by Ravi Somaiya
Perhaps it was their ages—Ivan Smith was seventy-seven and O’Brien, seventy-four. Perhaps it was that more than thirty years had passed since the crash. But the letter stated their conviction more clearly and concisely than ever before: Mercenaries had been hired, indirectly, by European industrial interests to prevent the UN from reunifying the Congo.
A unified Congo stood to ease Cold War tensions. But would also have imperiled the profits of companies like Union Minière and Tanganyika Concessions. “We saw and felt the bare fangs of commercial interests cornered on a patch of gold,” they wrote.
Those commercial interests sent two planes to divert the Albertina, but they hit a wire to the tailplane when they fired a warning shot, causing the crash. “Two official enquiries were complete and found no evidence to the contrary. Why should they if only a wire was hit?”
Reluctantly, they wrote, they wanted to open the case again “in the interests of peace and peoples who work for it. Bosnia is subject to raw race and religious prejudice causing brigands to commit the same type of insane acts from which we suffered in the Congo.”
They had every right to expect nothing. But this time the story took off. The Guardian ran a separate piece on their letter, expanding on each of their theories. It was followed up around the world. Union Minière felt compelled to issue a denial.
Two weeks after the initial letter, O’Brien wrote another piece for the Guardian, this time calling for further investigation on key points. The mercenaries, he outlined, had means, motive, and opportunity for committing the murder. The argument that they were insane—which had been used to discredit their claims of involvement—cut both ways, O’Brien felt. Who conspires to the ridiculous more often than the insane?
Why did the Rhodesians take fifteen hours to find a plane wreck so close to the airport? he mused. And why had the governments of Britain, America, France, and Belgium been so uncooperative in addressing the open questions about the crash?
O’Brien concluded that the nations were overtly supportive of the UN but had also been helping commercial interests that may have acted against it. And so the nations probably “did not conspire against Hammarskjöld, but I believe they conspired to cover up that conspiracy.”
Footnotes
1 It was founded in 1962 and remains vibrant even today.
Chapter 28
“We are going to teach them”
Godefroid Munongo woke at 4:30 a.m. on May 28, 1992, in his home on the outskirts of the Congolese capital of Kinshasa. He read from the Bible as he lay in bed next to his wife. Then he walked out on to the balcony attached to his bedroom and began to pace in the cool morning air.
He had much to think about. Munongo was scheduled to address the Congolese people that afternoon. He had written a speech that he felt, according to family legend, would shake his country to its foundations, and finally set its history straight.1 Shortly before 6 a.m., just as the men who guarded his walled compound changed shifts, he bathed, put on a dark Belgian suit, ate a breakfast of bananas and coffee, and prepared to leave the house.
Thirty years earlier, when Kinshasa was still called Leopoldville, Munongo had been Tshombe’s interior minister, and one of the most powerful and feared men in the Congo. He was stocky and bald, with a chillingly implacable affect, his eyes piercing through small transparent sunglasses.
He was accused of being intimately involved in killing Lumumba. And in 1962, a man named Cléophas Kanyinda had told the UN he suspected Munongo had involvement in, or knowledge of, Hammarskjöld’s death, too.
Kanyinda had been a clerk with the Katangese government until he abandoned Tshombe and sought refuge with the UN. He told UN officials that, before the wreckage of the Albertina had been found, he had witnessed Munongo pull up in a car to talk to a Belgian official. Munongo, he recalled, looked satisfied through the rolled-down window. “Mr. H has been knocked down,” Munongo said. “We are going to teach them.”
It chimed with other accounts. Beukels had pointed out Munongo as the contact between Mr. X, the leader of the mysterious European conglomerate, and the Katangese. And Conor Cruise O’Brien had separately felt that Munongo was among the most dangerous of the Katangese leadership.
After Katanga rejoined the rest of the Congo in 1963, Munongo had served in the central government again. In 1966 he fell in one of President Mobutu’s purges and was arrested and jailed. Mobutu seized his home in Elisabethville, now renamed Lubumbashi, and housed soldiers there. Munongo was released in 1968, when he left Congolese politics and began to work in the private sector, traveling between Europe and his home in Kinshasa.
Through the decades, despite periodic pressure, Munongo had never addressed the allegations against him. He saw his silence as regal. His last remaining title was Msiri—the king of the Bayeke people, a group of his forebears who had first migrated from Tanganyika to settle Katanga at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was not a responsibility he wore lightly. His people, he felt, had discovered Katanga and tamed and tended the region until it had become the most fruitful and prosperous for hundreds of miles around.
It was a Msiri, Godefroid’s grandfather, who had resisted the Belgians when they first came, in 1891, to plunder Katanga. They shot him in front of his people. The story had become a family parable. The embodiment of the proper willingness to do whatever was necessary to maintain the kingdom. Munongo felt that he had carried on his grandfather’s proud traditions during his own rule in Katanga. He did not have to justify that to anyone.
But in 1990, under international pressure to moderate his dictatorship after twenty-five brutal years, Mobutu had instituted a national conference—a kind of truth and reconciliation commission that was supposed to be a step toward democracy in the Congo. It pushed the old allegations against Munongo toward the front pages again. As the conference sprawled over months and years, Munongo grew increasingly aggrieved at what he felt was an unfair focus on him.
By 1992, Munongo, now sixty-two and increasingly concerned with his legacy, told Mobutu privately that he had decided to confront the accusations directly. Mobutu, by Munongo’s account, pleaded with him not to. He said that they should discuss the matter in secret. That he wanted to talk to the nation on these topics first himself. Munongo responded that each of them would have to do what they had to do. Munongo had announced he would speak to the conference on that day, May 28, 1992, at 5 p.m.
He left the house for the conference after breakfast, so he could watch the proceedings before his speech. He was driven the forty-five minutes or so to the huge, white Congolese parliament building2 in a Mazda 929 limousine, alongside Christian, the oldest of his nine children.
They pushed past the crowds outside, ignored the television cameras, and made their way to their seats on a long bench in the chamber. Munongo was excited, he told his family, to get a weight off his chest. To tell his story even if it implicated others, and clear his name and that of his people. He had asked his wife to prepare a celebratory meal of chicken, sweet potatoes, and vegetables for later.
At around noon, as Munongo was sitting by himself, a small group of angry men approached him. They were carrying folded newspapers whose headlines accused him of killing Lumumba. They kept throwing them, hard, onto the table in front of Munongo. It seemed bizarre to those sitting nearby.
Shortly after that Munongo started to wheeze and gasp. He could not get enough air. Christian rushed him into a car, and on to Kinshasa’s Ngaliema Hospital. By the time he arrived he was barely hanging on. The doctors resuscitated Munongo, and briefly he opened his eyes. Christian said “Papa” twice. He squeezed his son’s hand, hard in response.
The power had gone out at Munongo’s house, so none of his family had seen the televised coverage of the emergency. They waited, in the semi-dusk, unknowing.
As soon as Christian returned, inconsolable with grief, his mother and sister collapsed. They barely needed telling that Munongo had died while holding Christian’s hand. First, they in
formed his younger children, studying in Los Angeles and in Belgium, by phone. Then the guards in the compound. Then they left as a group to go and tell the neighbors.
When they returned, they noticed that the gate to the house was open. Usually the guards made sure that it was locked at all times. But they’d been distracted by the death, too. Upstairs, Munongo’s office had been ransacked. Papers lay all over his ebony desk and the floor. The trash can had been emptied out, and its contents apparently taken.
The Munongo family is convinced that Congolese political interests, with something to lose from the truth emerging, poisoned him. They suspect the newspapers thrown in front of him were treated with one of the deadly airborne powders, made from a concoction of poisonous plants that grow wild, then in vogue in Kinshasa.3
Munongo had suffered from heart trouble. It might merely have been a terrible coincidence. But because the Msiri’s body must be left intact, according to tradition, no autopsy was done. He habitually kept few papers. And no copy of Munongo’s scheduled speech was ever found. Whatever he was planning to say about the dark events of the Katangese secession died with him.
Footnotes
1 This account was provided by Munongo’s son, and only the portions of it that are public could be independently verified.
2 Now named the Palais du Peuple.
3 This occasionally still happens. In 2019, a mysterious poison called karuho was implicated in Congolese murders.
Chapter 29
“The page is gone”
By 1992, around the time Munongo died and Ivan Smith and O’Brien’s letter appeared in the Guardian, conspiracy theorists had discovered the Hammarskjöld story.
A former Swedish archbishop said God had told him that He had instructed a charcoal burner to kill Hammarskjöld. Another theory suggested Hammarskjöld had committed an elaborate suicide by murdering the entire flight crew. A Norwegian lady insisted he had died because he wanted to bomb Katanga himself.
The Swedish government, beset by both legitimate news and a flood of lurid tabloid headlines, appointed a veteran diplomat, Bengt Rösiö, to investigate the new claims. Ivan Smith wrote to him to ask him not to close leads that “one day others may open.”
Rösiö, a witty and bemused-looking man with thick glasses and unruly hair, gray at his temples, was then sixty-five. He had recently retired after forty-one years across seventeen nations in the foreign service. Among his postings, decades earlier, had been a stint as Swedish vice consul in Leopoldville in 1961. It gave him an intimate understanding of the chaos and comedy of the Congo Crisis.
Leopoldville had felt like landing on a different planet, Rösiö recalled. He visited Matadi, the main seaport, with President Kasavubu. On the way back, Kasavubu’s entire gleaming motorcade got lost and went in endless winding circles because nobody had told the lead driver where to go. Stray dogs kept him up as they howled through the nights. And an invitation to a formal dinner instructed guests that the dress code was merely to “dress.”
Rösiö’s colleagues from other nations dropped like flies. A British diplomat contracted a tropical disease and was flown home. A Danish one was attacked by armed robbers in his bedroom. Belgian and Swiss officials had nervous breakdowns. A Russian was sent home when his alcoholism escalated past the point of disguise, a German was eaten by a crocodile, and an American military attaché was murdered in bed with his Congolese mistress.
UN officials, he discovered, were the fish who found themselves most out of water. Only one, as far as he could make out, had any grasp of the local language or culture. He had just gotten used to being perpetually off balance when a UN jeep careened up his driveway and a Swedish air force colonel jumped down with a message: Hammarskjöld was missing, probably dead.
Rösiö traveled immediately to Ndola, where he was shocked by the raw, flaming hatred he heard against the UN from white Africans. It struck him that it was not beyond the bounds of emotional logic, at least, that one of their number might have sought to harm Hammarskjöld.
Rösiö certainly didn’t rule out the idea when he came to examine the evidence in 1992. But to his bafflement the Swedish foreign ministry, despite assigning him the task, provided little help and a tiny budget. He conducted hundreds of interviews anyway, mostly at his own expense, over the course of a year or so. And he gained access to Virving’s boxes of evidence, too.
Rösiö was, as an investigator, a different proposition from some who had come before him. He was funny. And being funny enabled him, for better or worse, to skip a lot of dead ends that the credulous dutifully trudged.
The official inquiries and the Swedish government, he felt, had been inept. All had been primarily concerned with hiding the core fact all established institutions protect: that nobody knew anything. Leopoldville in 1961 had baffled everyone, most of all the UN, which was utterly flailing. He learned, too, that news editors would publish any exciting-sounding junk that met the rigorous standard of both crossing their desks and not being easily corrected. This included speculations about the CIA and KGB that had virtually no evidence to support them.
The end result, he felt, as he surveyed the landscape of speculation, theory, and evidence, was that everyone fell back on their prejudices. The Rhodesians, and white Africans in general, blamed the UN, whose pilots, they had implied, were tired, ignorant, useless, and possibly drunk. Black Africans blamed the white Africans, with an increasingly conspiratorial bent.
He interviewed former Belgian mining executives who felt that it was not at all implausible that Union Minière might have been strongly connected to the mercenaries. But he remained skeptical of Ivan Smith and O’Brien’s theories.
It was exceedingly unlikely, Rösiö wrote in his eventual report, released in 1993, “that even mercenaries and/or their backers could have believed that kidnapping the U.N. Secretary-General and keeping him hostage would lead to increased respect for their common sense and good judgement.”
A Swedish journalist, he discovered, had been asked to pay 500,000 francs to meet Beukels in 1981, and had declined. Which cast the pilot’s motives into doubt. Rösiö had not been able to find him to corroborate his story, but he noted that Beukels had never gone to the authorities, who might have been able to establish the truth of his tale.
Rösiö felt that the earlier theory, put forth by O’Brien in his play, that French mercenaries had placed a soldier named Réné Gheysels aboard the Albertina to hijack it, had a fatal flaw: “If his colleagues had found ‘Gheysels’ to be expendable, is it conceivable that he would have concurred? A mercenary is, almost by definition, not kamikaze material.”
But on the other hand, it was equally implausible that the pilots of the Albertina had simply used the wrong chart—for Ndolo, a town near Leopoldville, rather than Ndola—and planted the plane into the ground in simple error. “To mistake Ndola for Ndolo is as likely as explaining a crash at Geneva by believing that the pilot… had mistaken the Alps for the Mediterranean,” Rösiö wrote.
That such far-fetched theories could have gained credence, he wrote, “could be taken as an indication that somebody has wanted reporters to run up blind alleys.”
That left only questions:
Did the pilot feel so relieved after a long and strenuous flight that he made too daring a turn, like a downhill skier who falls when displaying a final triumphant swerve in front of the spectators? Might he have been frightened by the sudden appearance of an unexpected plane and made a sudden dive, much like a bus driver who skids into a ravine as a result of turning the wheel too sharply in order to avoid hitting a child who has run into the path of his vehicle? Was any other aircraft “up and about” at that time, near Ndola?
He didn’t know. And he felt that nobody else did, either. Which left him with a similar conclusion to the Rhodesian report—that quirks of the landscape and the circumstances had combined to leave the pilots blind, causing them to fly into the ground. He gave the conclusion its modern name, controlled flight into terrain.
By 1992, he noted, aircraft had special ground proximity sensors to warn pilots of such an error. An urgent computerized voice would shout, “Terrain, terrain, pull up, pull up.” But the DC-6 had no such system.
It was, he wrote, “the most probable—or, if you so wish, the least improbable—reason for the crash. Even so, it is then difficult to understand why none of the four in the cockpit of the DC-6B looked at any of the three altimeters during the final descent, an established routine which they ought to have found even more imperative than usual given that they were on such an important mission.”
There were still, he wrote, things that troubled him about the crash. The Albertina’s radio was noted as dead by Ndola air traffic control five minutes after its scheduled landing time. There were eighteen planes and countless personnel at the airport. Yet nobody did anything for hours. The Albertina and its occupants were left to burn.
The airport manager, Williams, had been informed of sightings of flames at 5:38 a.m., Rösiö said, but had still not gotten to his desk to begin investigating until 9 a.m. The Rhodesian wing commander Maurice Barber—who had later overseen the initial investigation into the crash that exonerated Rhodesian officials—had also been informed before the sun rose. But he had roused himself to look into it even later than Williams. The explanation by other airport staff, who said that they would have initiated a search had the Albertina’s radio not gone dead, was “a statement tantamount to wondering why a dead man does not call a doctor,” Rösiö said.
He blamed Lord Alport, the British official who had been waiting at the airport for Hammarskjöld, for his eagerness to explain away the disappearance of a plane carrying the secretary-general of the United Nations as nothing.