Episode 29: Dag Hammarskjöld’s Final Mission, Part II – Dag’s Death

Shortly after midnight on September 18, 1961, Dag Hammarskjöld’s plane went down near Ndola in Northern Rhodesia (today Zambia), cutting short both his life and his final mission to broker peace in the Congo. What was meant to be a daring act of shuttle diplomacy—flying directly into hostile territory to meet Moïse Tshombe—ended instead in fire, wreckage, and unanswered questions.

Links:

Part 1: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2451415/episodes/17810545

David Talbot's book: https://a.co/d/cQTxQl1

#DagHammarskjöld #CongoCrisis #ColdWarHistory #Diplomacy #Peacekeeper #history #LegacyOfPeace #DagHammarskjold #decodingtheunicorn 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

In Episode 29 of the Decoding the Unicorn podcast, Sara Causey continues her two-part series on Dag Hammarskjöld’s final mission. She discusses Hammarskjöld’s efforts to broker peace in Congo, his meetings with Prime Minister Cyrille Adoula, and his attempts to meet with Tshombe. Despite a ceasefire being agreed upon, Tshombe failed to show up, leading to increased violence. Dag Hammarskjöld’s plane, the Albertina, was targeted, leading to his death. Causey explores conspiracy theories, the suppression of black African testimonies, and the broader implications of Dag Hammarskjöld’s murder, emphasizing the need for justice and remembrance.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Dag Hammarskjöld, final mission, Congo, ceasefire, UN personnel, mercenaries, plane crash, Harold Julian, conspiracy theories, deep politics, remembrance, justice, system of power, historical context, podcast episode.

Welcome to the Decoding the Unicorn podcast. Here's your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, Hello and thanks for tuning in. Welcome to Episode 29 of decoding the unicorn. The podcast, I appreciate you being here today will also be part two of my two-part series about Dag Hammarskjöld’s Final mission. If you didn't catch part one last week, I'll drop a link in the write up for this episode. I would highly advise you to check that out first. If you come to this out of sequence, I would highly advise you to go back and listen to part one, because it really provides you with the backstory. It lays out the important groundwork of, why did Dag knowingly go into a dangerous situation? It was volatile. Why was he there? It's important for us to be able to put historical events into a proper context. So make sure that you check out part one, and now let's go into part two.

What if the unicorn wasn't a myth? What if he walked among us and wore a bow tie, a diplomat, a seeker, a man of frost and fire, misunderstood by the world until now. Decoding the unicorn isn't just a biography, it's a revelation. Discover the real Dag Hammarskjöld in Sara Causey’s groundbreaking book, Decoding the Unicorn available on Amazon.com.

Dag has gone to Congo at the request of Cyrille Adoula, the Prime Minister. Now, as I mentioned last week, there are some historians who say that a doula was a puppet of the West, and he was put in by Western interests. If that is true, it certainly does color the situation, which I'll get into a bit more in this episode. Further on, he's also there because Tshombe has said that he wants a cease fire. A doula is trying to get Chom be to the negotiating table. The goal is still to have a reunified Congo, and DAG is trying to broker peace as best as he can. On September 15, Chom be has agreed to a meeting, but he doesn't show up, even though it had been agreed upon by everyone beforehand, including CHom. Be himself, he doesn't show up. So on the 16th DAG, writes another letter to him, like you called for a cease fire. You've missed the last meeting. Your absence has been a major setback, not just to the overall peace process, but for the UN to be able to restore any kind of order in Katanga, the mercenaries were becoming even more brazen than they had been before, and Chom be is getting more brazen too, because he stands dag up At that meeting on the 15th, and then he demands that UN personnel cease any and all operations in Katanga. So dag knows that this is trouble, and it's like, well, how are we going to broker a cease fire without some kind of UN presence in the country? He also knows that if the mercenaries have a complete free for all, there is going to be like a total hurricane, and there's going to be a lot of terror and destruction in their wake. So he writes this letter on the 16th, and he's more direct, polite, but direct. He still wants to meet with Tommy in person. He still wants to try to broker the cease fire, like you ask for it for a reason. You see that things are spiraling out of control. Let's meet face to face, break the silence and figure out what we can do. The situation as it is now is only going to continue to deteriorate and get worse. What can we do to make things better? So he gets a message late in the afternoon that Chom be would be in in Dola. There's the chance that he'll make himself available. Now on the 19th on September 19 dag was due back in Manhattan for a meeting of the General Assembly. So His time is getting narrower and narrower. And so he thinks on the 17th that he will fly. He'll take a late flight because of the mercenaries. He's not wanting to file a flight plan and get a lot of publicity around this meeting. He wants to fly to in Dola as carefully as he possibly can and as quietly as he possibly can, so that he can try to have this last ditch meeting with Chom be and that's really what it was, because he feels like, if I get stood up again, if we get to in Dola and we're stood up and Chompy won't do anything, we're just going to be wheels up for New York, because I've got to be in Manhattan on the 19th, and it's going to take us some time to fly all the way back from Africa. So if he plays more games, we're gone and we're out of here. It gets on the Albertina. And it's also worth mentioning that before, the plane had been interfered with and it had bullet holes, but it was gone over by a crew and deemed safe. So we have this foreboding that the plane has already been targeted. It's deemed safe just some superficial damage, but nothing that's like important to the integrity of the flight. It's still safe to go in the air, and DAG is still thinking like I got to make this last ditch effort. If it doesn't work out, we're gone. If it does work out, then thank God, and maybe we can get a cease fire. Maybe somebody will benefit from this trip. Of course, we know that the Albertina doesn't make it. There were black Africans who said, and I'm calling out race for a reason here. There were black Africans who said that they saw another aircraft in the sky and that it interfered with DAGs plane. There was also the report of bright lights and explosions. There was a man on board the flight named Harold Julian, who was part of the security personnel after the crash. He was found clinging to life. Nobody else was alive, including Dag and even though I really do not like getting into these sorts of details, we do have to talk about what happened. DAGs body was some distance away from the others, some have said that he was in an upright position, like he was sitting up, and that he had been propped against a termite mound. Other people say that's not the case, that his body was flung from the wreckage, but he wasn't sitting up. He was just laying down out in the grass, even though the plane had erupted into flames and some of the victims of the crash were burned so badly, investigators had to rely on dental records and the jewelry they were wearing to even tell whose remains belong to who, dag was not damaged. His his body was not damaged by the flames, his skin and his clothing were not even singed, and his briefcase was also intact. That's odd. So there's this other man, Harold Julian, that's found clinging to life. He's dehydrated because even though should have been obvious that there was trouble, a search party was not sent out immediately, and even though the wreckage was only a few miles from the airport where they were supposed to touch down in and dola, the search party doesn't find the wreckage until the following afternoon, so this poor man who has survived The plane crash is out there in the hot sun, suffering and slowly baking and dehydrating in the heat. Nevertheless, he makes it to a hospital, and he starts talking about the plane being interfered with. He says that dag makes the comment to turn around to go back. His comments are deemed unreliable, officially unreliable because he had been out in the heat. He was dehydrated, and then once he went to hospital, he was pumped full of morphine for his pain and suffering. So you can't really count on what he said. And there's also this sense of trying to debunk his testimony, because people will point to sometimes he said that he heard explosions before the plane crashed, and then other times he said that he heard explosions after the plane crashed, and so he's not reliable, and after a few days of medical treatment, he passes away. And now we're we're back into the some people say this. Some people say that category because some people say that. His injuries were so bad he was never going to make it anyway. Others say that his injuries were survivable and that he was actually on the mend in the hospital, but he dies of renal failure because he was out in the sun, because of all the trauma, because of the dehydration, his kidneys fail and he dies. So now at this point, there are no survivors of the plane crash. There's nobody who can say anything about what it was like to be an eyewitness in the thick of it all the white government in Northern Rhodesia, which at the time, was being controlled by the British, they run point on the investigation, and you have the testimony of black Africans being actively suppressed by white authorities. So these Charcoal burners who saw the Albertina being interfered with in the sky are intimidated and shoved to the side like your testimony doesn't matter you don't have the right skin color. And then on top of that, you're not saying what we want you to say about what happened. Therefore, get out of here. You're causing trouble for us that we don't want. And so get out of here and be quiet. And there have been a number of inquiries over the years. And it reminds me of the investigations in America that pertain to the murder of JFK that's like the HSCA back in the 70s, came to the conclusion that Kennedy's murder was probably a conspiracy. They never did say who they thought perpetrated the conspiracy, but simply that there was a conspiracy of some kind, probably wink, and that's a bit like what we've seen with the murder of Dag Hammarskjold. Well, we believe it's a conspiracy, or we can't rule a conspiracy out, but we're not going to point any fingers. And it seems like people get fixated on trying to figure out, well, who did it? Chom be had access to fuga jets, and there were mercenaries everywhere. If a mercenary used one of the fuga jets and forced the aircraft down, if someone was there on the ground, if somebody planted a bomb beforehand, or somebody planted bombs afterwards to blow the plane up, if someone shot dag after he was thrown clear of the wreckage because they wanted to be absolutely sure that he was dead, who did it?

And to me, that question is much less important, and it's much less compelling than why was it done, and then what kind of power structure allowed that to happen? Because pointing the finger at one or two mercenaries that by now are dead and gone, that they would had to have been scumbags anyway, to have been in that area, participating in fascist activities backed by fascist entities who even cares about trying to point at one or two particular mercenaries. To me, that's an it's a non starter. I'm much more interested in the system of power that allows something like the murder of a sitting UN Secretary General to happen. And then, why? What? What was going on that that system of power felt that dag needed to be removed forcibly. That type of power structure doesn't only control the murder itself. They control inquiries and investigations. I think it's very difficult to try to find any truly independent inquiry. I'm not saying there hasn't been one, and I'm not pointing fingers at anybody. I'm telling you, in my opinion, it would seem to me to follow that it would be really damn difficult to get any kind of independent inquiry and come to any real conclusion about what actually happened, because I have to believe that kind of system of power would prevent john and jane Q Public from knowing the truth. So you have them in positions where you're not going to be able to find out the who done it anyway. That doesn't mean that we don't keep trying. It doesn't mean that we don't keep looking for facts. I think it's one massive David versus Goliath battle. And in terms of ever finding some memo, this is something that we see a lot with the JFK files. Everybody hopes for, for the proverbial smoking gun the moment that's like something from a Sherlock Holmes story. Aha. We know now we have all the answers. This memo definitively proves X, Y and Z. We look for it and we're not going to find it. I don't think, I think instead, it's going to be a collection of evidence. That's really what we've seen bear out true with the JFK case, and I think that that's what will happen with Dag hammershould as well. It's like little pieces of tile that make up a mosaic, or little tiny pieces that all go into a jigsaw puzzle, and you can finally start to see an overall narrative. But I don't think there will ever be some single memo from an intelligence agency that says we did this. And here's why. I could be wrong, but if I had to make my best guess, that's what it would be. I just don't think that there would be some firm paper trail. There have been stories certainly about the symar and Keith Maxwell and the alleged involvement of Allen Dulles. And I don't know, having, having not ever been able to examine any kind of original documents. I don't know the veracity of that. It's a bizarre story, the story of this South African maritime research organization and Keith Maxwell, their odd leader, who was some kind of quack doctor. The whole scene down there a very weird thing, very weird. Did they really have some involvement? I truly I don't know, and I think that we have to be careful of red herrings and bizarre stories that lead us down rabbit holes. There was a novel that was written, I think maybe late 60s, early 70s. I'm just trying to remember off the top of my head what the publication date was, but Richard Condon, the same writer who composed the Manchurian Candidate, later wrote a satirical novel called Winter kills, and it was made into a movie where Jeff Bridges is in the main character role, and it satirizes people who go down these various rabbit holes of JFK conspiracy theories. I felt that it was rather a slap in the face, considering that Kennedy played an important role in the the film The Manchurian Candidate ever being made. He was a fan of the novel and and he played an important role in seeing the film get made. So I sort of like, well, what beef does Richard Condon here have here that he's doing such a thing I that just struck me as odd, and it still does. I didn't care for the novel and I didn't care for the movie, but he's not making a completely insane point. I think his delivery is a bit off, and I think his besmirchment of Kennedy, it is beyond the pale, that part of it I didn't really care for. And I also would say his portrayal that people who go looking for answers are buffoons, and they're just going further and further down a rabbit hole that they're that they're never going to get out of. At the same time, we can see that there's a nugget of truth there. When we go too far into the story of Keith Maxwell and the symar then we start to get further and further away from what actually happened to DAG, who was DAG. Why does he matter? Why does his murder still matter as well? Because we get fixated on the weird, and I do mean weird stories of what was going on, allegedly, with Keith Maxwell in the cymar. And then we just get further and further away from the original starting point. You see that, in my opinion, in a documentary, which I'm using in air quotes, there a documentary like Mads brugers, Cold Case hammer sold, where he openly admits in the documentary, well, I didn't get any closer to finding out who killed DAG, but I didn't really care about him anyway, and I'm sitting there like, wow, wow. All right, so I don't, I don't myself, have any desire to start going down this pathway of, let's examine who is Keith Maxwell, and let's talk about the cymar That's that's not my goal for this podcast at all. The goal is to keep the focus on DAG, and that's why also trying to point a finger at some particular mercenary and say, Well, I think he did it. I think he was piloting the fuga jet. Well, why at whose behest was he doing that? I. It. He probably didn't have the idea to do it himself. Who gave him the green light and then who told that person to green light? It Go, go further up to the top. It's a bit like when prosecutors get somebody that's a low level criminal, but what they really want is for that person to turn state's evidence and get the big fish. They're not worried about the guppies or the minnows in the pond. They want the big kahuna. And that, to me, is the question, who's the big kahuna in this situation? That's where I think inquiries and private investigations need to look. There's a notion that dag was planning to come back if he was unsuccessful at a cease fire, or unsuccessful suddenly creating peace in Congo, which would have been an unrealistic goal anyway, to say that the whole situation would be solved in one trip that he was going to come back to the UN and tender an immediate resignation, I have found no evidence of that. As a matter of fact, I found copious evidence that such a rumor is not true. As I mentioned earlier, there was a general assembly meeting on September 19 DAG. Had already been briefed that the Cuban government felt that the US was going to attack Cuba from either Puerto Rico, Panama, Guatemala or Guantanamo Bay, and they wanted to bring that issue to the General Assembly. When it opened, also Willie Brandt, who was the Mayor of West Berlin, had indicated that he wanted dag to come visit West Berlin quickly. So it's like there were all of these other Cold War issues that dag had to deal with, and he was planning to be back. Moreover, Dr Greg polgreen Has the fantastic book JFK versus Allen Dulles. He spoke to George Ivan Smith, and George Ivan Smith confirmed that dag was also intending to get involved in an issue with Netherlands, New Guinea. JFK felt like he couldn't get in the middle of it, because it would turn into a mess with the allies. The Dutch didn't want to leave, and the Indonesians felt like Netherlands, New Guinea was part of their country. So DAG, at the request of JFK, was going to get involved in this Netherlands New Guinea debacle towards self determination and pole grain uncovered some amazing information about exactly how profitable Netherlands New Guinea was, according to Paul grain, Allen Dulles knew. JFK didn't know, and Dag hammerschool didn't know, but Dulles did. So we have a couple of different important things there to call out. One is that dag had plans. There's no evidence to suggest that he was going to fly back from Mendola, get in front of the General Assembly and tender his resignation. Dag had already made it very clear that at any point in time, if the majority of member nations lost confidence in him and didn't want him in the job, he would step aside, not because he wanted to resign, but if he no longer was viewed as competent for the job by the member nations, he wouldn't put up a fight. But I have just simply found no evidence that he was intending to come back, tender his resignation and hit the road. There's also the defamatory idea put forth by the now defunct fact magazine that dag was suicidal, that he had turned into some kind of schizophrenic megalomaniac, and that he was suicidal he was so upset by his failure to broker peace in Congo, and he was some kind of sexually repressed pervert, and he decided to put a bomb on his own plane, take a gun on his own plane, and he went nuts in the air and murdered everybody on board, and then turned the gun on himself. It's worth mentioning that even though the American courts have really upheld the journalists side of things, and it's typically very difficult to prove actual malice and to prove defamation in the American courts, especially if you're talking about public figures, and even More, especially if you're talking about political public figures in the case of Goldwater V Ginsburg, where fact magazine was sued by Barry Goldwater for defamation, the Court sided with Goldwater. That's a rarity, so it's not surprising to me. That they would have eventually been taken down by a defamation suit. Because, my God, to say such spurious, awful things about DAG, to me, it begs the question, who came up with that story idea, right? Because it's not about in my mind, it's not about fact magazine. It's not about the journalist who wrote the article, or even the quoted individuals in the article who completely shanked dag in the back and said awful things about him, who who came up with the story idea, not only who greenlit it, but who devised it? Now going back to the second thing that Greg polegrans research had turned up about this connection with Netherlands, New Guinea and Allen Dulles, after dag was murdered, Harry Truman, who knew DAG, and was friends with DAG. Truman was friends with DAG, and he was also friends with JFK. So you have an ex president who's friends with the murder victim and is also friends with the sitting US president. He makes a comment to the media that dag was on the verge of getting something done when they murdered him, and the journalists are kind of like, what when he's asked to elaborate on the comment, he doesn't elaborate. He makes it clear that he said what he said, and that's pretty much his response when they murdered him. I said what I said, and then he won't elaborate any further from there. But it certainly makes you wonder, what did he know that people in the general public did not know? And by the way, there was a lot that people in the general public didn't know. Just yet, there were fake newspaper articles. You can go to newspapers.com and look at this for yourself. Don't take my word for it. There were fake newspaper articles while dag was dead in Angola. There were fake newspaper articles that hit the newsstands in America that Dag and Chom be had met, they spoke for an hour, and then dag was headed back to Manhattan when I was doing research for simply DAG, I sat absolutely gobsmacked when I found that information. I was like, how, how? How was this allowed to happen? Who? Who ordered this, who created this story? It is, by my literal definition, fake news. It is a fake story that dag met with Chom be at in Dola. They talked for an hour, and then DAG is on his way back to Manhattan. Meanwhile, Dag was deceased. Chauvin never showed up, and Dag and everybody else, except for Harold Julian, at that point in time was deceased. It definitely makes you think back to the 1970s when Carl Bernstein wrote an editorial that was published in Rolling Stone about how the agency has a lot of hooks in the American media. I mean, it's not just the American media, I would argue. But you get the point that I'm making things that make you say, Hmm, so Truman makes this comment when they murdered him. I want to go now to David Talbot, amazing book, The Devil's chess board. It's germane to this topic. Even though it's not about dag it's germane to the topic at hand. I just want to read a brief passage after the Bay of Pigs, Truman had confided in writer Merle Miller that he regretted ever establishing the CIA. I think it was a mistake, he said, And if I'd known what was going to happen, I never would have done it. Eisenhower never paid any attention to it, and it got out of hand. It's become a government all its own and all secret. That's a very dangerous thing in a democratic society, after JFK is murder in November of 1963 we read that Truman wrote a letter to Look magazine the managing editor William Arthur. And in this letter to William Arthur, from June of 1964 Truman again, makes clear that he has some grave concerns about the CIA. He writes, the CIA was set up by me for the sole purpose of getting all the available information to the President. It was not intended to operate as an international agency engaged in strange activities. Dulles is relentless. He's talking about Allen Dulles. In this case, Dulles relentless effort to manipulate Truman and failing that, the Truman record is yet one more example of. Spy masters strange activities. Talbot goes on to talk about how Dulles gets aggravated that Truman has been both publicly and privately denouncing the activities of the agency. So he goes to Truman and tries to strong arm him. Truman doesn't relent. So then Dulles goes out in the public and is like, well, you know, Truman is a sad old man. He's getting senile, and isn't that just a shame? He doesn't even know what he's saying. He doesn't even know what he's talking about. I just think it's worth considering. I'm not pointing the finger of blame again at any one particular person or even any one particular agency. I just think it's worth considering what Peter Dale Scott refers to as a system of deep politics. What kind of system allows for a sitting UN Secretary General to be murdered, violently murdered, and then everybody else on board the plane was just collateral damage.

That's frightening. It deserves to be talked about, even though I hate talking about it. It's not something that gives me any pleasure. It deserves to be remembered, and not in a sensational tabloid kind of way, but in the way that cries out for justice. I even if justice doesn't come, which, at the risk of sounding incredibly cynical, I don't think it ever will, to at least have a sense of remembrance. It's a bit like going into a cathedral saying a prayer and lighting a candle. You remembered that some injustice took place. You remembered that the world lost an incredible human being that day. I also believe it's very important to not reduce dag to being a murder victim, so that every conversation a person has about DAG is regarding the bizarre circumstances of his death. He had an amazing life. He was an amazing person, and his accomplishments, the goals that he was striving for, those things should be remembered first and foremost. So it's not about forgetting that dag was murdered. It's not about forgetting that, in my opinion, a system of power, this system of deep politics, bears a direct responsibility for that murder. It's about not going down these weird red herring rabbit holes and turning everything into a sensational circus. Dag would never have wanted that. He was a private man.

He appreciated dignity and respect not here's gory photos. Here's the most disgusting details we can possibly lay out about the wreckage and the carnage.

To me, it's not about that. It is about remembrance, even if justice never comes. It is about remembrance. And I think one of the best ways that we can remember, even beyond going in the cathedral, saying a prayer and lighting a candle, is to integrate that person's values into our own lives, to say that out of one comes many. You may have tried to squash one person, but you're not going to squash everybody. So as we come to September 18, that's my message to the listeners. What can we do to keep DAGs memory alive and to integrate his values and the things that he stood for, the things that he lived for and the things that he died for into our own lives, to keep that light burning, to keep that fire stoked, to do what we can to avoid a beautiful human being silenced forever, just my thoughts, take good care of yourself, and I will see you in the next episode.

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