by Ravi Somaiya
It was just one of many strange new details Othman pieced together over four painstaking years and countless dull meetings with dismissive representatives of uninterested governments. Gradually, he built a picture of Katanga and its surroundings during its ill-fated secession between 1960 and 1963.
It had played host to more espionage and double dealing, usually in the service of proxy games between governments, than many large and ancient nations. A web of seasoned, brutal spies and assassins, a pervasive eavesdropping apparatus, nefarious commercial interests, dirty international deals. And a wild and uncontrollable Fouga Magister jet that was on the attack every few hours.
I have combined Othman’s work with the material Ivan Smith, Virving, Rösiö, and Williams revealed, and new fragments of information I and others have gathered. It provides a very different account of the crash of the Albertina.
Footnotes
1 Namely Axel Edelstam, who had denied to Rösiö ever meeting de Kemoularia.
Chapter 40
“He would return and attack again”
As the Albertina lifted into the air in Leopoldville just after 4 p.m. on Sunday, September 17, 1961, Hammarskjöld’s mind must have been on the nation below him.
He knew that Operation Morthor had raised the stakes. If he failed to persuade Tshombe to cease fighting, it would mean the end of his tenure as secretary-general. He knew that Britain and America were displeased. He knew that the Katangese despised and suspected him, and that the Rhodesians supported them. The capitalists called him Communist, and the Communists called him capitalist.
But he had grown comfortable under pressure. He felt he understood what was happening well enough to navigate regardless. He was wrong. A second war, more chaotic, secretive, and vicious, seethed beneath the one he thought he was fighting.
Part of the evidence for that, though he could not possibly have known it, sat in a box near him aboard the DC-6. It contained a small gray machine for sending encrypted messages. It was made by a Swiss company called Crypto AG. Model number CX-52. He typed messages into it. The machine encoded them via a series of pinwheels that could be arranged in virtually unbreakable combinations. The coded messages were transmitted and then decoded on the ground using an equivalent machine.
Cracking the code would have required a team of mathematicians and a thousand years. So British and American intelligence didn’t bother. They just co-opted the manufacturer and built in a back door—the means to decrypt any message. Hammarskjöld’s most secret communications had been compromised.1
The rest of his messages were being gathered by Rhodesian intelligence using what Welensky described in one message to London as “wireless intercepts” and “signals intercepts.” The Rhodesians had long been recording details of UN plans, and even troop movements, and sharing them with the British (and by extension the Americans) and the Katangese. By the time the sun set over the Albertina, about two hours after takeoff, its movements and intentions were broadly known.
And the intercepts were just one small part of the intelligence network. Though Devlin never mentioned it, the CIA had an operative, David W. Doyle, in Katanga, and three other named operatives across both nations. They were running more, and more mysterious, missions than Hammarskjöld could possibly have guessed. In fact, many of the details still remain redacted.
One of those missions, code-named WICLAM, had something to do with pilots and planes. And the agent code-named WIROGUE, who had worn the wig and boasted unknowingly to a fellow CIA agent in the bar of the Memling Hotel in Leopoldville, had remained in the Congo.
WIROGUE, a former citizen of the Soviet republic of Georgia named either David Tzitzichivili or David de Panasket, had been a mercenary, a forger, and a bank robber in his past lives. The CIA had given him flying lessons, plastic surgery, and training in small arms and demolitions.
He had been assigned to fly a CIA station plane code-named YQCLAM. The precise purpose of his flights is redacted. But he was certainly running an air intelligence unit. And he seems to have been working in some capacity with West Germany. He had traveled there that September. Another CIA report reveals that the West German security service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst or BND, had an operative named Hans Germani in Katanga on the night of September 17, 1961.
The German aircraft manufacturer Dornier had also supplied Katanga with Do 27 and Do 28 propeller planes. The Dorniers were excellent for bush flying because they required only a short runway to take off and land. They had been used across Africa, fitted with rocket launchers and other weapons. At least one of those planes was in Katanga before Hammarskjöld’s death, according to West German records, and may well have been equipped to attack UN planes.
The CIA knew about the Dorniers, and had done its own investigations into Katangese air capabilities. The State Department released information that showed Katanga had secretly received three Fouga Magister jets in February 1961, likely sent by Belgium. It is fair to assume that one or more would have been airworthy by September. And that they were patrolling the skies that night, tracked by the United States.
In the days before the Albertina’s last flight, the US ambassador to Leopoldville, Edmund Gullion, who worked closely with Devlin, had sent urgent messages to headquarters. On September 15, he described a “single-engine jet fighter attack on Kamina,” a UN air base in Katanga. “Tower in voice contact with fighter. Pilot appears to be Belgian. Pilot stated after attacking with rockets and machine guns he would return and attack again.”
The next day, Gullion sent another message. It spoke of a commercial pilot who had been flying above Katanga when he heard and felt a jet fighter nearby. When he looked over, it was flying wing-to-wing with him, close enough that he could see into the cockpit. He recognized the pilot. It was a large, bearded man named Van Risseghem. On September 16, Gullion had elaborated, and reported “two Magisters believed operable.”
Hammarskjöld was himself aware of Van Risseghem. He had sent a message to the Belgian foreign minister, Henri Spaak, on that day, September 16, requesting help to stop Van Risseghem’s attacks on the UN and on civilians.
Belgian secret services told Othman that when they tried to piece together the pilot’s movements, they found that a pilot named Jan Van Risseghem had flown in Katanga. But he had returned to Belgium between September 8 and 16 that year, as recorded by immigration authorities. Given that it took days to get to Africa in 1961, he could not have been at Ndola on the seventeenth.
Van Risseghem himself had denied any involvement in the crash of the Albertina, in an interview with Rösiö that the Swedish government provided Othman. He even provided his flying logs to prove his point. But the innocuous details for the month of September looked different from the other months. Almost in different handwriting. Different stamps and signatures were used. And different information was recorded—including takeoff and landing locations.
Another pilot in Katanga, Bracco, provided logs to a French author, Maurin Picard, that disputed some of the details in Van Risseghem’s accounts. Othman suspected the logs for that month had been created at a different time, possibly by a different person. It was plausible they were falsified.
UN records also showed Van Risseghem as present for the hostilities of Operations Rumpunch and Morthor just days before the Albertina went down. And someone had definitely been flying the Fouga, or more likely two Fougas, in those days even if it wasn’t him. The sheer quantity of attacks indicated as much.
There had been many other pilots—named as Fouquet, Pence, de Radiques, de Stoute, Dubois, Hedges, Puren, Delcors, Mans, Heuckets, Hislier, Boutet, Bertaux, Volont, Pier, Hirsch, and Osy—capable of flying such missions. Another was named as Melot—a name exceedingly similar to that of the mysterious copilot, Mertelot, whom Beukels had named to de Kemoularia.
And though the pilots went to great lengths to tell anyone who would listen that they could only operate from their main air bases, some were accomplished and reckless enough to put a Fou
ga down on a dirt strip, risking its jet engines as they sucked up billowing dust.
As midnight approached, one of the pilots most likely climbed into the cockpit of a Fouga, a Dornier, or a de Havilland at one of dozens of possible makeshift air strips near Ndola, levered down a glass canopy that framed a 180-degree view of the black above, and powered up his engines.
Fifteen minutes before the Albertina landed, it transmitted a mundane message to the control tower at Ndola about its arrival time. That message never appeared in the tower logs. But the British consul in Elisabethville overheard it. He did not record how the British came to be listening to, or communicating with, the Albertina. But he worked closely with MI6’s man in Katanga that night, Neil Ritchie, who had secured radio equipment from Union Minière.
Another operative, this one for Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5, which helped oversee the remnants of the empire, was nearby. As was a more mysterious figure—an MI5-linked operative named Gordon Hunt. He had an ambiguous job that seems to have included meeting British representatives, commercial interests, the Belgian government, mercenaries, Union Minière, and the Rhodesians. Daphne Park and a more junior operative, meanwhile, were in Leopoldville.
Their precise activities that night have not been detailed. But the Canadian government picked up a hint in September 1961 at Britain’s foreign ministry. The head of the Africa Department, Basil Boothby, told a colleague that the British had been pressured into dubious actions in Katanga by Tanganyika Concessions, a British conglomerate that owned as much as 40 percent of Union Minière. Its chairman, Sir Charles Waterhouse, was a former Conservative MP who liked to joke that Union Minière had ways to deal with political inconveniences.
Shortly before midnight, Hallonqvist, the Albertina’s captain, asked Ndola for clearance to descend. He locked the landing gear into position and set the flaps at a conventional thirty-degree angle. “Your lights in sight,” he told the tower after midnight, “overhead Ndola, descending, confirm.”
His radio must have crackled with a response from the Federation’s operatives. They had been placed at Ndola and given instructions to shoot if required, out of a fear that hostilities in Katanga would spill over Rhodesian borders. They asked for details of its passengers, intentions, and destination. But the Albertina did not respond. As the DC-6 prepared to land, lights flashing against the dark-blue sky, five new eyewitnesses reported another plane screaming closer to it. I believe that a hostile aircraft approached the Albertina as a warning, as an act of intimidation or violence, or in the service of some other plan too arcane and ridiculous to be guessed at now. And that the Albertina’s pilots, convinced quite legitimately they were under attack, took the evasive actions we know they were trained to take—to dive, veer sharply, and head for an airfield. Perhaps, under pressure and facing confusing topography around Ndola airfield, they miscalculated and the plane crashed, killing all aboard with the brief exception of Julien, just seconds from safety. It is the only theory that encompasses all of the evidence, including the denials. There may still be ways to know for sure. The details of this moment—the heart of the mystery—were almost certainly noted or recorded by the invisible network of radio signals connecting the Albertina to the ground.
The US Air Force had Dakota transport aircraft on the tarmac at the airport in Ndola, equipped with high-powered radios capable of transmitting or relaying messages as far as Washington. They had been in nearly continuous contact, according to one account, with Leopoldville, Elisabethville, New York, and Washington and from time to time with United Nations aircraft in the air. Those Dakotas, according to an account Devlin gave later that was partly corroborated by British Intelligence, had been in touch with the Albertina that night.
In Cyprus, according to Southall’s account, the NSA intercepted a transmission suggesting that a pilot, possibly French-speaking, had targeted the DC-6. And in Iraklion, Greece, about five hundred miles away from Southall’s station, a US Air Force security services officer named Paul Abram was listening to radio signals in a similar facility. His job was to monitor five or six different radio channels with a specific eye toward information about the war in the Congo: troop movements and arms sales, among other things.
He had been listening all night to what sounded like a group of American ground forces. At around midnight he heard someone say: “Here comes the plane… the plane is well lit.” Then, on another frequency, he heard a non-American voice—he could only recall that it was not French- or Spanish-accented—saying “the Americans just shot down a UN plane.” Then his radio blew up with chatter.
Seven new witnesses noted that the DC-6 was on fire before it hit the ground.
In the long hours between the last communication of the Albertina and the discovery of the wreckage, as fifteen people gave in to their injuries and Julien screamed alone in the forest, Gullion sent another memo.
“Hammarskjöld’s plane believed lost in vicinity Rhodesian border, near [Ndola]. There is possibility he was shot down by the single pilot who [has] harassed UN operations and who has been identified by one usually reliable source as Van Risseghem,2 Belgian, who accepted training lessons with so-called Katangan air force.” Gullion asked that influence be brought to bear in Brussels and Salisbury to ground this pilot.
It didn’t work. Later that day, one of the American Dakota transport planes departed Elisabethville to fly to Leopoldville. Shortly after it took off, a Fouga attacked and wounded it in midair. The plane was damaged, but it managed to evade the Fouga and complete its journey.
At around 2 p.m., an hour or so before the wreck of the Albertina was officially discovered, Lord Alport landed in Salisbury, the capital of the Rhodesian federation. He was told of the crash, before anyone else it seems. He returned to Ndola, where he made sure he took possession of Hammarskjöld’s briefcase and his Crypto AG machine.
A Rhodesian official known only as Mr. Steadman also rushed to the scene of the crash. He followed Julien to the hospital in Ndola. And he listened very carefully when he was there. He reported back to his government that he had discovered important information. Julien had been speaking to his doctors.
Julien had told them, apparently lucidly, that “Mr. Hammarskjöld had changed his mind while the plane was over Ndola and had decided to go to Katanga. He said that shortly after leaving Ndola there was a big explosion on board, followed by a series of smaller explosions as the plane was forced to the ground. Julien escaped by throwing himself through a safety hatch.”
Shortly after that, a Rhodesian official named as Colonel Archer contacted the hospital to say that no medical staff should talk about what they had heard, especially about sparks in the sky. He cited the “security angle.”
It was part of a concerted cover-up operation by the Rhodesians, led by Welensky, that would ramp up alongside the investigations. The government withheld evidence from the Rhodesian inquiry, according to other documents, and had hoped that by appointing a UN representative as part of it, they could prevent the UN from starting its own investigation. When they could not, Rhodesian officials sought to influence UN investigators away from the notion of hostile activity instead.
In a letter in late November 1961, in the middle of the Rhodesian inquiry, Welensky’s transport minister Kenneth Towsey had told an official named as Major Cox that the Rhodesians should “show as much cooperation as we reasonably can without giving away any important positions.” Major Cox responded that the Rhodesian investigation was “of course, the best safeguard which those who were involved in the accident have.”
Footnotes
1 It was later revealed in the Washington Post that the cooperation went even further. The CIA and West German intelligence came to co-own Crypto-AG, which was the center of a sprawling eavesdropping operation.
2 The original memo contains a typo, or a mistake, and spells the name “Van Riesseghel.”
Epilogue
The devils enter uninvited when the house stands empty. For ot
her kinds of guests, you have first to open the door.
—Dag Hammarskjöld
Othman does not feel he uncovered the whole story. Each new piece of intelligence indicates the presence of other documents that must logically exist and would reveal more of the final minutes of the flight. As of this writing it is uncertain whether he will continue his investigation—the UN will ultimately decide.
Prime among the missing evidence must be the Ndola tower logs from the night of September 17, 1961. It is simply not plausible that they were accidentally destroyed. And it is hard to trust the reconstructed versions put forth by the Rhodesians given the admission that they were seeking to protect those involved.
The airport manager, John Williams, who would have known what happened, said it was not a normal flying accident. The British government went to great lengths to make sure that Rösiö could not see him to ask more. And I could find no current trace of him.
The original logs may be buried in an archive somewhere, unmarked. If they are gone forever, someone still alive might know why they were destroyed, and what they contained. Or the secret died with its last keeper.
If that is the case, there could still be a way to peer into those last minutes through the interceptions that Britain and America were gathering. But in 2014 the NSA, or American officials acting on its behalf, had mounted a quiet campaign to persuade the UN and concerned governments to stop pursuing the information.
Officials connected with the agency showed a few people, including a colleague of Othman and at least one Swedish government minister, copies of two classified documents that they said were relevant to the crash. These promised to be the holy grail—transcripts that clearly defined what had happened in the air that night. But in the end, according to two people who described the documents to me, they were nothing. Intercepts of irrelevant UN communications. The reason they had been held so secretly was that it was embarrassing that the United States spied, and presumably continues to spy, on the UN.