by Ravi Somaiya
He also pointed out that air kidnapping, by means of hijack, had been briefly in vogue at around the time of the crash. He cited a particularly relevant example. Ahmed Ben Bella, an Algerian leader who had become the symbol for resistance against the French, had been kidnapped by the French crew of a flight from Rabat to Tunis in 1956. Ben Bella was held in France—a significant victory for Paris, which denied Algerian forces a charismatic and tough leader—until the war in Algeria ended.2
When that story had first been revealed, he said, it had been seen as absurd, too. And because Notre Guerre au Katanga had come out after the Rhodesian and UN investigations had concluded, nobody had ever seriously looked into the hijack theory.
Ultimately, O’Brien concluded, it had to be taken seriously that Hammarskjöld’s death, during a hijacking, had been proclaimed as an exploit of Tshombe’s forces by Duchemin, the man who was in charge of those forces. But even if one chose to disregard that fact, it was undisputed that the Albertina had been unsecured on the runway at Leopoldville. And so, if nothing else, hijacking had to be investigated as a possibility.
There had previously been a mysterious—almost poetic—corroboration of the idea that the French white supremacist forces had been closely involved. A dispatch from the UN in Leopoldville in early 1962, just a few months after the crash, noted that the nickname for the French group of about forty soldiers Duchemin and Trinquier headed had changed recently. It was now called “the crash group.” No explanation was given.
Footnotes
1 It is not clear how O’Brien came across it. But he had been a counselor to the Irish embassy in Paris before he joined the UN, and he retained connections in the city.
2 He became Algeria’s first president, and survived at least two French assassination attempts.
Chapter 23
“I need your help desperately on this”
By 1971, Ivan Smith was director of the UN’s information center in London. He had also become, in any spare moment, the informal head of a group of Hammarskjöld’s prominent associates who continued to gather evidence on the crash.
He worked from a chaotic study on the ground floor of his home, on a farm in Stroud, Gloucestershire, overlooking a rolling green valley and a village of pale limestone houses in the distance. His chief tool was an Olivetti typewriter, surrounded by fallen piles of photographs and books on a leather-topped desk.
He decided that the time was right to air what he had found. He agreed to appear in a BBC documentary exploring the idea that the crash had been a murder, not an accident.
“Enough evidence has come to my notice,” Ivan Smith explained, under the gaze of a giant, boxy television camera, “to make me believe that further investigation may well show the reasons for the flying accident were not the ones that many people supposed.” Those who had supplied him information, he said, were afraid to speak for themselves.
“Why are they afraid to come forward?” the presenter asked, in clipped BBC English.
“Well I suppose the personal involvement, and in some cases the evidence they offer is not thoroughly tested and in other cases there are some people whom I have spoken to who do have what seems on the surface firmer ground to stand on. They are afraid of the kind of people that might have been involved in an operation of this kind.”
“They are afraid of reprisal?”
“Yes.”
The burst of public attention shook loose a flurry of letters and leads. A friend wrote to tell him of a conversation with Edward Goodacre, a former British intelligence operative who had been involved in the UN investigation. Goodacre joked he had been “in on the act.” Lots of inconvenient facts about the flight, especially those that mitigated against the idea of an accident, he said, had been hushed up.
Ivan Smith and Virving still felt that Welensky held the final threads of the mystery, the ones that could tie their own tantalizing clues together. And by 1976, Ivan Smith felt a fresh urgency. In America, a Senate panel known informally as the Church Committee had just released blockbuster investigations into recent abuses by the CIA, NSA, FBI, and others. They included embarrassing details on the death of Lumumba. If the CIA and SIS had been involved in one elaborate conspiracy in the Congo, was it so unlikely they knew more than they had said about Hammarskjöld? Besides, Ivan Smith had been bedridden with an illness. And Welensky had had a heart attack. Neither man had forever.
Ivan Smith sent Welensky a note of support, along with a book to read while he recuperated. But the letters took on a new tone. “I need your help desperately on this,” he wrote. “My health is rotten and it would mean so much for me to get this right in my own mind before I go to my fathers.” He asked him to phone, reversing the charges. He asked for access to Welensky’s secret papers. Most of all, he begged Welensky to “please help me to solve this. I now have everything except the last links and it has become a point of personal importance—as a close friend of Dag’s, to set the record straight.”
He had settled on the aerial attack theory. He told Welensky that he knew another plane had been involved on the night of the crash. He suspected that it had evaded detection by using a paved Rhodesian road, instead of an airfield with its guaranteed witnesses and inconvenient records, to take off and land.
His working theory, he said, was that the Albertina had been attacked by this mercenary plane. An American official had told him, he wrote to Welensky, that there had been a “U.S. aircraft on the ground passing messages to [Hammarskjöld’s] aircraft.” Perhaps that American aircraft had spotted the danger and warned the Albertina of the threat it was under. Hammarskjöld would likely have ordered the pilots to land anywhere they could. And the crash could have come in all the confusion.
Lastly, he veiled an accusation—that Welensky had been responsible for the delay in beginning the search for the wreckage—as an innocent question. “The puzzle for me, [is] why Williams, the Airport manager, took so long to start the search. It was undertaken at your instigation from Salisbury. Did he know what had happened and was that why he delayed the official search?”
Welensky replied shortly afterward. His tone had shifted. It was cold, dismissive. At points he seemed to sneer. And at others, he lied. He confirmed that an American plane had been on the ground at Ndola, and that it had a “very powerful radio.” But he denied everything else.
The two inquiries established that there had been no other plane, he wrote. (One of them had, but not very convincingly, and the other had explicitly not.) If there had been, the odds of it successfully attacking the Albertina were astronomical. (This evades the fact that Ivan Smith did not feel the attack had been successful.) There was only one Fouga, he wrote. (Welensky knew that Tshombe had at least two, because he’d helped supply them.) There were no suitable concrete roads near the airport. (Less a lie than a willful misinterpretation.) The search had been delayed simply by confusion. And even if it had gone ahead at night, it would have taken hours to find anything in the dense bush. (Such considerations do not usually stop searches from beginning as soon as possible.)
He offered, brutally for Ivan Smith, who specifically wanted new and unpublished information, to read over the official inquiries again. And he mentioned that recently, a Swedish journalist had come out to Rhodesia to look into the crash, but had found nothing and given up. The implication was that Ivan Smith should do the same.
Ivan Smith replied less than a week later. He tried to put Welensky at ease—to say that he bore no personal blame. It had been mercenaries, he wrote, acting on their own who had killed Hammarskjöld. Tshombe did not control them. And they did not want a cease-fire—some because they didn’t want to have to find another war, others, likely French, to push the cause of white supremacy. This was more than theory, Ivan Smith wrote.
He wrote with such confidence because he now had corroboration. Bo Virving had sent, by fax and mail, his entire body of evidence. Every calculation and lead. With it, as a kind of executive summary, came the full report Virvin
g had submitted to the Swedish foreign ministry back in 1962.
Ivan Smith’s sureness lent a new tension to the correspondence with Welensky. It increased in 1980, when the Swedish writer and documentarian Gunnar Möllerstedt, an ally of Ivan Smith’s, aired a multi-part biographical documentary on Hammarskjöld on Swedish television. It ended with the mercenary theory.
It further emboldened Ivan Smith. He had found out, he wrote to Welensky, that Rhodesia had helped Katanga buy planes. And details from the Kennedy papers, recently made public, showed Welensky asking Tshombe to be more discreet about using Rhodesian roads as landing strips.
“I know without any argument that you could not have been party in even the most remote degree to what happened at Ndola, nor Tshombe,” he said. “I want for all our sakes to put the record straight. Please help me to do that.”
Shortly afterward, Ivan Smith received a reply. He was surprised to note that it was from Welensky’s daughter, also his private secretary. Sir Roy had been taken sick, she wrote, using her father’s formal title. Heart trouble. “It is quite likely that Sir Roy will not be dealing with any of his correspondence within a period to be of any assistance to you,” she concluded.
The next letter Welensky sent to George Ivan Smith was dictated. And it meant Welensky could no longer effectively disguise his disdain in the ambiguities of written language.
He hated the Swedish documentary. “I understand how the Swedes feel,” he dictated, “they really haven’t had a hero since Charles XIIth, and of course, it is very difficult to swallow that the death of the one man that they had produced in all these years that has hit the world scene, should have been killed as a result of the error of a Swedish pilot, it is damned difficult to swallow.”
Unprompted, perhaps guided by the mysterious mental patterns of the spoken word, he added that “neither Tshombe or I had any reason for wanting the death of Dag Hammarskjöld.”
Ivan Smith replied a few days later. The odds of the theory aired in the documentary were high, he said. But “we cannot exclude the possibility of attack by other types of aircraft—indeed a friend of mine has a complete file which I hope to see. He has met two of the pilots who were involved and is in no doubt at all about what happened.”
Chapter 24
“The truth about the events”
The story Ivan Smith was referring to began on the evening of Thursday, January 12, 1967, under the soaring frescoed ceilings of the Palais Garnier, the grand opera house in Paris.
Claude de Kemoularia, a French diplomat in his mid-forties with dark, piercing features that betrayed his Georgian heritage, was attending an opulent ball there. As he wandered among the hundreds of Parisians in tuxedos and gowns, sipping champagne on three sweeping marble staircases, he bumped into a man he knew. A harried and bespectacled Paris correspondent for United Press International named Robert Ahier.
By the gentle light of ornate candelabras, they spoke of the waves of chaos and change they felt were washing over the world. Paris itself would soon be riven by riots. De Kemoularia, an adviser to Prince Rainier of Monaco, had been Hammarskjöld’s personal assistant until his death. And so the conversation turned, wistfully, to where global geopolitics might have been had he lived.
“Curiously,” Ahier said, over the sound of echoing voices, “I have come across a man who claims to know, or pretends to know, the truth about the events.” De Kemoularia asked if it would be possible to meet this man.
Ahier said he thought he could trace him, and would try to arrange it. And one Saturday nearly two weeks later, de Kemoularia was at his Paris office, in a handsome mansion of biscuit-colored stone that had once hosted the wedding of Napoleon Bonaparte and Josephine de Beauharnais, when his phone rang. It was Ahier’s source. He named himself, in a Belgian accent, as De Troye.
De Kemoularia asked if De Troye could come by. He gave his address. An hour later, De Troye arrived, with another colleague he named as Grant. (It remains unclear who these men were exactly, but their names match two soldiers who appear in UN records from the Congo, as Major Jacques de Troyer, the commander of the Katangese gendarmerie, and a mercenary fighter, Johan Mawer Grant.)
De Kemoularia concluded immediately, from their rough appearance, that these men were likely mercenaries. They were headed to Marseille, to recruit soldiers for a fight in Angola between the Portuguese colonialists and black independence guerrillas. By coincidence, De Kemoularia was about to depart for Monaco, about two hours from Marseille on the Côte d’Azur in the south of France.
De Kemoularia reserved them a room at the opulent Hotel Metropole, a palatial maze, dotted with lush plants, minutes from the casino in Monte Carlo.1 And on Tuesday, January 24, De Troye and Grant arrived at de Kemoularia’s home in Monaco as arranged. The men talked all afternoon, and de Kemoularia took meticulous notes.
They kept repeating that it had been an accident. That a mercenary Fouga had brought down the Albertina, but that had not been the plan. They knew the pilot who had flown it. They knew who had killed the secretary-general. But he had been flying a different mission.
Footnotes
1 Monaco is a tiny nation that almost entirely comprises the city of Monte Carlo.
Chapter 25
“Mr. X”
The Congo Crisis had sputtered on for years after Hammarskjöld’s death. On January 14, 1963, Katangese ministers finally declared that the nation’s secession had ended. The last mercenaries took refuge in Angola the day after. In February, Tshombe had fled for Northern Rhodesia. He cited poor health. But he also flew bales of money, the equivalent of between $5 and $15 million in contemporary funds, across his borders to be deposited in banks in Geneva and Brussels.
The crisis transformed, eventually, into a rolling civil war. In 1964 the Congolese central government, under Cyrille Adoula, lost control of the country. Another province, Stanleyville, in the east, seceded, and rural insurgencies rose. Tshombe, the man who had himself wanted to split the country apart, was the unlikely rescuer. He returned to be prime minister.
Until November 1965, when Mobutu, the American ally who had headed the army, launched a coup. Tshombe fled, to plot his return. In 1967 he was tried for treason in absentia in the Congo, and sentenced to death. Shortly afterward he himself was kidnapped in midair by a hijacker, a French operative named François Bodenan, connected with his country’s intelligence services and rumored to have worked with the CIA. Tshombe was flown to Algeria, where he subsequently died.
Mobutu, who wore a leopard-skin hat and carried a traditional symbol of power in the Congo, a carved stick, was beginning to set the clichés for the modern African dictator. His was to become the only political party allowed. He crushed dissent with a combination of violence, cunning, and cash. As he repeated his rallying cry, “Authenticity,” he looted the treasury. He was enabled and supported by America, which still considered him an ally in the fight against Communism.
De Kemoularia’s main memory of Katanga and Tshombe was chaos. As far as he could recall, back to the early 1960s, the country and its leader had acted one way one day, and another the next. It was erratic, with no obvious strategy.
Over a series of meetings in Monte Carlo and at de Kemoularia’s Paris apartment, a luxurious, modern white block overlooking the Bois de Boulogne, De Troye laid out an intricate story. It explained each change of course in Katanga and showed, plausibly, de Kemoularia felt, the unknown danger that Hammarskjöld was flying into. (The other man, Grant, usually stood guard outside.)
It was the first time he had candidly heard the story of Katanga from the perspective of the mercenaries. They called themselves “foreign volunteers” and hated the idea that they were driven only by money, De Troye said. “We’re not brigands. Among us there are excellent and good people, medical doctors, professors, ex-military officers, so we were not as bad as [all] that.”
The story began four days before the Albertina took off, on Wednesday, September 13, 1961. Hammarskjöld was on his way fr
om New York to Leopoldville. UN troops, in an attempt to resolve the situation in Katanga before he arrived, had begun taking aggressive action in two consecutive operations against the mercenary forces—Operation Rumpunch and Operation Morthor.
Tshombe nominally led Katanga, De Troye told de Kemoularia. But in actual fact, he was a dupe. The country was run by a powerful group of about a dozen European advisers, drawn from Belgium, Britain, France, and elsewhere, and representing industry and other European interests in Africa. It was led by a man he would only name as “Mr. X,” a European executive who was the functional high commander of the Katangese forces and an adviser of such influence that he was more feared than Tshombe.
He acted independently of the formal Katangese government, working mainly through Munongo—a more ruthless character than Tshombe, according to De Troye. When the UN stepped up operations, Mr. X and his cohort feared it was a dangerous sign for the continued presence of Europeans, both in Katanga and across Africa. The UN was acting, effectively, as an independent force for the reunion of the Congo—somewhat against the will of both the United States and the Soviet Union, and of European business interests. It could not be allowed to stand, for the precedent it might set.
That September, he said, white-led Katangese troops overran a giant and strategically vital air base, Kamina, that was more like a small city, and attacked the UN across Katanga. They shot up UN planes, including an air ambulance.
And they arranged a trap. Europeans in Jadotville, a mining center that was considered Katanga’s second city, were tasked with making the UN believe they felt endangered and required protection. A contingent of 150 Irish soldiers arrived that week during Operation Morthor. But they found themselves vastly outnumbered—some figures suggest twenty to one—by Katangese troops, led by white European mercenaries. One of the Fougas screamed over with bombs.