A Cold War killing?

[music] Hello and welcome to the History Extra Podcast from BBC History Magazine, Britain's best-selling history magazine. [music] I'm Ellie Corporn. In 1961, the UN Secretary General, Dag Hammers Gold, was attempting to mediate in a crisis in the Congo when his aircraft crashed in the jungle. Was it an accident or was it murder? And if the latter, then who might have been responsible? In his new book, Operation Martha, the journalist Ravi Samaya siffs through the evidence in an attempt to solve one of the most enduring mysteries of the Cold War. He spoke to our editor, Robata. So, first off, Ravi, what actually drew you into this mystery? I was working night at the New York Times and I was just kind of reading into strange and interesting stories because the New York Times is a fabulous archive of, you know, old journalism that you can look into that you can't really get to any other way. And somehow I stumbled across this story and I think one of the first things I found was that little brief article in which Harry Truman, who's a former president, as you know, had sort of said to reporters that he felt how my world had been killed. That was the day after he died. And once you find a thing like that, you can't really help but be drawn further into it. You have a figure like Harry Truman, who, you know, is one of my favorite presidents. He's not known for being a dishonest man. And if he says a thing like that, you kind of feel duty bound to look into it further. And then I found the previous investigations. I found the UN investigations. I found, you know, details and records of the Rhodesian investigation. And as soon as you read those reports, you see there are so many holes in them and so many questions spring to your mind. And I guess I kind of just started answering them and then I'd written a book. I guess you say this is different to a lot of so-called conspiracy theories. In that there is no, I suppose there's no coherent official story and what there is doesn't really hold water. Is that fair to say? Yeah. I mean, to be fair to the people who put together those reports, it was a very different time and a very different moment. Aviation in the '60s wasn't like aviation now where there's neat dots on an air traffic controller's screen all the time. And, you know, there's radar and monitoring and you pretty much know where any plane in it is at any given moment. In the '60s, especially in Africa, it was a bit, you know, the Wild West. It was just people flying where and when they wanted to. And it's a big place. And so, you know, whether by accident or design, those reports are pretty incomplete. They leave out big chunks of evidence that I think that the author's found inconvenient, which I think is not a great starting point for a comprehensive investigation. Just to give some context to this story, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about the Congo crisis, which is the backdrop to the events in your book. Sure. So, in the late 19th century, the Belgian king Leopold II decided he absolutely had to have a colony. And he kind of went around the world, colony shopping, as it were. And eventually, through complicated means, he ended up on the Congo. And Belgium seized control of it in the late 19th century and presided over one of the most horrific colonial regimes that you can imagine. Tens of millions of Congolese died of exhaustion or murder or sickness. And essentially, Leopold Day was to extract as much of the Congo's mineral wealth as he could for, it wasn't even for Belgium, honestly, it was for himself or his personal fortune. And in the years after that era, it sort of settled into a kind of apartheid in the Congo where the white European colonialists had a superior social status to the black Congolese. Of course, that's not sustainable. And in starting in 1959 and into 1960, they essentially rose up against their old colonial masters and demanded democracy. At that point, the army mutinied the Congolese army, which was made up of primarily black Congolese citizens. And it sort of broke out into the beginnings of a civil war where there was lots of retribution from the black Congolese against the colonialists. And the white cloneers fled to a place called Katango, which is the most southern region of the Congo. And also, it's most mineral rich. It's where the uranium for the Manhattan project came from. It's where the majority of copper and cobalt were. And they seceded with the support of the mining companies have been extracting money from the Congo. And with the support of Belgium, it made its own country, Katango, under its own leader, a guy called Moisee Chambre. And the Congo, as a nation, couldn't really survive without the revenues that Katango supplied it. And so the central government wanted Katango back. Katango wanted to be separate. And there you have the ingredients for what is called the Congo crisis, but could in fact be called the first Congo civil war, or the first modern Congo civil war. And then how and why did the UN become involved in this? And was this typical for UN actions at the time? Well, so we have to remember we're in the throes of the beginning of the Cold War when it was still sort of under the surface, but was very, very, very fevered. And so every international conflict became a proxy conflict for this conflict. And the Congo was no different. Britain and America considered it strategically vital. Of course, it was the source of the world's richest uranium. And of cobalt, which was used for important guidance systems in nuclear missiles. And Russia, for similar reasons, found it vital. It was also its placement is right in the middle of Africa. It's bordered by nine nations. And so it was seen as strategically key. And so essentially, the world got pulled into it. And Dark Hammer Quilt, who was the second UN Secretary General, came to realize that this had the potential, this conflict, to become kind of a sparking point for a third world war, or at least an unpleasant proxy war. And so the Congolese government had asked for help. And he readily agreed to send in tens of thousands of UN peacekeepers. But I suppose that then put the UN on one side of a civil war. Was there quite a backlash to that? Well, I mean, I think Hammer Quilt was trying very, very hard not to take a side. He felt that the Congolese people ought to have whatever it was that they wanted. And what they wanted was the chance to rule themselves. And he felt that was the only way that the country could function. And he felt that in the midst of so much global double dealing, it was kind of the UN's job to protect the small country, to protect the country that didn't have an army of spies, or even a literal army going around the world doing its bidding. What happened essentially is everyone hated him. The Russians hated him. They thought he was an agent of the West. The West kind of hated him because they thought he was ushering communism into the Congo by supporting the democratically elected Congolese leader, who was a guy called Patrice Lamumba. And he made himself extremely unpopular. And the UN peacekeepers were essentially a target of hire for everyone on the streets. And from your reading of him, what kind of a man was Hammerhold? So what drew me to him was that he was kind of an eccentric and an idealist. And he kind of had these wide ranging interests that you don't often see in modern politicians. We associate them all with that era. He was a poet and a photographer and he numbered John Steinberg among his friends and Barbara Hepworth. And he was really a man of letters. He spoke five languages. He was quite religious and he started out as quite Christian, but he kind of developed a sort of pantheistic view of religion. He was kind of more spiritual than anything else. And it's always very interesting to me when an idealistic character can survive or even thrive in the middle of cynics. And I just thought that was such an interesting dilemma that he faced. When you're faced with among the most vicious moments in modern history, to have a guy who's willing to do the right thing or to try and do the right thing is incredibly interesting. And so I guess that from the sidelines, which is where you are when you're reporting a book like this, you kind of cheer when you see someone taking the side of the Congolese in this. You cheer when you see someone who's trying not to be expedient, but to do the right thing. So could you please tell us a little bit about the events of the night he died and what people at the time thought happened? So essentially the Congo crisis had reached, you know, even greater crisis point. The UN had tried to intervene and reunite the Congo. It had tried to deal with white supremacist mercenaries that Katanga had hired to try and keep it separate from the rest of the Congo. And it had sort of backfired or it had escalated the conflict anyway. He was under a great deal of pressure and so he was flying from the Congolese capital, which at the time was called Leopoldville and is now called Kinshasa, to a place called Endola for a sort of final ceasefire summit with the president of Katanga, which was the region that has seated a guy called Moisee Shambay. And he had taken off from the airport in Leopoldville about four o'clock in the afternoon on September the 17th, 1961. And he hadn't told anyone where he was flying to exactly. For security reasons, there were cat and geese warplanes circling in the sky. It was a very hostile environment. He was a very hated figure. America and Britain wouldn't let him have fight-to-plane escorts to protect him. So there's only protection really with secrecy. So he'd taken off amid all of this secrecy from the airport in Leopoldville. And his pilot had flown a strange route. No one knew quite where he was. And so to some extent his plane to the observers anyway appeared over the south of the Congo near Katanga, at around, you know, between 11 o'clock and midnight on September the 17th. And then the official account essentially says at that point that the pilot had made an approach to the airport, misjudge something and just crashed into the ground. And what we know for sure is the wreck was discovered 15 hours later and of the 16 people on board, 15, including Hammer World, were killed at the site of the accident, one survived briefly for a little longer. But once you start digging beneath the surface, as people did at the time, and as I've done subsequently, you find that there were so many eyewitnesses who saw an account that didn't match that. I mean, that account was incredibly convenient for everyone involved. It allowed them to tie a neat bow on top and say, how sad this great man was killed, we can carry on as we'd carried on. And we'll give him the Nobel Prize prize, which he won the year afterwards, and that's an end to it. But so many people on the ground saw a second plane in the sky, or they saw, you know, fire or an explosion on Hammer World's plane, which of course is not consistent with a controlled crash as it were. And the final survivor, a man called Harold Julian, he was alive for a day or two after the crash, and he described an explosion and what he called sparks in the sky. And it said that Hammer World had told the plane to go back, which, you know, these things aren't consistent with a plane drifting gradually into the ground out of error. And that's the essential dilemma of the story, you know, is the official account correct or all of these other accounts and investigations do all of these accounts and other investigations hold any water. So if it's possible that this was say a deliberate act, at least to some extent, who would have been the main contenders for people who might have wanted to kill him. So I saw this a lot like a giant Agatha Christie mystery because the Congo was absolutely stuffed with nefarious characters from around the world. At the time, the CIA's operation in the Congo was its most expensive ever. It was hundreds of millions of dollars. And they spared no expense and they considered any measures worthwhile to retain the Congo in sort of a capitalist sphere rather than what they considered a communist sphere. There's lots of evidence that America and Britain, who were also on the ground in great numbers with with SIS or MI6. I had a hand in the murder of the elected Congolese leader Patrice Lamumba. They certainly had assassins on the ground and they certainly were doing very nefarious things. The Russians had an enormous quantity of spies on the ground. The West Germans had an enormous quantity of spies on the ground. And Katanga had sort of put together a magnificent seven or a dirty dozen of the world's white supremacist mercenaries. After World War II, of course, you had a lot of fascists and white supremacists who didn't quite know what to do with themselves. And they were kind of going round in search of a cause. And of course, this cause, which was kind of a black native Congolese population seeking democracy and seeking to overthrow a European colonial regime, this was irresistible to them. So they had flown in in their thousands to try and protect Katanga from the reaches of the central government. And all of these people, to some great for a lesser extent, dislike Tamako, they disliked the UN and they did not want to see the Congo reunited. On top of it all, you had this mining company called Union Minier, which had been extracting all the minerals from Katanga with really sweet, hard deals. It took in the vast chunk of the profits and very little went back to the country. If the country was reunited, it would have to renegotiate those deals and on what were overtly going to be less good terms. And so in a sense, they were supporting the Katanga and funding the mercenaries and even providing them, you know, material support, for example, workshops and financing to continue their fight. So you have this collection of suspects, each of whom had expressed a hostility to Hammer World, each of whom had some incentive for the Congo not to be reunited. And then once you start matching up those motives with the events of that night, a different picture emerges than the one you see in the official accounts. Now subsequent to his death, there have been a number of separate investigations into what happened. And it doesn't seem like any of them have yet really got to the bottom of it. Why do you think it's been so difficult to piece together what actually happened? So I think we know a lot more than it seems like we know from the very beginning from almost before the first official account had come out. There were really expert investigators, including some of those I detail in the book, a guy called Bo Verving, who was a trained pilot who unearthed all these extra witness accounts and sort of realized that the official account wasn't cohesive and came up with his own account. So he would do was kind of plot where all the witnesses were and plot where all the planes were on transparent sheets of plastic and then lay them over each other. And when he did, they kind of magically revealed a potential path for an attack aircraft and gradually over a series of investigators, they sort of zeroed in on a thesis, which was that there was another plane in the sky. And without those investigators, we would know almost nothing. We would only have the official account. So there is this whole big body of evidence, which points in another direction entirely. But as you point out, it's sometimes a little inconclusive. And I think that's just because it's decades ago. It's so long ago. It's, you know, what is it, 70 years, but it's an era ago, you know, it's before cell phones, it's before widespread communications, it's before widespread radar in Africa. It's just a hazy different time. It's like looking, you know, a long way back through history. So I think that's firstly one factor. The second was that the Congo crisis was described as nearly uniquely chaotic, you know, I describe it as kind of slapstick tragedy. There were lots of very strange things happening very out of the ordinary things became very ordinary, very surreal things became totally normal. If I looked into occasions on which other participants in that war had died, often they just thought whatever happened was happening was really silly until it wasn't and they were dead. Or on other occasions, they felt like a situation was really dangerous and it turned out to have been silly all along. So it was very hard to, very hard to sift fact from fiction, even on the ground in the moment. And of course, that doesn't get easier with time. And from reading the book, you see that so many people in subsequent years have come forward to say that they might have been involved or they know someone else was involved and these stories clearly don't all tally. So does that tell us something about the reliability of witnesses in general? I mean, that's a fascinating question. I think when you get into reporting, you presume that if you walk up to someone in the street and say what did you see, they can give you a really good answer and they can't. If you ask someone what someone looked like, the first word they will always say is normal. They looked normal. And it's quite an art actually to interview people and to figure out what it was that they saw as opposed to what they interpreted, for example. I think one of the errors that the official reports made is that they were kind of lazy with witnesses. You know, they sort of just got the surface answers and happily moved on. Essentially, what you tend to find is that one person's account is clouded by both their perspective literally from where they were and their perspective as a person. This was a very politically charged moment. It's not so dissimilar to now. And people's accounts tend to they take into sort of people's views of what happened, take into account their political views or kind of what they would have wanted to happen or what they think might have happened. And sifting all that is really difficult. Well, I found as I went through all of them and I must have gone through dozens, I mean, up towards a hundred of different witness accounts and people who say they saw or heard a fragment of this. If they start to rhyme, they start to all be a little different. They start to all have a different, you know, putative motivation behind them, but they start to overlap in a really interesting way. And I think that's where you can find. Maybe not the truth, but certainly some directional guidance toward what the truth is. on the history extra podcast. Usually when you're running out of rogue with the stories you dig, you find thinner and thinner evidence. In this case, as I dug and as the UN dug further, the UN is still doing its own investigations. The evidence gets hairier and hairier and bigger and bigger and weirder and weirder. Now we won't give away the conclusion to your book but you do put forward a theory of what you believe happened in the end. How confident would you say you are that this is the as much as we can say the true account of the events? So when I first started writing this book I was convinced something dodgy had happened and then halfway through I had a crisis because I thought oh my god what if it was an accident and I'm writing a book about a giant accident that would be the most boring conclusion but I would have felt duty bound to follow it all the way through and then just the weight of witness statements, just the weight of accounts which they vary but they all have a similar cast to them and they all point in one direction and toward one set of suspects and toward one method and as I dug usually when you're running out of rogue with the stories you dig you find thinner and thinner evidence. In this case as I dug and and as the UN dug further the UN is still doing its own investigations the evidence gets hairier and hairier and bigger and bigger and weirder and weirder. Every new report that comes out every piece of evidence that I come across points in a more nefarious direction than previously the only way I would say at this point to to take the investigation any further than it's been taken lives in the archives of the British and American governments and in fact in some other governments around the world too maybe Belgium maybe South Africa where there's that huge group of spies that was on the ground we don't know what they knew we don't know what their involvement whilst we don't know where they were they've all died so there's no particular people to protect both Britain and America have released embarrassing intelligence documents from that era previously and what we think are in their archives are a couple of NSA operatives for the American National Security Agency have come forward to say that they thought they heard the events of that evening while they were on duty while they were intercepting radio communications for the American government we've never seen those transcripts we don't know if they exist but two people have confirmed that they heard something along those lines you had a half a dozen spies between Britain and America on the ground we don't know what their report said what they what they reported back to headquarters although we have evidence that they were reporting something similar to the witnesses who said that something dodgy had happened and that would be that would be kind of the holy grail in this case I think that's what the UN is pushing for that's what I'm pushing for that's what others are pushing for what did this incident mean for the UN did it change the way it operated afterwards so I think Hamilton has become kind of the archetype of what a UN secretary general could and should be he was idealistic he did not take a side which is the hardest thing to do because you're funded by these various governments and they honestly they pretend they want you to do the right thing but what they want you to do is whatever they want and you give them day and he's one of the very few secretary generals who who managed to negotiate that he was a very deaf negotiator a very thoughtful guy and a very I think a very good psychological reader of people and so he was able to navigate this thicket and he kind of became what we would hope the UN would be I would say it wasn't just in the Congo around the world during his his term and a bit as secretary general he was taking the role of of what a more activist UN might be I often think of him now because of course many of the issues we're facing are completely global a pandemic is global it doesn't really care what what your national government is trying to do it it's global disinformation is global climate change is global we have all these global issues that we need to tackle and sometimes I crave a figure like like Amicalt who who pushed the UN into a position of a prominent at that moment which you know I think it's attained rarely since I think during some areas the UN has been approaching that role on the global stage and in other eras sadly including ours now it's sort of an afterthought it's sort of a seen as an inconvenience I think by by leaders in Britain and America and elsewhere and then on this sort of Africa what does this incident tell us about the content at that point so I was surprised when I was reporting into the history of the Congo you know we have this weird myth that that until white people showed up in Africa it was you know mudhuts and it just wasn't it was a really thriving civilization it was had empires that rose and fell it had you know dramas of its own and so I was kind of surprised that we didn't know more about that that was incredibly interesting to me and when you look at a country like the Congo and the news now I think you only ever see it in the headlines when something terrible has happened when it's been struck by Ebola or there's another civil war or you're reading a harrowing story about child soldiers that you get halfway through before you skip to the sports section and what struck me is once you understand how much trauma and pain has been inflicted on that continent over the decades and centuries what's happening there now makes more sense because once you've ceded that kind of chaos once you've ceded that kind of anger and hurt it doesn't go anywhere you know so it helped me understand modern Africa or at least at least the myths of modern Africa it helped me understand that Africa is a is a very large and very culturally diverse place and that sometimes when we look at it now we make the same error as colonialists and that we just see it as a monolith or a place that's subject to uncivilized chaos more than any other place and it's just not. Now I appreciate that you've finished writing the book now but are you finished with this story or are you still investigating? Absolutely not finished. I'm still investigating it's still like an unscratched itch to some extent. There are still new things being found the whole time. It took me years and years to write this book in part because it's a story that I got obsessed with and in part because new things kept happening. I think it's really picked up pace in recent years. I think the UN's new investigations have really added some fuel to the fire. I think the documents the Zimbabwean government is digging up which form the ending of my book are incredibly interesting Zimbabwe as you I'm sure know is geographically where a place called the Federation of Rhodesia and Nearsaland used to be and the Federation of Rhodesia and Nearsaland is a very interesting place. It was sort of run in collaboration with Britain. It was on the Congolese border and lots of the nefarious activity that Britain certainly was engaged in and Africa came through that Federation. The documents from that Federation have been lost or scattered or destroyed because they did a lot of strange and unpleasant things that perhaps they would have wanted forgotten. But the Zimbabwean government has started to find veins of these documents. They're scattered around the world. They're in this person's personal archive here. They're in you know that box under the stairs there. They're in this government archive in another place and they're starting to find really eye-opening documents and I'm certainly not going to stop bugging them and I know the UN is not. And I think with the story you can kind of feel when it's about to break and this one feels to me like it's about to break. Okay Ravi I think I've gone through the questions I was going to ask you. Is there anything that you think we I really should have asked you about but I didn't I didn't get around to I didn't think of that's a great question which I also always ask. So I guess sort of the final note in my book is kind of a plea to the British and American governments which I would reiterate here to just open up their archives I mean if you if you take the darkest view of their modern behaviour the British and American governments you could say that they've embarrassed themselves enough already why don't they just open their archives and and at least shine some light on a on a historical mystery while they're kind of airing all of their dirty laundry. I myself and and the UN and another investigator whose whose wake we all sort of trail in named Susan Williams have been pushing for years for the for the British and American governments to just reveal whatever they have. I think I say in the book that I think the most basic form of justice is to have your story honestly told. Of course at this remove we're unlikely to get someone we can put in jail for the death of Hammerwell we're unlikely to get a villain who we can you know neatly blame for all of this but I do think we can get toward the truth even closer to the truth or at least to an honest account and that's what I would continue campaigning for. That was Ravi Samaya. Operation Morthal the last great mystery of the Cold War is out now published by Viking. Thanks for listening this episode was produced by Benuit and Jack Bateman. We'll be back tomorrow with another lecture from my 2019 history weekends. (upbeat music)