The Golden Thread

by Ravi Somaiya

  In fact, he wrote, nobody knew what had happened because the Albertina did not have a black box recorder, and the records from the tower at Ndola had gone missing. That had been taken as evidence that the authorities knew of the assassination and wanted to help cover it up. But there was another, more plausible explanation, Rösiö said: that they were scared of civil unrest if the details of Hammarskjöld’s death emerged, and wanted to keep a lid on it. “This would at least explain,” he wrote, “why honourable and competent men at Ndola airport did not come to the succour of fellow aviators in a burning wreck nine miles from where they stood.”

  He pointed out, in the understated language of a diplomat, that the governments with information that might clarify matters were hardly clamoring to provide it. And that into that vacuum had rushed the “inevitable allegations behind every conspiracy theory”: that evidence had been falsified and suppressed, and that those involved had gone mad, committed suicide, “or, in one case, become a monk.”

  His conclusions, he wrote, were ultimately:

  (i) that it is not known how an experienced crew of four could lose 1,000 feet in altitude without noticing it; (ii) that there is nothing to indicate that the DC-6B crashed because of outside interference; and (iii) that professional ground staff from civil aviation, as well as members of the police, security, and air force, let 15 hours go by from the moment the radio of the ‘Albertina’ went dead until the scorched wreckage was found exactly where it could have been calculated to be four minutes after commencing its final descent to Ndola airport.

  He cited the poet Robert Penn Warren1 as his final thought.

  The answer is in the back of the book

  but the page is gone

  And grandma told you to tell the truth

  but she is dead.

  Footnotes

  1 From the poem The Ballad of Billie Potts, first cited by O’Brien in his book about Katanga.

  Chapter 30

  “A state secret”

  Rösiö did not feel comfortable with his public conclusions. Many strange things had happened in the course of his investigation. The Swedish foreign ministry—his employer for nearly his entire career, which had asked him to pursue the investigation—refused to release all of its own documents on the crash. In fact, when his report was released, the ministry quickly classified even more material related to that night in Ndola. He never found out why.

  When Rösiö met Claude de Kemoularia to discuss Beukels, de Kemoularia had told him he had previously presented his findings to a Swedish diplomat, Axel Edelstam. But when Rösiö asked Edelstam—a colleague, after all—Edelstam denied it.

  Rösiö found that de Kemoularia had kept Edelstam’s business card. And that travel records showed that Edelstam had indeed been in Paris on the day de Kemoularia described. Edelstam refused to explain further.

  He had contacted the British Foreign Office, too, to seek out Williams, the airport manager at Ndola in 1961. Because he had realized that a small fact, dismissed in every official inquiry with a glib line or two, was in fact the heart of the mystery.

  Williams had insisted in 1961 that tape recording equipment at the Ndola tower, required by strict regulation to be present and operating, had been malfunctioning on the night of September 17. The tower logs—notes taken by air traffic controllers that provide a fallback account—were missing, too.

  These records are sacrosanct for even the most boring flights. For the flight of a figure such as Hammarskjöld, in circumstances like those in 1961 in Katanga, it was difficult to imagine that they would have been casually lost or destroyed.

  The only record of the last moments of the flight was a reconstruction of events in the tower that Williams had made himself, from unknown source material, two days after the crash.

  No explanation had been given. And apparently—to Rösiö’s shock—none had ever been sought by investigators for this vital missing evidence. Williams was the only man who could provide solid answers.

  When Rösiö asked the British government he was told, by an undersecretary for transnational affairs in the Foreign Office, that Williams’s address was a state secret. Undeterred, Rösiö hired a private detective, who provided the address, and he wrote to Williams to say he’d be coming to see him. But a few hours before Rösiö left Sweden, Williams called him to say that he’d been contacted by British officials and was unable to meet after all. (Rösiö went anyway, but was given nearly word-for-word the account Williams had given previously to the inquiries.)

  And there was one incendiary rumor that Rösiö had left out of the public version of his findings, but that he had supplied to the Swedish foreign ministry. It came, secondhand, from the Norwegian ex-wife of an American naval officer named Charles Southall, who had been stationed in Nicosia, Cyprus, on the night of Hammarskjöld’s death.

  The foreign ministry asked the US Department of State to locate Southall as a matter of urgency. In late 1992, the response came back: America could not find him, and did not feel there was much to it.

  Chapter 31

  “Never believe anything until it is officially denied”

  The Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, known as INR, is America’s smallest and arguably best-respected intelligence agency. Its 350 or so analysts1 are spread across the Department of State’s complex of dark-beige buildings on C Street in Washington, DC.

  In 1992, those of its staff who interacted with the public had blank, anonymous offices on the third and fourth floors. Others worked on the eighth floor, in a leaky attic that had been constructed for the Manhattan Project. And those engaged in sensitive matters worked on the sixth floor, in what is known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF—a secure zone designed for examination of very secret intelligence without fear of interception or eavesdropping.

  INR analysts are divided into sections to address particular areas of the world—Europe, Africa, East Asia and the Pacific, and so on. Instead of being moved to a new role every few years, as is the custom in the CIA for example, analysts specialize over a longer period. They learn the languages and build relationships with a network of their counterparts in other agencies.

  It allows them to circumnavigate bureaucracy and politics with a neatly placed phone call to a friend or colleague. That means, in turn, that they can draw together information from across the vast intelligence apparatus, including the intercepts of the National Security Agency and human intelligence from CIA operatives on the ground across the world. Their aim is to weave those strands into cohesive and punchy reports that will clarify foreign policy decisions for the department’s executives.

  Nobody makes movies about them. But before being broken out as a part of the State Department, INR was the elite unit of the very first American intelligence operation, the Office of Strategic Services. It remains the case that once analysts make INR, they often stay put because they feel there is nowhere to go but down.

  INR was pessimistic in its assessments of the Vietnam War. And when other agencies caved to the pressure to supply intelligence that supported the use of force against Iraq in the early 2000s, INR refused. It was praised, later, for its impartiality.

  INR analysts are allowed to be both selective and autonomous. Their reports, a tight page or two of ruthless relevance, are analysis rather than mere information, and they want to contribute something of significance. And so it is telling that in late 1992, when the Swedish government requested help to examine Rösiö’s report and the secret material it had gathered alongside it, INR took on the task.

  The request landed on the desk of Bowman Miller, the director of analysis for Europe and a former US Air Force officer and special investigator. Miller worked it himself, instead of handing it off to one of his staff, along with a Nordic analyst, Karen Enstrom, who was fluent in Swedish.2

  Most INR reports are put together quickly, a little like news analysis, to cover fast-breaking situations around the world. Analysts pride
themselves on being able to find an answer within five minutes, for a diplomat who is about to meet a counterpart or an executive who must brief the president, even if that answer is, “Here is what will arrive tomorrow.”

  From what we can piece together, this case proceeded more like detective work. It was conducted from an office on the seventh corridor of the fourth floor and ran on for at least a year. That duration is an indication, within the department, that new evidence had emerged which necessitated keeping the case open.

  In December 1992, at around the time the American government was telling its Swedish counterpart that it could not locate Charles Southall, Enstrom had in fact sent him a letter. “The Government of Sweden,” she wrote,3 “has found new information which indicates that Hammarskjöld’s plane may have been shot down. We understand that you may have additional information about the plane crash in question.” She, and INR, needed his help.

  Southall replied on March 23. He had been waiting for such a letter for thirty years, he said. “I am an intelligence officer in the U.S. Naval Reserve with the rank of Commander,” he wrote. “I served overseas for roughly a decade,” he said, before a stint with the Defense Intelligence Agency. “My activities remain buried several layers deeper than anything that will be reflected in my service record.” He said he’d welcome the opportunity to provide more information—or even to investigate further himself, in person. But he heard nothing back until May 14.

  The letter he received said that INR had searched State and CIA files “as well as other sources” but found nothing to support the theory that the plane had been shot or forced down. But it wanted more evidence. “We have been told by the Swedish government,” the letter said, “that you may have listened to a taped conversation between an air tower and a Fouga plane that allegedly shot down Hammarskjöld’s plane. Is that assertion true?” It asked for details. Who was involved? How did he get access to the tape? Was it connected to de Kemoularia’s story about Beukels?

  Southall replied a few days later. He wrote opaquely, presumably in case anyone stumbled on his letters. But he was dubious about the claim that INR had found no evidence of foul play. He cited an old adage: “Never believe anything until it is officially denied.” The recording in question, he said, “should be in files not many miles from your office, along with some interesting documentation about its origin. This recording may not be the only one. I do not recall whether it is in English or French, as I speak both, but it is chilling to listen to.”

  His theory was that the Albertina “happened on the scene when an excited pilot (called by some the ‘Lone Ranger’) was looking for an intruder.” He offered to meet to explain further. But the exchange petered out.

  INR reports are routinely declassified. They’re often just old news, decades later. But Enstrom and Miller’s report on Hammarskjöld’s death has never been released. Rösiö was never told what his counterparts had found.

  It would emerge later that, as Southall suspected, it was probably not true that INR’s search of State and CIA files yielded no evidence the Albertina had been shot down.

  And another document, released years later, shows a strange coincidence, at the very least. At about the time INR must have been concluding its report, on November 1, 1993, the FBI spontaneously decided to destroy all the materials it had concerning Hammarskjöld.4 It has never explained why.

  Footnotes

  1 The CIA has fifteen hundred and the Defense Intelligence Agency has three thousand, for comparison.

  2 As well as Dutch and Russian.

  3 According to letters seen by the writer and researcher Dr. Susan Williams.

  4 According to a FOIA request filed by Susan Williams, who kindly provided it to me.

  Chapter 32

  “I’ve hit it. There are flames”

  In 1993 Rösiö, given a lead by the Swedish tabloid Expressen, found Southall without American help. Southall was working in Casablanca, Morocco. Rösiö sent him a letter asking to visit. “Neither the US nor British authorities have been very helpful,” Rösiö wrote, betraying a little weariness. “And though I try and avoid believing in conspiracies, I note a marked reluctance in digging up the Ndola file.”

  Southall had graduated both the American University of Beirut and the University of California, Berkeley, with degrees in political science, in the late 1950s. He looked all-American, blue-eyed and blond-haired. But he had studied the Arab world under the tutelage of George Lenczowski, who helped invent the modern Western study of the region, and he spoke both Arabic and French like a native.

  He joined the navy, and had become a pilot in Okinawa, Japan. But in the early 1960s he was transferred to a listening facility operated by the navy for the NSA near Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus. He was a “processing and reporting” officer, tasked with scrutinizing intercepted messages.

  He was later transferred to the Defense Intelligence Agency, where he retained a focus on North Africa and the Middle East. He left in 1969 and became a private intelligence operative. He investigated counterfeiting, piracy, fraud, and embezzlement, among other transgressions, for companies across the world.

  In March 1994, Rösiö landed in Casablanca, a blast of dry heat and color after the muted and vast bucolia of Sweden. He and Southall met four times across the course of three days, in Southall’s office and his home—room 1019 of the Casablanca Sheraton, an imposing concrete cube just off a major highway. While Rösiö took notes for his report, and fought feelings of bewilderment at what he was hearing, Southall related his story from the night of September 17, 1961.

  Cyprus, a small island in the Mediterranean, south of Turkey, east of Greece and west of Syria, is about half the size of Connecticut and is noted for its crystal-blue waters and ruggedly idyllic beaches, for its use in recent years as a center for money laundering, and as the reputed birthplace of the goddess Aphrodite.

  It’s also studded with British and American radio masts and dishes. By dint of its location just seventy miles off the coast of Syria, it offers unparalleled access to signals intelligence—the interception of electronic communications and other signals, such as those from weapons systems—from across the Middle East. It is strategically vital for both the NSA and its British equivalent, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ.

  In 1961 the NSA’s listening post in Cyprus was a substantial, square cement block without windows, surrounded by dry scrub and a fence. Its entrance was carefully guarded. Southall worked in a vast room that hosted a hundred or so desks, occupied exclusively by men who were listening to intercepted phone calls and other messages flying across the air, encrypted or not.1

  Southall told Rösiö that he usually worked the day shift, from 6:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. But on that evening, Southall said, he received a call at home from an officer. “Get yourself out here tonight,” the officer said, according to Southall’s account. “Something interesting is going to happen.” Southall got in his car and drove to the listening post.

  Shortly after midnight, Southall recalled, a recording was played back for him and a group of four or five others that had gathered. It was from Ndola, about 3,500 miles away. Which means it was likely relayed—intercepted closer to Ndola, and sent to a powerful transmitter nearby to be beamed onward to the listening station. He recalled a single male voice, which he described as cool and professional, speaking over the sound of an aircraft engine in either English or French. It was a pilot, reporting to a field command post, not a control tower, though he only ever heard the pilot’s voice. It did not seem, he told Rösiö, that the pilot knew who was aboard the DC-6. Which led Southall to suspect he had just been patrolling, rather than targeting Hammarskjöld specifically.

  “I see a transport plane coming low. All the lights are on. I’m going down to make a run on it. Yes, it’s the Transair DC-6. It’s the plane.”

  Southall recalled the sound of gunfire. Then the voice, more animated this time, said:

  “I’ve hit it. There are flames. I
t’s going down. It’s crashing.”

  He was told by an officer that it was from a Belgian pilot nicknamed “the Lone Ranger,” flying a Katangese Fouga.

  At virtually the same moment Rösiö was talking to Southall, in March 1994, a story appeared in one of Sweden’s most prestigious newspapers, Dagens Nyheter. A reporter there was speaking to a Swedish flying instructor, Tore Meijer, for a mundane story.

  Meijer mentioned that he had been working in Ethiopia in 1961. On the night of September 17, by coincidence at precisely the moment Hammarskjöld’s plane was coming in to land, he was testing the radio by turning the dials slowly, with a fizz of static, across the frequencies. He landed on a conversation in English, and heard the name Ndola.

  A voice said, “He’s coming in for landing, he’s turning… he’s planning… another airplane is behind, what is it? He’s breaking off the plan… he continues.”2 Then the connection was cut.

  Footnotes

  1 According to an account Southall gave Dr. Susan Williams.

  2 In the original Swedish, from DN : Så säger rösten att “han kommer in för landning, han svänger… han planerar”—där piloten går in mot själva landningsbanan. Så hör jag att samma röst säger att “ett annat flygplan ligger bakom, vad är det.” Rösten sager, “Han avbryter planen… han fortsätter.” Så avbryts sändningen.

  Chapter 33

  “Kaleidoscope”

  Over the years that followed, Rösiö came to see the mystery less as a jigsaw puzzle missing pieces than a kaleidoscope, filled with hundreds of clues, which could form nearly any picture if rotated.

  He came to feel, like the UPI correspondent Ahier who had helped de Kemoularia find Beukels, that each of the stories he had investigated contained some element of truth. But each also had significant problems.