after his wife, who had recently been unwell.
The connection paid off. In a letter to another friend, Ivan Smith revealed that he and Welensky had privately been “able to discuss the whole of the Katanga operation in a way that was very profitable from my side.”
Ivan Smith said he had now learned of another active group of Katangese soldiers which also had a motivation for targeting Hammarskjöld. He described them as “French mercenaries,” numbering about twenty-five, who fought for themselves. “They felt that if they could show how to lead a ‘victory’ over the UN… they would be able to appeal to other extremists in the Rhodesias, Angola and South Africa. They had in mind to assist such extreme elements to prepare a last line of continental defense behind which a ‘white man supremacy’ could be preserved.”
Ivan Smith was not alone in turning his focus to France.
Footnotes
1 Or not in any way that has been recorded, at least.
Chapter 22
“Oh my God, they’ve done it!”
Mid-September 1961. A few days before Hammarskjöld dies. Moïse Tshombe sits in an easy chair, still safe in Katanga, and reads an illustrated newspaper. A spotlight falls upon him. And then the telephone begins to ring. An emissary for Hammarskjöld. The two talk briefly, and arrange the meeting at Ndola.
Tshombe hangs up the phone. Then he picks it up again and calls his interior minister—the feared Godefroid Munongo, sitting by his own phone, under his own spotlight, with a French soldier, Colonel Zbyre, by his side.
“Listen, Godefroid,” Tshombe says. “That Swede. You know? He’s coming to see me. He’s throwing in the sponge! What do you think of that?”
“Nothing. How is he traveling?”
“To Ndola airport. On the seventeenth. His own aircraft, I suppose—the DC-6.”
“How many in the crew? How many passengers?”
“I don’t know, what does it matter? The main thing is…”
Tshombe sits up suddenly. His voice grows urgent. “Godefroid! Godefroid! Are you there?”
“Yes, Moïse; you sound excited. You should avoid excitement, you know.”
“Godefroid, for God’s sake, no tricks. Godefroid! Godefroid! Please!”
Munongo chuckled. “Take it easy Moïse—calm yourself. After all, you won’t be on the plane.”
He replaces the telephone and does a small war dance with Colonel Zbyre, who then squats and drives his bayonet into the ground.
“Can you be sure of getting him alive?” Munongo asks Zbyre.
“He presents himself favorable… Of course, you can never be sure. We got Ben Bella. We missed Salan. We got Moumié. We missed de Gaulle. We got Mattei. Yes, we missed de Gaulle… but the terrain here is, as you say, conducive… Congo is provincial and also unappetizing. But is a first-rate terrain for assassination and also kidnapping.”
“How, this time?”
“Our boys in Leo know what they have to do, once they get the signal. If they can, they put specialist on board plane.”
“Specialist in what?”
“Kidnapping. The hijack. We have good man there—Roger Gheyssels. It is a Fleming, of course. But is trained—knows job. We get him on plane. Hammarskjöld gets in. Flight toward Ndola. Very nice, very tranquil. Then, just preparing to land, Monsieur Gheyssels puts pistol in the back of pilot’s neck and he say very politely: ‘I am sorry, sir, there is a little changement in flight plan. It is not Ndola any more. It is Kolwezi—K-O-L-W-E-Z-I—Kolwezi.’ And pilot, he say: ‘But Kolwezi is in the hands of Tshombe mercenaries!’ And maybe Gheyssels, if he has time he says: ‘Those you call mercenaries, sir, are the last idealists, the last chevalerie of the age!’ Or maybe he just push pistol harder in pilot’s neck. So they do not land at Ndola. They do not meet all these nice bourgeois and English milords. They do not make a nice deal. They land at Kolwezi and meet some very nasty pipple. You for example. Me for example…”
The two men laugh.
“Of course, it may not work like that. Maybe someone just hits Gheyssels on the head and shoves him in the compartment with the valises. Or maybe Gheyssels must shoot pilot. Or maybe there is a big bagarre and they all crash. But are many chances for something interesting to happen.”
Later, while waiting for Hammarskjöld’s plane to land, Tshombe watches a brilliant flash, followed by a sustained orange glow in the distance.
“Oh my God, they’ve done it!”
A powder-blue velvet curtain, tasseled with gold, fell. The eight hundred or so people attending the Broadway opening of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s play Murderous Angels applauded and then stood and began to gather their coats and hats.
It was December 20, 1971, a decade after Hammarskjöld had died. The crash had entered the pantheon of endlessly debated recent-historical controversies. And as the crowd milled into the marble lobby of the Playhouse Theatre for a cigarette, or filed out onto a blustery 48th Street, they mulled what they had seen. Some enjoyed the poetic recounting of real events. A few were stony with outrage at the liberties taken with history by a man who ought to know better.
O’Brien, an Irish historian, writer, politician, and diplomat, had been Hammarskjöld’s special representative to Katanga. Now into his sixth decade, he was ruddy-faced, with a mop of dark hair that managed to look bookishly outraged all on its own. The nicknames his colleagues, friends, and enemies had given him across his career—the cruiser, the bruiser, Conor Cruise O’Booze, Camera Crews O’Brien—revealed a passion for firsthand experience rare in a poetic soul, and a desire to communicate his own bravery as often as possible.
Murderous Angels was based on the accusation, hotly denied, and with little backing from historians, that Hammarskjöld had brought about the downfall of Patrice Lumumba and then refrained from preventing his death. That, O’Brien theorized, had precipitated the events that would lead to the crash of the Albertina.
During its short run of a month or so into 1972, the play became a matter of public intrigue. Did O’Brien know something nobody else did? What was fact, and what was fiction? Was it okay to blend the two?
“It is a good, controversial political play—it excites the mind and certainly deserves to be seen,” the New York Times wrote in its review. But, it added, “Mr. O’Brien would have done better to have told his story of these murderous angels as honest fiction and left people to place what assumptions they liked upon it.” Another reviewer accused O’Brien of playing “ ‘God+,’ imagining sequences of events that may or may not have occurred.”
In the printed edition of the play, O’Brien included a lengthy preface and notes that defended and justified his decisions. Hammarskjöld, he said, speaking from firsthand experience, genuinely feared that the Congo might become Spain, or Korea: a local dispute that would draw the rest of the world into a nuclear-armed war. He also felt that he had to sell the role of the UN to reluctant world leaders, which in practical terms meant playing up geopolitical dangers. The combination gave events in Katanga a fevered atmosphere. That, in turn, meant the events he described were more than plausible, he said.
He also revealed the source for the hijacking scene that ended the play: a book, Notre Guerre au Katanga (Our War in Katanga),1 that had come out quietly during the 1960s in French. It was co-authored by two leaders of the group of French mercenaries—the same group that Ivan Smith had heard about from Welensky.
The first was the French guerrilla warfare theorist Roger Trinquier, the former schoolteacher who had been the literal leader of Tshombe’s forces until he had been expelled, and its spiritual leader and chief strategist after that. The second was Jacques Duchemin, the undersecretary of defense for the Katangese government and th
e man in charge of the forces aligned against Hammarskjöld.
The hijacker theory came from Duchemin. According to his account, Tshombe had been intrigued to discover that Hammarskjöld’s older brother, Bo, worked for a mining company. He began to suspect that the brothers were after Katanga’s mineral wealth for themselves.
The Katangese president had been shaving one day when he resolved to have Hammarskjöld’s plane hijacked by a Belgian pilot named Réné Gheysels. The aim was to get Hammarskjöld to divert the Albertina to the mercenary airfield at Kolwezi, in Rhodesia and outside of UN control.
When he arrived, he’d be held hostage until he agreed to a resolution on Katanga’s terms.
By Duchemin’s account, Gheysels had successfully sneaked aboard the Albertina at Leopoldville and hidden until the plane was close to landing. When he emerged, there was a struggle aboard. The pilot had banked the plane to throw the hijacker off balance, and had crashed in the process.
Other UN officials who had been in Katanga felt the idea was ridiculous. Duchemin had been in Paris on the night of the crash and had heard the story secondhand. And it was riddled with inconsistencies. The glaring example was that no seventeenth body had been found in the wreckage.
But O’Brien did not trust the Rhodesian police who had discovered the wreck. And even if he did, he wrote, it was not implausible that a body could have been lost amid the flames and destruction.
He thought, too, of a moment he’d shared with Welensky. They’d been discussing the crash, and O’Brien asked about the body count—in pursuit of his theory there might have been a hijacker, and therefore an extra body. Welensky gave a big, shark-like smile and said, “Was it 14, or 15?” The number was incorrect—it had been sixteen—but the implication was clear.