"Evidence suggests" Hammarskjöld's plane shot down in 1961

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"Evidence suggests" Hammarskjöld's plane shot down in 1961

Postby RocketMan » Wed Aug 17, 2011 3:32 pm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/au ... eral-crash

New evidence has emerged in one of the most enduring mysteries of United Nations and African history, suggesting that the UN secretary general, Dag Hammarskjöld's plane was shot down over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) 50 years ago, and the murder covered up by the British colonial authorities.

A British-run commission of inquiry blamed the 1961 crash on pilot error, and a later UN investigation largely rubber-stamped its findings. They ignored or downplayed witness testimony of villagers near the crash site which suggested foul play. The Guardian has talked to surviving witnesses who were never questioned by the official investigations and were too scared to come forward.

The residents on the western outskirts of the town of Ndola described Hammarskjöld's DC6 being shot down by a second, smaller aircraft. They say the crash site was sealed off by Northern Rhodesian security forces the next morning, many hours before the wreckage was officially declared found, and they were ordered to leave the area.


...

The investigation led Björkdahl to previously unpublished telegrams – seen by the Guardian – from the days leading up to Hammarskjöld's death on 17 September 1961, which illustrate US and British anger at an abortive UN military operation that the secretary-general ordered on behalf of the Congolese government against a rebellion backed by western mining companies and mercenaries in the mineral-rich Katanga region.

Hammarskjöld was flying to Ndola for peace talks with the Katanga leadership at a meeting that the British helped arrange. The fiercely independent Swedish diplomat had by then enraged almost all the major powers on the security council with his support for decolonisation but support from third world states meant his re-election as secretary-general would have been virtually guaranteed if he had lived until the general assembly vote due weeks later.
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Re: "Evidence suggests" Hammarskjöld's plane shot down in 19

Postby StarmanSkye » Wed Aug 17, 2011 4:51 pm

Good Find;

'Funny' isn't it, how the US along with Europe led the struggle against decolonization on behalf of monopolisitic corporate resource-exploitive/extractive industries funding a large variety of mercenary and puppet-fronted corrupt dictatorships, all the while vigorously condemning largely illusory Socialist expansionism -- a historical perversion STILL widely believed.

Oh my ....
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Re: "Evidence suggests" Hammarskjöld's plane shot down in 19

Postby RocketMan » Wed Aug 17, 2011 5:03 pm

StarmanSkye wrote:Good Find;

'Funny' isn't it, how the US along with Europe led the struggle against decolonization on behalf of monopolisitic corporate resource-exploitive/extractive industries funding a large variety of mercenary and puppet-fronted corrupt dictatorships, all the while vigorously condemning largely illusory Socialist expansionism -- a historical perversion STILL widely believed.

Oh my ....


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Re: "Evidence suggests" Hammarskjöld's plane shot down in 19

Postby JackRiddler » Wed Aug 17, 2011 5:44 pm

.

Imperialist motherfuckers murdered him, the ostensible rules among Europeans be damned, for being in the way of what they knew to be their own crimes. This was obvious 50 years ago, and the sudden outing of it now gives an idea of the timescales involved before there will be official admissions or at least a common-knowledge consensus around cases like David Kelley's. (All other things remaining the same, of course. Which they will never, given unknowns.)

.
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Re: "Evidence suggests" Hammarskjöld's plane shot down in 19

Postby The Consul » Wed Aug 17, 2011 6:25 pm

Yeah, by 2061 the truth behing Sergio de Mello's death will also be uncovered; that is, presuming civilization still exists.
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Re: "Evidence suggests" Hammarskjöld's plane shot down in 19

Postby kenoma » Wed Aug 17, 2011 6:49 pm

Curiously resonant with the case of Bernt Carlsson

Patrick Haseldine always believed that Bernt Carlsson was the real target of the Lockerbie bombing, and that the South Africans were responsible:

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Postby wintler2 » Thu Aug 18, 2011 12:44 am

DR Congo is estimated to have $24 trillion (equivalent to the combined Gross Domestic Product of Europe and the United States) worth of untapped deposits of raw mineral ores, including the world’s largest reserves of cobalt and significant quantities of the world’s diamonds, gold and copper.[2][3] ..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_ind ... _the_Congo
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Re: "Evidence suggests" Hammarskjöld's plane shot down in 19

Postby stickdog99 » Sun Sep 18, 2011 2:00 pm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14913456

Dag Hammarskjold: Was his death a crash or a conspiracy?

...

Some Unanswered Questions

Why was a search and rescue operation not launched immediately, or at dawn?
Why did authorities only arrive, officially, at the crash site after 15:00 on the 18th?
Why of all those on board was Dag Hammarskjold's the only body undamaged by fire?
Why was a playing card, said to be the Ace of Spades, apparently found tucked into his collar?

....


In Congo, one issue was who should control the southern province of Katanga, rich in copper, uranium and tin. Belgium, the ex-colonial power, backed a secessionist movement led by Moise Tshombe, as did the UK and US who had mining interests in the region. But Mr Hammarskjold from the start backed Congo's elected central authorities - the Soviet-backed government of prime minister Patrice Lumumba, and later, after Mr Lumumba was deposed and murdered, Prime Minister Cyrille Adoula.

Mr Hammarskjold wanted to pursue a negotiated solution between Mr Tshombe and the central government, a goal that became even more urgent after UN peacekeepers found themselves outgunned during an aggressive operation to drive foreign mercenaries from Katanga. Mr Tshombe was waiting to talk to him in Ndola on the night he died.

The crash of his aircraft has never been fully explained. Two investigations held in the British-run Central African Federation, which included Northern Rhodesia, were followed by an official UN inquiry, which concluded that foul play could not be ruled out. So people have never stopped coming forward with new explanations, and asking new questions.

Some 30 years after the crash, in 1992, two men who had served as UN representatives in Katanga just before and just after Hammarskjold's death - Conor Cruise O'Brien and George Ivan Smith - wrote a letter to the Guardian claiming to have evidence that the plane was shot down accidentally, by mercenaries. In their view, a warning shot intended to divert the plane to alternative talks with industrialists in Katanga, in fact hit the plane and caused it to crash.

In 1998 South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, led by Desmond Tutu, published eight letters that suggested CIA, MI5 and South African intelligence were involved in sabotage of the aircraft. British officials responded that these were likely to be Soviet forgeries.

In 2005, the head of UN military information in Congo in 1961, Bjorn Egge, told the Aftenposten newspaper he had noticed a round hole in Hammarskjold's forehead when he saw the body in the mortuary. It could have been a bullet hole, he said, and it had been mysteriously airbrushed out of official photographs.


Over the last four years, Swedish aid worker Goran Bjorkdahl has carried out extensive research and British academic Susan Williams published a book on Thursday - Who Killed Hammarskjold? Both conclude that it is likely the plane was brought down.

Mr Bjorkdahl began his study after inheriting from his father, who had worked in Zambia in the 1970s, a piece of the plane fuselage containing unexplained small holes. He tracked down 12 witnesses, in whose accounts of the night three points appeared repeatedly:

The DC6 circled in the air two or three times before it crashed

A smaller plane flew above it

A bright light flashed in the sky above the large plane before it went down

Six witnesses also recall seeing uniformed personnel near the crash site that morning, even though official reports claim it was not located until after 15:00 that day.[/b]

The official inquiries held at the time also contain witness testimony referring to a second plane in the sky.

One of the key questions Ms Williams asks in her book is why this and other inconvenient observations were discounted, or in some cases doctored during the official Rhodesian investigations. She says it is clear to her that there was a cover-up.

She places particular emphasis on three of her discoveries:

The photographs of Hammarskjold after his death are either taken in such a way as to conceal the area around his right eye, or, where the eye is visible, they show evidence of having been touched up, possibly to hide a wound

The sole survivor of the crash, Harold Julien, said there was an explosion before the plane fell from the sky - his evidence was discounted in the original inquiry on the grounds that he was ill and sedated, but Ms Williams has found a doctor's statement insisting that he was lucid at the time (he died of his injuries within days)

A US intelligence officer at a listening station in Cyprus says he heard a cockpit recording from Ndola, in which a pilot talks of closing in on the DC6 - guns are heard firing, and then the words "I've hit it"


"There is no smoking gun, but there is a mass of evidence that points in the direction that the plane was shot down by a second plane," she told the BBC. "That is a far more convincing and supported explanation than any other."

There were a range of people, including white Rhodesians and the Belgian and British mining companies in Katanga, "with a sense of being at war with the UN and with African nationalism", she says - and with a motive for preventing Mr Hammarskjold and Mr Tshombe reaching a negotiated settlement.

Model diplomat

Mr Hammarskjold's main adviser at the time, Brian Urquhart, says it is "so wrong" to think that "at night without ground control you could shoot down a plane or even locate it". But Ms Williams says experts have told her that the DC6, on its way in to land at Ndola airport on a moonlit night, was a "sitting duck".

"There was a tacit agreement never to have such a single-minded Secretary General again.” Dame Margaret Anstee

Ms Williams argues that the time has come for a new inquiry, and Mr Hammarskjold's nephew Knut is reported to have called for one himself, after hearing of Ms Williams' new evidence. Fifty years later, his uncle is still a model for people working at the UN, says Knut Hammarskjold.

"Many, I've been told, still have his photo on their desks, and [former Secretary General] Kofi Annan says he always asks when there is a problem: 'What would Dag have done in this situation?'"

Dame Margaret Anstee says he had the courage to stand up for his principles and to the strong member states, which his successors have lacked.

"There was a tacit agreement never to have such a single-minded secretary general again," she says. "I think we can say they haven't."
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Re: "Evidence suggests" Hammarskjöld's plane shot down in 19

Postby MinM » Thu Jul 19, 2012 10:03 am

Image
New inquiry set up into death of UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld

Commission will investigate 1961 plane crash after new claims of assassination and cover-up


* Julian Borger
* guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 18 July 2012 22.41 BST



A fresh international inquiry is to be opened into the mysterious 1961 plane crash that killed the UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld following the emergence of new evidence over the past year.

A Guardian investigationin August 2011 and a bookpublished the following month both pointed to witness testimony that the plane was shot down over British-ruled Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, possibly by western mercenaries, and that the assassination was covered up by the colonial authorities.

The commission of inquiry will include a retired British appeal court judge, Sir Stephen Sedley, as well as Richard Goldstone, a South African judge who was formerly chief prosecutor at The Hague war crimes tribunal. The panel will also include a retired Swedish ambassador, Hans Corell, and a Dutch judge, Wilhelmina Thomassen.

The findings will not carry legal status but will be presented to the UN.

The commission was established after a preliminary review of the new evidence by an "enabling committee" including Lord Lea of Crondall, a former Commonwealth secretary general, Emeka Anyaoku, and the former archbishop of Sweden Karl Gustav Hammar.

"Why are we doing this? Because we believe that the whole of the truth, in significant respects, has yet to be told," said Lea, a former senior trade unionist. "There is prima facie evidence from a book published in 2011, Who Killed Hammarskjöld? by Susan Williams, and from other sources, that there is new information that ought to be evaluated."

"The legacy of colonialism won't go away," said Williams. "Here at last is an opportunity for a distinguished group of international jurists to examine a most disturbing episode at the dying end of colonial rule in Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Hammarskjöld carried the hopes of a generation in Africa, for whom his death was a tragedy."

The unanswered questions the commission will look into include why the sole survivor of the crash said the plane "blew up" before it fell from the sky, why local residents reported seeing a smaller second plane attack Hammarskjöld's DC-6 aircraft, and why the wreckage was not officially found for 15 hours, though it was only eight miles from the airport.

The crash happened during the struggle for post-colonial Congo just over the border. Williams says the evidence suggests the DC-6, known as the Albertina, was fired on by a plane piloted by mercenaries fighting for Katanga separatists who had revolted against the government of the newly independent Congo with the help of Belgian mining interests.

Hammarskjöld was hated by many white settlers in the region for the UN's military support of the Congolese government in Leopoldville, now Kinshasa. He went to Ndola in Northern Rhodesia with the aim of brokering a ceasefire, flying under cover of darkness to avoid being intercepted by Katangese war planes.

A British-run commission of inquiry blamed the crash in 1961 on pilot error and a later UN investigation recorded an open verdict.

Dickson Mbewe, a former charcoal burner, was sitting outside his house near Ndola on the night of the crash.

"Suddenly, we saw another aircraft approach the bigger aircraft at greater speed and release fire which appeared as a bright light," Mbewe, 84, told the Guardian last year.

"The plane on the top turned and went in another direction. We sensed the change in sound of the bigger plane. It went down and disappeared."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/ju ... arskjold-2

Show #554
Original airdate: Nov 27, 2011
Guest: Jim DiEugenio, Lisa Pease, Ira David Wood III
Topics: J. Edgar, RFK, The JFK Assassination Chronology


# Play Part Two - Lisa Pease (40:10) Real Media or MP3 download

# Lisa discusses her RFK case article in Salon magazine (Nov 21, 2011)
# It's impossible to paint Sirhan as the killer, Robert Kennedy was shot from behind from one to six inches away
# Researchers spend years, most reporters don't have the time to research the truth, without a guide
# Start occupying the public mind-space around conspiracy theory, historical investigation, legitimate theories
# The assassination of Dag Hammarskjold, the UN Secretary-General, the plot to overthrow Patrice Lumumba in the Congo
# Kennedy was going to stand behind Lumumba, the CIA rushed to take him out, during Kennedy's transition period
# Hammarskjold's plane 'crashed', evidence that it was shot down, hitman Roland "Bud" Culligan, the Church Committee
# We should be looking into and talking about taking people out to change policy. make it harder for them to happen
# Recently, this Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador on U.S. territory, a lot of journalists said 'smells like a setup'
# The Occupy Movement, here in Los Angeles, unusually festive, we are the 99 percent, the LA police have been fantastic
# Max Holland, JFK: The Lost Bullet, these programs don't have to be good, don't have to be accurate
# If I was Allen Dulles, I would constantly fill the media with theses stories, repeat it enough times
# Dealey Plaza, Nov 22, 2013, the Sixth Floor Museum is now taking over that space
# In this information war We need a lot more soldiers, send to your friends the links to the good articles
# Pick up Jim Douglass's book JFK & the Unspeakable (2008), best, latest, most condensed evidence in that case
# Oswald did not fire a rifle that day, he had no nitrates on his cheek, CIA involvement, using Oswald
# Laying a cover story in advance of the assassination, to trigger the cover-up among other agencies
# Author Hank Albarelli, writing a book about George Hunter White, a CIA operative, Oswald in Mexico

http://www.blackopradio.com/pod/black554b.mp3

viewtopic.php?p=449241#p449241

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index ... opic=19302
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Re: "Evidence suggests" Hammarskjöld's plane shot down in 19

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Sep 09, 2013 4:19 pm

9 September 2013 Last updated at 12:45 ET

Dag Hammarskjold death: UN 'should reopen inquiry'
The crash site of Dag Hammarskjold's DC6 plane The DC6 plane crashed in the early hours of 18 September 1961

Who killed Dag Hammarskjold?

A commission looking into the death of former United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold has recommended that the UN reopen its investigation.

Mr Hammarskjold's plane was travelling to Congo on a peace mission in 1961 when it crashed in Zambia.

A UN investigation in 1962 failed to find the cause of the mysterious crash.

The commission said there were significant new findings, and that the US National Security Agency might hold crucial evidence.

In a statement, the UN thanked the commission and said the UN secretariat would study its findings closely.

It said Mr Hammarskjold had given "unparalleled service to the UN and paid the ultimate price", and that it was "among those most concerned in arriving at the whole truth".

The Swedish-born diplomat's plane crashed on 18 September in a forest near Ndola in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia.

All but one of the passengers and crew on the flight were killed.
Continue reading the main story
Dag Hammarskjold
Dag Hammarskjold

Born in 1905 into an aristocratic Swedish family
Full name, Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjold
Helped lay foundations of Swedish welfare state
Swedish state secretary for foreign affairs (1947-1951)
The UN's second secretary general (1953-1961), proposed by Britain and France
Nobel Peace Prize winner 1961

Mr Hammarskjold was trying to negotiate a peace agreement between Congo's Soviet-backed government and Moise Tshombe, who had declared independence for its mineral-rich province of Katanga.

The UN secretary general was going to Ndola to meet Mr Tshombe, who was backed by former colonial power Belgium and some Western mining interests.

Three investigations have failed to determine the cause of the crash, and many conspiracy theories have swirled around Mr Hammarskjold's death.

Two investigations held in the British-run Central African Federation, which included Northern Rhodesia, were followed by an official UN inquiry which concluded that foul play could not be ruled out.

The Hammarskjold Commission report, written by four international lawyers, said there was "significant new evidence".

It said the claim of an aerial attack, which might have caused the descent of the plane by direct damage or by harassment, was capable of being proved or disproved.

The report said that given the NSA's worldwide monitoring activities at that time, "it is highly likely" that the radio traffic on 18-19 September 1961 was recorded by the NSA and possibly also by the CIA.

The report said: "Authenticated recordings of any such cockpit narrative or radio messages, if located, would furnish potentially conclusive evidence of what happened to the DC6."

The Commission said it had made Freedom of Information Act requests to the National Security Archive, which were rejected on national security grounds - but that an appeal had been lodged.

The report concluded that Mr Hammarskjold's death was "an event of global significance which deserves the attention both of history and of justice".


NSA Has Secrets to UN Chief’s Death, Investigators Say
By Noah Rayman Sept. 09, 2013Add a Comment


The National Security Agency may hold the secret to the mysterious plane crash that killed United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold half a century ago, according to a commission investigating the incident. In 1961 Hammarskjold was flying to broker a seize fire in war-torn Congo when his DC-6 plane crashed in current day Zambia. His death has been the subject of many cold war conspiracy theories as well as three previous investigations.

Stephen Sedley, the chairman of the four-person commission, wrote in an introduction to the report, released Monday, that it was a “near certainty” that radio transmissions recorded by the U.S. intelligence gathering agency from an airfield near where the plane crashed could determine whether the crash was in fact an accident, the AP reports.
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Re: "Evidence suggests" Hammarskjöld's plane shot down in 19

Postby elfismiles » Mon May 19, 2014 11:43 am

via Len Bracken...
" ...my friend joe lauria has an important article in the WSJ on the death of dag hammarskjold..."

U.N. Considers Reopening Probe into 1961 Crash that Killed Dag Hammarskjöld
Latest Headlines is home to all the latest, up to the minute news headlines from...
http://stream.wsj.com/story/latest-head ... -2-534763/
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Re: "Evidence suggests" Hammarskjöld's plane shot down in 19

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Mar 22, 2015 12:40 pm

U.N. Orders Review of 1961 Crash That Killed Dag Hammarskjold
By ALAN COWELLMARCH 16, 2015
Photo

Dag Hammarskjold, the secretary general, in 1953. Credit Sam Falk/The New York Times

LONDON — The plane had flown deep into the African night on a mission for peace. Finally, it drew near its destination in the copper mining region of what is now northern Zambia. The crew radioed for permission to descend. Then there was nothing.

On the night of Sept. 17 to 18, 1961, the plane, a Transair Sweden DC-6B named Albertina, was carrying Dag Hammarskjold, the secretary general of the United Nations, and 15 other people. Mr. Hammarskjold was on his way to meet with Moise Tshombe, the leader of a bloody secession movement in Katanga, a province of the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo with vast deposits of strategic minerals, including uranium and cobalt.

But the four-engined plane crashed minutes after the last radio contact, in a stretch of bushland eight miles from the airport at Ndola, in what was then the British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia.

The crash turned a hinge in the tortured narrative of modern Africa, poised between rule by outside powers and independence. But its cause has never been established.

Now, the United Nations has agreed to reopen the Pandora’s box of fragmentary evidence, speculation, obfuscation and wild conspiracy theories surrounding the crash to order a review by an independent panel of three experts.

On Monday, a statement from the United Nations in New York said the panel, led by a Tanzanian jurist, Mohamed Chande Othman, would be given three months to assess the “probative value” of evidence that has surfaced in the decades since the last formal inquiry. The other two panelists are Kerryn Macaulay, an Australian aviation expert, and Henrik Larsen, a ballistics specialist from Denmark.

The three panelists will be empowered to travel to the scene of the crash and to interview witnesses. Notably, they may also draw on documents that the United Nations has urged its members to disclose.

Susan Williams, a British academic who has written an authoritative account of what is known about the crash, said that “it is extremely important for member states to deliver up documents,” including unpublished material from the United States, Britain, South Africa, France and Belgium.

Some of the panel’s most sensational testimony may come from two American intelligence officers who were working hundreds of miles apart at listening posts in the Mediterranean. Both claim to have heard evidence that the plane was shot down, and one of them maintains that Americans were somehow implicated.

Charles Southall, now 80, was a naval aviator in 1961, working at a signals intelligence base in Cyprus. He has told researchers and writers on several occasions that he was invited to come to the listening post near Nicosia on Sept. 17 because something “interesting” was about to happen.

The site of the wreckage of the airplane that carried Mr. Hammarskjold in what is now Zambia. Credit Associated Press
When he was there, Mr. Southall said, he heard a recording of a voice speaking over the sound of an aircraft engine: “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 DC-6. It’s the plane.”

Then came the sound of cannon fire, he said, and the voice spoke again, this time with more animation: “I’ve hit it. There are flames. It’s going down. It’s crashing.”

His recollections were included in a United Nations report published in 2013 and in other recent studies. Mr. Southall confirmed the account in an email exchange.

It was not clear exactly whom Mr. Southall had heard. But 400 miles away at Iraklion, Greece, another American was listening to high-frequency radio transmissions from central Africa that night. Paul Henry Abram, now 73, was a Russian-speaking Air Force expert on loan to the National Security Agency whose job was to monitor radio traffic among ground forces serving with the United Nations.

He recalled that on one frequency, he heard a voice saying: “We have the plane in sight. The plane is well lit. We can see it approaching.” Then he heard an accented voice on a different frequency saying, “The Americans shot down the U.N. plane.”

Mr. Abram, now a lawyer and author, said in a telephone interview that he alluded to this version of events in a 2013 memoir, “Trona, Bloody Trona,” but has never shared his version of events with Mr. Southall. And as for official inquiries into Mr. Hammarskjold’s death, he said, “no one has ever contacted me.”

Ms. Williams, the British academic, wrote in her study of the crash that a “Belgian pilot called Beukels” claimed to have shot the plane down by accident as it was approaching Ndola, after trying to force the pilots to divert to another airstrip.

None of these accounts of the crash have been independently corroborated.

Mr. Hammarskjold was flying to Ndola from Léopoldville — now called Kinshasa — the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which had gained independence from Belgium the year before. He was trying to broker an end to fighting in Katanga between United Nations troops sent to stabilize the country and secessionist forces backed by foreign mercenaries.

The wreckage of his plane was not spotted until the next afternoon, by a Royal Rhodesian Air Force plane based at Ndola. The sole survivor of the crash, Sgt. Harold Julien, an American security guard, died five days later without giving a coherent account of what happened.

Questions have been raised about the delay in locating the wreckage. The Royal Rhodesian officer who commanded the search, Squadron Leader John Mussell, wrote a detailed account a day after the crash, and recently made it available to The New York Times.

His chronology indicates that warplanes including a Canberra bomber began searching possible crash sites in the early morning without success. He then met at 2:23 p.m. with the American air attaché in Congo, Col. Benjamin Matlick, and other officials to plan a coordinated search. The wreckage was finally spotted at 3:10 p.m., 15 hours after the plane’s last radio message, and a second aircraft flew to the area “to help with positive identification,” Mr. Mussell’s chronology said.

Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story
In a note accompanying the document, Mr. Mussell, now 81 and retired in Wales, acknowledged that early searches were “directed to the wrong area,” but he rejected “any thought that we, in the Air Force, were not on our toes, and further, as conspiracy theories would hint, were in some way involved in the disaster.”

He said in a telephone interview that the new inquiry should consider the role of the pilots of Mr. Hammarskjold’s plane. “It doesn’t matter how fatigued you are or how experienced you are,” he said. “If you are in Africa and going into unfamiliar territory, it’s not difficult to make a serious mistake.”

An inquiry by Rhodesian civil aviation authorities found that the plane had descended too low, and that neither pilot error nor foul play could be ruled out. A Rhodesian public inquiry in 1962 also cited low altitude. A United Nations inquiry the same year reviewed a range of possible causes without pinpointing one factor.

But a United Nations panel reviewing the case in 2013 found that there was “persuasive evidence that the aircraft was subjected to some form of attack or threat as it circled to land.”

So much time has passed that the new inquiry “is probably our last chance,” Jan Eliasson, deputy secretary general of the United Nations, said in a telephone interview. “The more clarity we have on this tragedy, the better,” he said.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Re: "Evidence suggests" Hammarskjöld's plane shot down in 19

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Mar 22, 2015 2:33 pm


The Mysterious Death of a UN Hero
March 17, 2015

From the Archive: In reopening the investigation into the mysterious plane crash that killed UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold in 1961, the United Nations is appealing to member states to release long-secret files related to this cold case from a tense moment in the Cold War in Africa, which Lisa Pease examined in 2013.


By Lisa Pease (Originally published on Sept. 16. 2013)

More than a half century ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious.

There have been three investigations into the crash: an initial civil aviation Board of Inquiry, a Rhodesian Commission of Inquiry, and a UN Commission in 1962. Not one of them could definitively answer why the plane crashed or whether a deliberate act had been responsible.

While a few authors have looked into and written about the strange facts of the crash in the years since the last official inquiry in 1962, none did a more thorough reinvestigation than Dr. Susan Williams, a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London, whose book Who Killed Hammarskjöld? was released in 2011, 50 years after the crash.

Her presentation of the evidence was so powerful it launched a new UN commission to determine whether the UN should reopen its initial investigation. “It is a fact,” the current Commission wrote in its report, “that none of these inquiries was conducted to the standard to which a modern inquiry into a fatal event would be conducted….”

The Commission was formed by Lord Lea of Crondall, who assembled a group of volunteer jurists, solicitors and others from the Netherlands, South Africa, Sweden and elsewhere to tabulate and review the evidence the Commission collected from past investigations, Williams’s book, and independent witnesses, such as myself.

I was one of the 28 witnesses (and one of only three Americans) who provided testimony to the Commission, based on information gathered in the course of my research into the assassinations of the Sixties.

“It is legitimate to ask whether an inquiry such as this, a full half-century after the events with which it is concerned, can achieve anything except possibly to feed speculation and conspiracy theories surrounding the crash,” the most recent Commission wrote in its report.

“Our answer, and the reason why we have been willing to give our time and effort to the task, is first that knowledge is always better than ignorance, and secondly that the passage of time, far from obscuring facts, can sometimes bring them to light.”

The Congo Crisis

The report summarized the historical situation Hammarskjöld was faced with in 1961. In June of 1960, under pressure from forces in the Congo as well as from the United Nations, Belgium had relinquished its claim to the Congo, a move which brought Patrice Lumumba to power.

Lumumba faced a near civil war in his country immediately. The military mutinied, the Belgians stepped back in to protect Belgian settlers, and local leader Moise Tshombe declared Katanga, a mineral-rich province, an independent state.

As the Commission’s report noted, “Katanga contained the majority of the Congo’s known mineral resources. These included the world’s richest uranium and four fifths of the West’s cobalt supply. Katanga’s minerals were mined principally by a Belgian company, the Union Minière du Haut Katanga, which immediately recognised and began paying royalties to the secessionist government in Elisabethville. One result of this was that Moise Tshombe’s regime was well funded. Another was that, so long as Katanga remained independent of the Congo, there was no risk that the assets of Union Minière would be expropriated.”

The U.S. government feared that Katanga’s rich uranium reserves would fall under Soviet control if the nationalist movement that brought Lumumba to power succeeded in unifying the country. Indeed, rebuffed by Western interests, Lumumba did reach out to the Soviets for help, a move that caused CIA Director Allen Dulles to initiate CIA plans for Lumumba’s assassination. Lumumba was ultimately captured and killed by forces of Joseph Mobutu, whom Andrew Tully called “the CIA’s man” in the Congo just days before President Kennedy’s inauguration.

On the southern border of Katanga lay Northern Rhodesia, where Hammarskjöld’s plane would eventually go down, Sir Roy Welensky, a British politician, ruled as prime minister. Welensky, too, pushed for an independent Katanga. Along with the resources, there was also the fear that an integrated Congo and Katanga could lead to the end of apartheid in Rhodesia which might spread to its larger and more prosperous neighbor South Africa.

The British situation was divided, with the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Lord Landsdowne, backing the UN’s efforts at preserving a unified Congo, while the British High Commissioner to the Rhodesian Foundation, Lord Alport, was upset with the UN’s meddling, saying African issues were “better left to Europeans with experience in that part of the world.”

Similarly, U.S. policy appeared split in 1961. Allen Dulles and possibly President Dwight D. Eisenhower had worked to kill Lumumba just before President John F. Kennedy took office. But President Kennedy had been a supporter of Lumumba and fully backed the UN’s efforts in the Congo.

As the report notes, “There is evidence … of a cleft in policy between the US Administration and the US Central Intelligence Agency. While the policy of the Administration was to support the UN, the CIA may have been providing materiel to Katanga.”

So British, Belgian and American interests that weren’t always representative of their official heads of state had designs on Katanga, its politics and its resources. What stood in their way? The UN, under the firm leadership of Dag Hammarskjöld.

The UN forces had been unsuccessful in unifying the Congo, so Hammarskjöld and his team flew to Leopoldville on Sept. 13, 1961. Hammarskjöld planned to meet Tshombe to discuss aid, contingent on a ceasefire, and the two decided to meet on Sept. 18 in Ndola in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).

On Sept. 17, the last day of Hammarskjöld’s life, Neil Ritchie, an MI6 officer, went to pick up Tshombe and the British consul in Katanga, Denzil Dunnett. He found them in the company of a high-level Union Minière employee.

That night, Hammarskjöld embarked on the Albertina, a DC6 plane, and flew from Leopoldville to Ndola, where he was to arrive shortly after midnight. Lord Landsdowne, the British leader opposing a unified Congo, flew separately, although the report goes out of its way to say there was nothing sinister in them flying in separate planes and that this was “diplomatically and politically appropriate.”

A large group of diplomats, Africans, journalists and at least three mercenaries waited for Hammarskjöld’s plane at the Ndola airport. The Commission found the presence of mercenaries there strange as a police inspector was on duty specifically “to ensure nobody was at the airport who had no good reason to be there.”

The Crash

Hammarskjöld’s plane deliberately circumvented Katanga, fearing interception. The pilot radioed Ndola 25 minutes before midnight with an estimate that they plane was about 45 minutes from landing. At 12:10 a.m., the pilot notified the Ndola airport “Your lights in sight” and requested confirmation of the air pressure reading (QNH). “Roger QNH 1021mb, report reaching 6000 feet,” the airport replied. “Roger 1021,” the Albertina responded. That was the last communication received from Hammarskjöld’s plane. It crashed within minutes.

The Commission found the airport gave the plane correct information, that there was no indication the plane’s altimeter had been tampered with, that the landing gear had been lowered into the proper position and locked, and that the wing flaps had been correctly set. In other words, pilot error — the verdict of the initial Rhodesian inquiry into Dag Hammarskjöld’s death in 1962 — did not seem to be the likely cause.

At the crash site, several of the crash victims had bullets in their bodies. In addition, the Commission found “evidence from more than one source…that holes resembling bullet-holes were observed in the burnt-out fuselage.”

The Commission’s two aviation experts concluded the most likely cause of the crash seemed to be a “controlled flight into terrain,” meaning, no in-air explosion. This suggests someone deliberately or mistakenly drove the plane right into the ground. However, the report notes, this does not rule out some form of sabotage that could have distracted or injured the pilots, preventing a successful landing.

And the Commission noted contradictory evidence from a few eyewitnesses who claimed they saw the plane explode in mid-air. Another eyewitness, a member of the flight crew, found alive but badly burned, told a police inspector that the plane “blew up” and that “There was a lot of small explosions all around.”

The Commission interviewed African eyewitnesses who had feared coming forward years ago. One of them described seeing the plane on fire before it hit the ground. Another described seeing a “ball of fire coming on top of the plane.” Still another described a “flame … on top of the plane … like a ball of fire.”

Several witnesses saw a second plane near the one that crashed. One witness saw a second, smaller plane following a larger one, and told the Commission, “I saw that the fire came from the small plane…” And another witness also recalled seeing two planes in the sky with the larger one on fire. A third witness noted that he saw a flash of flame from one plane strike another. Several witnesses reported two smaller planes following a larger one just before the larger one caught fire.

A Swedish flight instructor described in 1994 how he had heard dialog via a short-wave radio the night of the crash. He recalled hearing the following from an airport control tower at the time of the crash: “He’s approaching the airport. He’s turning. He’s leveling. Another plane is approaching from behind — what is that?”

In one of the more bizarre elements of the case, Hammarskjöld’s body was not burnt, yet the other victims of the crash were severely burnt. The Commission concluded the most likely explanation, though not the sole one, was that Hammarskjöld’s body had been thrown from the plane before it caught fire.

And even more strangely, the commission found the evidence “strongly suggests” that someone moved Hammarskjöld’s body after the crash and stuck a playing card in his collar before the photographs of his body were taken. (The card “or something like it” was plainly visible “in the photographs taken of the body on a stretcher at the site.”)

Given the proximity of the plane to the airport, the Commission had a hard time explaining the nine-hour delay between the time of the crash and the Rhodesian authorities’ acknowledgement of its discovery of the wreckage.

While the Commission found a “substantial amount of evidence” that Hammarskjöld’s body had been “found and tampered with well before the afternoon of 18 September and possibly very shortly after the crash,” they also stated the evidence was “no more consistent with hostile persons assuring themselves that he was dead than with bystanders, or possibly looters, examining his body.” But the Commission also noted that “The failure to summon or send help, however, remains an issue.”

The Commission tried very hard to find the autopsy X-rays, as there were reports that a bullet hole had been found in Hammarskjöld’s head. But the X-rays appear lost forever.

Was Hammarskjöld deliberately assassinated?

Former President Harry S. Truman was convinced Hammarskjöld had been murdered. A Sept. 20, 1961 New York Times article quoted Truman as having told reporters, “Dag Hammarskjöld was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said ‘When they killed him.’”

Years later, when the CIA was revealed to have been engaged in assassination plots, reporter Daniel Schorr speculated that the CIA may have been involved in Hammarskjöld’s death.

The report references the report of David Doyle, the chief of the CIA’s Elizabethville base in Katanga who wrote in a memoir how three armed Fouga planes were being delivered to Katanga “in direct violation” of U.S. policy. Doyle doubted this was an official CIA operation, since he had not been notified of the delivery.

Bronson Tweedy, the head of the CIA’s Africa division, questioned Doyle about the possibility of a CIA operation to interfere with Hammarskjöld’s plane. The report notes that this could indicate a lack of CIA involvement in Hammarskjöld’s death, “unless, conceivably, Tweedy was simply trying to find out how much Doyle knew.”

It is the essence of CIA operations that they are highly compartmentalized and often kept secret between people even within the Agency itself. Meaning, Allen Dulles or someone high up the chain could easily have ordered a single operator to take out Hammarskjöld’s plane without using any official CIA channels. Indeed, that is what one would expect were so sensitive an operation as the assassination of a UN head contemplated.

After Lumumba’s death, in early 1961, the UN passed resolution 161, which urged the immediate removal of Belgian forces and “other foreign military and paramilitary personnel and political advisors not under the United Nations Command, and mercenaries” from the Congo.

Confession from a CIA operative

When I heard such a commission was forming, I reached out to Lord Lea of Crondall to offer some evidence of my own. John Armstrong, a fellow researcher into the JFK assassination, had forwarded me a series of Church Committee files and correspondence to and from a CIA operative named Roland “Bud” Culligan.

Culligan claimed the CIA had set him up on a phony bank fraud charge, and his way out of jail appears to have been to offer the Church Committee information on CIA assassinations (which he called “executive actions” or “E.A.’s”). Culligan was asked to list some “E.A.’s” that he had been involved in. Culligan mentioned, among high-profile others, Dag Hammarskjöld.

“Damn it, I did not want the job,” Culligan wrote to his legal adviser at Yale Law School. Culligan described the plane and the route, he named his CIA handler and his contact on the ground in Libya, and he described how he shot Hammarskjöld’s plane, which subsequently crashed.

As I testified, and as the Commission quoted in its report: “You will see from the correspondence that Culligan’s material was referred to an Attorney General, a Senator, and ultimately, the Senate investigation of the CIA’s activities at home and abroad that became known as the Church Committee after its leader, Senator Frank Church. Clearly, others in high places had reasons to believe Culligan’s assertions were worthy of further investigation.”

Culligan’s claims fit neatly with a broadcast allegedly heard by Navy Cmdr. Charles Southall, another Commission witness. The morning before the crash, Charles Southall, a naval pilot and intelligence officer, was stationed at the NSA’s facility in Cyprus.

At about 9 p.m. that night, Southall reported he was called at home by the communications watch officer and told to get down to the listening post because “something interesting” was going to happen that night. Southall described hearing a recording shortly after midnight in which a cool pilot’s voice said, “I see a transport plane coming low. All the lights are on. I’m going to make a run on it. Yes, it’s the Transair DC6. It’s the plane.”

Southall heard what sounded like cannon fire, then: “I’ve hit it. There are flames. It’s going down. It’s crashing.” Given that Cyprus was in the same time zone as Ndola, the Commission concluded it was possible that Southall had indeed heard a recording from Ndola. Southall was certain that what he heard indicated a deliberate act.

Bullets

Several witnesses described seeing bullet holes in the plane before it burnt. The report described one witness’s account that the fuselage was “’riddled with bullet-holes’ which appeared to have been made by a machine-gun.”

This account was disputed by AP journalist Errol Friedmann, however, who claimed no bullet holes were present. However, bullets were definitely found embedded in the bodies of several of the plane crash victims, which tends to give the former claim more credence.

The same journalist Friedmann also noted to a fellow journalist that the day after the crash, in a hotel, he had heard a couple of Belgian pilots who had perhaps had too much to drink discussing the crash. One of the pilots claimed he had been in contact with Hammarskjöld’s plane and had “buzzed” it, forcing the pilot of the Albertina to take evasive action. When the pilot buzzed the plane a second time, he forced it towards the ground.

A third-party account allegedly from a Belgian pilot named Beukels was investigated with some skepticism by the Commission. Beukels allegedly gave an account to a French Diplomat named Claude de Kemoularia, who evidently first relayed Beukels’s account to UN diplomat George Ivan Smith in 1980 (not long after Culligan’s 1975 account, I would note).

Smith’s source, however, appeared to be a transcript, about which the Commission noted “the literary quality of the narrative suggests an editorial hand, probably that of one or both of the two intermediaries.” Allegedly, Beukels fired what he meant to be warning shots which then hit the tail of the plane.

While Beukels’s alleged narrative matched several known facts, the Commission wisely noted, “there was little in Beukels’s narrative, as reported, that could not have been ascertained from press coverage and the three inquiries, elaborated by his experience as a pilot.” The Commission wrote of other elements which invited skepticism of this account, but did concede it’s possible this account was self-serving, designed to excuse a deliberate shooting down by Beukels.

The Commission’s recommendation

While the Commission had no desire to place blame for the crash, the report states: “There is persuasive evidence that the aircraft was subjected to some form of attack or threat as it circled to land at Ndola, which was by then widely known to be its destination,” adding “we … consider that the possibility that the plane was in fact forced into its descent by some form of hostile action is supported by sufficient evidence to merit further inquiry.”

The key evidence that the Commission thinks could prove or disprove a deliberate act would be the Ndola airport’s radio traffic that night. The Commission reported “it is highly likely that the entirety of the local and regional Ndola radio traffic on the night of 17-18 September 1961 was tracked and recorded by the NSA, and possibly also by the CIA.”

The Commission filed a Freedom of Information request for any such evidence with the National Archives but did not appear hopeful that such records would be released unless pressure was brought to bear.

In its discussion of Culligan, the Commission felt there were no leads there that could be pursued. But if any of Culligan’s many conversations with his legal adviser was captured on tape, and if tapes of the radio traffic cited above could be obtained, a voice match could be sought.

Based on its year-long investigation, the Commission stated that the UN “would be justified” in reopening its initial 1962 inquiry in light of the new evidence “about an event of global significance with deserves the attention both of history and of justice.”

[Regarding President Eisenhower’s possibly role in ordering the assassination of Lumumba, Robert Johnson, a National Security Council staff member, told the Church Committee he heard Eisenhower give an order that Lumumba be killed. He remembered being shocked to hear this. Under questioning, however, Johnson allowed that may have been a mistaken impression, that perhaps Eisenhower was referring to Lumumba’s political, not physical, removal.]
Lisa Pease is a writer who has examined issues ranging from the Kennedy assassination to voting irregularities in recent U.S. elections.

MrK
March 17, 2015 at 11:00 pm
Both MH17 and the Dag Hammarskjold were aerial assassinations.

Susan Williams identifies the pilot who killed Dag Hammarskjold, and notices that his conversation was recorded from the other side of the equator, by an NSA listening station in Cyprus. That was in 1961. And we’re told that in 2014, we don’t have satellite images from the MH-17 shootdown?

From the DAG HAMMARSKJOLD WEBSITE Who killed Hammarskjöld? Susan Williams’ formidable book, according to Commander Charles Southall, an American naval pilot, working at the NSA listening station in Cyprus in 1961:

Southall recalled the pilot saying: “I see a transport plane coming low. All the lights are on. I’m going down to make a run on it. Yes, it is the Transair DC-6. It’s the plane,” adding that his voice was “cool and professional”. Then he heard the sound of gunfire and the pilot exclaiming: “I’ve hit it. There are flames! It’s going down. It’s crashing!”

From The Guardian, which identifies the shooter, Belgian mercenary and head of the Katangan Airforce, Jan van Risseghem, who eventually died of old age:

(GUARDIAN UK) Dag Hammarskjöld’s plane may have been shot down, ambassador warned

In his cable, sent at 11am on 18 September, Gullion correctly identifies the Ndola area as the crash site. He also names the suspected Belgian pilot as “Vak Riesseghel”, almost certainly a mis-spelling of Jan van Risseghem, who had served in the South African and Rhodesian air forces, and commanded the small Katanga air force.

In another cable sent two days before the crash, Gullion passed on a commercial pilot’s report that the Belgian mercenary, flying a Katangese jet, “flew wing to wing” with him – a highly dangerous manoeuvre.

And…

“The telegram reveals that on the morning after the crash, the ambassador thought it credible that the plane had been shot down by a mercenary pilot – so credible, in fact, as to justify asking US diplomats in Brussels and Salisbury [now Harare] to put pressure on the Belgian and Rhodesian governments to ground the pilot,” said Williams, a senior researcher at the University of London’s Institute of Commonwealth Studies.

Reply

MrK
March 18, 2015 at 9:40 am
From the book, according to Commander Charles Southall, an American naval pilot, working at the NSA listening station in Cyprus in 1961:

From the DAG HAMMARSKJOLD WEBSITE Who killed Hammarskjöld? Susan Williams’ formidable book

Southall recalled the pilot saying: “I see a transport plane coming low. All the lights are on. I’m going down to make a run on it. Yes, it is the Transair DC-6. It’s the plane,” adding that his voice was “cool and professional”. Then he heard the sound of gunfire and the pilot exclaiming: “I’ve hit it. There are flames! It’s going down. It’s crashing!”

The pilot was identified in The Guardian as Jan van Risseghem, head of the Katanga Airforce.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: "Evidence suggests" Hammarskjöld's plane shot down in 19

Postby zangtang » Sun Mar 22, 2015 3:27 pm

I thought it was an 'open secret'

- thought i couldnt remember where i came across it, but i can......
- your friend and mine (draw breath) 'Dr' John Coleman, he of the 'conspirators hierarchy: the story of the committee of 300'
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Re: "Evidence suggests" Hammarskjöld's plane shot down in 19

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Aug 05, 2016 2:27 pm

U.N. to Probe Whether Iconic Secretary-General Was Assassinated | Foreign Policy

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki -moon will propose reopening an inquiry into allegations that Dag Hammarskjold, one of the most revered secretaries-general in the organization’s history, was assassinated by an apartheid-era South African paramilitary organization that was backed by the CIA, British intelligence, and a Belgian mining company, according to several officials familiar with the case.

The move follows the South African government’s recent discovery of decades old intelligence documents detailing the alleged plot, dubbed Operation Celeste, that was designed to kill Hammarskjold. In a recent letter to the United Nations, South African authorities said the documents have been transferred to their Justice Ministry so U.N. officials could review them, according to diplomatic sources. The South African Mission to the United Nations did not respond to a request for comment. The CIA has previously dismissed allegations that it was behind Hammarskjold’s death as “absurd and without foundation.”

This new information (the discovery of which has not previously been reported) is surfacing more than a year after a U.N. panel of experts, chaired by Tanzanian Chief Justice Mohamed Chande Othman, wrapped up a wide-ranging review of fresh evidence that had emerged in the years following the mysterious 55- year-old air tragedy. The panel urged the secretary-general, who is already required by a 1962 General Assembly resolution to report on any new evidence shedding light on Hammarskjold’s death, to keep pressing governments and their intelligence agencies to disclose or declassify information that could fill gaps in the evidence surrounding the tragedy.

Copies of the South African documents describing Operation Celeste were first made public about 18 years ago, but South Africa was unable to locate the original documents, making it impossible to substantiate their authenticity by subjecting them to ink and paper testing. It remains unclear precisely which documents the South Africans have discovered. But officials familiar with the South African letter to the U.N. said Pretoria confirmed that it had located previously lost documents related to Operation Celeste. The discovery, however, raised hopes that the U.N. could verify whether the documents were in fact produced at the time of Hammarskjold’s death.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/08/01/u-n ... assinated/



UN to probe whether iconic secretary-general was assassinated in South African plot backed by CIA

Colum Lynch, Foreign Policy, Washington Post | August 4, 2016 12:06 PM ET
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In this May 19, 1953, file photo, Dag Hammarskjold, recently appointed secretary general of the United Nations who is on a visit to Sweden, smokes his pipe at a press conference held at the Foreign Office in Stockholm.
AP PhotoIn this May 19, 1953, file photo, Dag Hammarskjold, recently appointed secretary general of the United Nations who is on a visit to Sweden, smokes his pipe at a press conference held at the Foreign Office in Stockholm.
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UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will propose reopening an inquiry into allegations that Dag Hammarskjold, one of the most revered secretaries-general in the organization’s history, was assassinated by an apartheid-era South African paramilitary organization that was backed by the CIA, British intelligence and a Belgian mining company, according to several officials familiar with the case.

The move follows the South African government’s recent discovery of decades old intelligence documents detailing the alleged plot, dubbed Operation Celeste, that was designed to kill Hammarskjold. In a recent letter to the United Nations, South African authorities said the documents have been transferred to their Justice Ministry so UN officials could review them, according to diplomatic sources.

The South African Mission to the United Nations did not respond to a request for comment. The CIA has previously dismissed allegations that it was behind Hammarskjold’s death as “absurd and without foundation.”

This new information (the discovery of which has not previously been reported) is surfacing more than a year after a UN panel of experts, chaired by Tanzanian Chief Justice Mohamed Chande Othman, wrapped up a wide-ranging review of fresh evidence that had emerged in the years following the mysterious 55-year-old air tragedy. The panel urged the secretary-general, who is already required by a 1962 General Assembly resolution to report on any new evidence shedding light on Hammarskjold’s death, to keep pressing governments and their intelligence agencies to disclose or declassify information that could fill gaps in the evidence surrounding the tragedy.

AP Photo
AP PhotoIn this Sept. 19, 1961, file photo, searchers walk through the scattered wreckage of the DC6B plane carrying Dag Hammarskjold in a forest near Ndola, Zambia.
Copies of the South African documents describing Operation Celeste were first made public about 18 years ago, but South Africa was unable to locate the original documents, making it impossible to substantiate their authenticity by subjecting them to ink and paper testing. It remains unclear precisely which documents the South Africans have discovered. But officials familiar with the South African letter to the UN said Pretoria confirmed that it had located previously lost documents related to Operation Celeste. The discovery, however, raised hopes that the UN could verify whether the documents were in fact produced at the time of Hammarskjold’s death.

In September 1961, Hammarskjold was flying on a peace mission from the Congolese capital of Léopoldville, now called Kinshasa, to the Ndola airfield in the British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia, renamed Zambia after independence. Hammarskjold’s Douglas DC6B plane, called Albertina, crashed into the forest on its approach to the Ndola airfield. Hammarskjold was believed to have been tossed out of the plane upon impact, fatally crushing his chest, spine, and ribs. Fourteen other passengers and crew members died in the crash; a fifteenth, American Harold Julien, succumbed to his injuries a week later. Before his death, Julien told authorities that there had been an explosion in the plane before it went down.

A Rhodesian commission of inquiry concluded in 1962 that the plane had crashed as a result of pilot error – a fatal miscalculation of the height of the forest tree line. A subsequent UN inquiry could not establish the cause of the crash, leaving open the possibility that Hammarskjold could have died either as a result of an accident or foul play. In the ensuing decades, Hammarskjold’s death has spawned a dizzying array of conspiracy theories that claim he was variously shot down by a CIA contractor or American ground troops, shot in the head by a South African mercenary after surviving the plane crash, or killed by a Belgian pilot who claimed to have shot down the plane. The first UN official to identify his body swore that he had a bullet sized hole in his forehead. But the autopsy, including X-rays of Hammarskjold’s body, undercut such claims.

The UN has also largely discarded a host of other claims, including an allegation that a South African mercenary supposedly named Swanepoel had once drunkenly boasted that he had participated in the assassination.

The new evidence is by no means conclusive, officials insisted, noting that it simply represents another piece in a much larger investigative puzzle that might never be solved. And some observers familiar with the investigation cautioned that even if the documents prove to be authentic there remains a possibility that they may have been produced as part of a disinformation campaign by any number of possible sources, from the Soviets to soldiers of fortune seeking to brandish their standing with South African intelligence by claiming responsibility for Hammarskjold’s death.

But the UN chief felt that it is relevant enough to justify a fresh look at what has turned out to be the most notorious and perplexing cold case in the UN’s history. According to UN officials, the decision to press forward reflects the influence of Jan Eliasson, a former Swedish foreign minister who currently serves as the UN’s deputy secretary-general. But some senior diplomats have questioned whether the latest findings will simply lead the UN on a fruitless pursuit of any number of the conspiracy theories, many of them contradictory, associated with Hammarskjold’s death.

Next month, Ban will issue a five-page note describing the existence of the new evidence and asking the General Assembly to appoint an eminent person, most likely Othman, to examine the documents and see where they lead. Ban’s deputy spokesman, Farhan Haq, declined to comment on the new evidence or the UN chief’s recommendations. But he told Foreign Policy that “the secretary-general remains personally committed to fulfilling the UN’s duty to the distinguished former secretary-general and those who accompanied him, to endeavor to establish the facts after so many years.”

The Hammarskjold case gained new momentum in 2012, when a British scholar, Susan Williams, published a book entitled “Who Killed Hammarskjöld? The UN, the Cold War and White Supremacy in Africa,” which uncovered new evidence, including eyewitnesses accounts by locals who recalled seeing the plane go down in flames and the testimony of Charles Southall, a retired U.S. naval officer, who said he heard a recording of a pilot boasting about shooting down what appeared to be Hammarskjold’s plane. Southall would later express some confusion over whether he had actually heard the radio intercept or read a transcript of it.

The Hammarskjold case gained new momentum in 2012, when a British scholar, Susan Williams, published a book entitled “Who Killed Hammarskjöld?
“‘I see a transport plane coming low. All the lights are on,'” Southall, who had been stationed at a NSA listening post in Cyprus, recalled the pilot saying. “‘I’m going to go down to make a run on it. Yes, it’s the Transair DC6. It’s the plane. I’ve hit it. There are flames. It’s going down. It’s crashing.'”

Another American, Paul Abram, who claims to have been stationed at an NSA listening post in Iraklion, Greece, told the UN panel in May 2015 that he had also heard a radio intercept of an accented non-American on the night of Hammarskjold’s death saying: “The Americans just shot down a UN plane.”

Williams’ book spurred the establishment in 2012 of the Hammarskjold Commission, a voluntary body of four international jurists and lawyers, including the Rt. Hon. Stephen Sedley, a British judge; Richard Goldstone, a former chief prosecutor for the UN war crimes tribunals in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia; Ambassador Hans Corell, a Swede who served as the UN’s top lawyer; and Wilhelmina Thomassen, a former Dutch Supreme Court judge.

The commission concluded in its final 2013 report that “there is persuasive evidence that the aircraft was subjected to some form of attack or threat as it circled to land at Ndola.” It also concluded that it “is highly likely that the entirety of the local and regional Ndola radio traffic on the night of 17-18 September 1961 was tracked and recorded by the NSA, and possibly also by the CIA.” Their findings prompted the UN secretary-general to assemble his own UN panel, headed by Othman, to revisit the Hammarskjold case in light of the new evidence.

Researchers say many key players in the region, including white minority governments, had clashed with Hammarskjold, whose U.N peacekeepers had been battling Belgian-backed separatists in the mineral-rich Congolese province of Katanga. Days before Hammarskjold’s death, the UN launched an offensive against Katanga’s separatists as part of an effort to drive hundreds of Belgian officers and European mercenaries out of the country.

The UN leader was advocating for Congo’s full independence, while Belgium, with some support from Britain, the United States and South Africa, wanted to ensure that Katanga’s riches – which included the uranium ore used in the production of the atomic weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – remained in friendly hands and out of the reach of the Soviet Union. Several months earlier, the CIA had played a role in the assassination by Belgian officers and Katangese separatists of Congolese liberation leader Patrice Lumumba, who was suspected of moving too closely to the Soviet Union.

Hammarskjold, meanwhile, died while en route to discuss a cease-fire with Moise Tshombe, the Belgian-backed leader of Katanga’s secession drive. His broader mission was to convince at Tshombe to ditch his foreign backers and make peace with Congo’s pro-Western leaders. “All those parties – the Belgians, the South Africans, the CIA – had a reason for opposing Dag Hammarskjold’s mission,” Goldstone told FP.

The possible existence of an alleged CIA-backed plot to kill Hammarskjold first emerged in 1998, when the South African National Intelligence Agency turned over a file to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission related to the 1993 assassination of Chris Hani, the leader of the South African Communist Party. But the file also included copies of eight documents detailing internal correspondence among members of the South African Institute for Maritime Research, or SAIMR, an alleged front for a clandestine mercenary organization active in Congo in the early 1960s.

The documents, which contain an alleged exchange between SAIMR’s “commodore” and “captain,” said Operation Celeste was meant to “remove” Hammarskjold, who had grown increasingly “troublesome.” One document, marked “top secret” describes a meeting including representatives of SAIMR and Britain’s intelligence agencies, MI5, and the Special Operations Executive, an apparent reference to a British agency that was set up in World War II to carry out espionage and sabotage operations in German-occupied Europe.

The possible existence of an alleged CIA-backed plot to kill Hammarskjold first emerged in 1998
The documents state that CIA director Allen Dulles concurs that “Dag is becoming troublesome … and should be removed.” They also claim that Dulles pledged the support of his people on the ground.

According to the papers, saboteurs were to place six pounds of TNT in the wheel well of Hammarskjold’s plane before it departed from Léopoldville, Congo, for the Ndola airport.

The explosives were supposed to detonate when Hammarskjold’s pilot retracted the landing wheels. A backup plan described in the papers called for detonating the bomb remotely as it began its descent into Ndola. There is no hard evidence that the plane ever blew up.

The Othman panel gave the theory little credence last year, and pieces of wreckage bore no solid evidence that a bomb brought down the plane. The allegation, according to the panel, was based on copies of the South African SAIMR documents that couldn’t be authenticated.

One organization cited in one of the documents, the Special Operations Executive, was believed to have disbanded in the late 1940s. South African authorities could provide no record that a mercenary team existed using that name. The UN panel concluded that there was no way to even prove the documents were authentic without subjecting the original paper and ink to testing.

The copies, the panel concluded, have “weak probative value” as the UN was unable to verify their authenticity or to even establish whether the maritime institute existed. The theory that a bomb was planted in Hammarskjold’s plane, the panel concluded, “is weakly supported by the body of new information” it obtained.

The Hammarskjold Commission was even more skeptical. Hans Corell, a Swedish lawyer who served on the Hammarskjold Commission, said the Operation Celeste documents seemed “fishy. We were not impressed.” He said the commission concluded that neither the documents, nor their contents, could be considered “trustworthy.”

Susan Williams, who has studied SAIMR’s activities for years, said it would be a mistake to dismiss the papers’ authenticity out of hand. “I certainly would not discount the documents, which is why I went to so much trouble to find them,” she said. “Some of them may be what they are purported to be and some of them may not be what they are purported to be.”

Goldstone told FP said he continues to have a “strong feeling” that Hammarskjold’s death was not an accident. But the commission’s hunches about the cause of death differed in one critical aspect from the South African account of Operation Celeste. “Our view was that the bomb being placed in the plane was less likely than it having been shot down,” Goldstone said.

He recalled interviewing four eyewitnesses, including three local workers, who said they saw the plane descend in flames. Some said they saw a second plane open fire on Hammarskjold’s plane. Goldstone recalled that none of the locals had previously been interviewed by the Rhodesian commission or the UN “The Rhodesians tended to dismiss black witnesses as being unreliable,” he said. “It was clearly a racist issue.”

One of the key obstacles to finalizing the investigation is the reluctance of key powers, principally the United States and Britain, to release documents related to the case.

While Corell was skeptical about the likelihood of the CIA-backed plot described in the Operation Celeste documents, he believes U.S. intelligence agencies are withholding vital evidence that could help resolve the mystery surrounding Hammarskjold’s death. Corell said he is particularly troubled by the failure to obtain transcripts of air traffic reports on the night of the tragedy.

The Ndola airport did not record radio traffic on the night of Hammarskjold’s death, even though it possessed the technical capability to do so. A British diplomat, Sir Brian Unwin, who was at the Ndola airport on the night of Hammarskjold’s death, recalled that two American aircraft had been running their engines on the airfield throughout the night, fueling suspicion that they were monitoring radio traffic.

The failure to close the books on the Hammarskjold case has gnawed at the victims’ relatives
The United States claims it has no record of Hammarskjold’s radio communications that night, despite Southall’s claims to the contrary. In its own response to questions from the UN, the U.S. Mission to the United Nations also said they hadn’t found evidence that any American planes were on the tarmac at Ndola that night.

But Corell remains skeptical. “We came to the conclusion that the Americans were listening to everything you could listen to in the air,” Corell said. “I’m still suspicious of this. I’m sure they made a transcript of the radio traffic.”

The failure to close the books on the Hammarskjold case has gnawed at the victims’ relatives. Hynrich Wieschhoff, whose father died alongside Hammarskjold, welcomes the UN’s renewed interest in the case. But he fears the latest focus on a Operation Celeste may lead to another dead end.

Meanwhile, he is growing frustrated with what he sees as the UN’s piecemeal approach to the investigation; that is, limiting its investigation to pursuing new facts as they come to light. What is needed, he said, is “a full-fledged investigation” that reviews the complete body of evidence from past and current inquiries. He credited the the UN panel for doing a “masterful job” despite its limited resources and time; the panel was only given three months to carry out its work.

“The evidence is staler, memories are fading, and individuals are dying,” he told Foreign Policy. “Let’s clear the tables, forget about politics, and get an answer.”


http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world ... ked-by-cia
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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