by Ravi Somaiya
Rösiö was not sure about either Southall’s or Meijer’s stories. They added complexity, he felt, rather than reducing it. Southall had not inspired confidence during their meetings. And he felt that the conversation Meijer had heard, if it was as described, must have been an exchange between two air traffic controllers. The radio frequencies controllers use—VHF—do not carry across thousands of miles, and so could not have been overheard from Ethiopia.
The witnesses to the crash either saw two planes and flashes consistent with an attack or warning shot, or they didn’t understand what a DC-6 flying at night was supposed to look like under normal conditions.
Harold Julien’s last testimony, given to the doctors and nurses in Ndola, was either a dying-but-lucid man’s attempt to seek justice or nonsensical burbling.
Charles Southall and Tore Meijer either heard incendiary fragments of a pivotal moment, or they were misremembering garbled messages from decades prior.
Ivan Smith was either a brilliant investigator, familiar with both the UN and Africa, or a passionate and poetic soul who had been sadly fixated on the death of a friend and mentor.
Beukels was either a psychologically wrecked accidental murderer making a confession or a drunk who’d say anything for a little money and action.
Rösiö had found no record of a Beukels in Katanga—only a Beukens, who flew cargo planes, a very different skill than piloting a jet interceptor. And he had found no evidence that there had been enough Fougas, or pilots that could fly them at night, to allow for two to escort, or attempt to escort, the Albertina.
De Kemoularia had never reported the stories he heard to the police, Rösiö noted. And though de Kemoularia later became French ambassador to the UN, he never told anyone there that he knew who had killed that organization’s most famous leader.
As for O’Brien’s theory, Rösiö simply could not get over the fact that it required a suicidal mercenary with a disappearing corpse. The French mercenaries might have claimed credit for such a plot in their book Notre Guerre au Katanga, but lots of people confessed to major assassinations for reasons best known to themselves.
Rösiö hated easy narratives, and the idea of a heroic United Nations decapitated by an evil force of mercenaries arrayed against them was, from his own experiences in Leopoldville, too neat entirely. But so much never made sense to him in raw, practical terms.
Hallonqvist, the Albertina’s pilot, was supposed to report to the Ndola tower shortly before he landed—when he had descended to six thousand feet. But according to the official record, he never did. It did not seem plausible to Rösiö that the reason was simple negligence. He was a very experienced pilot doing a very routine thing.
That omission convinced him further that someone at Ndola had deliberately deleted records of radio traffic and amended the log for the night. Rösiö certainly could not easily accept that the tape recordings and tower logs that would have clarified the matter were simply gone.
Rösiö couldn’t shake the idea that nobody had ever investigated the “enemy” side of that evening—that no authoritative account existed of the motivations and movements of the Katangese, and that the initial inquiries did not seek material from Belgium, France, Britain, America, or anywhere outside of the Congo.
Over the coming years, even as he released a stream of skeptical writings about the crash, including a short book titled Ndola, he privately allowed for his own doubts about his conclusions. He was sure that whatever happened that night was not the result of meticulous planning. But he came to believe that it was, more likely than controlled flight into terrain, the unexpectedly disastrous effect of a clumsy attempt to hijack or divert Hammarskjöld.
Whoever had made that ridiculous attempt, and had forced Hallonqvist to fly so low and so dangerously, would hardly have boasted about it. The story might have drifted into the hands of others who had heard it and were more willing to play it up. Or maybe there was an attack, and it caused the pilots to misread their altimeters in their panic.
Altimeters, Rösiö learned, have three hands, like an elaborate clock. One refers to hundreds of feet, one to thousands, and one to tens of thousands. A pilot has to make a quick and routine calculation on glancing at it. If a plane had distracted all the pilots at the wrong moment, they might have simply misread the altimeter. If that was the case—and it was pure speculation—both things were true. It was an accident and a murder.
In the middle of October 1995, George Ivan Smith went to the hospital with stomach pains. It was colon cancer, though he never told anyone so. It barely slowed him. From his hospital bed, he wrote about Africa. He wrote letters to newspapers—on the UN, on the British royal family, on anything that caught his still-voracious eye. He delighted in poetry, particularly Seamus Heaney lines about curious children wondering at telegraph poles, imagining that words traveled the wires “In the shiny pouches of raindrops / Each one seeded full with the light of the sky…”
He loved the vivid pictures of space from the Hubble telescope. Perhaps he marveled, as one investigator to another, that though Hubble had not solved the mysteries of the universe it had clarified them for others.
Ivan Smith still believed that the Albertina had been approached by a mercenary plane as it came in to land on September 17, 1961. It had either attacked the DC-6, or caused enough of a distraction that Hammarskjöld’s plane had crashed in the chaos.
He died on November 21, 1995, without ever finding definitive proof. He was eighty. O’Brien wrote an obituary that celebrated him as a witty and idealistic man, a true believer in the United Nations, which for all its flaws he felt was a force for general decency. Though he never talked about it so grandly, “you could feel him believing it,” O’Brien wrote. He concluded that Ivan Smith was “one of the most fully admirable people I ever knew.”
Chapter 34
“Operation to be known as Celeste”
In 1998, Archbishop Desmond Tutu headed the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It was a sweeping effort to deal with thirty-four years of brutal apartheid in a court that sought both an honest accounting of the repression and reconciliation between the races rather than retribution for those crimes.
Its three-year mandate had expired the month before, and Tutu was set to depart, before a report was delivered to Nelson Mandela later that year. But something inconvenient had happened at the last moment.
On August 19 Tutu, in a cozy patterned cardigan and a blue tie, blinked against flashing cameras as he took his seat behind a table in a municipal building. Above him hung a banner that read TRUTH. THE ROAD TO RECONCILIATION.
Reading from notes, he gravely intoned that the commission had discovered, in the course of its investigations into apartheid crimes, “documents purporting to be from a South African institution called the South African Institute [for] Maritime Research discussing the sabotage of the aircraft in which the United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld died on the night of Sept. 17, 18, 1961.”
The commission had been unable to verify them, he said. But “given our commitment to transparency we feel that apart from having handed the documents to the Minister of Justice for further investigation we should release the key documents we have found.”
The documents consisted of eight letters headed with a grand crest, an elaborate Gothic font over an image of the Greek goddess Nike.1 It listed the institute’s address as the fifth floor of a run-down building on De Villiers Street near the Park Train Station in South Africa’s largest city, Johannesburg.
The letters had surfaced in the course of one of the many investigations into apartheid crimes the commission was pursuing. They had been in its possession for months, but a researcher had only recently found them.
The names in the letters were redacted. But the letters formed part of an exchange among four men. Three had given themselves military ranks: Commodore, Commander, and Captain. A fourth went by the code name Congo Red.
The letters laid out, with a mix of
the plausible, the obviously absurd, and the plain baffling, a plot that involved both the CIA and British intelligence in the death of Hammarskjöld.
The first letter, with the words SECRET CONFIDENTIAL EN CLAIR underneath the letterhead, was dated July 12, 1960, two weeks after the Congo declared independence and four days before Katanga seceded. It was from the Commodore to the Captain, typewritten and seemingly arbitrarily capitalized.
“Head office is rather concerned with developments in the Congo, particularly in the Haute Katanga, where it appears that the local strong man Monsieur Moïse Tshombe, supported by Union Minière, is planning a secession along with a number of emigrés,” the Commodore wrote.
The institute had it on good authority that the United Nations would “want to get its greedy paws on the province.” He had been instructed “to ask You to send as many agents as You think would be needed to bolster CONGO RED’S unit in case of future problems which may arise as we are sure they will.”
Katangese authorities, the Commodore said, “have agreed to place at your disposal a number of private aircraft, including two military ‘Fouga’ jets.” It was signed with a strange and very elaborate swirl of a signature.
The second letter, three days later, headed with the word ORDERS, and also from the Commodore to the Captain, added a sense of urgency. “It is essential that your combat units be put into training as soon as possible as we expect that they will be needed shortly,” the Commodore wrote. He would supply guns, .762 Belgian rifles, he said, and any other necessary matériel.
The third letter, undated, but evidently later, is also marked ORDERS, and is also from the Commodore to the Captain. “Your contact with CIA is ‘Dwight,’” he wrote, adding that Dwight would be staying at the Hotel Leopold II in Elisabethville. “Ensure identity is correct before giving info. Password is ‘How is Celeste these days?’ Reply is ‘She’s recovering nicely apart from the cough.’”
The fourth letter, also undated, also from the Commodore to the Captain, said that “in a meeting between MI5, Special Operations Executive” and the institute, it had emerged that the United Nations “is becoming troublesome and it is felt that Hammarskjöld should be removed.”
Allen Dulles, then the CIA director, it said, “agrees and has promised full cooperation from his people. He tells us that Dag will be in Leopoldville on or about 12/9/61. The aircraft ferrying him will be a D.C.6. in the livery of ‘TRANSAIR,’ a Swedish Company.”
“Please see that Leo airport as well as Elisabethville is covered by your people as I want his removal to be handled more efficiently than was Patrice,” it continued, implying involvement in the murder of Patrice Lumumba, too.
“If time permits, send me a brief plan of action, otherwise proceed with all speed in absolute accuracy,” the Commodore added. If Major-General Sean MacEoin, the commander of the UN forces in the Congo, and Conor Cruise O’Brien could also be killed simultaneously, he said, “it would be useful but not if it could compromise the main operation.” The letter ended with a note: “OPERATION TO BE KNOWN AS CELESTE.”
The Commodore headed the next, following his own instructions, OPERATION CELESTE. It would proceed as planned, he wrote. “Tell Your people that the op. Will not be allowed to be less than a total success. Union Minière has offered to provide logistics or other support. We have told them to have 6lbs. of tnt at all possible locations with detonaters [sic], electrical contacts and wiring batteries etc. (a full list of requirements has been given to R.) Your decision to use contact, rather than barometric devices is a wise one, we don’t want mistakes or equipment failures at this late stage.” It wished the Captain luck.
The next was a reply, delivered by hand, and written in a neat sloping pen. “In order to arrange for all three of the targets to be affected,” it said, “an enormous amount of planning will be required.” And so, it continued, “in order to ensure the success of ‘Celeste’ and taking into account the fact that time is of the essence, I would suggest that we concentrate on D. and leave the other two for some future date, possibly as early as next week or the week after.” Hammarskjöld, it continued, “will have to be sorted out on the 17th or 18th.” It signed off: “With a little luck, all will be well. Your servant, Commander.”
Another reply dated September 14, 1961, is a list of numbered points. It is written in all capitals, in what seems to be pencil. The first read: “DC6 aircraft bearing Transair livery is parked at Leo to be used for transport of subject.” The most salient, point two, was unambiguous: “Our technician has orders to plant 6lb TNT in the wheelbay with contact detonator to activate as wheels are retracted on taking off.”
The last, on September 18, is a report on the operation that is signed by the person code-named Congo Red. It is also a handwritten list of numbered points, but the version released is barely legible. It certainly opens with the fact that the device “failed on take-off.” Point three opens with the words “Device activated” and ends with the words “prior to landing.” Point four seems to confirm that O’Brien and MacEoin were not aboard. And point five seems to read: “Mission accomplished: satisfactory.”
The letters were big news in South Africa. Journalists speculated that if SAIMR existed, it was a front for South African soldiers or spies. The Cape Argus, the newspaper in Cape Town that had broken the story of the letters, had explored “a possible link to the Institute of Maritime Technology in Simon’s Town, which has ties with arms maker Denel.” But that institute had only been formed twenty-two years before—long after the dates on the letters.
The newspaper’s own cuttings library did reveal that Armscor, the body founded by the apartheid government to secure black-market weapons while other nations imposed trade bans on it, had briefed something called the “Institute for Maritime Research” in 1994.
Both Conor Cruise O’Brien and Brian Urquhart expressed strong skepticism (though O’Brien did take the chance to say that he still felt French mercenaries had been involved). The CIA denied it had had any involvement. Its claim was lent credence by the fact that it had previously opened its archives to admit that it had plotted to kill Lumumba, even if its final role in his death remained unclear. The British Foreign Office which technically oversees, and sometimes speaks for, MI6, said that British intelligence agents “do not go around bumping people off. At this time during the Cold War, Soviet misinformation was quite rampant so [the letters] may have been put out by them.”
It was, indeed, hard to believe that any group with the ability to kill a world leader, then hide that fact for more than three decades, would also lay its entire plot out on headed notepaper. But then again, cold war plots often combined the ostensibly absurd with a grain or two of truth.
Tutu admitted that the letters could well be disinformation. But, he added, his view colored by the fact he’d devoted his life to mitigating the very worst human instincts in his homeland, “it isn’t something that is so bizarre. Things of that sort have happened in the past. That is why you can’t dismiss it as totally, totally incredible.”
The press offered less nuance. WEST PLOTTED TO KILL UN CHIEF was the headline in the Times of London.
The initial investigations, by the Rhodesian government and the UN, in the days after the crash marked the first phase of the detective work. The second had been carried out for decades by Ivan Smith, Virving, and others. And it drew to a close with the South African letters. By the fall of 1998, talk of the mystery had faded from the headlines.
With hindsight, at least, it feels as though there was a diminished appetite, amid broad Western prosperity, to exhume the horrors of the past. Hammarskjöld appeared in “this day in history” features every September 17 or 18 and in the obituaries of diplomats he had known. In 1999, the Belgian historian Ludo De Witte published the definitive account of the murder of Patrice Lumumba, widely held to have solved much of the mystery.2 Though it was translated into English in 2001, it inspired precisely nobody to look into Hammarskjöld’s death.
Hammarskjöld came up again when the UN and Kofi Annan won the Nobel Peace Prize that same year. “His life and his death,” Annan said, “his words and his actions, have done more to shape public expectations of the office, and indeed of the Organization than those of any other man or woman in its history.”
Around that time the historian Matthew Hughes examined Ivan Smith’s papers, which had been acquired by the Bodleian Library at Oxford University in 1993, but which had languished in obscurity. He finally revealed, with eye-catching details in the London Review of Books and elsewhere, Ivan Smith’s research into the death. Nobody in particular followed up on his findings.
On the centennial of Hammarskjöld’s birth, in 2005, the scandal was not the riddle of the crash, but criticism of Auden’s role in the translation of his writings. O’Brien, the most vociferous remaining public defender of the idea that Hammarskjöld’s death was not an accident, died in 2008, aged ninety-one.
Larry Devlin died the same year. He had retired from the CIA in 1974, and had worked for the diamond merchant Maurice Tempelsman, the companion of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, apparently liaising with ministers of mines in Africa. He knew them all.
He remained a company man until the end. On the few occasions on which he spoke of Hammarskjöld’s death, he emphasized that he knew nothing. But all the information he had from his American colleagues in the Congo suggested it had been an accident.
Only later would it be revealed that the CIA in Leopoldville had its own very different theories about the crash, and the sinister forces reputed to be behind it. And that it likely knew as much as it did because Devlin was running more, and stranger, operations than he had publicly admitted.
And so the task of unraveling what happened shortly after midnight a few miles from Ndola airport on the night of September 17, 1961, fell to a new generation. Those investigators would unearth a line of inquiry that came to be known as the golden thread.