19 Sep 1961 Dag Hammarskjöld, SAIMR shoot down UN boss plane

[scienceplease 2]

former headline
Tue19Sep61 - Dag Hammarskjöld, CIA shoot down UN SG's plane

UN chief's plane was shot down

Eyewitnesses claim a second aircraft fired at the plane raising questions of British cover-up over the 1961 crash and its causes

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/17/dag-hammarskjold-un-secret ary-general-crash

[scienceplease 2]

I suggest people read the whole article. It is rather humbling...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dag_Hammarskj%C3%B6ld

[TonyGosling]

this stuff goes back a long way doesn't it - no sooner had WW2 finished than....



On 19 August 1998, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chairman of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), stated that recently uncovered letters had implicated the British MI5, the American CIA, and then South African intelligence services in the crash.[16] One TRC letter said that a bomb in the aircraft's wheel bay was set to detonate when the wheels came down for a landing. Tutu said that they were unable to investigate the truth of the letters or the allegations that South Africa or Western intelligence agencies played a role in the crash. The British Foreign Office suggested that they may have been created as Soviet misinformation or disinformation.[17]

On 29 July 2005, Norwegian Major General Bjørn Egge gave an interview to the newspaper Aftenposten on the events surrounding Hammarskjöld's death. According to General Egge, who had been the first UN officer to see the body, Hammarskjöld had a hole in his forehead, and this hole was subsequently airbrushed from photos taken of the body. It appeared to Egge that Hammarskjöld had been thrown from the plane, and grass and leaves in his hands might indicate that he survived the crash – and that he had tried to scramble away from the wreckage. Egge does not claim directly that the wound was a gunshot wound.[18]

In his speech to the 64th session of the United Nations General Assembly on 23 September 2009, Colonel Gaddafi called upon the Libyan president of UNGA, Ali Treki, to institute a UN investigation into the assassinations of Congolese prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, who was overthrown in 1960 and murdered the following year, and of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961.[19]

According to a dozen witnesses interviewed by Swedish aid worker Göran Björkdahl in the 2000s (decade), Hammarskjöld's plane was shot down by another aircraft. Björkdahl also reviewed previously unavailable archive documents and internal UN communcations. He believes that there was an intentional shootdown for the benefit of mining companies like Union Minière.[20][21][22] A US intelligence officer who was stationed at an electronic surveillance station in Cyprus stated that he heard a cockpit recording from Ndola. In the cockpit recording a pilot talks of closing in on the DC6 in which Hammarskjold was traveling, guns are heard firing, and then the words "I've hit it".[23]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dag_Hammarskj%C3%B6ld#Alternative_theorie s

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

Dag Hammarskjöld: Ban Ki-moon seeks to appoint investigator for fatal crash
The UN secretary-general said ‘this may be our last chance to find the truth’ behind 1961 death of his predecessor as UK insists it has no further information

Ban Ki-moon said in a note to the UN general assembly that there were enough unanswered questions in Dag Hammarskjöld’s death to warrant further investigation.
Julian Borger in Washington Thursday 25 August 2016
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/24/dag-hammarskjold-crash-b an-ki-moon-un-investigator

The UN secretary-general has called for the appointment of “eminent person or persons” to pursue an investigation into the death of his predecessor, Dag Hammarskjöld in a mysterious 1961 air crash in central Africa.

Declaring “this may be our last chance to find the truth” Ban Ki-moon sent a note to the general assembly, saying there were enough unanswered questions arising from the crash to warrant further investigation and that the responses of the UK, US and Belgium (the major powers in the region at the time) to a UN request for archive material “do not appear to alter” that conclusion.

Dag Hammarskjöld: evidence suggests UN chief's plane was shot down
Read more
In particular Ban noted that the UK had stuck to its position last year that it had no further documentation to show the UN investigation. He appended a letter sent in June by the British permanent representative to the UN, Matthew Rycroft, saying “our position remains the same and we are not able to release the materials in question without any redactions”.

Rycroft added “the total amount of information withheld is very small and most of the redactions only consist of a few words”.

The wording of the letter echoed a similar letter, turning down the UN request for more information, the UK sent in June 2015, which said that “no pertinent material” had been found in a “search across all relevant UK departments”.

In reply the UN legal counsel, Miguel de Serpa Soares, reminded Rycroft of the shared responsibility of the UN and its member states “to pursue the full truth” about Hammarskjöld’s death, and asked him to confirm that the search of “all relevant UK departments” included security and intelligence agencies.

In reply, Rycroft simply quoted the former UK foreign secretary Philip Hammond telling parliament that the foreign office had “coordinated a search across all relevant UK government departments”.

“I think the British response is extraordinary. It’s very brisk and curt and evasive,” said Susan Williams, a British historian at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, whose book Who Killed Hammarskjöld: The UN, the Cold War and White Supremacy in Africa, revealed new evidence that helped persuade the UN to open a new investigation into the crash near Ndola, in what was then the British colony of Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia.

Part of that evidence was a report from a British intelligence officer, Neil Ritchie, who was in the area at the time of the crash and who was trying to organise a meeting between Hammarskjöld and a rebel leader from neighbouring Congo, where the UN secretary general was trying to broker a truce.

“This was British territory and they had a man on the ground. It doesn’t make them responsible for the crash but it does indicate they knew a lot of what was going on,” Williams said, adding it was “highly unlikely” that Ritchie’s report which she found in an archive at Essex University, was the only British intelligence report coming the area at the time.

In suggesting that the UN investigation continues under “an eminent person or persons” chosen by the general assembly or himself, Ban said: “Seeking a complete understanding of the circumstances is our solemn duty to my illustrious and distinguished predecessor, Dag Hammarskjöld, to the other members of the party accompanying him, and to their families.”

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

RAF veteran ‘admitted 1961 killing of UN secretary general’
Exclusive: Cold case documentary casts new light on mystery of Dag Hammarskjöld’s plane crash
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/12/raf-veteran-admitted-kil ling-un-secretary-general-dag-hammarskjold-in-1961

‘Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to…’
Emma Graham-Harrison, Andreas Rocksen and Mads Brügger
Sat 12 Jan 2019 12.59 EST Last modified on Sat 12 Jan 2019 18.45 EST

New evidence has emerged linking an RAF veteran to the death in 1961 of the UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld in a mysterious plane crash in southern Africa.

Jan van Risseghem has been named as a possible attacker before, but has always been described simply as a Belgian pilot. The Observer can now reveal that he had extensive ties to Britain, including a British mother and wife, trained with the RAF and was decorated by Britain for his service in the second world war.

Film-makers investigating the 1961 crash for a documentary, Cold Case Hammarskjöld, have found a friend of Van Risseghem who claimed the pilot confessed to shooting down the UN plane. They also gathered testimony from another pilot that undermines one of his alibis for that night.

Van Risseghem, whose father was Belgian, escaped occupied Europe at the start of the war to join the resistance in England. He trained with the RAF and flew missions over Nazi-held areas. During this period he met and married his British wife, cementing a lifelong connection.

Man accused of shooting down UN chief: ‘Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to…’

At the end of the war the couple returned to Belgium, but by 1961 Van Risseghem was in the Congo, flying for separatist rebels who had declared independence for the breakaway province of Katanga. There, the documentary claims, he was ordered to shoot down a plane carrying Hammarskjöld, who was on a secret midnight journey to try to broker peace. The film will premiere at the Sundance festival in two weeks.


It was not clear at the time of the crash, which also killed all 15 people travelling with the secretary general, if it had been caused by sabotage or was a tragic accident. More than half a century later the UN is still investigating what happened on 18 September 1961. But as news of Hammarskjöld’s death emerged, the RAF veteran was apparently an obvious suspect. He was named as the possible attacker by the US ambassador to the Congo, in a secret cable sent the day of Hammarskjöld’s death and only recently declassified.

Jan van Risseghem
Jan van Risseghem’s alibi has been questioned by one of his colleagues.
For decades, Van Risseghem appeared to have proof that he wasn’t flying in the region on the night Hammarskjöld’s plane, the Albertina, came down outside Ndola in Zambia, then called Northern Rhodesia.

Flight logs – meticulous records of where and when he flew – appear to show Van Risseghem was not flying for most of that month, returning to duty only on 20 September. However, Roger Bracco, another mercenary flying for the Katangese, told filmmakers that his colleague’s logbooks are dotted with apparent forgeries.


He does not believe that Van Risseghem shot down Hammarskjöld. But when asked in an interview for the film if he considered the logbook a fake, he responds: “I won’t say so, but … I didn’t recognise the story [it told].” Leafing through the book, he later directly accuses Van Risseghem of forgery. “This is fake,” Bracco says bluntly of one flight destination, and goes on to add that some of the names listed for co-pilots are not real.

Swedish soldiers carry Hammarskjöld’s body from a plane
Swedish soldiers carry Hammarskjöld’s body from a plane at Stockholm’s Bromma airport on 18 September 1961. Photograph: AP
A friend has also come forward to claim that, less than a decade after Hammarskjöld’s death, Van Risseghem told him he had attacked the plane. Pierre Coppens met Van Risseghem in 1965, when he was flying for a parachute training centre in Belgium. Over several conversations, he claimed, the pilot detailed how he overcame various technical challenges to down the plane, unaware of who was travelling inside.

“He didn’t know,” Coppens said. “He said ‘I made the mission’ and that’s all. And then I had to go back and save my life’.”


Van Risseghem died in 2007. Surviving relatives, including his widow and niece, say he was not involved in any attack. His widow told the Observer that he was in Rhodesia negotiating the purchase of a plane for Congolese rebels and the logbooks provide proof that he was not flying for Katanga at the time.

Van Risseghem was never interviewed by the authorities or journalists directly about the death of Hammarskjöld, but it is clear that he followed news about it closely. In an interview with an aviation historian Leif Hellström in the 1990s, he returns to discuss the crash and details of an official enquiry repeatedly. He emphasises that he was not in southern Africa at the time it happened, and describes the idea of an attack as “fairy stories”.

Topics
Dag Hammarskjöld

The Observer

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

UN Leader Dag Hammarskjold Died in Mysterious Circumstances in 1961. What Really Happened?
https://www.history.com/.amp/news/dag-hammarskjold-death-plane-crash

New evidence supports a theory that the pioneering U.N. secretary general was assassinated.
BY SARAH PRUITT

Universal History Archive/UIG/Getty images
Shortly after midnight on September 18, 1961, a chartered DC-6 airplane carrying United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold on a peacekeeping mission to the newly independent African nation of the Congo crashed in a forest near Ndola, in the British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).
Hammarskjold and 14 other people aboard, including U.N. staffers and the plane’s crew, were killed; a single survivor died of his injuries six days later. Though inquiries by colonial authorities in Africa indicated the crash had been the result of pilot error, rumors of foul play surfaced immediately—and they have not stopped swirling since.
Today, Hammarskjold’s name is emblazoned on several buildings at U.N. headquarters in New York, while his death remains the biggest enigma in the organization’s eventful history. In 2017, the UN commissioned a new investigation of the crash, while the 2019 documentary Cold Case Hammarskjöld explores the long-running theory that Belgian or South African mercenaries may have shot down Hammarskjold’s plane to stop his diplomatic activities in the Congo, possibly even with the backing of U.S. and British intelligence.
Who was Dag Hammarskjold?
The son of a former prime minister of Sweden, Hammarskjold started young in public service, working at the Ministry of Finance, the Bank of Sweden and later the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He first became a Swedish delegate to the U.N. General Assembly in 1949, and in 1953 was elected as the second secretary-general, succeeding Trygve Lie of Norway. He was reelected to a second five-year term in 1957.
Hammarskjold was known for his hands-on approach to diplomacy, and his role in shaping the U.N. into an active force in making and keeping peace around the world. In 1954-55, he personally negotiated the release of 15 U.S. soldiers that China, which was not part of the U.N. at the time, had captured during the Korean War. He also helped assuage conflicts in the Middle East, including the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the clash between Lebanon and Jordan in 1958.

Dag Hammarskjold pictured on September 13 1961, just five days before his death, in Leopoldville as part of a peace mission in the region.
AFP/Getty Images
U.N clashes with foreign powers in Congo
In mid-1960, Hammarskjold’s attention turned toward central Africa, where the Belgian Congo had recently become the independent Republic of the Congo (now Democratic Republic of the Congo). Shortly after independence was declared, the mineral-rich southern province of Katanga seceded, sparking a violent conflict that would pit U.N. peacekeeping troops supporting the republic’s new central government against Katanga’s separatist forces. The separatists, in turn, were backed by Belgian mining companies seeking control of Katanga’s resources (including uranium).
When Patrice Lumumba, the republic’s first democratically elected prime minister, appealed to the Soviet Union for military support, the Congo crisis also became a proxy battle in the Cold War. Lumumba was kicked out of office and assassinated (with the help of Belgium and the CIA) in early 1961. Shortly before his death, Hammarskjold was in Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) meeting with his successor, Cyrille Adoula, when he learned that U.N. forces had launched an aggressive attempt to expel foreign mercenaries from Katanga.
Hammarskjold’s fatal flight
The U.N. attack, codenamed Operation Morthor, angered both U.S. and British authorities, who had not been consulted beforehand, as well as the mining interests backing the Katangese rebels. Hammarskjold arranged a meeting with Moise Tshombe, leader of the separatists in Katanga, to negotiate a cease-fire.
Hammarskjold’s plane, a chartered DC-6 aircraft known as the Albertina, was nearing the destination arranged for the secret meeting with Tshombe when it crashed into the forest early on September 18.
Two investigations into the crash by the British-run Central African Federation, which included Northern Rhodesia, found that pilot error was the likely cause, as the plane had been flying too low when it made its approach to the airport. But an official U.N. inquiry delivered an open verdict in April 1962, stating that it could not rule out sabotage or attack.

Officials search the crash site after the plane carrying Swedish diplomat Dag Hammarskjold came down near Ndola in Northern Rhodesia (later Zambia), resulting in his death, in September 1961. Hammarskjold was on his way to negotiate a ceasefire with President Moise Tshombe of Katanga.
Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Why people suspect foul play
Questions surrounded the crash from the first. For one thing, writes Susan Williams in her 2011 book Who Killed Hammarskjold?, the British high commissioner at Ndola, Lord Alport, showed little concern after the U.N. plane failed to land at its scheduled time, instead insisting that Hammarskjold had decided to go elsewhere. Then there was the fact that search for the plane’s wreckage and crash site didn’t begin for hours after the crash, though witnesses had reported seeing a great flash in the sky soon after midnight.
Local residents in the area had seen a second plane in the sky that night, but their testimony was discounted or ignored by colonial authorities, the Guardian reported in 2011. The crash’s sole survivor, U.N. security officer Harold Julien, also spoke before he died of an explosion on board the plane, but the authorities assumed he was too ill and sedated to be taken seriously.
Two days after Hammarskjold's death, former U.S. President Harry Truman insinuated to reporters that the U.N. leader had been assassinated, saying he “was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said ‘when they killed him.’”
Children eagerly gather to shake hands with visiting United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold on January 17, 1961 in Ridgeville, South Africa. Hammarskjold was making a tour of Pretoria province following talks with South African Prime Minister Verwoerd.
Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Theories on who was responsible
Such uncertainties have fueled several long-running conspiracy theories, centered around the powerful groups inside and outside Africa who hadn’t wanted Hammarskjold’s peacekeeping efforts in Congo to succeed.
According to one popular theory, Katangese separatists ordered a Belgian mercenary pilot, Jan van Risseghem, to shoot down the secretary-general’s plane. Van Risseghem was mentioned as a possible suspect in a cable sent by the U.S. ambassador to Congo just hours after the crash (but not declassified until 2014). But he was never interviewed by authorities about the crash; apparently flight logs gave him an alibi by showing he had not been flying at the time, and there are questions about whether he was even in the region.
Another long-standing theory centers on documents released from apartheid-era South Africa in the late 1990s, which suggest that a white militia group called the South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR) orchestrated the plane crash that killed Hammarskjold—with the support of both British intelligence and the CIA. Though British officials claimed that the documents were likely Soviet forgeries, the theory has persisted.
Both theories are addressed in the 2019 documentary, Cold Case Hammarskjold. The film contains interviews that suggest the flight logs were forged and that van Risseghem (who died in 2007) admitted his involvement in the crash to a friend named Pierre Coppens four years later. A former SAIMR member recalls the group’s claims of successfully taking Hammarskjold down.
A new U.N. investigation
After former Secretary-General Ban-ki Moon took the lead in calling for renewed investigations, the U.N. appointed Mohamed Chande Othman, a Tanzanian judge, to review the crash in 2017. Othman didn’t reach a definitive conclusion, but later that year he reported that “it appears plausible that an external attack or threat may have been a cause of the crash, whether by way of a direct attack…or by causing a momentary distraction of the pilots.”
Othman’s inquiry was relaunched under U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres in 2018. Amid calls for countries around the world to be transparent and cooperate with his investigations, the New York Times reported that the Swedish government blocked a researcher’s request for access to related official documents on national security grounds—suggesting that even in Hammarskjold’s native land, there is still much that remains hidden in the long-running mystery of his death.

[TonyGosling]

South Africa must investigate the death of Dag Hammarskjöld
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2020-02-09-south-africa-mu st-investigate-the-death-of-dag-hammarskjold/

UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld was one of only four people to have been posthumously awarded a Nobel Prize (for Peace), and was described by the then-US president, John F Kennedy, as ‘the greatest statesman of our century’. His death in 1961 has sparked many theories, among them that a South African right-wing paramilitary organisation, or South African mercenaries, were responsible.

Shortly after midnight on 18 September 1961, a plane crashed when approaching Ndola, a mining town in Northern Rhodesia (today Zambia) bordering the Congo. On board were UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 other people. They were on their way to meet Moïse Tshombe, leader of the secessionist Katanga Province, to find a solution to the conflict in the Congo.

All but one of those on board died in the wreckage. The bodyguard Harold Julien succumbed to his injuries six days later in a local hospital. He could have been saved if treated properly. His eyewitness report of the crash was also neglected.

Foul play was not ruled out. The inquiry by a United Nations Commission noted that “the Rhodesian inquiry… had reached the conclusion that the probable cause of the crash was pilot error. The Commission, while it cannot exclude this possibility, has found no indication that this was the probable cause of the crash.”

UN Resolution 1759 (XVII) of 26 October 1962 therefore tasked the secretary-general “to inform the General Assembly of any new evidence which may come to his attention”. This left the door open for a return to the matter.

Fifty years later, Susan Williams published a book which pointed to omissions, flaws and failures of the earlier investigations. It triggered a new inquiry conducted by an independent commission of jurists. It submitted its report in 2013.

As a result, official investigations by the United Nations were resumed. The United Nations Association Westminster Branch in London has since then provided regular updates on developments.

In 2017, the former Chief Justice of Tanzania, Mohamed Chande Othman, was appointed as Eminent Person, tasked with further investigations. He concluded in his first report that an aerial attack “would have been possible using resources existing in the area at the time” and “that there is likely to be much relevant material that remains undisclosed”.

Othman identified “the continued non-disclosure of potentially relevant new information in the intelligence, security and defence archives of Member States” as “the biggest barrier to understanding the full truth”. He stressed that “the burden of proof has now shifted to Member States 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”.

In support of Othman’s report, UN Secretary-General António Guterres recommended “that relevant Member States appoint an independent and high-ranking official to conduct a dedicated and internal review of their archives, in particular their intelligence, security and defence archives, to determine whether they hold relevant information”.

Following a Swedish draft resolution co-sponsored by 70 member states, the General Assembly extended Othman’s mandate. He presented his second report in September 2019.

New information, Othman concluded, “highlights the fact that there were many more foreign mercenaries in and around Katanga, including pilots, than had been considered by earlier inquiries”. These had the logistics and necessary conditions (suitable planes and airfields) to intercept the plane. For Othman, “it remains plausible that an external attack or threat was a cause of the crash”.

New information also confirmed that the crash site was discovered much earlier than officially reported – and testifies to the deliberate neglect of the only survivor. As Othman notes, this “calls into question the acts of various Governments directly after the crash and leaves open the issue of why the earlier crash discovery time was not reported”.

Othman based his conclusions partly on reports of the “independent high-ranking officials” appointed by several member states. However, states where most discoveries could be expected did not comply. South Africa finally assigned a high-ranking official at Dirco in May 2019 with the task. But no report has so far been submitted.

Othman therefore recommended:

That an independent person be appointed to continue the work;
That key member states be again urged to (re)appoint independent high-ranking officials to determine whether relevant information exists within their security, intelligence and defence archives;
That a conclusion be reached as to whether member states have complied with this process; and
That key documents be made public.
In December 2019, another Swedish draft resolution was adopted with a record number of 128 co-sponsoring countries (including South Africa, but as before without the support of the US and the UK). It extended Othman’s mandate.

This has a significant symbolic meaning. The Westminster Branch of the UK’s UN Association considers “a record number of co-sponsoring Member States to be a clear indication to those few states which have failed to cooperate”. It should be a strong reminder that it is time for South Africa to deliver.

It is one thing if the US and the UK are unwilling to assess and disclose classified material. The assumption that they want to avoid embarrassment by not sharing what they know is not too far-fetched. But South Africa has long since eschewed the traditions of the apartheid regime.

Concerned about apartheid, Hammarskjöld had visited South Africa in early 1961.

His death was celebrated in the white settler-minority communities. It is inconceivable that local archives contain no information on what happened at Ndola. South African agencies and individuals played an active role in the region. This needs to be closely investigated.

Democratic South Africa should deal with such skeletons in its closet. It must come to terms with a past which is not one of today’s government. As Guterres stated in his letter to the General Assembly:

“It remains our shared responsibility to pursue the full truth of what happened on that fateful night in 1961. We owe this to Dag Hammarskjöld and to the members of the party accompanying him. However, we also owe this to the United Nations.” DM

[TonyGosling]

Film Review: ‘Cold Case Hammarskjöld’
https://variety.com/2019/film/reviews/cold-case-hammarskjold-review-12 03123358/

Mads Brügger's investigation of the death of Dag Hammarskjöld is a documentary that opens into a looking glass: a conspiracy that chills you.
By OWEN GLEIBERMAN
Official Site: http://www.sundance.org/projects/cold-case-hammarskjold

The vast majority of conspiracy theories have one key thing in common: Investigate them, and they turn out not to be true. But that doesn’t mean all of them aren’t true. “Cold Case Hammerskjöld” is a slow-building documentary mystery that sucks you in like a vortex. It offers several intertwined conspiracy theories, at least one of which, by the sternest reckoning, appears to be grounded in reality. Does that mean everything in the film is true? Maybe not. Yet “Cold Case Hammarskjöld” is a singular experience that counts as one of the most honestly disturbing and provocative nonfiction films in years.

Directed by the Danish filmmaker Mads Brügger, it starts out as an offbeat journalistic inquiry into the 1961 plane-crash death of Dag Hammarskjöld, the secretary-general of the United Nations. Reviving old claims that have dogged the case but have never been proved, the film suggests that the crash was, in fact, engineered — that Hammarskjöld was murdered. Even if you’re young enough that his name strikes nothing but a distant chord, it’s a scary, bracing notion that gets its hooks in you. It makes you think: Could it possibly be true? And, if so, who could have been behind such an act, and why?

“Cold Case Hammarskjöld” sucks us in, but in a circling idiosyncratic way that only fuels its intrigue. Brügger — bald, twinkly, and a tad officious, like the young Donald Pleasance — first appears in a hotel room dressed in a white safari uniform. He tells us that the villain of his story is, yes, a man in a white safari uniform, and that there’s only one photograph of him in existence. (He shows us the photo.) Brügger, a filmmaker with a prankish reputation but, in this case, a deadly serious agenda, may be toying with the audience, but we go with him, because he seems to be in earnest, and he plants the seeds of a criminal enigma that turns out to have shockingly far-reaching implications.

Dag Hammarskjöld was a Swedish economist and diplomat who, in 1953, become the UN secretary-general, a post he held until his death. He had, as Brügger says, the look and aura of a dull Swedish bureaucrat, and many of the UN powers hoped he would be just that; they did not look favorably upon a secretary-general with pointed leanings. But Hammarskjöld turned out to be something of an activist, especially when it came to the African nations that were struggling to free themselves from the yoke of colonialism and forge independent identities.

When Hammarskjöld died, he was on his way to Congo to oversee cease-fire negotiations in the ongoing crisis there. Several background forces were vying for power in Congo, including the Soviet Union and Belgium, Congo’s former colonizer, whose largest mining company was intent on maintaining control of the country’s wealthy mineral resources.

Brügger takes us back to the night of Sept. 18, 1961, when Hammarskjöld’s small plane went down in a field in Zambia, eight miles from the Ndola airport. He tells us that investigators, at the time, dismissed statements by locals who were near the crash when it happened. So Brügger goes back and talks to them, and one after another, in a way that seems guilelessly casual and convincing, they all mention the same things: the sighting of a second plane, a red flash, a shot-like sound.

He also interviews a witness of significant authority: Charles Southall, a former top official in the U.S. National Security Agency, who in 1961 was working at an NSA listening station in Cyprus. Southall heard a recording of the pilot referencing a second plane, and also heard gunfire. Brügger then presents a photograph of consummate creepiness. It shows Dag Hammarskjöld’s bloodied corpse at the crash site, and wedged into his collar is a playing card: the ace of spades. What could this mean? It means something, and when we find out what it’s a true suck-in-your-breath “Whoa!” of an epiphany.

Brügger, lifting tricks from Nick Broomfield and Werner Herzog, knows just how to inhabit the role he’s playing: the cultivated European muckraker as teasing showman. He gathers equipment (a metal detector, two shovels) and heads for the spot where the wreckage from Hammarskjöld’s plane was buried. We think: Is he going to dig up a smoking gun? In a way, he’s still playing us, at once exploiting and tweaking our desire to see a puzzle in which every piece fits perfectly. “Cold Case Hammarskjöld” doesn’t provide that. Yet the film does convince you that the death of Dag Hammarskjöld was, in all likelihood, an assassination, a revelation that becomes the entry point into a larger looking glass.

A key clue emerges from an unexpected place: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which unveiled, but did not investigate, a tell-tale document from an organization called the South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR). It’s a mercenary group that worked hand in glove with the Apartheid regime, and the document contains what one witness describes as “the manuscript for killing Dag Hammarskjöld.” Brügger, who effectively communicates that he’s discovering this evidence right along with us, then pursues the hidden agenda of SAIMR. Its founder and leader? Keith Maxwell, the man in the safari uniform. He was a trainer of mercenaries and a devout white supremacist; he was also a little nuts. (He liked to dress in 19th-century naval regalia and wrote screw-loose diaries.) And what he was up to, according to the movie, was big. Nothing less than a way to reshape the world on racist grounds.


In the three days since “Cold Case Hammarskjöld” premiered at Sundance, its key claim — which has to do with the spread of AIDS in Africa — has been investigated by several journalistic organizations, notably The New York Times. The Times story that appeared on Jan. 27 debunks a number of the implications of Brügger’s film. I saw the movie several weeks ago (it was pre-screened for critics before Sundance), but have waited to write about it until some of this follow-up information could get out there. My initial experience of watching “Cold Case” was of falling into the seductive quicksand that a conspiracy theory can create. When I saw the movie, I bought the claims Brügger was making. I now believe The New York Times more.

That said, Brügger presents an extensive interview with Alexander Jones, a former SAIMR militia member who makes the shocking claims that “Cold Case” leaves us with. And what was haunting when I first saw the film, and remains haunting, is the intent that Brügger captures. This is what a contingent of people in South Africa, allied with the government, at least wanted to do. And that’s eminently believable. And it chills us. “Cold Case Hammarskjöld” doesn’t offer the last word about the issues it raises. But it’s a movie that should be seen, grappled with, argued with, and experienced, because the questions it plants in us are dark enough to reverberate as powerfully as answers.

[TonyGosling]

Missing Link in a UN Cold Case?
April 21, 2022
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/04/21/missing-link-in-a-un-cold-case/

A French death warrant against Dag Hammarskjold comes to light, Maurin Picard reports.

Wreath-laying ceremony on the 59th anniversary of the death of former Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld. Swedish Ambassador Anna Karin Eneström at the podium, Secretary-General António Guterres on right. (U.N. Photo/Eskinder Debebe)

By Maurin Picard
PassBlue

Six decades after the unexplained death of United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold and 15 other people in a plane crash in Central Africa, a new discovery in French government archives may bring researchers closer to the truth and answer a famous Cold War riddle: Who killed Hammarskjold?

The discovery of an important clue happened in November 2021, following years-long research into the death of the secretary-general. It began with a yellow folder, whose cover was marked with an “H” in blue and the words “TRÈS SECRET” written across the top in a red stamp.

“H” stood for Dag Hammarskjold, it turned out. The file from the French intelligence service (SDECE), dated July 1961 and destined for French Prime Minister Michel Debré, was kept in the French National Archives.

It contained a typewritten death warrant against U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, issued by a mysterious “executive committee” that had “gathered to examine . . . the behaviour of Mister Hammarskjoeld in Tunisia,” where French forces were besieged by Tunisian militias in the coastal town of Bizerte and the secretary-general tried to intervene on July 26, 1961.

Dag Hammarskjöld, right, on the Red Square with Ilya S. Tchernychev, under-secretary-general of the United Nations, July 5, 1956. (U.N. Photo)

Asserting that Hammarskjold’s “angst of the Russians” made him “change his mind and decide to support them in the Congo,” another serious crisis facing the U.N. at the time, the warrant concluded that it was “high time to put an end to his harmful intrusion [sic]” and ordered “this sentence common to justice and fairness to be carried out, as soon as possible.”

The “angst of the Russians” openly referred in the letter to the U.N. presence in Congo and the oversize influence of Afro-Asian countries in the peacekeeping mission there.

The warrant had no signature. Just three letters and a notorious acronym: OAS (Organisation Armée Secrète, or Secret Armed Organization), a far-right French dissident paramilitary group opposing Algerian independence and the Gaullist regime.

[Related: “Who Was Dag Hammarskjold?“]

The clandestine movement, which was mostly operational from 1961 to 1962, even tried to murder President Charles de Gaulle on Aug. 22, 1962. It killed 1,700 to 2,200 people, mostly French and Algerian civilians, French soldiers, police officers, politicians and civil servants, during its brief existence.

Jacques Foccart, left, Hubert Maga, center, and Guy Chavanne, right, visiting a school in Torcy, Seine-et-Marne, France. in 1961. (Soniqueboum, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Somehow, the death warrant — a facsimile that seemed to be a transcription of an original letter — ended up in the personal files of a legendary man from the shadows and chief adviser to President de Gaulle on African affairs and mastermind of the “Françafrique” networks, Jacques Foccart (who lived from 1913 to 1997).

The document appears to be authentic, given that it was found in Foccart’s confidential files preserved by the French National Archives.

The text itself mentions the Bizerte crisis and Hammarskjold’s intervention in Tunisia, which puts the letter sometime between July 26 and 31, 1961, as the date cannot be fully read on the envelope. A 2019 investigation by the French government into the cause of Hammarskjold’s death makes no reference to link the OAS to the 1961 crash of the Albertina plane carrying the secretary-general and others.

Was the original letter intercepted before it reached New York City and Hammarskjold himself?

It is impossible to know.

Did the U.N. ever see it?

Probably not, considering there are no traces of it in the U.N. archives or in Brian Urquhart’s personal notes on Hammarskjold, who was originally a Swedish diplomat. As a former U.N. under secretary-general for special political affairs, Urquhart, who was British, wrote a biography of his boss.

Six weeks after the approximate date on the letter, Hammarskjold was dead. On Sept. 18, 1961, he was killed along with his party of 15 other U.N. officials and air crew in a plane crash that night near Ndola, in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), while trying to stop hostilities in Katanga, a breakaway province in the newly independent Congo.

U.N. Investigation Reopened in 2016

Dag Hammarskjold library at U.N. headquarters, 1962. (U.N. Photo/Yutaka Nagata)

Their deaths were ruled an accident by a North Rhodesian official investigation, while a subsequent U.N. investigation refrained from reaching such a conclusion, given the many outstanding questions regarding the crash. The U.N. investigation was reopened in 2016 by then-Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, following newly uncovered testimonies of African eyewitnesses and renewed suspicions that there had been another plane in the air that night.

[Related: “Likely Assassination of U.N. Chief by US, British and South African Intelligence Happened 60 Years Ago“

After six years and two interim reports, Mohamed Chande Othman, a former Tanzanian chief justice who has been leading the independent inquiry for the U.N. on Hammarskjold’s death, is expected to hand his conclusions to U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres in September 2022.

Chief Justice of Tanzania Mohamed Chande Othman in 2011. (Coalition for the ICC, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Since 2016, Othman had tirelessly been asking member states to “conduct a thorough review of their records and archives, particularly from their intelligence agencies,” as part of the inquiry’s mandate. Despite having gathered a “significant amount of evidence,” Othman, known as a U.N. “eminent person,” is at pains to “conclusively establish” the exact circumstances of the crash, Othman’s latest report says.

Several major countries have been openly reluctant to cooperate, in particular the United States, Britain, South Africa and, to a lesser extent, France.

Indeed, in 2018, the French government finally named a historian, Maurice Vaïsse, to respond to Othman’s request. The result was disappointing. The report of Vaïsse, confidentially released in 2019, established that after an exhaustive search marred by bureaucratic and regulatory hurdles, there was no groundbreaking document to be found by the French regarding Hammarskjold’s death.

As to why the OAS, the far-right French paramilitary group, would have threatened the secretary-general may be manifold: the Swedish diplomat was loathed within French military circles for his intervention in the Suez crisis in 1956, when he tried to broker a cease-fire; for his repeated attempts to take the issue of the Algerian war to the Security Council; and for his controversial intervention in Bizerte, where he again tried to broker a cease-fire, this time unsuccessfully.

The OAS, however, never claimed responsibility for Hammarskjold’s death. In Paris, the group was known as “OAS Metro” and was led by a fugitive Foreign Legion captain, Pierre Sergent,under the distant command of Gen. Raoul Salan, who was hiding in Algeria.

“If this is the work of OAS Metro, this could only have been done by Pierre Sergent himself, since it was a very military organization, in a hierarchic sense,” claims French historian Rémi Kauffer. “No subordinate would have dared author such a letter.”

Other experts, such as Olivier Dard, a French historian at Paris La Sorbonne University, and an expert on the history of the OAS, nevertheless “doubt” it could have been penned by Sergent, a prolific writer who became a right-wing politician and died in 1992. While use of harsh language was an OAS trademark, the style of writing in the letter, improper and trivial, tends to exonerate Sergent, who remained at large until an amnesty law was approved in 1968.

Question Remains

Funeral service for the late U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold in his home town of Uppsala, Sweden. Sept. 29, 1961. (U.N. Photo)

If the death warrant reached would-be assassins in Katanga, another question remains: Who could have carried out the killing? Until now, no OAS presence in Katanga has ever been established. Yet a trove of previously disconnected documents found in declassified French, Belgian, British and Swedish national archives that I thoroughly examined while researching Hammarskjold’s death gives credence to a potential OAS plot against the secretary-general.

Surely, there were OAS sympathizers among the two dozen French officers who had been sent to fight under the Katangese flag, including Yves de La Bourdonnaye, a paratrooper and expert on psychological warfare, and Léon Egé, a seasoned clandestine radio operator who would later be identified as the man who threatened a Norwegian officer with a knife on July 14, 1961, according to an archived U.N. document. The Norwegian officer, Lt.Col. Bjorn Egge, turned out to head the U.N. Military Information Branch in Katanga and was in charge of tracking and expelling all foreign mercenaries hired by the separatist regime.

Egé described Katanga as “the last bastion of white influence in Africa,” contending that “every white man in the U.N. is a traitor to his race.” On Sept. 20, 1961, Egé wrote to a Katangese official, in a letter found in Belgian archives: “H is dead. Peace upon his soul and good riddance. He bears a heavy responsibility in this bitter and sad adventure.”

In 1967, Egé was named by Le Monde as an OAS recruiter in Portugal. A third man, Edgard Tupët-Thomé, a former Special Air Service (or SAS, a British special forces unit) and French commando, also had a brief stint in Katanga. He is mentioned by French historian Georges Fleury in a book about OAS as being a member of OAS Metro.

Before leaving Katanga, Tupët-Thomé, a demolition specialist, had been heard boasting, according to the U.N. representative in Katanga at the time, Conor Cruise O’Brien: “The U.N.? No problem. 20 kilos of plastic and I will take care of it!” Plastic, a soft and hand-moldable solid form of explosive material, was the weapon of choice among OAS operatives.

On Aug. 30, 1961, O’Brien, who was also a former Irish diplomat and politician as well as a writer, warned his superiors in Léopoldville (now called Kinshasa) and New York City that his deputy, Michel Tombelaine, had been threatened by members of OAS: “The following message arrived in an envelope with the Elisabethville postmark. ’28 August 1961 — Tombelaine UNO Elisabethville. 48 hours ultimatum departure from Katanga or else. O.A.S. / Katanga,’” according to U.N. archives.

On Sept. 6, the U.N. discovered that a guerrilla warfare group led by a French mercenary officer, Maj. Roger Faulques, who used to be Sergent’s direct superior in the Foreign Legion, was planning to “use plastic bombs against U.N. buildings” and had set up a “liquidation” list against U.N. civilian and military leaders, according to another U.N. archived document.

Jan. 16, 1962: Anti-OAS Demonstrators in Toulouse, France, holding banner “Stop Fascism Peace in Algeria.” (André Cros, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

When the Albertina carrying Hammarskjold and the 15 others crashed on Sept.18, a South African witness in the area, Wren Mast-Ingle, walked to the site and stumbled upon a group of white mercenaries wearing combat fatigues, before they ordered him to leave at gunpoint. When shown different types of camouflage outfits much later, Mast-Ingle pointed at a leopard-like scheme and “funny caps, with a flap,” he recalled, identical to the type of cap worn by French paratroopers in Algeria.

Another witness, a Belgian named Victor Rosez, would later identify the same kind of fatigues discarded by a group of mercenaries wearing civilian clothes in Ndola, near the crash site.

In the decades since the crash, a string of testimonies has also mentioned a small outfit of French mercenaries spotted near Ndola around the time of the tragedy. The testimonies seem to originate from a U.N. Swedish officer in Katanga, Col. Jonas Waern, who shared his views with Hammarskjold’s nephew, Knut Hammarskjold, who would later become director-general of IATA (International Air Transport Association) and died in 2012.

On April 5, 1962, a former U.N. director of public information and close confidant of Hammarskjold, George Ivan Smith, wrote to Conor Cruise O’Brien, in a letter found at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University: “I am more and more convinced of a direct OAS link.” In December 1962, The Scotsman newspaper reported that “O’Brien still thinks it possible that Hammarskjöld and his party were murdered by French OAS men.”

“I now understand that during all this time a psychological warfare commando, led by famous French ‘Colonel’ Faulques [sic], was stationed in Ndola,” Knut Hammarskjold wrote to Smith on Feb. 5, 1963.

Could such a group have carried out the death warrant apparently issued by the OAS?

To answer this question, the U.N. investigation led by Othman — who is likely to conclude his work by September — must first and foremost clarify these points:

If the original warrant stills exists, where is it and can it be authenticated?
Did the French government in 1961 notify the U.N. and Hammarskjold of a threat to his life?

The family members of the 16 people killed in the Ndola crash deserve to know, at long last, the truth. Only then will the U.N. come closer to solving one of the last great mysteries of the Cold War: How did Dag Hammarskjold die?

Maurin Picard is a French journalist and the author of a book on Dag Hammarskjold, Ils ont tué Monsieur H? (Who Killed ‘Monsieur H?), Seuil, 2019.