by Ravi Somaiya
The Irish soldiers, led by a tactically astute commandant, Pat Quinlan, realized quickly they were in trouble and dug in, manning antiquated Gustav machine guns. They fought bravely but were eventually forced to surrender.
It was seen in Ireland, until recently, as a national shame. An act of cowardice. And it called into question the presence of Irish troops among the UN contingent. Which is precisely what the European control group had intended, De Troye said.
The mercenary commanders crowed at their victory. They felt it showed the UN who was in charge, and that they could now negotiate as equals—as opponents worthy of more favorable terms in any cease-fire. So they were elated when Hammarskjöld elected to fly into the heart of their territory—itself a concession, they felt—to talk with Tshombe.
But Tshombe chose that moment to drift away from their influence. He decided to meet with Hammarskjöld without his European advisers present. Hammarskjöld had been excited because he felt an independent negotiation might yield a better outcome for the UN. The group led by Mr. X had made the same analysis, De Troye told de Kemoularia.
The mercenaries had means of tracking UN movements, and they were notified, on Sunday the seventeenth, when the Albertina had taken off to bring Hammarskjöld from Leopoldville to Ndola. And it was only then that they decided to act.
The mercenary forces were based at Kolwezi, a mercenary stronghold, but planned to divert Hammarskjöld’s plane to Kamina, which was 150 miles from Ndola by air. It had a runway more than adequate for a DC-6, and plenty of buildings for a quiet meeting. They wanted to talk to Hammarskjöld themselves, first, and find a more elegant solution—one in which their power and influence would not wane so quickly as it would with the end of Katanga and the reunification of the Congo.
They scrambled two Fouga Magister jets, each equipped with radar to help locate the Albertina and with sophisticated radios that ensured clear midair communication with the plane and with headquarters. The plan was to intercept, then fly in formation around the DC-6 and guide it to Kamina. The European group flew, in another plane, from Kolwezi to Kamina to await their guest. They were kept informed of the Albertina’s movements as they waited.
In the modern era, with ubiquitous monitoring of aircraft, it would have been an utterly pointless endeavor. But in the 1960s, the skies were a wilder place.1 And though the idea was unorthodox, De Troye and Grant told de Kemoularia, in his Monte Carlo apartment, there was no desire to harm Hammarskjöld. The motivation was not evil.
But one of the pilots who had flown the mission could speak to that, De Troye said. His name was Beukels, a Belgian. De Kemoularia had his doubts about De Troye—he felt he might be trying to secure money for his story, perhaps from Ahier at UPI. So he very much wanted to meet Beukels for himself, to make his own judgment.
On February 8, 1967, De Troye and Grant promised to bring Beukels to de Kemoularia’s apartment in Paris. De Troye and Grant showed up without him. They had not been able to arrange it after all, they said. A week later, De Troye called de Kemoularia and told him Grant had gone to Brussels to pick Beukels up. They’d be back in a day or two.
First, De Troye came alone again. He wanted a conversation to prepare the ground for Beukels’s arrival, de Kemoularia felt. He said that Hammarskjöld’s death had had a severe psychological effect on Beukels. He had dropped in weight from 190 pounds to 110, and was working for a construction company in between attempts to drink himself to death. In fact, that was why he wasn’t here now, De Troye said. He’d been drinking and had forgotten the appointment.
De Kemoularia was beginning to feel he was being strung along, and had to bite his tongue and channel all of the patience he could muster to avoid showing his fury. After De Troye left, at about 5 p.m., de Kemoularia called Ahier.
The reporter agreed that the story required meticulous checking. Not least because he had recently heard from another mercenary that the Albertina had been brought down by the white supremacist forces, but in this account it was done with anti-aircraft fire.
Ahier believed, first, that mercenaries were unreliable because they often found themselves in financial trouble, and had a natural tendency to spin schemes that might help them secure money. He felt, second, that all the stories had truth in them, but none had all of it.
The following Monday, De Troye finally brought Beukels. They posted a guard downstairs again—it struck de Kemoularia that he was there as a lookout. The mercenaries feared he might call the authorities and have them arrested for their part in the events they were describing.
Beukels looked as De Troye had described him: worn thin by life and by the torments of his own mind. He had the ambient acetone smell that comes from years of drinking. But to de Kemoularia, as the men sat overlooking the bucolic park, Beukels seemed sincere. Like he wanted to get something off his conscience.
Footnotes
1 In fact, the world was about to enter an era of audacious aviation capers. A few years later, the number of hijackings in America alone would spike to one a week, and stay there well into the 1970s.
Chapter 26
“If you refuse we have orders to use force”
De Troye and Beukels told de Kemoularia that on the day of the crash, Sunday, September 17, 1961, two Fouga Magister CM.170 jets had sat ready on the runway at the mercenary air base, Kolwezi.
The Fougas were low and narrow with rapier-thin wings and tail fins. Each was armed with 75mm guns. Every fifth bullet was a phosphorous tracer that would carve a bright line in the sky. (It was important that they be visible.) And each had 990 liters of fuel in its main tanks, with a reserve of 110 in its wing tanks. The pilots had calculated that though the Fouga’s technical range was twelve hundred kilometers, they could stretch it to fifteen or sixteen hundred kilometers in good conditions on a clear night.
Two pilots and two radio operators had been called earlier that evening and told to stand ready at Kolwezi for a mission. They would be informed of the precise details thirteen minutes prior to takeoff.
At ten thirty-five, they were told that their mission would be to locate a DC-6 flying from Leopoldville to Ndola, and divert it to Kamina. They did not know, Beukels said, who was aboard or why the plane had to be diverted. He presumed, he told de Kemoularia, that it was carrying African officials or war matériel. Five minutes later they received detailed air traffic control information on the plane’s speed, altitude, and line of flight.
At about ten fifty-two, they received their thirteen-minute warning. One pilot and one radio operator climbed into each Fouga, then levered down and locked a snug glass canopy that framed a 180-degree view of the black above. Beukels had been told, he said, to search along the Rhodesian border and in a northern zone around Ndola. The other Fouga would search farther north, on a more direct intercept path. It was expected that this Fouga, Fouga Two, would be more likely to find the plane first. Beukels was a backup.
When they located the plane, they were instructed to radio a request that the DC-6 divert, with wording in French, that said roughly: Call to DC-6, this is a landing notification. Please divert to base Kamina. We will escort you. Important Europeans want to meet one of those aboard. If you refuse we have orders to use force. Please confirm your acceptance.1
They were to give the plane one minute to respond if it was headed toward the runway at Ndola, and three minutes if it was flying in another direction. If the plane failed to heed the request, they were authorized to fire a burst of the visible tracer bullets as a warning. Once the Albertina submitted, the plan was to fly in formation around it and ensure it landed at Kamina, where the control group, headed by Mr. X, would be waiting.
The two Fougas flew together, Beukels at about two thousand meters, and Fouga Two at five thousand meters. After about a hundred kilometers—approximately halfway—they both climbed to nine thousand meters before splitting off to their intercept zones.
Updates on the Albertina’s position crackled through on a rarely used frequency accessibl
e only to advanced radios like the ones aboard. The operation they were flying, from Kolwezi to Ndola and back, was at the outside edge of the Fougas’ range, and precise information was key to save flight time, and thus fuel.
Fouga Two never found the DC-6, and returned to base. But Beukels said he did not know this. The two interceptors maintained radio silence between them—they were afraid, Beukels said without specifying further, of being overheard by “America.”
Beukels said he descended to seven thousand meters on the edge of his designated intercept zone. He received an update at 2358: The DC-6 was about eighty kilometers north of Ndola at two thousand to twenty-five hundred meters, about ten minutes from arrival. He said that the Ndola tower had collaborated with him at this point. It asked the Albertina to make another turn in order to delay it for interception. Beukels tuned his radio to hear communications between the DC-6 and the tower for further guidance.
His radio operator, a man he said was named Mertelot, advised him to climb to nine thousand meters, to better get into position, which took him nineteen seconds.
And then he realized that he was right above his target. He dove again to two thousand meters, about two hundred meters above the Albertina. He turned on two powerful external floodlights, used for search and rescue in the dense African bush, as a kind of signal, and radioed the DC-6 with the message he had been supplied.
“Wait, I will check,” someone aboard the Albertina replied. Beukels dropped to the right of the DC-6, again on the advice of his radio operator, and flew parallel with it. They then heard the Albertina speaking to the tower at Ndola. Beukels, now flying a short distance behind the Albertina, felt that the pilot had hesitated and that perhaps he was preparing to pull a trick and land anyway. He turned to his left, slightly higher than the DC-6, and dropped behind it. He felt he had no choice but to fire warning shots, and he wanted them to cross the path of the Albertina so that the pilot would see them.
He pulled the trigger and felt the gun expel a bright fusillade. He expected to see it arc harmlessly through the night. But to his horror the Albertina began to weave, and it appeared to Beukels that the pilot was struggling to correct and hold it in line. He must have hit part of its tail assembly.
“Do you think I really hit it?” he asked his radio operator. “Yes,” he replied. Beukels said he was so horrified that he lost his bearings and knew nothing except that he was still in the interception zone somewhere. It was his radio operator who saw that the DC-6 was burning on the ground, and informed Kolwezi, before Beukels took the plane to nine thousand meters and headed back himself.
He landed at a mercenary base at 1:05 a.m. local time. As soon as he stepped out of the aircraft and saw the faces of his superiors, he said, he knew something terrible had happened. He was brought before a panel of senior officers, and members of the control group, and interrogated. He found out then, for the first time, what he had done. He was held for ten days. He feared he would be killed, without trial or hope of appeal. But he was freed.
The tower recordings, which were noted as missing by both the UN and the Rhodesian inquiries, had been destroyed deliberately, Beukels said. The group decided to send Major Delin, another mercenary pilot, to the Rhodesian inquiry to deny any involvement—as a kind of bluff. And so the crime had disappeared.
After Hammarskjöld’s death, Beukels and De Troye said, they had been shunned. They could not find work. Beukels’s radio operator, Mertelot, disappeared. Lieutenant Colonel Lamoumine, the official commander of Katangese forces whom Ivan Smith had gotten to know in Ndola, was named among the interrogation panel and might also have corroborated the story. But he, too, had fled. “Left the world,” they put it, to join a monastery in Europe somewhere.
Even without corroboration, de Kemoularia somehow felt that the broken man in front of him was sincere. He got the impression that Beukels had come because he wanted to defend his character, to tell someone close to Hammarskjöld that he had not intended to kill him.
Until now, the mystery of the crash of the Albertina had been a sprawl of rumor. Hints, whispers, and dark implications. There was evidence, from the Rhodesian and UN reports, of an accident. There were second-hand accounts, surfaced by O’Brien, that the plane had been hijacked at the behest of a group of French mercenaries. Ahier had heard tales of a ground attack.
De Kemoularia had found the first concrete evidence—a confession, no less—that Virving and Ivan Smith had been correct to focus their attentions on the skies.
Footnotes
1 In French, as recalled by de Kemoularia and transcribed by Ivan Smith: “Appelle à DC-6. Avisation aterrisage. Prière vous détourne sur base Kamina. Vous escortons. Importantes personalités Européenes desirent rencontrer personalité a bord. Si refus, avons ordres de vous contraire par force. Si OK répondez.”
Chapter 27
“Cornered on a patch of gold”
Ivan Smith first heard the story in de Kemoularia’s apartment, on September 17, 1981—the twentieth anniversary of the crash. They each signed a solemn document stating their commitment to the truth, and to exposing it together.
Ivan Smith taped their meeting, with every detail of the story De Troye, Beukels, and Grant had told. And when he played it back, at home in Stroud, he was electrified. It had taken twenty years, the span of a third of his life. But at sixty-six he felt he finally had in his possession—in folders, piles, neatly folded maps, stacks of letters, and the connections in his mind—everything he needed for his final work.
He sat at his typewriter and began the process of synthesizing Beukels’s account with the material he’d gleaned from Welensky, from Virving, from his travels in Africa, and from public sources of information like the Swedish documentary and the French book Notre Guerre au Katanga.
On December 8, 1981, he sent a seventy-one-page account, dense with excited notes, to de Kemoularia. “I am more encouraged than ever by the validity of the story,” he wrote, and said he planned to focus on “getting it right in detail.” He also wanted to find Beukels again, with a view to getting his full account verified and published somewhere—with all proceeds to go to the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation.1
Virving, he said, had noted that the DC-6 was controlled, in part, by wires leading to the tailplane. Even a botched attack could easily have severed one of those wires without destroying the plane. Virving also had a picture, Ivan Smith wrote, of a mysterious hole in the DC-6’s astrodome—a small, transparent bubble behind the cockpit for taking navigation sightings. It could plausibly have been caused by a bullet that had also hit the tail assembly.
Among Ivan Smith’s interviews was a conversation with a Swedish trade union official, Sven Mattson. In 1961, Mattson had been helping the charcoal burners to build their own unions. After the crash, he said, many of them told him they’d seen things that contradicted the official accounts. But despite his urging, they were afraid to come forward in case they were punished.
He unearthed a previously unnoticed report from two of those charcoal burners, who had been on the ground in Ndola that night. They said they had seen two white men, in a jeep, come to the site of the crash, long before any search-and-rescue efforts were mobilized. They had looked at the wreckage, then got in their car and left again, the charcoal burners had said. “Who were they, and why did they not go immediately to the police?” Ivan Smith wrote. “Why did the search not begin until 9.00am in the morning?”
Ivan Smith had also, he wrote, confirmed for himself that the mercenaries were using Union Minière communications equipment and workshops.
When he examined the siege at Jadotville that Beukels and De Troye mentioned, he found it had gone exactly as they claimed, and had precisely the demoralizing effect they spoke of.
Ivan Smith had confirmed previous accounts that suggested there had been more than one jet fighter in operation. He spoke to a pilot who had delivered a Fouga, purchased by Tshombe from France, to Katanga. He had landed on the way at Malta, then under Brit
ish control. “The British did nothing to stop those planes going through to Katanga,” Ivan Smith wrote.
He suggested that, given that the story had started with Robert Ahier at UPI, Ahier might be willing to take it on. But he wasn’t. And nobody else was either, apparently. It is not recorded why, or how, or where the two men tried to have their story placed. But it is a matter of record that they did not succeed.
In the twenty years since Hammarskjöld had died, the world had shifted, and shifted again. The idealistic rebellions of the 1960s had curdled into the chaos and dysfunction of the 1970s. The UN had faded, both as an emblem of a postwar hope and as a force in the world. Put bluntly, nobody seemed to care.
So Ivan Smith waited. And then, in September 1992, an Italian United Nations plane carrying aid to Sarajevo during the Balkan conflict was shot down, reportedly by a hostile missile. Four people died. Ivan Smith told Conor Cruise O’Brien he felt this was the moment: an instance on which they could build, when the world’s attention had flitted back toward the injustice of an embattled nation targeting the UN.
The two men wrote a letter together, to the Guardian newspaper in Britain. It was printed on September 11, 1992. It was short, but powerful. “Yet again United Nations personnel are being killed in peace-keeping and humanitarian missions,” it opened.
Now the Italian crew on a mercy mission to Bosnia have been shot down we feel it is time that we should say that we are convinced that UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld was killed in the same way in 1961 when his aircraft crashed over Ndola, Northern Rhodesia. He was trying to settle the Congo crisis, in many ways as complex as that in the skeleton Yugoslavia.