Murder Incorporated
Part 2 of the mystery: Who killed UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld?
SO WHAT sort of activities would SAIMR (South African Institute for Maritime Research) have become involved in? Dr Williams has analysed further documents in the file dated 1960, which offer a commentary from Joburg on events in the Congo and the secession of Katanga in July 1960.
Katanga had parted company with the rest of Congo at the behest of the mining companies, especially those controlled by Belgium mining giant Société Générale (SG) to avoid the great wealth falling into the hands of Patrice Lumumba and the Congolese people.
The Katangan operations were operated by Tanganyika Concessions Ltd (Tanks), which owned shares in SG subsidiary Union Minière and provided some of the management in those earlier times. Tanks was closely tied to Anglo-American, on whose board sat Harry Oppenheimer of De Beers and Anglo American.
“We have it on good authority,” “Commodore” reports to “Captain”, that “UNO will want to get its greedy paws on the province”.
Katanga was crammed with minerals, including diamonds, copper and tin, that was the economic strength of the Congo.
The reference to the “greedy paws” of the UNO must mean that the mining companies dominating the Katanga province were fearful of losing the unlimited treasure there. That the UNO wanted the minerals for itself is unthinkable and the only sensible meaning was that the UNO wanted to accede to the plan to redistribute the wealth to the people.
The next paragraph shows that “Commodore” was involved in the military forces deployed there. He refers to SAIMR’s agent in the region, “Congo Red”, and a possible need to bolster his combat units which would need to be prepared to take on Baluba warriors as well as UN forces.
They would be given adequate quantities of 7.62mm FN rifles. At that time the FN rifle was standard issue for South African troops and the SA Military could easily provide these.
The Baluba warriors were the supporters of Lumumba, who was hell-bent on saving the mineral wealth for the Congolese people.
From the following paragraph it emerges clearly SAIMR was not part of the intelligence services, but a separate entity.
“At a meeting between MI 5, Special Ops. Executive, and SAIMR”, begins the document entitled “Orders”, this emerged: “Dag has requested that blockbusters be shipped to Katanga via South Africa and Rhodesia – both Dr V (that is, Hendrik Verwoerd, the Prime Minister of South Africa) and Sir Roy (Welensky) have refused.”
The role of Verwoerd and Welensky was antagonistic to Lumumba and the UNO. Hammarskjöld needed arms to combat the rebels fighting fiercely to take away power from Lumumba’s democratically elected government. The sinister orders are then spelled out: “UNO is becoming troublesome and it is felt that Hammarskjöld should be removed. Allen Dulles agrees and has promised full co-operation from his people. (He) tells us that Dag will be in Léopoldville on or about 12/ 9/ 61. The aircraft ferrying him will be a DC6 in the livery of ‘Transair,’ a Swedish Company.”
At the time Dulles was head of the CIA and responsible for numerous dirty-tricks operations. If all covert operations needed the US president’s authorisation, Dulles would have had to ask John F Kennedy, who took office on January 20, 1961, to give the go-ahead for the assassination of Hammarskjöld.
During the hostilities between Katanga and Lumumba, weak radio contact caused problems in Katanga. British secret service MI6 agent Neil Ritchie turned to Union Minière for help with better radio contact and the mining company smuggled a radio transmitter over the border.
They also sent an engineer from Brussels, whose name was Loeb, to help set it up.
Loeb arrived first in Salisbury, where he was assisted by Anglo American, which had offices in the Rhodesian capital and was active in the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt.
“We are pleased to report that Loeb arrived in Kitwe last night,” reported a telegram from Anglo American to Union Minière in Brussels, on September 15, 1961. “We were able to assist him on from Salisbury. The equipment to be installed has arrived in Kitwe. We shall be glad to help you in future.”
Another document referred to by Williams makes mention of the next phase. The orders for the “removal” of Hammarskjöld are given: “Please see that Leo airport as well as Elizabethville is covered by your people as I want his removal to be handled more efficiently than was Patrice (Lumumba).
“If time permits, send me a brief plan of action, otherwise proceed with all speed in absolute secrecy… If, and only if serious complications arise tell your agents to use telephone Johannesburg 25– 3513. Operation to be known as ‘Celeste’.’’
According to another of the documents, the CIA had provided a contact, codenamed “Dwight”, who would be staying at the Hotel Léopold II in Elisabethville until November 1, 1961.
The password was “How is Celeste these days?”, to be followed by the reply: “She’s recovering nicely apart from the cough.”
It is plain that a considerable force was involved and there was a need for each person to assume a separate task in the overall objective. What is clear is the priority of the main target. The agents decided to concentrate on Hammarskjöld and postpone any attempt to target two others.
“We have a number of problems to sort out with regard to the operation, in order to arrange for all three of the targets to be affected, an enormous amount of planning will be required, in order to ensure the success of ‘Celeste’, and taking into account the fact that time is of the essence, I would suggest that we concentrate on D. and leave the other two for some future date, possibly as early as next week or the week after.
“Dag will have to be sorted out on the 17th or 18th (he has an appointment in Ndola on the 18th or 19th) all my men as well as Congo Red’s people are in position. With a little luck, all will be well. Your servant, Commander.”
Williams explains from the documents how the killing of Hammarskjöld was to take place.
“The operation involved the placing of a bomb, made of six pounds of TNT, on Hammarskjöld’s plane from Léopoldville to Ndola. It was to be placed beneath the undercarriage of the aircraft so that it would detonate soon after take-off, when the wheels were retracted. The TNT, along with ‘detonators, electrical contacts and wiring, batteries, etc.’, should be made available by Union Minière “at all possible locations”.
But the bomb failed to explode on take-off and “Eagle” was despatched – presumably in an aircraft to shoot at Hammarskjöld’s plane, Albertina – activating the device prior to landing.
The plot was successful as a report by Congo Red details. “Report. Operation Celeste... 1. Device failed on take-off. 2. Despatched Eagle to follow and take3. Device activated prior to landing. 4... 5. Mission accomplished: satisfactory.”
In 1976 Roland “Bud” Culligan, a CIA employee, confessed to shooting down the plane. This was passed on to Florida Attorney General Robert Shevin, who passed it on to US Senator Frank Church, who was investigating shenanigans and murders by the intelligence community. Other sources support these documents. The heads of state of Britain and the US were keen to kill Lumumba. British Foreign Secretary Lord Home met with the US President, Dwight Eisenhower, on September 19, 1960, and heard Eisenhower “express his wish that Lumumba would fall into a river full of crocodiles”.
Not even a week later British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and Lord Home met Eisenhower and the minutes record that Lord Home, “raised the question why we had not got rid of Lumumba at the present time. If he came back into power there would be immediate stress on the Katangan issue, which would get us into all sorts of legalistic difficulties. He stressed now was the time to get rid of Lumumba”.
Eisenhower told the Special Group of the NSC that Lumumba had to be eliminated by any means. In 1975, Larry Devlin, a CIA agent, told a US Senate Committee, chaired by Senator Frank Church, to investigate CIA attempts to assassinate a number of foreign leaders, that on August 18, 1960, the NSC had met in Washington to discuss the Congo.
The next day the CIA had authorised its Congo Station to proceed to replace Lumumba’s government with a “pro-Western group”.
In December 2013, the US State Department admitted that Eisenhower authorised the murder of Lumumba.
In April 2013, in a letter to the London Review of Books, a British parliamentarian, Lord Lea of Crondall, reported having discussed Lumumba’s death with Baroness Park of Monmouth just before she died in March 2010.
Park had been an MI6 officer posted to Leopoldville at the time of Lumumba’s death, and was later a semi-official spokeswoman for MI6 in the House of Lords.
According to Lea, when he mentioned “the uproar” surrounding Lumumba’s abduction and murder, and recalled the theory that MI6 might have had “something to do with it”, she replied: “We did. I organised it.”
So the probabilities favour that Baroness Park and Larry Devlin must have worked together with the mining companies and SAIMR to carry out both murders.
An intriguing point is why these documents in a file relating to the murder of activist Chris Hani. Hani was in the vanguard of ANC endeavours to redistribute South Africa’s wealth after democratic elections and had many enemies.
Evidence before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Janus Walus, one of two convicted of killing Hani, revealed that he had applied to join SAIMR, and his name and address appeared among the organisation’s documents. Could it be that SAIMR was also responsible for his death and that all documents revealing its complicity there were purged, leaving those concerning Lumumba and Hammarskjöld behind?
If the documents did not link the two killings it seems strange that they were in the same file. They were connected in the mind of the person who compiled the file and handed it over, and the organisation was operating at the time of the Hani killing.
The co-operation of big business and intelligence agencies is most sinister. Former US president Harry Trumansaid Hammarskjöld “was on the point of getting something done when they killed him.”
As secretary-general of the UN, Hammarskjöld was, in a sense, the prime minister of the world, and his killing was possibly the worst single murder of all time. US president John F Kennedy spoke soon after Hammarskjöld’s death and said he regretted that he had opposed the UN policy in the Congo.
His praise was generous: “I realise now that in comparison to him, I am a small man. He was the greatest statesman of our century.”