The Golden Thread

by Ravi Somaiya

  Footnotes

  1 Nike inspired both the sportswear company and the spirit of ecstasy figurine on the front of Rolls-Royce cars.

  2 See chapter 8.

  PART THREE

  And the ragged rock in the restless waters,

  Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;

  On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,

  In navigable weather it is always a seamark

  To lay a course by, but in the sombre season

  Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.

  —T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages,” Four Quartets

  Chapter 35

  “For repair of your tumble drier. Phone Nick on 970890”

  In the mid-2000s, Susan Williams, an author and a researcher at the University of London who specializes in the study of decolonization, set out to write a book. It was provisionally titled White War on Africa, and it was to be about white supremacists who had resisted majority rule by black Africans across the continent in the middle of the last century.

  Often, as she searched archives related to the topic, she came across material about Hammarskjöld’s death. At first she didn’t take suspicions that he had been killed seriously. But then another document or report or letter would appear. And when she came across the pictures of Hammarskjöld, his colleagues, and the crew of the Albertina dead she felt she could no longer ignore the crash.

  Williams, slight and blond with palpable determination in her clipped voice, decided to focus on the Albertina. She would turn over each and every clue.

  She saw the conflict in Katanga as a war driven by big business and its interests. Hammarskjöld, who supported black Africans against both business interests and the white supremacists with whom they were linked, had made an enemy of thousands of white campaigners, some of them in positions of power. She admired his sense of principle. But she also began to get a sense of the forces massed against him.

  The sheer quantity of intelligence operatives, agents, and offices in the Congo—a relic of the World War II battle for the nation’s uranium—made operating there dangerous, if only because there could be no secrets.

  She examined Rösiö’s material, kept in Sweden’s grand national library, the Kungliga Biblioteket in Stockholm. She examined Ivan Smith and Welensky’s archives, stored across several honeyed-stone buildings at Oxford University. She scoured the earth for forgotten pieces of paper, records of the crash, its preamble and aftermath that had languished for nearly fifty years. She conducted hundreds of interviews in America, Sweden, France, Britain, Belgium, South Africa, and Zambia.

  She mostly found doors closed that should have stayed open. Small ones: Rösiö was wrong to have dismissed Tore Meijer’s account of a radio conversation that detailed the crash, because it was indeed plausible that the radio signals1 would have reached him.

  And large ones: When she met Southall, at a private members’ club in London, he proved to be an honest and reliable witness. On one occasion she doubted him. The times that he cited for the events of the night just didn’t fit. But she found later that Cyprus had had a different time zone in 1961, and his account matched perfectly.

  She knew that the resolution the UN had passed in 1961 to investigate the crash allowed for a reopening of the investigation if significant new evidence emerged. That became her aim. A full, new investigation.

  And in August 2009, she located a researcher for the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission named Christelle Terreblanche. Her job was to complete a section on human rights violations by the right wing for the commission’s final report.

  In 1998, Terreblanche had been given a batch of documents on one of the major crimes of the apartheid era—the murder of Chris Hani, the leader of the South African Communist Party. Hani rivaled Nelson Mandela for popularity within the black political movement. His murder had left black South Africans bereft and enraged. Days of rioting followed. It felt as though the very idea that South Africa could move from apartheid to equality in peace was in danger.

  Hani had been shot and killed in the driveway of his home in April 1993. The police had arrested Januzu Jakub Waluz, a Polish immigrant with close links to a militant white nationalist group. He and Clive Derby-Lewis, a politician with the pro-apartheid Conservative Party who had supplied Waluz with a gun and a list of prominent targets, were found guilty in October of the same year.

  The Hani files had come from South Africa’s National Intelligence Agency, she told Williams, and she had the security clearance to examine them. Among the papers she found the Operation Celeste letters. She recalled about twelve—fewer than were released by the TRC.

  She wanted to investigate further. But there were so many loose ends as the commission tied up its work that her superiors did not particularly want to look into another, however intriguing.

  Later a woman submitted a separate grievance to the commission. It said that her daughter had worked for the South African Institute for Maritime Research in the late 1980s. She conducted what was described as AIDS research in Mozambique. But she came to believe that the group was, in fact, smuggling in contaminated vaccines. (Others have theorized that SAIMR planned to spread the disease as a kind of tool for the mass murder of black Africans.)

  The woman said her daughter had planned to visit her and tell her more in person. But she was shot during a carjacking in Johannesburg and never made it.

  Terreblanche had heard other accounts, too, including allegations of gun smuggling, that corroborated at least the existence of the group, if not its role in the death of Hammarskjöld. But the original letters that referred to Hammarskjöld, she told Williams—including four that were not initially released by the commission—had disappeared.

  When Williams2 made inquiries, the South African Ministry of Justice said they had simply lost the box they were in. And Dullah Omar, the minister entrusted to look into them, had died in 2004.

  On balance, Williams decided at first, the documents didn’t make any sense anyway. Why would mercenaries spell out their plans so clearly? But as she continued to research, she found circumstantial evidence both that SAIMR existed, at least in the eighties and nineties, and of animosity toward Hammarskjöld in South Africa.

  His support for black African independence had, of course, aggrieved many in the nation that stood for draconian white rule above all else. Another prominent opponent of apartheid, the Mozambique president Samora Machel, had also died in a mysterious plane crash, in 1986, while flying to a controversial political meeting. Investigators had concluded, despite significant evidence of foul play, that it must have been pilot error. One of those investigators, the South African jurist Cecil Margo, QC, had also been involved in the investigation into the crash of the Albertina a quarter of a century earlier.

  And SAIMR itself kept coming up in tantalizing and horrifying glimpses. The man who had killed Hani, Januzu Waluz, had been interrogated in 1997, Williams found. He confirmed that in 1989 he had replied to an advertisement SAIMR had placed in a newspaper, The Citizen. It sought someone for a dangerous assignment, six months in duration, for the lavish pay of $5,000 per month. He sent a résumé to a man who called himself the Commodore, at a post office box. It connected Hani’s killer with SAIMR, and thus made it plausible that the Hani file might contain strange correspondence connected with the organization.

  She found a copy of a 1990 article on SAIMR by a respected South African investigative reporter, De Wet Potgieter, in the Johannesburg Sunday Times. The story accused SAIMR of involvement in a series of bizarre plots across Africa during the 1980s and 1990s. They included Operation Crusader, which was an attempt to unseat the president of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, and replace him with the deposed dictator Idi Amin. And Operation Anvil, another plan for a coup, this time in the Seychelles. The group, Potgieter wrote, also smuggled gemstones.

  When Williams interviewed Potgieter, he told her that he had received information from a man named Keith Maxwell, who said he had joined SA
IMR after Hammarskjöld’s death and had risen to become its Commodore himself. Maxwell told eyebrow-raising tales of SAIMR’s activities, and supplied him with a copy of a sprawling, grandiose memoir that detailed many more. Much of it sounded too fantastical, and too lyrical, to be true. Potgieter thought it could be disinformation—an attempt to throw him off whatever the group had actually been doing.

  But after Potgieter put out one story about SAIMR, he received a letter from a man who called himself Nick. Nick wrote that he had had to flee to Botswana for his own safety, but he knew that SAIMR had planned and executed a coup in Somalia the previous year. Nick would supply battle plans, if Potgieter placed an ad reading “For repair of your tumble drier. Phone Nick on 970890” on July 31.

  The letter had come via the newspaper. By the time it got to Potgieter, it was too late to place the ad. He never heard from Nick again. But Potgieter kept following the group. He gathered clippings, fragments of reporting and interviews. They included evidence of efforts to spread contaminated AIDS vaccines, and of involvement in other coups, mostly bungled. Gradually, as far as Potgieter could make out, the bulk of SAIMR’s work became mercenary recruitment before it faded away.

  Williams, too, heard from a former SAIMR operative who insisted on remaining anonymous. He said that the organization was certainly in existence in 1961, and that it was rumored to have existed for more than a hundred years.

  The only copies of the Operation Celeste letters that existed, Williams found, were scratchy and in some cases illegible. They looked like copies of copies. The details visible were accurate. The phone number matched the format in use at the time. And the drawing of the ship on the letterhead—of the British merchant clipper Cutty Sark—could plausibly have been in circulation in 1961.

  Williams was determined to get hold of the originals, in order to have them forensically examined. But the government insisted they could not be found.

  Footnotes

  1 They were high-frequency (HF) not very high-frequency (VHF) signals, and could have traveled the required distance to Ethiopia.

  2 Via the South African History Archive, which submitted the request.

  Chapter 36

  “We did it”

  On April 11, 2013, a letter appeared in the London Review of Books. It was from David Lea, or Baron Lea of Crondall, a former trade union leader who had been elevated to Britain’s House of Lords.1 It was headlined WE DID IT.

  Lea said that he had read, in a previous issue, a story that concluded nobody knew whether Britain had any role in the death of Patrice Lumumba. “Actually, in this particular case,” he wrote, “I can report that we do.” Lea said that in March 2010 he had met Daphne Park for a cup of tea.

  After leaving Leopoldville in 1961, Park had been posted to Lusaka, Zambia; Hanoi, Vietnam; and Ulan Bator, Mongolia. She retired from MI6 and had become principal of Somerville College, Oxford, in 1980. She had also, after receiving official permission to reveal her former employer, become a staunch defender of Britain’s intelligence apparatus in interviews with the press.

  In 1990 she had been ennobled as Baroness Park of Monmouth. Since which time she had been a fixture, famous for her probing questions, in the House of Lords. By 2010, she was most often seen whirring down its paneled corridors in an electric wheelchair.

  Lea wrote in his letter to the LRB that he knew Park had been head of MI6 in Leopoldville from 1959 to 1961. He took the opportunity, as the two sipped their tea, to raise the controversy surrounding Lumumba’s abduction and murder. He suggested that MI6 might even have had something to do with it. She replied simply, he said, “We did. I organised it.” Lumumba, she told him, would have handed the whole of the Congo to Russia, uranium, diamonds, and all.

  A month later, the academic Glen Newey responded with his own letter, also printed in the pages of the LRB, to point out that MI6’s involvement in Hammarskjöld’s death was also an open question. But Park had died, aged eighty-eight, just a few weeks after her conversation with Lea. The only answers she might have been able to supply to questions about Lumumba and Hammarskjöld lay in the reports she must have filed from Leopoldville in 1961.

  Park’s friends and colleagues said that she had been on heavy medication to treat cancer, and that in any case Lea’s account sounded fanciful. But there remain a series of open questions.

  The British government has insisted it has no materials relevant to the death of Hammarskjöld. But an archivist apparently made an error that revealed otherwise. Lord Alport, the British high commissioner to the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, eventually returned to England and bequeathed his papers to the University of Essex.

  Williams searched those papers. She found that a week after the Albertina had crashed, Alport had sent a standard memo back to Britain. But attached to it in the archive, Williams found, was a secret report from Neil Ritchie, an MI6 operative under diplomatic cover and a close colleague of Park’s. Williams was shocked. It was so strange to find such a secret document out in the open that she presumed it must already be public knowledge. It was not.

  The document revealed, first, that Britain must know more about events in the Congo in September 1961 than it has said. And it revealed an uncomfortable duality between Britain’s official position—support of the United Nations to reunite the Congo—with its more expedient private position, which was to befriend and work with anyone. Most notably, the British government was closely enmeshed with Union Minière, the mining company that provided support to the white mercenaries who hated Hammarskjöld and the UN.

  The mercenary pilot Beukels had told de Kemoularia that his aerial interception of Hammarskjöld had been ordered by a mysterious Mr. X, an executive who represented European interests in Katanga. No persuasive evidence for that theory has ever surfaced. But Ritchie’s memo does show that there were plenty of Union Minière officials involved at the highest levels in Katanga and who were present on the night of the crash. Any one of them might have been considered Mr. X—an eminence grise, directing matters behind the scenes.

  Ritchie’s task, in the days before the Albertina crashed, had been to track Tshombe down and deliver him to the meeting with Hammarskjöld. The task was necessary because Operation Morthor, the UN’s brutal attempt to end the Katangese secession by force in September 1961, had left the Katangese government scattered. Some ministers were in Salisbury, the capital of the Rhodesian Federation, to ask Sir Roy Welensky for help. Others were simply unaccounted for.

  Communications were key, Ritchie wrote. So Union Minière had provided Ritchie with a radio and an operator, who traveled with him on his mission to find and deliver Tshombe. When Ritchie had to send messages back to his superiors, he and the radio operator would first transmit them to Union Minière’s top man in Elisabethville, Maurice van Weyenbergh. Van Weyenbergh would then cross the street to the British consulate to pass them along.

  Henri Fortemps, an assistant director general of Union Minière, was with Tshombe in a safe house. Union Minière, which was funding, supplying, and arming the Katangese and their mercenaries in their fight with the UN, therefore knew everything the British government did in Katanga.

  Ritchie spoke, also, of a meeting with Sir Ronald Prain, the British president of the Rhodesian Selection Trust, a mining company that was interlinked with Union Minière. And he does not seek to hide his disdain for the UN, or his respect for the Katangese government and its European advisers.

  Life rarely falls into neat political categories. It makes sense that Ritchie worked closely with secessionist Europeans, and that British officials in Katanga took a different view of the UN’s actions than their superiors in London. None of them had the luxury of seeing events in black and white. But it remains striking that powerful forces aligned with, and funding, Tshombe’s mercenary army were so interwoven with sympathetic British diplomatic and intelligence efforts. And it makes it more likely that the British knew something of mercenary and Rhodesian activities that night.


  Park, the best connected spy in the Congo, who shared a network with the CIA’s Larry Devlin, must have filed a report like Ritchie’s about the days surrounding the crash of the Albertina.

  But the British government says no such thing exists in its archives. Neither, if one is to interpret its gnomic statements about relevant material broadly, do any records from MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, which also operated in Africa. Or from GCHQ, Britain’s own signals intelligence branch.

  With the exception of Ritchie, Britain’s entire intelligence apparatus in the Congo, the British official position holds, recorded nothing on the night of September 17, 1961.

  Footnotes

  1 Britain has two chambers in its Parliament. The lower, the House of Commons, is made up of elected politicians. The upper, the House of Lords, used to be hereditary but is now mostly made up of appointees, selected and given titles by the government of the day.

  Chapter 37

  “Flail chest”

  Susan Williams released her book, titled simply Who Killed Hammarskjöld?, during the fiftieth anniversary year of the crash, 2011. It examined, in forensic detail, each of the theories of the crash. Accident. Hijack or sabotage. Aerial attack. And each of the forces that might have influenced those attacks or helped cover them up. Business interests like Union Minière and Tanganyika Concessions. Katangese mercenary forces. Transnational white supremacists. Britain and America. The Soviet Union. The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.

  New fragments of information emerged in its wake—memories long buried, or documents nobody had thought might have been important. Williams’s aim was to reactivate the UN investigation. And in 2013, as part of that effort, an independent panel of judges, known as the Hammarskjöld Commission, examined the new evidence.