Ndola crash, Youtube screengrab.
The night of 17-18 September 2024 will mark the 63rd anniversary of the death in a plane crash near Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) of the second United Nations Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld and fifteen other people, UN staff and the plane’s crew. They were on a crucial UN mission to the newly independent Congo, where Hammarskjöld was to meet Moïse Tshombe, leader of secessionist Katanga province who was lavishly backed by Western political and mining interests, and negotiate the withdrawal of Belgian troops and deployment of UN peacekeepers. A large amount of circumstantial evidence screams murder, but the UN isn’t screaming at all, even though eleven of its staff, plus five Swedish crew members of DC6 flight SE-BDY were killed. Most speculation about what happened that night tends to focus on events in Congo, who killed Hammarskjöld, and why. But important questions about the United Nations itself are mostly left unraised, and the immediate and ongoing consequences of what amounts to an international coverup are largely unexplored. There are also other painfully significant but glossed-over questions about what Dag Hammarskjöld stood for, and what happened to his projects after his death.
The UN web page titled “Death of Dag Hammarskjöld” is very strange. It notes that in her study Who Killed Hammarskjöld? Susan Williams concludes that “his death was almost certainly the result of a sinister intervention”. Yet, the UN’s meagre acknowledgement of ill-doing comes directly after a pussyfooting observation: “The official inquiries that immediately followed suggested that pilot error was the cause, but one of the reports, by the United Nations Commission of Investigation in 1962, said that sabotage could not be ruled out. That possibility helped feed suspicions and conspiracy theories.” It’s as if the UN is sowing a seed that rigorous scholar Susan Williams might be fuelling “suspicions and conspiracy theories”. And only one of the UN reports didn’t rule out sabotage? This simply isn’t true. The UN web page continues, “Western intelligence agencies, including those of Britain, the United States and Belgium, the former colonial power in Congo, had withheld information relating to Mr. Hammarskjold’s death.” The page gives the impression that Dag Hammarskjöld died alone. The glaring omission is the other fifteen people who also died. Is the UN trying to play down the monstrous nature of a crime in which sixteen people (at least eleven of its own staff), were cold-bloodedly murdered? The fact is that their names are hard to find in UN reports.
In a 2014 report their names are given, but only in a footnote, “out of respect” but one name seems to be missing. Meticulous researchers like Susan Williams say there were sixteen people on flight SE-BDY, but the UN can’t/won’t accurately give—not even “out of respect”—this most basic detail as to how many and who actually died on one of its own highly important missions, just eight months after the Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba was assassinated on January 17. The fourteen other names given in the 2014 report are Alice Lalande (secretary), Heinrich Wieschhoff (Africa specialist), Vladimir Fabry (legal adviser), Bill Ranallo (bodyguard), Harold Julien (acting ONUC chief security officer), Sergeant Serge Barrau (from Haiti, whose body was labelled as “coloured” in the first Rhodesian inquiry into the crash), former Irish Garda sergeant Francis Eivers, Stig Olof Hjelte and Per Edvald Persson (UN guards), Per Hallonquist, pilot-in-command, pilots Nils-Erik Åhréus and Lars Litton, Nils Göran Wilhelmsson (flight engineer) and Harald Noork (purser). Weischhoff’s son Hynrich confirms this UN negligence in PassBlue (a publication that monitors UN activities): “In their Dag Hammarskjöld Lectures, in Uppsala, Sweden (Mr. Hammarskjöld’s home base), Secretaries-General Ban and António Guterres each mentioned the search for the truth about the crash but at the tail end of their presentations, almost as an afterthought.” Not only that, but the dead were maligned when the crash was attributed to “pilot error” in the Rhodesian public inquiry of 1961-62 and as late as 1993 in a private inquiry for the Swedish government, despite ample circumstantial evidence of sabotage and expert testimony presented in the Othman report (points 250-259) stating that, “the crew of SE-BDY did everything properly and skilfully in the circumstances that they faced”.
This more recent inquiry by former Tanzanian Chief Justice Mohamed Chande Othman, appointed in 2015 as head of an Independent Panel of Experts, notes that, “The UK and the United States must be almost certain to hold important undisclosed information”. The US and UK have been accused this year of obstructing the inquiry, as did the UN itself, which Hynrich Weischhoff also documents: “[…] in 2017, Secretary-General Guterres’s office sought to end the Judge Othman probe. Thanks to Sweden’s insistence, the General Assembly renewed his appointment. Did the secretary-general tip his hand last year when, rather than appear in person before the General Assembly, he sent a subordinate to present Judge Othman’s interim report?”
After lamenting “the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind”, the UN Charter determines that “the peoples of the United Nations” aim “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom”. Hammarskjöld took this pledge seriously. However, his appointment as Secretary-General says a lot about the real workings of the UN. The big powers had agreed to the election of this relatively unknown outsider as Secretary-General as it was generally believed that he was politically “harmless”, a mere economist and technocrat. They were soon disabused, as Australian academic Greg Poulgrain (cited in the Othman report, points 241 to 246) details. Not only did he quickly set out to democratise the internal UN working environment, but he also emerged as “an outspoken advocate for the economic development of poorer countries”. He gave special attention to Indigenous peoples and, scorning Cold War tensions, insisted that the UN should play a major role in his democratising project partly by means of a Special Fund, thus greatly irking leading players on both sides of the Cold War, including CIA director Allen Dulles and Nikita Khrushchev, especially when it seemed that President John F. Kennedy respected the Secretary-General’s approach to decolonisation. This was just the beginning and, “The beginning of something may be beginning of everything”, to quote, from another context, photographer Richard Schulman.
The UN responses (flying in the face of its own Charter) to Hammarskjöld’s decolonisation initiatives, and its refusal to investigate (when not actively hiding) so many aspects of his death bring to mind British Labour MP, Tony Benn’s five key questions for democracy. “What power have you got? Where did you get it? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? How do we get rid of you? What follows are just six of many deplorable aspects of the response of the UN and other institutions to the crash of flight SE-BDY, which bring to the fore the urgency of Tony Benn’s questions.
1) The 2014 UN report accepts that there were local, African witnesses to the crash. They didn’t know each other. Although they coincided in most aspects (the main discrepancy being about the hour of the crash … maybe because they didn’t wear watches) their testimonies were generally dismissed. John Ngongo was in the forest with Safeli Soft, a charcoal burner. They saw a plane on fire, inside and on the wings and engines, “in a tilted position” in the sky. They also heard another plane. At first light, Ngongo and Soft went to the wreckage. Hammarskjöld’s body had clearly been moved and was left reclining against a termite mound. An ace of spades (favoured by 18th-century pirates to warn a traitor that his end was nigh, and also representing asexual, aromantic people, which is what Hammarskjöld was said to be) had been tucked inside his collar.
Local residents Emma and Safeli Mulenga testified that they saw a plane circling and a “ball of fire coming on top of the plane”. Charcoal burner Custon Chipoya “heard some kind of a bang and then the fire … on top of the plane”, and a second, smaller plane following the first. “I saw that the fire came from the small plane …” When he went to the crash site at first light the next morning it was surrounded by soldiers, even though the official rescue team didn’t arrive until fifteen hours later. Two of the charcoal burners saw Land Rovers speeding to the place soon after impact, then driving off again, hours before the official search party came to the wreckage.
Other witnesses suggested foul play. Davison Nkonjera, a storeman at the African Ex-Servicemen’s Club, said he saw an aircraft arrive from the north and circle the airport before flying away to the west. While it was circling the runway the control tower lights went off. Then two jets took off in the dark in the same direction as the larger plane and he saw “a flash or flame from the jet on the right strike the larger plane”. The Club’s watchman, M. K. Kazembe, gave a similar account. Other charcoal burners, Lemonson Mpinganjira and Steven Chizanga, saw two smaller planes following a larger one. One of the small planes moved above the larger one. There was a red flash, a loud explosion and then a series of smaller bangs. All this evidence was discounted as unreliable in the first (certainly racist) Rhodesian inquiry, which set the tone for most later official reports.
2) A Swedish flying instructor with the Imperial Ethiopian Air Force, Tore Meijer, told a journalist in 1994 that, when trying out a short-wave radio set on the night of 17-18 September 1961, he heard a conversation mentioning Ndola. One speaker said, “He’s approaching the airport. He’s turning. He’s levelling. Another plane is approaching from behind — what is that?” Charles Southall, at the US National Security Agency’s naval communications facility in Cyprus, who’d been advised some hours earlier that “Something interesting is going to happen”, heard the following just after midnight: “I see a transport plane coming low. All the lights are on. I’m going down to make a run on it. Yes, it’s the Transair DC6. It’s the plane.” Another more excited voice then said “I’ve hit it. There are flames. It’s going down. It’s crashing.”
3) The official search for possible survivors wasn’t launched until four hours after daybreak. The crash site was only eight miles from Ndola airport, along the plane’s flight path, yet it wasn’t “found” for fifteen hours. Part of the delay was caused by British High Commissioner to the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, Lord Alport who was at Ndola airport when the plane crashed but he bizarrely insisted to the airport management that Hammarskjöld had flown elsewhere, even after flight SE-BDY was reported as being overhead.
4) One crash victim, UN staff member Harold Julien who, despite burns over about half his body, a fractured skull, a dislocated right ankle, and lying most of the day under a blazing sun, was still alive fifteen hours later. Once in hospital, he testified to Senior Inspector A. V. Allen of the Northern Rhodesian police that the plane blew up over the runway, there was a loud crash and “little explosions all around”. His comments were dismissed as the ramblings of a sedated sick man, although the doctor who attended him said he was “lucid and coherent”. It seems that no serious effort was made to save Julien’s life. He wasn’t airlifted to a more modern hospital, for example in Lusaka or Salisbury, and died on 23 September. In 2019, Susan Williams reports, the Zimbabwe government informed the UN that the Rhodesian authorities actively sought to silence Julien’s statements about the flight and the crash. Justice Othman concludes that “a general undervaluing of the evidence of Harold Julien…may have affected the exhaustiveness of the earlier inquiries’ consideration of the possible hypotheses”. His report also recognises that if Julien had not been left to lie so long in the sun with grave injuries, and if he had been transferred to a hospital more able to treat his injuries, he might have survived the crash.
5) Astonishingly, the “UN” fact-finding process was entrusted to a single person, Hugo Blandori, a former FBI agent. The first UN Secretary-General, Trygve Lie, had opened the doors to the FBI which, in the McCarthyite purges, found that there was “infiltration into the U.N. of an overwhelmingly large group of disloyal U.S. citizens”. After Hammarskjöld’s appointment in April 1953, he defended and supported his UN staff and swiftly removed the FBI from the UN headquarters. Blandori sneered at the remarkably consistent testimony of the African eyewitnesses (“it is most difficult to distinguish from their testimony what is truth and what is fiction or imagination”). The UN “fact-finding” inquiry relied heavily on his proposals.
6) Suggestions of UK and US involvement in the Ndola crash came to light when Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Chairman of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, released eight documents that appeared by chance among other material. They referred to an “Operation Celeste” of a shadowy South African mercenary group called SAIMR (South African Institute for Maritime Research), a plan to assassinate Hammarskjöld, in which CIA director Allen Dulles was involved. The 2014 UN report notes in points 12.34 to 12.36 that “Orders”, dated 14 September 1961 (the day after Hammarskjöld’s arrival in Leopoldville), read “1) DC6 AIRCRAFT BEARING “TRANSAIR” LIVERY IS PARKED AT LEO TO BE USED FOR TRANSPORT OF SUBJECT. 2) OUR TECHNICIAN HAS ORDERS TO PLANT 6 lbs TNT IN THE WHEELBAY WITH CONTACT DETONAT[OR] TO ACTIVATE AS WHEELS ARE RETRACTED ON TAKING OFF. 3) WE ARE AWAITING SUBJECTS TIME OF DEPART[URE] BEFORE ACTING. 4) WILL CONCENTRATE ON D. 5) REPORT WILL FOLLOW.”
An undated document from some days earlier, with notes of a meeting of “M.I.5, Special Ops. Executive, and SAIMR” records that the group was told, “UNO is becoming troublesome and it is felt that Hammarskjöld should be removed. Allen Dulles [head of the CIA] agrees and has promised full cooperation from his people. [?He] tells us that Dag will be in Leopoldville on or about 12/9/61. ….. I want his removal to be handled more efficiently than was Patrice [Lumumba].” A final document on Operation Celeste dated 18 September 1961 states, “1. Device failed on take-off. 2. Despatched Eagle […..] to follow and take [……] 3. Device activated [……..] prior to landing. 4. As advised O’Brien and McKeown were not aboard. 5. Mission accomplished: satisfactory.” The documentary Cold Case Hammarskjöld by Danish filmmaker Mads Brugger offers compelling evidence that SAIMR existed, and was engaged in many other atrocious projects like trying to infect the Black African population with the HIV virus.
This final point, in which Allen Dulles appears, bodes one of the most terrible and probably least explored tragedies resulting from the Ndola crash. As Greg Poulgrain reports, Hammarskjöld was resolutely committed to a plan he had for October or November 1961 regarding the dispute between Indonesia and the Netherlands over sovereignty of West Papua, whereby he would declare Dutch and Indonesian claims to the territory invalid at the UN General Assembly. Kennedy welcomed his initiative not least because it saved him from having to decide whether to hand the disputed territory of West Papua to Indonesia or the Netherlands, in a thorny situation where the Soviet Union and China supported Indonesia’s bid to take control of West Papua.
With the CIA closely observing UN activities, Dulles was determined to wrest Indonesia from communist control, internally and internationally. Hammarskjöld’s project of “the speedy and unconditional granting to all colonial peoples of the right of self-determination” also meant that, with 88 territories waiting for independence, he would create in the UN a counterweight to the neocolonially ambitious Cold War powers. Moreover, as a former Standard oil employee who’d arranged for control of the Netherlands New Guinea Petroleum Company to go to the Rockefeller family, Dulles was also well informed about the huge magnitude of West Papua’s natural resources (which he hadn’t revealed to Kennedy).
Less than a year after Dag Hammarskjöld’s death, what then transpired in the UN demolished all the decent principles he upheld. John Saltford gives a definitive account of the many deliberate UN violations of the infamous (from its very inception) 1962 New York Agreement by means of which, hosted by the United Nations, the Netherlands and Indonesia decided on the fate of West Papua, without any participation whatsoever of West Papuans. Article XVII of the Agreement states that all adults from the territory were eligible to participate in the act of self-determination, “to be carried out in accordance with international practice”. The international practice that occurred was far from what Hammarskjöld understood by the term. Washington overlooked the “niceties of ascertainment” in the interests of keeping Indonesia’s goodwill. A British official I. J. Sutherland spoke of the US, Japanese, Dutch, or Australian governments being unwilling to risk their economic and political relations with Indonesia on a matter of principle involving “a relatively small number of very primitive people”. The British Foreign Office opined that “no responsible Government is likely to complain so long as the decencies are [read: farce is] carried out”.
In the UN farce of the “Act of Free Choice” in 1969, its representative Ortiz Sanz, bowed to Indonesia’s insistence on letting only 1,000 hand-picked, greatly threatened and intimidated “representatives” vote; lied when he claimed that West Papuans wanted to remain in Indonesia; refused to respond (“not his business”) when an Indonesian B-26 bomber strafed (anti-integration) Enaratoli and displaced some 14,000 people; saw nothing on inspection tours where he sometimes didn’t even leave the airstrip; and spent “the remainder of his time in the territory collaborating with U Thant and Jakarta in their efforts to conclude the Act with as little controversy as the situation permitted”. After giving many other brutal examples of the UN’s dereliction of duty (or successful pursuance of an insidious agenda), Saltford concludes, “it is clear that the Secretariat’s priority throughout was to ensure that West New Guinea became a recognized part of Indonesia with the minimum of controversy and disruption. This was the role assigned to the organization by the Americans in 1962, and U Thant saw no reason not to comply. It was Cold War politics, and the rights of the Papuans counted for nothing.”
The circumstances of the death of Dag Hammarskjöld and fifteen other people have raised valid questions about the Ndola crash, about who caused it, why, and how. Yet, if mercenaries are involved, one can be sure that there are covert big stakes behind the visible facts, which have also overshadowed other general issues about the nature of national institutions and international order that we call democracy, the kind of issues that concerned Tony Benn. What is the real extent of power, where does it come from, who are the powerholders and to whom are they accountable? The highly suggestive evidence related to the death, the murder, of Dag Hammarskjöld, which can be found by any ordinary person in secondary sources, indicates that in global politics, checks and balances don’t limit power, don’t reveal where it comes from, or who really wields it, so there is no accountability. These obscure forces, dressed in democratic garb, have forged and underpinned a totally amoral neoliberal system that brings out the worst in human beings (encouraging individuals like Elon Musk who’s well on the way to becoming the world’s first trillionaire, whatever such wealth means), that has inter alia led to the killing—the sacrifice to greed—of some 500,000 West Papuans in the last sixty years and is ultimately responsible for permitting the present genocide in Palestine, as well as bringing the whole planet and everyone and everything that inhabits it to the brink of extinction. Tony Benn’s last (and favourite) question—how do we get rid of them?—has become crucial.
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