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THAT Macmillan was capable of initiating some kind of covert action should not be doubted now with the revelation in The Times’ 8th August, 1986 article, “Liquidating Sukarno”, in which a CIA document reveals that Macmillan and Kennedy in April, 1962, in Washington, talked about “liquidating” the troublesome President Sukarno of Indonesia.

With the onset of Operation Morthor in the Congo, Macmillan decided to send Lord Lansdowne to the Congo.

Lansdowne, the Junior Foreign Affairs Minister had been sympathetic to the cause of the Katanga Lobby. When he learned of the Cabinet’s decision (under pressure from the Labour Party) to help the UN forces which had included Commonwealth troops, he minuted to the Home Secretary,“ I don’t like this at all.” (Alan James, Britain and the Congo Crisis 1960-1963, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)).

The UN Sec-Gen Hammarskjold arrived in Leopoldville to find that the conflict had escalated into a full-blown war between the UN forces and the Katangese forces. O’Brien’s attempt to dislodge the mercenaries from the province had failed (Dramatised in the movie, The Siege of Jadotville, 2016 (Netflix)). The situation was extremely worrying to the Secretary-General. The legal implications and objective of the UN intervention were unclear, but it was obvious the force was only there to keep the peace and ensure there was law and order. Personally, Hammarskjold was worried, but outwardly he had to support O’Brien. He decided to meet Tshombe personally to resolve the new crisis.

The condition laid down by Hammarskjold for the meeting was that there should be an immediate ceasefire in the fighting between the Katangese and the UN peace-keeping forces. Communications with Tshombe were made through the British Consul in Elisabethville, the capital of Katanga. For some reason, the message failed to get through and the fighting which continued later caused the Secretary-General’s plane to fly a circuitous route to avoid the secessionist territory. Lansdowne who was in Leopoldville at the time, assumed the role of a liaison between the UN and the British government. Earlier he had turned down the Secretary-General’s request to the British government, for rights for Ethiopian fighters flying for the UN to overfly British territory in East Africa and refuel at Entebbe, Uganda, to come to the aid of the UN Forces. His meeting with Hammarskjold appeared to be a fortuitous coincidence. It was not.

Susan Williams, in her book, ‘Who Killed Hammarskjold? The UN, the Cold War and White Supremacy in Africa’, (Hurst & Co., London, 2011) writes:

“In fact, the British government played an instrumental role in the setting-up of the meeting. This emerges from two secret reports in the private papers of Lord Alport, the British High Commissioner in Salisbury…The first is a secret dispatch by Alport to Duncan Sandys, the Secretary of State at the Commonwealth Relations Office, dated 25 September, 1961”.

It was suggested (it is not certain by whom) that the meeting be held in Ndola, a border town in Northern Rhodesia, which was then part of the British colony of the Central African Federation and close to the Katanga. Lansdowne proposed to the Secretary-General that he, Lansdowne should go on ahead to Ndola so that he could meet the British High Commissioner, Lord Alport who would be at the airport, and arrange for the talks. Hammarskjold agreed, and a DC4, with call-sign OO-RIC was put at Lansdowne’s disposal.

The day before (the 16th), Hammarskjold’s plane, the DC6, call-sign, SE-DBY, named ‘Albertina’ had been shot at over Katanga. It was repaired and ready to fly by 1.00 pm on the 17th. The DC6, however, had to wait for Lansdowne’s aircraft to take off from then until 17.00 hrs, local time or 19.00 hours GMT. Lansdowne was supposed to leave at 3.pm so that the UN plane could follow later, but for reasons unknown, he delayed his flight, as a result of which the DC6 did not get to Ndola until around midnight.

Lansdowne’s plane took a direct route to Leopoldville, strangely unconcerned with safety it seemed, and arrived at Ndola early. Then, according to him, after dealing with the authorities there overseeing the proposed meeting, he decided to go on to Salisbury. His plane, however, did not leave the airport until the DC6 flew over the airport. Lord Alport who waited at the airport said that when the UN plane which he had heard flying over the airport did not return to land there he thought the Secretary-General must have decided “to go elsewhere”. Thereafter he left the airport and it was subsequently closed for the night. As it happened, the aircraft was last heard from at about 23.00hrs when it advised Ndola tower that it was approaching from the west. Air Traffic Control at Ndola gave the aircraft permission to descend to 6000 ft, and to continue to the waypoint east of the airport where it was to enter into the flight pattern for landing at the airport.

The airplane failed to turn up. No alarm was raised for the rest of the night.

According to official reports, the aircraft was not found until 15 hours or so later although the crash site was only about 9 miles from the airport. All its passengers save one had died on the spot, most burned beyond recognition, except for the Secretary-General whose body was found visibly intact but with some injuries. The sole survivor, his body-guard, Harold Julien, lived for a few days but died reportedly from renal failure due to his injuries and burns a few days later.

The mystery surrounding the disappearance and crash of the UN Secretary-General’s plane persists to this day, 61 years later, despite four boards of inquiry having been set up to determine the cause of the crash; The Northern Rhodesian Department of Civil Aviation investigation (October,1961), The Northern Rhodesian Commission (February, 1962), the United Nations Commission (April, 1962), and the Hammarskjold Commission (September, 2013).

The Department of Civil Aviation of Northern Rhodesia’s investigation into the crash appeared to be quite thorough; technical details of the aircraft were noted, plans of the site drawn, and photographs were taken of the bodies of the victims and parts of the wrecked plane in situ and duly marked on the plan of the crash site. It was noted that the plane had deployed its flaps and set for landing with the wheels properly extended. Damage to trees and vegetation was also noted. The anomaly that no photograph of the Secretary-General’s body was taken in-situ was later noted.

The investigators determined that before the plane hit the ground, its left wing had clipped the top of some of the trees on its final approach. Statements were also taken from witnesses. However, the choice of witnesses interviewed, it was noted later, was biased and arbitrary.

The Board’s final conclusions are that the aircraft was fully operational at the time and that the crash might be due to one of three possible reasons; one, misunderstanding of the nature of the ‘aerodrome altitude’(4,000 ft.) by the pilots, two, sudden incapacitation of the three pilots and lastly, some ‘misreading of the aircraft’s altimeters or an incorrect indication of altitude on at least one of the aircraft’s three altimeters.

The Northern Rhodesian authorities conducted another investigation into the accident in February, 1962 (The Rhodesian Commission of Inquiry). The thirty-paged report re-examined the evidence collected by the DCA and in addition, interviewed various persons who had not been called before. These witnesses included the inspector and the nurse who questioned the sole survivor, Harold Julien sometime after the crash. The answers appeared confused. Julien talked of an explosion, but when it was unclear. Both ‘on the runway,’ and ‘over the runway’ were the answers given in reply. Despite the evidence, the Commission concluded that the crash was ‘most probably’ due to pilot error; ‘we cannot say whether [the crash] came about as a result of inattention to the altimeters or misreading of altimeters’ but that the aircraft ‘was allowed by the pilots to descent too low so that it struck the trees and was brought to the ground.’

The United Nations’ Commission report in general agreed with the findings of the earlier inquiries in Rhodesia, and was only slightly more thorough in going through the circumstances which led to the Secretary-General deciding to fly to Leopoldville, and from Leopoldville to Ndola to meet with Tshombe. More attention was also paid to the role of Lansdowne in the arrangements made prior to the flight.

The Commission noted that Lansdowne had himself suggested that he accompanied Hammarskjold to Ndola ‘to help with the arrangements in British territory.’ Lansdowne, in his statement to the Commission continued:

“Thus, he (Hammarskjold) accepted my suggestion, but, after having considered it, he thought it wiser – for political reasons which I do not think we need to go into here – that I should go in another aircraft provided by the United Nations and that I should travel ahead of him.”

Lansdowne then said that it was agreed that he should leave from Leopoldville ‘in the early afternoon – about 3 o’clock and that the Secretary – General would follow later. The Commission noted that Lansdowne’s aircraft, 00-RIC did not take off until 15.04 GMT or 17 hours, local time.

The Commission noted that from that time until 5 o’clock in the evening, the plane ‘remained unattended,’ and ‘notes with regret and concern that in the afternoon of the 17 September while SE-BDY remained for several hours unguarded and unattended on the tarmac of the airport ‘any person wishing to sabotage the aircraft might have gained access to it without being detected.’

The Commission appeared not to have given much attention to the evidence given by Sture Linner, a UN staff and a close associate of Hammarskjold who stated:

“I remember distinctly we sent a message to the British Embassy, where Lansdowne was having lunch, asking him when he would be prepared to take off, but for reasons unknown to me, he could not make it before 4 o’clock, and, therefore, there was no other thought in the late Secretary-General’s mind than that he was anxious to take off as soon as possible, and, as things turned out, it happened to become a night flight.”

The Commission however noted that there were other reasons why the Secretary-General’s flight did not leave earlier. It also said that because of the danger from Katangese jet fighters, the ‘Fouga Magister’, most of the flights in the Congo at the time were undertaken at night.

After examining the evidence given in the two Rhodesian inquiries and hearing a further 25 witnesses not called by those two inquires, the Commission returned with an open verdict. It remarked, however, that the possibility of sabotage or interference by other aircraft when the DC6 was preparing to land could not be excluded. For the next 30 years or so following perfunctory expressions of regret from the great powers, the incident was conveniently forgotten. But it was not so for the people whose lives had been deeply affected by the loss, and for the others whose respect for the Secretary-General caused them to continue to search for answers to this day.

In 2011, Susan Williams, a Research Fellow at the School of Commonwealth Studies, the University of London, described as ‘part researcher, part journalist and part detective’, published the definitive study of the incident. ‘Who Killed Hammarskjold?’ draws together all extant evidence from state and university archives, and from interviews, on the subject. It includes some fresh revelations.

Williams came up with two new discoveries about the plane crash in her investigation; the first, documents that surfaced apparently by pure coincidence, during the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearing, and secondly, the claim of a former US serviceman who was at the time serving as a radiographer in Cyprus that he overheard radio communications from the planes in the air at the time of the crash. The documents that surfaced during the TRC in South Africa were not volunteered to the TRC but had appeared in one of the files of complainants to the commission, belonging to a woman who said the documents, 11 pages in all, came from her daughter who was doing work on smuggling which involved the agency, the South African Institute of Marine Research (SAIMR). The file by pure chance had been included in a batch of documents given to a researcher to study overnight.

- In this series that will appear over the next few weeks, David CC Lim and Syn Chew look at what happened on the world stage when colonialism was being dismantled to understand the decisions that also had a bearing on the future of other colonies like British North Borneo (Sabah) and Sarawak.