U.N. Archives - ASSASSINATION ARCHIVES

Theory That Hammarskjold Plane Was Downed Is Bolstered by U.N. Report

[AARC Editorial Note: Readers interested in the following may detect eerie similarities between language used to address this case and the ways in which aspects of President Kennedy’s murder mysteries are described.]

By ALAN COWELL and RICK GLADSTONE|The New York Times|OCT. 25, 2017

The finding by Judge Mohamed Chande Othman, a senior Tanzanian jurist who was asked by the United Nations to review both old and newly uncovered evidence, gave weight to a longstanding suspicion that Mr. Hammarskjold may have been assassinated.

The crash, during the overnight of Sept. 17-18, 1961, remains a painful open wound in the history of the United Nations and one of the 20th century’s most enduring mysteries.

Judge Othman’s 63-page report offered a further rebuttal of the idea, advanced in inquiries soon after the crash, that pilot error or some other accident had caused Mr. Hammarskjold’s chartered DC-6 airplane to crash in what is now Zambia.

Moreover, Judge Othman’s conclusion reinforced the theory that the plane had been deliberately brought down, either by what the judge called “direct attack” or a distraction that diverted “the pilots’ attention for a matter of seconds at the critical point at which they were on their descent.”

At the time, Mr. Hammarskjold was flying to Ndola, in what was then Northern Rhodesia, for negotiations to end secession and civil war in the neighboring mineral-rich Congolese province of Katanga. The Katangese separatists were supported by Western political and mining interests not eager to see Mr. Hammarskjold’s diplomacy succeed.

In recent years, much attention has focused on the extent to which Western governments and their intelligence agencies, including those of Britain, the United States and Belgium, the former colonial power in Congo, have withheld information relating to Mr. Hammarskjold’s death.

Judge Othman said these countries had provided some “valuable new information” in response to his requests.

At the same time, he said, the “burden of proof” had now shifted to member states of the United Nations to “show that they have conducted a full review of records and archives in their custody or possession, including those that remain classified, for potentially relevant information.”

His remarks seemed to reinforce many earlier suggestions that, for whatever reason, Western governments were loath to disclose their full knowledge about what had befallen Mr. Hammarskjold, a Swedish diplomat killed at a tipping point in African history between colonial rule and independence.

At the time, Congo had achieved a fraught independence from Belgium, while British and Portuguese colonial rule still prevailed farther south. The secession of the southern Congolese province of Katanga illuminated the competition among rival superpowers and commercial interests for influence over Africa’s future.

For supporters of Katanga’s secession, Mr. Hammarskjold was a reviled figure.

Such were the concerns about his safety that his airplane, call-sign SE-BDY, flew a circuitous route, skirting Congolese territory and observing near-total radio silence before it approached Ndola.

Myriad theories about the causes of the crash have emerged, including pilot miscalculations of altitude and the sudden appearance in the nighttime skies of a secessionist warplane flown by a mercenary pilot.

Judge Othman’s report said: “There is a significant amount of evidence from eyewitnesses that they observed more than one aircraft in the air, that the other aircraft may have been a jet, that SE-BDY may have been on fire before it crashed and/or that SE-BDY was fired upon or otherwise actively engaged by another aircraft. In its totality, this evidence is not easily dismissed.”

Secretary General António Guterres, who released Judge Othman’s report, called its findings “insufficient to come to conclusions about the cause or causes of the crash.” But Mr. Guterres also said it seemed “likely that important additional information exists.”

Susan Williams, a British academic whose 2011 book “Who Killed Hammarskjold?” inspired the latest phase of high-level interest in the crash, said the report “reinforces my strong suspicion of foul play.”

“The onus is now on the U.K., the U.S., Belgium, France and South Africa, to release all relevant documents, including the secret records of their security and intelligence agencies and all intercepts” of radio traffic relating to the case, she said in an interview. She also urged multinational companies operating in the area to “release relevant records.”

Judge Othman’s report evoked an era when rebellious forces, white mercenaries and United Nations soldiers battled in breakaway Katanga as foreign intelligence agents chronicled and perhaps steered events for governments back home. American aircraft with high-powered radio transmitters flew clandestine intelligence missions, the report suggested, and United Nations communications were routinely intercepted.

One issue centered on the capability of Katangese secessionist forces and their foreign hires to attack Mr. Hammarskjold’s plane.

At the time the secessionists were using French-built Fouga Magister warplanes. Earlier inquiries had discounted their deployment because they lacked flying range, despite witness testimony about a second plane seen that night as Mr. Hammarskjold’s DC-6 approached Ndola.

But more recent evidence suggested that one or more Fouga Magisters could have flown a combat mission or harassed the DC-6 at a critical moment on its approach.

Judge Othman also said there had been evidence that the British colonial authorities had sought to ensure that early inquiries ascribed the crash to pilot error. But, he said, that conclusion should now be considered “logically unsound.”

He noted that, in the past few years, the United States had acknowledged the activities of C.I.A. officers in the Congo region and changed the narrative about the presence of Fouga Magisters in Katanga and American DC-3 Dakotas on the ground in Ndola at the time of the crash.

“Judging from history and the manner in which potential new information has emerged over the years,” his report said, “it is still likely that additional information will be located, unearthed or made available.”

Do Spy Agencies Hold Answer to Dag Hammarskjold’s Death? U.N. Wants to Know.

By ALAN COWELL and RICK GLADSTONE The New York Times JULY 15, 2017

Whether the keepers of those archives will allow access remains an open question.

Mr. Hammarskjold, an iconic Swedish diplomat who was the second secretary general of the world body, died with 15 others when their plane, a chartered DC-6, crashed just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, minutes from its destination: an airfield in Ndola, in what was then the British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia and is now Zambia.

The three official inquiries that immediately followed suggested pilot error was the cause, but the third of the reports, by the United Nations Commission of Investigation in 1962, said sabotage could not be ruled out. That possibility helped feed suspicions and conspiracy theories that Mr. Hammarskjold, 56 at the time of his death, had been assassinated.

Since then, independent investigators and academics have spent years collecting and scrutinizing evidence that had been dismissed or suppressed, bolstering the theory of foul play. In her 2011 book “Who Killed Hammarskjold?,” Susan Williams, a University of London scholar of African decolonization, concluded that “whatever the details, his death was almost certainly the result of a sinister intervention.”

A strong advocate of decolonization, Mr. Hammarskjold certainly had adversaries who felt threatened by his diplomacy. He died while on a visit to help end a secessionist war in newly independent Congo, a former Belgian colony rich with strategically vital minerals, including uranium, coveted by the world’s big powers.

It was a mission regarded with suspicion by powerful mining interests in Belgium and South Africa, as well as permanent members of the Security Council, including the United States and Britain. Mr. Hammarskjold’s work later earned him a posthumous Nobel Peace Prize.

The narrative of his final hours has been one of enduring fascination, laced with cryptic references to shadowy mercenaries, big-power machinations, airplanes parked on darkened runways and distant monitors tracking radio communications as the DC-6 made its fatal, final approach.

The crash came at a pivot in Africa’s fortunes between colonialism and independence, heralding an era when the Cold War split the continent, fueling guerrilla wars and uprisings — from Mozambique and Zimbabwe to Angola and Namibia — that reached their conclusions more than three decades later with the end of apartheid in South Africa.

Frustrated that a definitive answer to what exactly happened to Mr. Hammarskjold’s plane had never been established, his two most recent successors in the top role at the United Nations — Ban Ki-moon and António Guterres — have revitalized the inquiry.

A panel appointed by Mr. Ban found in 2015 that enough new tidbits of information had surfaced to warrant a new investigation. A General Assembly resolution last December authorized the appointment of an “eminent person” to review the information to determine the scope of any new inquiry.

That person, Mohamed Chande Othman, a former chief justice of Tanzania, who also was the leader of Mr. Ban’s panel, is due to submit his findings in a report to Mr. Guterres this month.

Mr. Othman declined to speak about the findings ahead of submitting the report. But senior United Nations officials and other associates of Mr. Othman said he had compiled detailed new questions about intercepted radio communications and other aircraft in the area as Mr. Hammarskjold’s plane went down eight miles from Ndola’s airfield — and that the answers may be found in the intelligence archives of the United States, Britain and Belgium.

“We know from available information that they know much more than what they’re saying,” said one of the senior United Nations officials, referring to the government keepers of those archives. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a confidential United Nations report.

One theory is that the DC-6 may have been attacked or harassed by a French-built Fouga Magister fighter jet operated by secessionist forces in the southern Congolese province of Katanga, who were resisting Mr. Hammarskjold’s efforts to end their rebellion.

Seven months before the crash, three Fouga Magisters had been delivered to the secessionists aboard an American-owned cargo plane that was supposed to be delivering food. President John F. Kennedy was deeply embarrassed by the delivery, which was later reported to have been a C.I.A. operation.

Whether a Fouga was in the Ndola area on the night of the crash remains unknown, despite earlier assurances to Mr. Othman from the C.I.A. that it had no records of a fighter jet’s presence there, a senior United Nations official said.

Mr. Othman has also put new questions to Britain and Belgium about the findings of their own intelligence services. Essentially, the senior United Nations official said, Mr. Othman had asked Western governments to carry out “more exhaustive searches and comprehensive searches” through their archives.

His inquiries also include questions about two American military intelligence officials at different listening posts on the night of the crash, one of whom has since died. Both claimed years later to have overheard radio intercepts that suggested the DC-6 had been shot down. Mr. Othman has also inquired about whether an official American DC-3 aircraft had been parked at the Ndola airfield that night.

As the deadline approached for Mr. Othman to submit his report, it was unclear what kind of information, if any, the intelligence services of these countries had released in response to his requests.

Officials of the National Security Agency in the United States referred inquiries about Mr. Othman to the State Department, which had no immediate comment.

Britain’s Foreign Office said in a statement that “we conducted another search and are providing him with further material,” referring to Mr. Othman. It did not specify the substance of the material but said “we believe all information of direct value to the inquiry has been released.”

There had been some hope that Belgium’s intelligence services would help Mr. Othman after a member of the country’s Parliament, Benoit Hellings, publicly raised the issue with the Justice Ministry last year.

But Mr. Hellings said in an interview that some of Belgium’s archives — particularly from its colonial secret service — remain classified. He has called for all of the archives to be made public as part of Belgium’s reckoning with its colonial past and said he intended to press the matter further.

The Belgium connection is potentially important because of unverified information that Belgian mercenaries had been operating in the Ndola area — including a Belgian pilot who may have been operating the secessionists’ Fouga Magister.

“I just want to know the truth, and when you have some archives, it’s normal to give access to people from the science world, and especially from the U.N.,” Mr. Hellings said. “We are talking about the death of a secretary general, so it’s a fairly important topic.”

Mr. Othman also reached out to Goran Bjorkdahl, a Swedish aid worker and development expert based in Africa, who had conducted his own investigation from 2008 to 2011 after learning that his father, who was in Zambia in the 1970s, had been given a fragment of Mr. Hammarskjold’s wrecked aircraft by local villagers.

The investigation by Mr. Bjorkdahl suggested the plane had been shot down as it was approaching Ndola. That conclusion was based on interviews he conducted with residents of the Ndola area, who said they had seen a second smaller aircraft, but had never been asked to provide testimony for any official inquiry.

New versions of what happened that night and additional allegations in the Hammarskjold mystery, many of them uncorroborated, have continued to emerge, further complicating Mr. Othman’s effort to sift fact from fiction.

Tom Miller, an American journalist based in Arizona, said he had provided Mr. Othman access to notes he had made after a series of meetings, the last in 1975, with a British mercenary who described what he called a C.I.A.-backed conspiracy to ensure that Mr. Hammarskjold’s plane crashed by falsifying altitudes on the crew’s aviation charts, causing the pilot to fly much too low.

The two official inquiries by the Rhodesian civil aviation authorities immediately after the crash found that the plane had descended too low. The United Nations Commission of Inquiry report found the plane crashed in an area just 200 feet higher than the Ndola airfield’s altitude.

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