Dag Hammarskjöld
Photo: Sverre A. Borretzen/Scanpix
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“I do not personally believe we help the Congolese by actions in which Africans kill Africans or Congolese kill Congolese." - Dag Hammarskjöld
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The Guardian just published a series of articles on the crash of the UN-chartered Swedish DC6 SE-BDY (with on board UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld)--around midnight, in the night of September 17/18, 1961, in Ndola, in today's Zambia--that establish beyond any reasonable doubt that nefarious "skulduggery" was afoot. The plane was downed by a smaller plane following in its wake. This is what Göran Björkdahl, a Swedish aid worker, just discovered after three years of personal investigation, corroborated by The Guardian (start here and check out all related articles if interested).
At the time of the crash, however, the investigation by Northern Rhodesian authorities had quickly ruled that the crash was due to pilot error. The testimony of the American Sergeant Harold Julian, detailed to the UN as Hammarskjöld's bodyguard and who'd survived the crash for 5 days without being medivaced, was intentionally dismissed out of hand by Rhodesian authorities as the ravings of a man in shock. Sergeant Harold Julian told Rhodesian police Hammarskjöld might have sensed there was a double-cross as he was frantically yelling at the pilot to turn back. Sergeant Harold Julian, who'd seen combat up close in North Korea, also told Rhodesian investigators he'd seen "sparks in the sky" followed by "an explosion." His account was dismissed as caused by symptoms of the uremia he'd suffered in the crash, which "include spots and flashes of light before the eyes."
Hence, pilot error. Case closed!
For 50 years, all those who dared to question that finding were called nutty conspiracy theory buffs and saw their professional career destroyed.
In July 1998, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, then chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), was called a fruitcake when he revealed that apartheid-era South African intelligence documents the TRC had come across in the course of unrelated investigations evinced "alleged involvement of the American CIA and British MI5 in the plan" to assassinate Hammarskjöld. The documents, discovered at a private outfit called South African Institute for Maritime Research, which was actually a South African Defence Force intelligence "front company," detailed "plans to detonate a bomb in Hammarskjold's aircraft":
"the bomb was due to explode when the wheels were retracted. But it appears that if there was a bomb it exploded shortly before the aircraft was due to land at Ndola airport in the former Northern Rhodesia"
As could be anticipated, the British Foreign Office, through a spokesman, denied any involvement: "Intelligence agents of the United Kingdom do not go around bumping people off. At this time during the Cold War, Soviet misinformation was quite rampant so [the documents] may have been put out by them."
Does the Foreign Office spokesman mean that there was a Soviet mole in South African intelligence who'd planted those documents, anticipating that the TRC would one day find them?
As TRC was then winding down its operations, Desmond Tutu ordered the documents to be turned over to Mandela's Justice Minister Dullah Omar, who sat on them. And, to date, there's no indication the South African government would ever open an inquiry into this very cold case.
Be that as it might, if there was a bomb plot, it didn't come through. Just as in the case of the murder of Lumumba that had occurred 8 months earlier nearby in Elisabethville (Lubumbashi), the conspirators (and here we have to assume they're the same suspects who'd wanted Lumumba's death) had developed various plans and options. There was even one Dr Goetlieb who was sent from Langley to Kinshasa to put poison into Lumumba's toothpaste. When this option didn't pan out, local hitmen were put to contribution: Belgian mercenaries and local henchmen.
In the case of Hammarskjöld, contemporaneous reports had briefly mentioned a rogue Rhodesian or Belgian mercenary pilot called "Lone Ranger" as a likely perpetrator, as this Time article confirms :
"Shortly after 4 p.m., Hammarskjold and his party of 15 climbed aboard the Albertina, a white DC-6 used by the U.N. in the Congo. Hammarskjold's main concern, on takeoff, was ominous: his plane had to cross territory controlled by a marauding Katanga jet fighter known as 'The Lone Ranger.' The pilot, thought to be Rhodesian or an English-speaking Belgian, had been terrorizing U.N. garrisons since the beginning of the fighting, had even made strafing passes at a press conference given by U.N. Katanga Commander Conor Cruise O'Brien in Elisabethville."
In the early 1990s, Conor Cruise "The Cruiser" O'Brien and George Ivan Smith, another diplomat who'd worked in the Congo, "wrote to the Guardian arguing that Hammarskjöld had been the victim of a kidnap that went wrong" (read Matthew Hughes's article on this theory in the London Review of Books here).
In the late 1960s, Smith had even met in Paris the man other former mercenaries introduced to him as The Lone Ranger, one Belgian named Beukels, who, by that time, "was a troubled man whose involvement in Hammarskjöld’s death had taken its toll. He now worked for a construction company in Belgium but had lost weight and was drinking heavily" (Matthew Hughes).
But Lone Ranger was only a low-level member of the operating personnel. Beyond even the interests of the people behind the assassination or the question of the "how," what really matters now is to know why Dag Hammarskjöld was so coldly assassinated.
Dag Hammarskjöld was heading to Ndola, in Northern Rhodesia (today's Zambia), to negotiate a cease-fire with Moïse Tshombe, the leader of the secessionist province of Katanga. Without the backing of western superpowers, Hammarskjöld had ordered UN troops based in Katanga to crush secessionists and their mercenary associates whose departure was one of the sine qua non he'd given the rebel leaders. But "Operation Morthor," as it was called, turned out to be disastrous. This didn't endear him to the British and American governments who wanted to keep their "options open" on Katanga where powerful Belgian financial interests were backing the secessionist government.
In fact, Hammarskjöld was so independent he was hated by both Western and Eastern bloc powers.
Hammarskjöld was able to take these extraordinary measures in Katanga because he'd dramatically raised the profile and power of the office of UN Secretary General. Some even argue that since his death, no other UN Secretary General has even come close to wielding the power Hammarskjöld had. He "conned" his way around and beyond the legal mandate of a UN Secretary, ordering for the first time in the history of the United Nations a massive deployment into the Congo of more than 10,000 UN peacekeepers involving Swedish, Irish, Ethiopian, Ghanaian and Indian troops under his direct command and with a clear military mandate to back by force the Congolese central government. He had the UN implement his theory of "preventive diplomacy" he'd defined as "smelling conflict in the air before it is on your table."
But his commitment to the Congo and its real economic independence were actually what spelled doom for Dag Hammarskjöld.
As Göran Björkdahl rightly concludes:
"My own conclusion, after adding the new witnesses' statements and the archive information to previously published documents, is that Hammarskjöld's DC6 was brought down and that the motive was to maintain the west's control over Katanga minerals. It is significant that the UN, after Hammarskjöld's death, has become less of a challenge to the big powers."
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Contemporaneous newsreel on the death of Dag Hammarskjöld with a statement by JFK at the end of the video:
UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld's death... by aengw
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