by Ravi Somaiya
It is likely this was an attempt to evade further scrutiny rather than a total disclosure. The agency still refuses to either verify or disprove Southall’s account and Abram’s new story from that night. The British government, too, refuses to acknowledge its own intercepts—though we have ample evidence that they existed.
There were, by my count, at least a dozen spies—working for America, Britain, and West Germany alone—on the ground the night that Hammarskjöld died. The fragments of their work that have emerged, in the form of the report from Neil Ritchie, and the information Gullion sent to Washington, suggests ample useful contemporary reporting on the events of that night. But officially they don’t exist. And the INR report that drew together the work of all the American spies has not been released.
I decided to contact the two analysts who had put that report together, Karen Enstrom and Bowman Miller. I hoped enough time had passed that one or both might be willing to discuss the matter, even if only to tell me that their report had been innocuous.
Enstrom never replied. Miller told me, by email, that I was misinformed. That he knew nothing more about the crash of the Albertina than had appeared in the news, and so it was pointless to talk. When I pushed, politely, his tone changed. “I wish you luck with your researches,” he wrote. “End of story.”
Bengt Rösiö died in early 2019. The Swedish government still has material on Katanga that it did not release to him, and has never released. I was told this is because it contains evidence that Swedish soldiers had been cannibalized there. The government had swept it under the carpet at the time, and it would be embarrassing for them to admit the truth to the families of those soldiers now.
Munongo kept no diaries or papers, his son told me. None that he knew of anyway. He had been very careful to avoid writing things down, he said.
Susan Williams does not believe it likely there will be any grand revelation. “There’s an idea that in the NSA or CIA archives there will be a smoking gun, but in my experience that is not the case,” she says. “It rarely happens like that.” More likely, she said, is an aggregation of evidence and clues that add up to something more.
That process would be infinitely easier if the British and American governments opened their secret archives. The topic can no longer present any security threat. Most of the people involved are dead, and some of the nations involved no longer even exist. The only risk would seem to be exposing their methods. Which we already know about, from the public material.
Nor would such a revelation set a difficult precedent. Similarly sensitive documents, which revealed that eleven prisoners had been beaten to death in British colonial Kenya during the 1950s, were released in 2012. The CIA released thirteen million pages of classified material from a similar era in 2017.
Shortly after I began writing this book, on a blustery blue day in Uppsala, I visited Hammarskjöld’s grave in a gated cemetery not far from the castle in which he grew up.
It is a small, rectangular stone, no more than two feet by one, worn and pitted over the years, laid flat into the grass. It sits in a family plot and says simply:
Dag Hammarskjöld
29.7.1905—18.9.1961
United Nations
Secretary-General
I was taken aback by the fact that the tombstone of his father, Hjalmar, a looming, asymmetrical monolith that must be ten feet tall, towers above it. About halfway through writing, that eternal act of dominion started to feel like a metaphor.
Hammarskjöld was not a saint. But he was, in some fundamental sense, good. He sought to persuade rather than force. To do the kind thing even when it hurt. His father preferred battle.
I suspected, too, that he would be denied the simple justice of a complete and honest account of his death. But as I reported, I came to realize that truth has its own quiet power. It cannot dominate or bully. It triumphs quietly, in the feelings of others.
If Hammarskjöld had been another fearful leader, focused on expedience, Ivan Smith, Virving, Rösiö, Williams, and Othman would perhaps have given up a little earlier, or thought twice about taking that last trip or making that last call. Their work means that the noise, for me anyway, has resolved itself into signal.
Nobody visits Hjalmar’s grave. Sometimes, someone visits his son’s. When they do, they stand and think.
Bo Virving (Courtesy of Björn Virving)
Bullets found in the wreckage (Courtesy of Björn Virving)
Dag Hammarskjöld’s gravestone in Uppsala (Conny Odenfrund, CC BY-SA 3.0)
A Fouga Magister jet (Philippe Dulac, C BY-SA 3.0)
Dag Hammarskjöld outside the United Nations, 1953 (UN/DPI)
The crash site (Courtesy of Björn Virving)
Enlarged wreckage plan (from the Rhodesian report, 1961)
One of the Albertina’s four engines (Courtesy of Björn Virving)
George Ivan Smith, March 1957 (UN Photo)
King Leopold II
Lt. Gen. Sean MacEoin and Dr. Conor Cruise O’Brien, Leopoldville, June 1961 (UN Photo)
Secretary-General António Guterres and Justice Mohamed Chande Othman, June 2019 (UN Photo)
Daphne Park, 1943 (Somerville College, Oxford)
The Albertina (Courtesy of Björn Virving)
Moise Tshombe
Godefroid Munongo (Munongo family website)
Patrice Lumumba
Dag Hammarskjöld at Elisabethville airport, Katanga, August 1960 (UN Photo)
Crash site map (from the Rhodesian report, 1961)
A Katangan Fouga, destroyed in fighting later in 1961 (UN Photo)
Acknowledgments
Writing is a humbling experience. Never more so than when I consider how much kindness and inspiration I have received from so many people during the course of this book.
I must start by thanking those whose stories I have been allowed to tell. It is an unsettling thing to be written about, and an act of trust and generosity to allow some writer you’ve never heard of to try.
Without George Ivan Smith and Bo Virving, this mystery would have died long ago. And without the help of their children, Edda Ivan-Smith and Björn Virving, I would never have understood these men or their work. Bengt and Görel Rösiö, Susan Williams, and Mohamed Chande Othman all took the time to talk to me, patiently, over messages, calls, visits, and meetings. And Simon Thomas at the United Nations was so helpful that I still get occasional pangs of guilt.
They were part of a broader community of Hammarskjöld obsessives—including Roger Lipsey, Hans Kristian Simensen, Maurin Picard, and countless others—who were unfailingly generous with this newcomer.
Without the love, inspiration, and support of my wife, Caroline, to whom this book is dedicated, I’d still be staring at a blank page. As if that were not enough, she also explained Sweden, her home nation, to me, found and translated source material, and was my most trusted reader and adviser. Any parts you enjoyed were probably due to her.
My father, Raj, died shortly before I began writing. He felt that there were certain writers every child should read: P.G. Wodehouse, Gerald Durrell, Roald Dahl, Spike Milligan. He and my mother, Hershi, bought them for me, in heavy stacks I couldn’t see over, when we could barely afford them.
Our downstairs bathroom was filled with books by authors that I came to appreciate later—Clive James, Simenon, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Graham Greene, James Cameron (the journalist, not the filmmaker), Gay Talese, George Orwell. These wonderful voices added up to a spirit—kind, curious, seeking the universality of human experience over the fevered groupthink of the day—that Hammarskjöld embodied and that I strive to emulate.
My mother also bailed me out, and worried about me, and laughed at my jokes and kept me sane as I wrote. My sister Suniti read my first draft and responded generously, which anyone who has read a first draft knows is a profound act of love.
John Burns, David Carr, Jo Becker, Chris Chivers, and numerous others at the New York Times taught me whatever I know of the act of lo
oking at the world and writing down what you see. Richard Zacks generously took the time to read and to answer my questions about narrative nonfiction when he absolutely did not have to.
Lajos Egri’s Art of Dramatic Writing is a wonderful guide to how longer stories function. I took apart Thomas Harris’s Silence of the Lambs and Douglas Preston’s Monster of Florence to see what thriller authors were up to. I could not have picked more beautiful machines to examine.
My agent, Kris Dahl, has been a kind, supportive presence for as long as I remember. She read my drafts, gently guided me, and reassured me at every turn. Gordon Wise, at Curtis Brown in London, was unfailingly enthusiastic and nice. Tamara Kawar and Caroline Eisenmann at ICM were calming presences.
My publisher, Sean Desmond, should be canonized for services to patience and wit. He’s the type of reader and editor every writer dreams of: He can see and sense, but he is kind. He and Rachel Kambury, and my publishers in Britain, Jack Ramm and Tom Killingbeck, and in Sweden, Martin Kaunitz and Sara Nyström, were nothing but generous of spirit.
I wrote most of this book in the Allen Room at the grand New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. It’s an amazing place, with amazing staff. They bring, virtually to your desk, any book you can imagine. Lucy McCann at the Bodleian Library, at Oxford University, was a fabulous guide to the papers and materials over which she meticulously watches. She dealt patiently with my urgent requests for some oddity or another, as did Amanda Leinberger at the United Nations archives.
They and their colleagues at other institutions helped me realize that libraries and archives are churches for books and writing. I was reminded every day that I was joining a fellowship of people through the ages who had determined to set down, however imperfectly, a story, or a piece of wisdom, or hard-won information, that they felt needed remembering. I think it is how civilization endures.
Henrik Hammargren and the staff of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation—Mats Svegfors, Carl Bildt, Annika Söder, Göran Björkdahl, Bengt Wicksen, Annika Rembe, and the Villard family—helped me understand Hammarskjöld, Sweden, and countless facets of the mystery.
Paddy Hayes explained Daphne Park and her world to me. Jean Sackur shared her memories of both Park and the Congo in the 1960s. Patrick Munongo helped me understand his father, Godefroid, and the way the Katangese saw secession. James Dunnett, whose father, Denzil, was the British consul in Elisabethville, provided both recollections and materials. Others, who preferred not to be named, explained the world of secrets, and that it is subject to the same forces, human foibles, and slapstick as everything else.
Maria Dimitrova dug into the British archives for me and listened to my neuroses. Clifford Waldman, Jessica Weisberg, and Kristian Harborg reassured me that those neuroses were normal. Maggie the dog didn’t care either way, which was equally important.
Morgan, Abraham, Jordan, Enzo, and Phillipe at 11th Street Cafe provided caffeine, food, and low-pressure socialization. My colleagues at Columbia University were patient and kind. Curtis Summit taught me to stop saying sorry. So instead of apologizing to anyone I have forgotten here, I will just say: Thank you.
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About the Author
Ravi Somaiya, a former New York Times correspondent, has also written for the Guardian, Rolling Stone, and New York Magazine among others, and has presented and produced documentaries for Vice and HBO. He has covered Islamic extremist terrorism, disinformation, mass shootings, Anonymous, and Wikileaks, among other stories.
Source Notes
The descriptions and details in this book are drawn from interviews with those present at the events in question, from contemporary documents, archival materials, and press clippings and news footage made available to me through the astounding databases and research tools of the New York Public Library. The Mary Ferrell Foundation was an invaluable source of declassified US intelligence materials.
There were a few key texts that recurred throughout, as sources, guides, verifiers of details, or references, and to which I’d like to draw special attention (in alphabetical order). Larry Devlin’s Chief of Station, Congo, Paddy Hayes’s Queen of Spies, Roger Lipsey’s Hammarskjöld, Christopher Othen’s Katanga 1960–63, David Van Reybrouck’s Congo, Brian Urquhart’s Hammarskjöld, and Susan Williams’s Who Killed Hammarskjöld.
I’ve detailed any particularly key sources—those that formed the spine of a particular chapter—below; a select bibliography follows that. And if you have any information you’d like to share, you can reach me at [email protected].
Introduction
The account of Truman’s daily routine was drawn from a September 3, 1961, Associated Press report, “At Home with Harry,” by Saul Pett, which profiled the ex-president in retirement. The version I used appeared in the Hartford Courant.
Reports by UPI, as printed in the New York Times, and by the Independence Examiner detailed the presentation of the check and his comments about Hammarskjöld.
Laila’s story is drawn from a talk given by Hammarskjöld’s friend Sture Linnér on Sveriges Radio, “Sommar i P1,” on July 11, 2007.
A variety of contemporary press reports detailed the Congolese guard of honor and the protests outside the UN. The accounts from inside the UN are drawn from the Hammarskjöld biographies by both Brian Urquhart and Roger Lipsey, as well as from interviews.
Prologue
The descriptions and details of the Congo and its history are drawn from V.S. Naipaul’s Congo Diary, David Van Reybrouck’s Congo, Larry Devlin’s Chief of Station: Congo, Ian Scott’s Tumbled House, and Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, as well as contemporary photographs, press clippings and film footage, and interviews with those present in Leopoldville at the time.
The details of the riot, and the events that preceded it, are drawn from a Belgian parliamentary report into the events; from Van Reybrouck’s Congo; from Janssens’s memoir, J’étais le général Janssens, and an obituary that appeared in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir on his death in 1989; and from contemporary press clippings and news report films.
The Congolese history draws on Van Reybrouck’s Congo, Hockschild’s King Leopold’s Ghosts, and historical documents connected with the establishment and operations of the Congo Free State.
The descriptions of the young Congolese bills are drawn from the photographs of Jean Depara and from Van Reybrouck’s Congo.
Chapter 1
The history of the UN is from the UN itself.
The biographies by Lipsey, Urquhart, and Kelen form the spine of the biographical material on Hammarskjöld and his work on the Congo crisis, along with materials from the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, archival materials from both the UN and the George Ivan Smith papers at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, and interviews.
Hammarskjöld’s own writings—speeches, correspondence, and his diaries—gave great insight into his state of mind, as did Sture Linnér’s body of work on his friend.
The material on the Congolese election and its aftermath is drawn from contemporary reports, interviews, Van Reybrouck’s comprehensive history, and Zeilig’s Lumumba.
The details of the mutiny at Camp Thysville come from a Belgian parliamentary report and from contemporary journalism.
Chapter 2
The material on Thiriart and white supremacy in the 1960s comes from Othen’s Katanga, Bourseiller’s Extrême Droite, Lee’s Beast Reawakens, Coogan’s Dreamer of the Day, Laroche’s Salan Devan L’Opinion, O’Donoghue’s Irish Army in the Congo, Laurent’s L’Orchestre Noir, and from Thiriart’s own words, available online.
The material on Katanga comes from Othen’s Katanga, Puren’s Mercenary Commander, O’Brien’s Katanga and Back and his My Life and Times, Gerard-Libois’s Katanga Secession, an unpublished memoir by the British consul Denzil Dunnett, and from Gordon Hunt’s memo “Hotlin
e to Katanga,” as well as the descriptions of those present and material from the UN archives, the Ivan Smith papers in Oxford, and the British National Archives.
The material on Tshombe comes from contemporary press reports and from interviews with those connected with him.
Chapter 3
The descriptions of the fifteenth UN General Assembly are drawn from contemporary accounts and news reports, as well as Kelen’s Hammarskjöld biography and the recollections of those present.
Biographical details on Hammarskjöld are drawn from sources noted for Chapter 1, with a particular focus on Lipsey’s biography, which was a central guide to locating relevant letters and documents. Hammarskjöld’s ascent to secretary-general was covered in myriad press reports, most notably the wonderful interview conducted by Abe Rosenthal for the New York Times.