The Man Who Killed Hammarskjöld?
Matthew Hughes
In the afternoon of 17 September 1961 a four-engine DC-6 passenger plane SE-BDY Albertina took off from Leopoldville, the capital of the former Belgian Congo, bound for Ndola in Northern Rhodesia (then part of the British-run Central African Federation). On board was a Swedish flight crew, the Swedish UN Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld, members of his staff and an armed security team: in total, 15 men and one woman. Hammarskjöld’s plane never made it to Ndola. Instead, just after midnight local time on 17/18 September, as it turned over high ground while making its approach, the DC-6 ploughed into trees in rough bushland several miles to the west of the airfield. By the next afternoon, when Rhodesian police finally discovered the shattered, melted wreckage resting on and around a vast termite mound in the bush, there was only one survivor: the American chief security officer and Korean War veteran, Sergeant Harold Julian. The remaining crew and passengers on the Albertina perished in the fireball that consumed the DC-6 when it hit the ground and broke apart, spilling thousands of litres of aviation fuel. Thrown clear of the fire, Hammarskjöld might have survived for a time after the crash. It was somewhat surprising that Julian, exposed to the tropical sun, was still alive. The police took him to Ndola hospital suffering from 50 per cent burns, a fractured, dislocated right ankle, skull injuries and uraemia. Before he died a few days later, Julian told Inspector Trevor Wright of the Rhodesian police of sparks in the sky, and an explosion. He also said that shortly before the plane hit the ground Hammarskjöld had demanded that they ‘go back’. Eager to prove that the crash was an accident rather than the result of a bomb or action by a hostile plane, the first Rhodesian inquiry into the disaster dismissed Julian’s confused ramblings, arguing that the symptoms of uraemia included spots and flashes of light before the eyes.
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Letters
Vol. 23 No. 18 · 20 September 2001
From Bengt Rösiö
Matthew Hughes's reflections on Dag Hammarskjöld's death at Ndola (LRB, 9 August) are highly debatable. I knew George Ivan Smith well, talked to him extensively and wrote two books on the subject of Hammarskjöld's death in addition to the report I submitted in 1993 to the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, which had commissioned me to investigate rumours regarding the Ndola accident. I have also read Smith's notes.
Claude de Kemoularia refers to people whose identity he never checked. These individuals claim that Hammarskjöld's DC6 was followed by two Fouga planes operating out of Kolwezi in an attempt to kidnap him and bring him to Kamina. Only one Fouga existed: KAT 92 (factory number 295). KAT 91 had crashed and the UN had impounded KAT 93. KAT 92 was not equipped for night-flying and had no glare shield, which means that a pilot would have been blinded by his own firing. Its range was barely sufficient to reach Ndola from Kolwezi; Kamina was out of the question. The pilot of Hammarskjöld's plane never sent a mayday and there were no bullet holes in the fuselage.
Hughes writes that there were mercenary pilots available. Of the 21 whose logs I have checked, only two were capable of flying a Fouga (in daylight). Neither was in Kolwezi on the night of the crash. There is no record of any Beukels – possibly 'de Troye' has borrowed the name from Beuken, who flew cargo for a Sabena subsidiary in the Congo at the time.
Hammarskjöld did not set out for Ndola to persuade Tshombe to accept a peaceful settlement to the Congo impasse, but to resolve an immediate crisis involving the UN troops in the country. It arose on 13 September, the day he arrived in Léopoldville (he had decided to undertake a fact-finding mission prior to the opening of the UN General Assembly on 19 September). At 3 a.m. on that day three of his senior staff in the Congo – Conor Cruise O'Brien, Mahmoud Khiary and K.S. Rajah – launched a military attack on Katanga in order to arrest Tshombe and four of his ministers. In clear contravention of the UN Charter, they used a warrant issued by the Congolese Government and brought to Elisabethville by Vladimir Fabry, legal adviser to Sture Linner, Hammarskjöld's top representative in the Congo. Brigadier Rajah called the operation 'Morthor', Hindi for 'twist and break', but it failed dismally. People were killed and world opinion turned against the UN peacekeepers for opening fire on civilian targets. When the Congolese Prime Minister Cyrille Adoula hosted a welcoming banquet for Hammarskjöld on the evening of 13 September, it had to be curtailed so that he could meet with Riches, the British Ambassador in Léopoldville, who had been told by Whitehall that British logistical support would be withdrawn immediately and Britain's veto exercised in the Security Council if the UN did not end hostilities. His message was confirmed by a British Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Lord Lansdowne, who flew to Léopoldville the next day. Hammarskjöld agreed to fly to Ndola to negotiate a ceasefire with Tshombe and the details were decided shortly before 10 o'clock on 17 September. Lansdowne flew down to Ndola a little ahead of him. He travelled in a chartered DC6, OO-RIC, Hammarskjöld in the Force Commander's DC6, SE-BDY, just repaired having been fired at over Elisabethville the night before.
The first suggestion that Hammarskjöld had been shot down came from Sture Linner's personal assistant J. Poujoulat, and the press swallowed the bait. An assortment of theories was supplied by Transair, the Swedish charter company which operated SE-BDY. Having just started the first Swedish charter flights to Mallorca, Transair was embarrassed by the possibility that an error on the part of one of its captains had – as the Inquiry Commission later concluded – caused Hammarskjöld's death. The Morthor scandal was quickly and conveniently forgotten as the media instead began searching for a non-existent assassin.
Hughes also mentions O'Brien's theory about a hijacker on board. Mercenaries are not kamikazes: they kill for money and like the rest of us, they leave a corpse behind when they die, in an air crash or otherwise. The French mercenaries Trinquier and Faulques claimed the credit for a hijack in Notre Guerre au Katanga (1963), but then 120 Swedes have so far confessed that they murdered Olof Palme. Kemoularia never reported his conversation with de Troye and Co to the police. He later became French Ambassador to the United Nations, but never told the UN that he 'knew' who killed Hammarskjöld. According to a letter from Smith to me in 1993, the plan was that he and Kemoularia would sell the story to Paris Match and donate the proceeds to the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation.
Bengt Rösiö
Täby, Sweden
From Michiel Wijnberg
I was present at the Airport in Ndola that evening of 17/18 September 1961 until well after the DC6 turned and was not seen again, and there were certainly no other aircraft in the air or even in the vicinity until daylight, when the search started. This was a time of intense political feeling within Northern Rhodesia, as we prepared for various changes leading ultimately to the break-up of the Central African Federation. Any evidence given by freedom fighters that put the Federal Authority in a bad light was valued not for its veracity but for the publicity it would achieve, whether it concerned fighter aircraft in the dark or strange white men in the forest.
As a pilot of many years' experience, I remain puzzled as to why the captain of the DC6 chose to maintain radio silence after passing overhead, and to execute a visual rather than an instrument approach: the more usual nighttime procedure at an unfamiliar location, particularly with a VIP on board. Had he taken the latter option, he would have reported to Air Traffic Control that he had passed the non-directional beacon (at Ndola this is 2.5 miles from the end of the runway), turned and again reported to ATC that he was 'beacon-inbound', leaving the tower in no doubt of his position and landing time. As it was, the aircraft hit the trees more than nine miles from the airport, travelling at about a thousand feet lower than it should have been. There were those who wondered at the time if the very bright orange street lights confused the pilot, who assumed they were the runway lighting.
Michiel Wijnberg
Ndola, Zambia
Vol. 23 No. 21 · 1 November 2001
From Rolf Rembe
Bengt Rösiö (Letters, 20 September) dismisses the evidence left by George Ivan Smith that Dag Hammarskjöld's death may have resulted from an attempted hijack. He argued similarly in 1992 when the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs sent him to investigate the matter. According to Rösiö, the Fouga which was supposedly used for the hijacking was unsuitable and did not have sufficient range.
Ironically, the best source for the opposing view is Bengt Rösiö himself. He was stationed in the Congo as a diplomat in 1961, and was closely involved in the aftermath of the events. In June 1962 he told his superior in the Swedish Foreign Office that there were 42 aircraft under Tshombe's control. 'It cannot,' he wrote, 'be excluded that a possible attack by a renegade against the SE-BDY could have come from one of these.' In May he had written to Hammarskjöld's half-brother Knut, at the time Assistant General Secretary of EFTA in Geneva: 'You can in no way exclude the possibility that the SE-BDY was forced down through surprising manoeuvres (not including firing) by a private plane operating from a small airfield in Katanga or Rhodesia.'
Admittedly, this was before the Swedish Government closed the case, accepting the verdicts of the two commissions, one from the British-run Central African Federation and one from the UN. The former came to a foregone conclusion: its chairman had made it clear before the proceedings started that he believed the only possible cause was pilot error. The UN commission left an open verdict. Neither commission made a real effort to move beyond the immediate technical details characteristic of a 'normal' air crash, into the obvious political circumstances that surrounded the disaster. Knut Hammarskjöld requested that all air movements within 1000 kilometres of Ndola on the night of the disaster be examined, but the Swedish Government didn't pass the request on to the commissions.
In the end, the Swedish Government accepted the maximum penalty: not only the loss of Dag Hammarskjöld, but the attribution of responsibility for his death to a Swedish crew. Why? Parallels have been drawn with the behaviour of the Swedish Government when Raul Wallenberg disappeared in the USSR in 1945. The overriding aim was to avoid embarrassment, to avoid jeopardising friendly relations and Sweden's neutral position. The 'kidnapping track' was not to be examined, not even in order to be disproved.
The two commissions left a number of problems unsolved. What was the reason for the activity, noticed by so many witnesses, along the route the DC-6 was expected to take? What explained the strange behaviour of the airport manager and the traffic controller who went to bed instead of starting search and rescue operations when the plane did not come in to land? And why did the British High Commissioner, Lord Alport, say that 'the General Secretary has probably decided to go elsewhere'?
A telegram Alport sent to the Secretary of State on 21 September 1961, available in the Public Record Office but to my knowledge never published, includes the following: 'My recollection is that after the last message from the aircraft to Ndola control a period elapsed, during which the aircraft appeared to be transmitting to some other station.' What station – the hijacker? This recollection was apparently never forwarded to the commissions, either by Alport or by the Foreign Office.
Rolf Rembe
Stockholm
