by Ravi Somaiya
It comprised Sir Stephen Sedley, who had sat on Britain’s highest courts and the European Court of Human Rights; Ambassador Hans Corell, a Swedish diplomat, judge and former UN undersecretary for legal affairs; South African justice Richard Goldstone, who had been chief prosecutor during UN criminal tribunals regarding Yugoslavia and Rwanda; and from Holland, Justice Wilhelmina Thomassen, a former judge with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
They decided that the three previous inquiries—the Rhodesian technical investigation, the Clayden inquiry that had called witnesses in Ndola in 1962, and the UN investigation the same year—were significantly flawed. The first reached a balanced verdict but had limited evidence. The second was determined to blame the pilots, and it dismissed evidence from inconvenient witnesses as untrustworthy. The UN had used much of the same material as the Rhodesian inquiry, and had followed its conclusions that black African witnesses, eight of whom had reported another plane in the sky, were not to be relied on.
Despite those three inquiries, the body of evidence still contained significant and infuriating gaps, they found. Most notably, photographs of Hammarskjöld’s body, at the scene of the wreck and during the postmortem, were missing. So were the X-rays. National archives in America, Britain, Sweden, and elsewhere that might shed light on key issues were closed.
The record was also marked by what seemed like artifacts of a bitter war of disinformation between Soviet and American spies. A former senior KGB official, Oleg Kalugin, wrote in a memoir in 2009 that when “the esteemed U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld died in a plane crash, I and my fellow officers did everything we could to fuel rumors that the CIA was behind it.”
The judges unearthed an investigative report in the August 1978 issue of Penthouse magazine1 by the journalists Joe Trento and Dave Roman, which was mostly about Russian spies in America. In a short aside, it referred to a report the CIA had sent Kennedy in 1962 about Hammarskjöld’s death. It quoted from the report: “There is evidence collected by our technical field operatives that the explosive device aboard the aircraft was of standard KGB incendiary design.”
It’s possible that this was a real document. It’s possible it was invented by one of the bitterly anti-Soviet American spies quoted in the piece to smear the Russians. It’s possible it was something else entirely. Without the original document, the judges decided, it was impossible to say much at all. So they set the issue aside.
Their aim, with the reams of more reliable material that was available to them, was to narrow the dozens of plausible narratives for the last minutes of the Albertina down to the most substantial and worthy of further investigation.
They dismissed the seventeenth man theory. It was possible there was a hijacker on board, but since no evidence for such a thing existed, it was not worth exploring. It dismissed, too, the Operation Celeste documents. They contained nothing that a forger, working later, could not have known from the public record. Without the originals, which could be subjected to forensic examination of the paper and ink, the theory had to be set aside.
The judges hired three eminent pathologists to examine the very last moments of Hammarskjöld’s life, in the forest next to that blazing plane. They knew from photographs and contemporary descriptions that he had been found slightly away from the wreck, sitting up against a termite mound. He looked remarkably unscathed. Photographs of his body on a stretcher at the crash site showed a playing card, said to have been the ace of spades, on his body.
He had massive chest injuries, the pathologists deduced. His ribs, spine, and sternum had been crushed. His cause of death was most likely respiratory failure, as his lungs gave out amid the shattered bones and internal bleeding. (It is known, evocatively, as “flail chest.”) But given the missing X-rays and photographs, nobody could be sure without exhuming his body.
In the aftermath of the crash, two Swedish observers, Björn Egge and Knut Hammarskjöld, Dag’s nephew, had spoken of seeing head injuries, including a possible bullet hole on Hammarskjöld’s body that did not appear in the official reports.2
The remaining postmortem photographs showed no such hole. The images did look a little strange in places, including his forehead. Perhaps they had been retouched—a manual process in 1961, but still possible—to hide evidence of a crime by obscuring the bullet hole. But the pathologists felt the strange marks in question were likely on the body itself—and likely the result of pressure pallor as his body had apparently lain and settled on a flat surface after death.
That conclusion was supported by the positions of Hammarskjöld’s limbs in rigor mortis, and by the blood tracks on the body. He had first lain flat on his front as he had died in the Ndola woods that night. But he had also been laid on his back at some stage. And when police officers had found the wreck and begun examining the scene, he had been sitting up.
That would mean that before the authorities had officially found the wreckage, someone had found the body and turned it over to see whether Hammarskjöld was alive or dead, then pulled him to sit up against the termite mound. That person or persons could also have placed the card in his collar.
It might have been hostile forces, checking in on a murder. But it could equally have been looters, or curious bystanders. It remained suspicious, though, that whoever had moved the body had apparently not reported the crash.
At the same time, a team put together by the commission painstakingly cross-referenced all the previous witness accounts of the last moments of the Albertina from the night of September 17, 1961. Many contradicted each other, they found. But, the judges realized, that did not mean that one or the other was true, or that neither was true, or that both were true. It simply meant more evidence was required.
It was notable, though, that almost none of the accounts described a gentle descent into the ground followed by the plane spontaneously igniting—which is what must have happened if the official accounts of controlled flight into terrain were true.
In fact, four new witnesses had come forward whose accounts closely matched those of the black Africans dismissed by the investigations. A charcoal burner, John Ngongo, had gone into the woods that night and seen a plane coming down in a tilted position. He could see that it had already caught fire, particularly on its wings and in its engines. After it had crashed nearby, he heard the sound of another aircraft, a jet. The fire was too intense to allow him to get too close to the wreckage.
A local woman, Emma Malenga, was keeping watch for chicken thieves when she noticed a plane circling above her. It went around twice. The third time it came around, she said, it was on fire. Two others had similar tales.
Another witness spoke of a local legend, almost a horror story, that had spread around Ndola in late 1961. It told of a woman who had been thrown clear of the crash and been caught in a tree, where she screamed until she died. This was perhaps a reference to Sergeant Harold Julien, the last survivor of the crash. He had lain grievously injured, and screaming for help, in the forest for fifteen hours before later dying in a hospital.
Julien had regained consciousness briefly, to give an account that suggested strange events, including an explosion, before the plane went down. The official line had been that he was delirious and could not be relied on.
Mark Lowenthal, the doctor who had looked after Julien, broke years of silence to speak about the incident. Julien had been strong, Lowenthal, now a professor in Israel, recalled. It was one of his great regrets, he said, that he had not insisted that the Americans fly him to the United States for immediate treatment. He might have survived. It lent new credence to Julien’s description of an explosion.
The judges took Harry S Truman’s equally mysterious statement—suggesting that Hammarskjöld had been killed—on September 19 seriously, too. “It is unlikely in the extreme,” the report said, “that he was simply expressing a subjective or idiosyncratic opinion. It seems likely that he had received some form of briefing.”
Truman’s words helped n
arrow their focus. There were, broadly, five options to explain the crash. It might have been an accident. It might have been a hijack or sabotage—something aboard the plane. It might have been a ground attack, or it might have been an aerial attack.
The judges felt that one of those theories formed what they called a golden thread.
Footnotes
1 In the 1970s, a heyday for American journalism, well-reported and edited stories appeared even in pornographic magazines. Penthouse had a conspiratorial bent, but it published great reporters like Seymour Hersh. And the previous issue had included a story by James Baldwin.
2 See chapter 14.
Chapter 38
“Buzzed”
It had been forty-six years since the mercenary pilot Beukels had met with Claude de Kemoularia and confessed to causing the crash. And in that time, others had also come forward with tales of attacking or disrupting the Albertina from the skies.
Errol Friedmann, a former Associated Press reporter, told the judges that he had covered the 1962 Rhodesian inquiry. On about the fourth day, he recalled, two Belgian mercenary Fouga pilots told the courtroom that they had not been flying on the night of September 17, 1961.
But later, in a hotel bar, one of the pilots—he could not recall a name—told him they had “pulled the wool over the eyes of the commission.” They had, in fact, been flying on the night of the crash. The same pilot, the more talkative of the two, said they had been in contact with the Albertina, and that when it got near Ndola they had “buzzed” the DC-6. It took evasive action. The pilot said he buzzed it again and forced the plane to lose altitude. Friedmann asked whether he’d seen the plane crash. The man’s only response was to laugh out loud. Friedmann’s editor forbade him from testifying to the inquiry about the incident and sent him immediately to Johannesburg instead.
And the judges discovered that in 1974 a petty criminal named Bud Culligan had tried to bargain his way out of jail for check fraud by saying he’d worked for the CIA and had flown a plane involved in Hammarskjöld’s death. The letter he wrote made it as far as the attorney general of the United States, and was passed on for Senate investigation. This raised the suspicion that someone, somewhere, felt it might merit further scrutiny.
Mercenaries like Beukels, Culligan, and the Belgian pilots, the judges decided, were more often guilty of passing others’ exploits off as their own than of making up stories wholesale. They agreed, in other words, with the UPI correspondent Ahier who had felt that all of the mercenary tales contained some element of truth, though none had all of it.
And those tales echoed the evidence that Ivan Smith, Virving, Williams, and others had gathered. Even the snippets that Charles Southall, the former NSA officer, and Tore Meijer, the pilot who had been messing around with a radio, said they had heard that night matched.
The golden thread through all of them was the notion that an aerial attack or diversion could plausibly have taken place that night. It might not have directly caused the crash. Perhaps it was immaterial, in fact, and the Albertina had crashed during a controlled flight into terrain. But the question needed to be asked.
The existing evidence, alone, demanded it. It was baffling that it had ever been dismissed. Davison Nkonjera, a storeman at the African Ex-Servicemen’s Club, about a mile from the airport, had testified to the initial UN inquiry that he had seen the entire crash.
In the skies over the airport he had first seen a plane, presumably the Albertina, arrive from the north and circle. Then, as he watched, he said, the runway and control tower lights at Ndola went out. Out of the darkness he heard two jets take off in the direction of the plane that had been circling. Nkonjera felt that something was wrong, and so he went toward the planes on his scooter. He said he saw a flash or a flame from one of the jets, to the right, strike the larger plane. His testimony was corroborated by a colleague.
Two charcoal burners, Lemonson Mpinganjira and Steven Chizanga, said they, too, had seen two smaller planes following a larger one as it circled. As the larger plane turned, they said, the lower of the two jets repositioned above it. Then they saw a red flash on the larger plane and heard a loud explosion followed by a series of smaller ones.
A former diplomat told the judges that there might be a new way to verify or disprove those accounts. On the tarmac at Ndola that night, he said, were two American aircraft. It was well known that they had powerful and advanced radio equipment, and it was said they were in touch with Hammarskjöld’s plane. Their engines were running, which was most usually done to allow transmissions. Their mission was overseen by the US air attaché in Pretoria, South Africa, Don Gaylor. He was an intelligence officer (but had been at pains to point out that he had not been operating in that capacity that night).1
When combined with Southall’s testimony that the NSA had recorded radio communications from that night, it was overwhelmingly likely that in American security vaults lay transcripts that would provide a more complete picture of Hammarskjöld’s last moments. The panel asked the American government for any relevant material. The response was that there were three documents that were pertinent. Two were marked TOP SECRET and would likely never be released. They heard nothing about the third.
The panel recommended that the UN investigation be reopened. Perhaps it would have more luck persuading America, Britain, and others to disclose what they knew.
In Sweden, a new government had taken power in 2014. It helped push the resolution. On December 29, 2014, the UN agreed and appointed Mohamed Chande Othman, a Tanzanian judge, to oversee the detective work.
For the first time in more than five decades, the investigation into Hammarskjöld’s death had a dominant theory. One that would be examined not by devotees, but by the only body that had both the right to the truth and the ability to push beyond national boundaries: the UN itself.
Footnotes
1 A candidate for the ancient journalistic maxim: Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he.
Chapter 39
“Other interference”
Othman, a soft-spoken, gray-haired man with a round face and a neat mustache, is in his mid-sixties. He has the affect of a kindly uncle, and listens more than he talks. He and two colleagues, Kerryn Macaulay, an Australian aviation specialist, and Henrik Larsen, a ballistics expert from Denmark, quickly decided that the keys to the mystery lay in government vaults around the world.
When they mapped those leads, in 2015, the dotted lines led in fourteen directions—to secret, or undisclosed, documents in Angola, Belgium, Canada, the Congo, France, Germany, Portugal, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
His aides argued that he should apply all the force at his disposal. That these countries needed to be pressured into disclosure. Othman had been chief justice of Tanzania before his appointment to head the new investigation. And before that he had been lead prosecutor in international trials for atrocities in Rwanda and East Timor, among other high-profile international roles. He had developed a strong stomach. But he had come to feel that quiet determination would serve him better. So he asked for help instead of demanding it. Politely. Respectfully. But repeatedly.
He found that though the passage of time had dulled memories, it had also removed heat and stigma. Many who had wrestled quietly with their consciences for decades finally lost the fight and came forward, or provided documents. Intelligence agencies that had starkly reported, repeatedly, that they had no information suddenly discovered relevant documents. New details flooded forth.
The Swedish government declassified its own autopsy and medical records on Hammarskjöld. And the panel found a complete set of X-rays of all of the victims, including Hammarskjöld, and a detailed pathology report in the personal archives of the Rhodesian doctor who had performed the autopsy in 1961.
The X-ray of Hammarskjöld’s skull showed no bullet wound in his forehead. And a team of pathologists told Othman that the injuries his chest X-ray revealed would hav
e been so catastrophic as to render a gunshot pointless anyway. He had not been assassinated after the crash.
A Danish-produced documentary, Cold Case Hammarskjöld, had come out in 2019. It focused on the Operation Celeste letters and the mysterious South African Institute for Maritime Research that claimed to have assassinated Hammarskjöld. It found evidence that SAIMR had existed, and that it had sinister motivations.
And the researcher who had found the letters in the first place, Terreblanche, told Othman that she recalled dimly that the documents had been on old paper, and that the letterheads may have been in color—both indications that they may have been originals.
But the Celeste letters themselves could only be corroborated by forensic analysis. And the South African government did not respond to a request for help in finding the original documents. Without them, it was impossible to verify whether the communiqués were real or an elaborate forgery.
Othman, like each investigator before him, ended up looking to the skies. He was most convinced by the golden thread theory, or “aerial attack or other interference,” as he put it. Though the Belgian and French governments had said they had no information on Beukels, Othman got hold of de Kemoularia’s papers—including correspondence, notes, and diaries—from his daughter.
They corroborated de Kemoularia’s meetings with the Belgian mercenaries. They also revealed that he had reported what he had heard to the French police in July 1969, and to the Swedish government1 in November 1974. It lent credence to de Kemoularia’s work that he had attempted to have it verified and acted on. It was not recorded why the French and Swedish authorities declined to investigate further.