Dag Hammarskjöld

Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjöld (July 29, 1905 to September 18, 1961) was a Swedish economist and diplomat who served as the second Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1953 until his death.¹ He was one of sixteen people aboard the Swedish Transair DC-6 known as the Albertina, flight SE-BDY, which crashed near Ndola in Northern Rhodesia on the night of September 17 and 18, 1961.² The Rhodesian and United Nations inquiries of 1961 and 1962 did not fix the cause, and the General Assembly has kept the investigation open since 2014.

Swedish career

Hammarskjöld was the youngest of four sons of Hjalmar Hammarskjöld, who had been prime minister of Sweden, a member of the Hague Tribunal, governor of Uppland, and chairman of the board of the Nobel Foundation.³ He took degrees at Uppsala University in the humanities in 1925, in economics in 1928 and in law in 1930, and a doctorate in economics in 1934. He taught economics at Stockholm University in 1933. He was secretary of a governmental commission on unemployment from 1930 to 1934, and secretary of the Bank of Sweden from 1935. He was undersecretary in the Swedish Ministry of Finance from 1936 to 1945 and head of the Bank of Sweden from 1941 to 1948. The Nobel biography says he has been credited with coining the term "planned economy."⁴ From 1946 he was financial adviser to the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, took an official post there in 1949, became deputy foreign minister with cabinet rank in 1951, and represented Sweden at the United Nations in 1949 and again from 1951 to 1953.

Secretary-General, 1953 to 1961

The General Assembly elected him Secretary-General in 1953 for a five-year term, with fifty-seven votes out of sixty, and reelected him in 1957. The Nobel biography says that he called his method "preventive diplomacy," that in 1954 and 1955 he personally negotiated the release of American soldiers captured by the Chinese in the Korean War, and that he sought more independence and effectiveness for the post itself.⁵ In 1958 he proposed to the Assembly a solution to the crises in Lebanon and Jordan. In 1959 he sent a personal representative to Southeast Asia when Cambodia and Thailand broke off diplomatic relations, and another to Laos.⁶

Suez and the emergency force

During the Suez Crisis of 1956 he exercised what the Nobel biography describes as his own personal diplomacy with the nations involved. Under the United Nations mandate he commissioned the United Nations Emergency Force, "the first ever mobilized by an international organization."⁷ General Assembly resolution 1001 (ES-I) of November 5, 1956 established a United Nations Command for the force, appointed the Chief of Staff of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization as its chief, and created an advisory committee whose chairman was the Secretary-General.⁸

Katanga and the mining interests

On July 14, 1960 the Security Council authorized the Secretary-General to provide the Government of the Republic of the Congo with the military assistance it had asked for.⁹ On August 9, 1960 the Council reaffirmed that the United Nations Force in the Congo "will not be a party to or in any way intervene in or be used to influence the outcome of any internal conflict, constitutional or otherwise."¹⁰

On July 11, 1960 the Katangan politician Moise Tshombe declared the province independent, with the overt support of the Belgian military command. The Commission of Jurists wrote that Katanga contained the majority of the Congo's known mineral resources, "the world's richest uranium and four fifths of the West's cobalt supply," mined principally by a Belgian company, the Union Minière du Haut Katanga. The company immediately recognized the secessionist government in Elisabethville and began paying it royalties, so that Tshombe's regime "was well funded," and "so long as Katanga remained independent of the Congo, there was no risk that the assets of Union Minière would be expropriated."¹¹

The Commission recorded that Union Minière had close relations with the British company Tanganyika Concessions, whose chairman, Captain Charles Waterhouse, was also a director of Union Minière, and that Tanganyika Concessions had links with Anglo American, the Rhodesian Selection Trust and the British South Africa Company. The prime minister of the Rhodesian Federation, Roy Welensky, wrote on April 21, 1961 in a secret message to the British foreign secretary, Lord Home, that "Tshombe is a very good friend of the Federation." The High Commissioner in Salisbury, Lord Alport, sent London a dispatch a week after the crash blaming the United Nations' "complete failure to understand the conditions in Central Africa."¹² The Commission wrote that there was evidence of a cleft in policy between the United States administration, which supported the United Nations, and the Central Intelligence Agency, which "may have been providing materiel to Katanga," and concluded that Belgium, the British and American security services, the Rhodesian Federation with its British supporters, and South Africa "had reasons not to welcome the prospect of a reunited and independent Congo which it was the UN's policy and Dag Hammarskjöld's mission to bring about."¹³

On February 21, 1961 the Security Council resolved that measures be taken for the withdrawal of all Belgian and other foreign military and paramilitary personnel and political advisers not under the United Nations Command, "and mercenaries."¹⁴ The Commission wrote that some 500 foreign mercenaries were attached to the Katangan army by the start of 1961, at about £4,000 a year plus keep, that the principal paymasters were likely Belgium and South Africa, and that commercial sources were also possible.¹⁵

Political command of the United Nations operation was exercised by the Irish diplomat Conor Cruise O'Brien, whose priority was to force Tshombe to expel the mercenaries and to acknowledge the authority of the Congolese government. Tshombe's refusal prompted Operation Rumpunch, which on August 28, 1961 captured a number of strategic points in Elisabethville; Britain, Belgium and France then intervened diplomatically and took responsibility for deporting the mercenaries captured, while at least 100 remained unaccounted for. Operation Morthor followed on September 13, 1961, designed to seize key buildings in Elisabethville and facilitate the arrest of Tshombe and four of his ministers. Katanga's resources included at least one and possibly several Fouga Magister jet trainers armed with two machine guns, with mercenaries to fly them, one of which had on several occasions harassed United Nations transport planes on the ground.¹⁶

Lumumba

The Church Committee documented the American side of the Patrice Lumumba affair from CIA cables. On August 18, 1960 Bronson Tweedy, chief of the Africa Division of the agency's clandestine services, replied that he was seeking State Department approval for an operation based on "your and our belief Lumumba must be removed if possible." On August 19 Richard Bissell, director of the agency's covert operations branch, signed a follow-up cable to Leopoldville reading "You are authorized proceed with operation."¹⁷

On August 26 Allen Dulles cabled that "targets of opportunity may present themselves to you," and authorized up to $100,000 "to carry out any crash programs on which you do not have the opportunity to consult HQS."¹⁸ The Committee wrote that Lumumba "was killed by Congolese rivals. It does not appear from the evidence that the United States was in any way involved in the killing."¹⁹ It also wrote that the evidence was "strong enough to permit a reasonable inference that the plot to assassinate Lumumba was authorized by President Eisenhower."²⁰ The Commission of Jurists wrote that Lumumba and two other Congolese politicians were kidnapped by the troops of Joseph Mobutu in January 1961, "allegedly with the connivance of the Belgian, British and US security services," and taken to Katanga, where they were tortured and murdered.¹³ On February 21, 1961 the Security Council, having "learnt with deep regret" of the announced killing, decided that "an immediate and impartial investigation be held."¹⁴

The journey to Ndola

The Commission wrote that Hammarskjöld and his team arrived in Léopoldville from New York on September 13, 1961, to discuss an aid programme with the Congolese government, on the day that Morthor was launched without his knowledge or approval. An attempt by the British consulate in Elisabethville to broker ceasefire talks between Tshombe and O'Brien had stalled over O'Brien's requirement that Tshombe first recognize the unity of the Congo. On September 16 Hammarskjöld proposed that he and Tshombe meet in Rhodesia, and the arrangements were passed through the British consul in Katanga, Denzil Dunnett; Ndola was settled on as the venue. On September 17 the Secret Intelligence Service officer Neil Ritchie, first secretary at the High Commission in Salisbury, flew with two small aircraft to collect Tshombe and Dunnett at Kipushi, where he found them with Henry Fortemps, the assistant director general of Union Minière in Elisabethville.²¹

The Albertina, chartered from Transair and assigned to the United Nations Force Commander, took off from Ndjili airport at 1751. Radio silence was maintained, the pilot filed a flight plan naming Luluabourg as his destination, and the aircraft flew a circuitous route to avoid interception by Katangan fighters. The Secretary-General had asked other states for air cover; Ethiopia had agreed to provide jet fighters, but the British government had not granted clearance to overfly British East African territory, which the Commission attributed to the want in London of any sense of urgency and not to more, finding no convincing evidence that the failure was deliberate. Lord Lansdowne, the British Under-Secretary of State, landed at Ndola at about 2230, flying ahead of the United Nations party at the Secretary-General's suggestion. The Commission recorded that among those at the airport by midnight were Alport, Dunnett and a considerable number of journalists, and that according to the memoir of the South African mercenary commander Jerry Puren, he and two other mercenaries were also at the airport and two more were in the town, a presence the Commission said had never been explained save by Puren as a coincidence.²² The last recorded exchange with Ndola air traffic control came at 0010 hours, when the aircraft reported "Your lights in sight, overhead Ndola, descending, confirm QNH" and, after the controller's reply, confirmed "Roger 1021." No further communication is recorded.²³

The Foreign Relations of the United States editorial note records that the plane "crashed as it approached Ndola that evening," and that all aboard were killed. On September 18 Dean Rusk, then in New York for the General Assembly session, called on Executive Assistant Andrew Cordier and Under Secretary-General Ralph Bunche. According to the memorandum of the conversation, Bunche "emphasized the depradations [sic] of a single jet fighter," and Rusk assured the group that "the United States could not stand idly by and let U.N. planes be interfered with on their missions."²⁴

The wreck and the survivor

The official Rhodesian account was that the wreckage was found at about 1500 hours on September 18, some fifteen hours after the aircraft failed to land. The 2022 report of the Eminent Person wrote that information from multiple sources established that it was discovered earlier, and that numerous sources refer to unidentified persons at the crash site before its official discovery.²⁵ One person aboard, a United Nations security sergeant, survived the impact and died in hospital some days later. The 2024 report wrote that the Rhodesian inquiries prematurely dismissed his statements, and that some statements he may have made before he died were not put before them.²⁶ The 2022 report recorded that the Ndola air traffic controller destroyed his original notes of the final communications, that no tapes were made of the control tower's interactions, and that later information cast further doubt on the completeness of his account.²⁷

Intelligence and military presence at Ndola

The 2019 report of the Eminent Person, Mohamed Chande Othman, recorded that Ritchie, Dunnett and Alport, together with others, made arrangements in September 1961 for the Ndola meeting with Tshombe. British diplomatic, intelligence and commercial personnel used the facilities of the Union Minière and other channels to communicate with each other and with Belgian and Katangan authorities, and the report recorded that the United States appeared to have been aware of some of these interactions. It recorded that the intercepts of United Nations communications were discussed at a high level by Alport, by the United States Consul in Elisabethville, William C. Canup, and by Welensky.²⁸ The 2022 report wrote that Ritchie flew a Union Minière engineer to Kitwe in Northern Rhodesia in September 1961, where the engineer worked with a British commercial figure who referred to himself as British intelligence, to support the transmission of messages between the governments of Katanga, Northern Rhodesia and the United Kingdom, and that on the night of the crash Ritchie and these two men stayed at the same location. After the crash the engineer and Ritchie travelled to Katanga with the aim of taking the Secretary-General's documents, recovered from the crash site, to Dunnett. Ritchie wrote a secret report for the Commonwealth Relations Office in London, and the United Kingdom has not disclosed records of MI5 or MI6 personnel.²⁹

The Commission recorded the account of David Doyle, a former CIA officer who had been in charge of the agency's Elisabethville base until April 1961. Doyle wrote in a memoir that on a night visit to the airport, not long after the killing of Lumumba, he found a US-registered Stratocruiser whose civilian crew were unloading three Fouga Magister jet trainers, armed, for Katanga, which he wrote was "in direct violation" of US policy. In June 2013 Doyle told Charles Southall that after he had been posted to Burundi, Tweedy "came out after and wanted to know if I had any idea what had happened." The Commission wrote that if Tweedy had to ask Doyle such a question, the possibility of direct CIA involvement in interfering with the Albertina's flight, as distinct from giving logistical support to Katanga, "begins to recede." The Commission also recorded that, according to Puren's memoir, one or more Katangan De Havilland Dove aircraft had been adapted to drop bombs of a kind manufactured by Union Minière.³⁰

The 2019 report recorded that Larry Devlin, chief of station in Léopoldville, coordinated agents designated "WIROGUE" and "QJWIN," and that the agency's activities in the Congo included planned assassinations, such as those under the programme "ZRRIFLE."³¹ The 2022 report recorded that the CIA employed the mercenary Mike Hoare in the 1960s, "though likely some years after the crash," that Hoare, who had been in the service of Katanga in 1961, stated that the crash was not an accident, and that Senator Frank Church "is said to have claimed" that the United States held significant undisclosed information relating to the crash. It recorded West German and CIA records suggesting West German operations in the Congo involving an agent of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), and a telegram of December 16, 1961 from the United Kingdom representative in Salisbury reporting that "certain Federal agencies were deeply implicated in military traffic between Northern Rhodesia and Katanga" and that the Ndola representative of the Federal Intelligence and Security Bureau regularly "briefed and debriefed" Katangan pilots.³² The same report found that the Katangan air force, Avikat, had multiple serving pilots, that its aircraft included a Fouga Magister, a Dornier DO-28 and several De Havilland Doves, and that armaments for its operations appear to have included weapons made locally with the involvement of Union Minière.³³

The Commission recorded that two USAF aircraft stood on the tarmac at Ndola that night, one from Pretoria and one from Léopoldville, and quoted a British witness who said that "Those planes we understood had high powered communication equipment." A Rhodesian squadron leader, Mussell, was reported to have told the UN inquiry that "American Dakotas were sitting on the airfield with their engines running." The United States air attaché in Pretoria, Don Gaylor, was according to his memoirs ordered by the Pentagon to Ndola to meet the Secretary-General.³⁴ The 2024 report recorded that two Dakota aircraft had arrived at Ndola by September 16, one under the command of Commander Don Ely, the naval attaché for air in Pretoria, and one under Gaylor, the air force attaché for air in Pretoria, and that a third was flown from Elisabethville on the morning of September 18 by Colonel Benjamin Matlick, United States air attaché in Léopoldville. It stated that there was "a reasonable evidentiary basis to consider that these or other aircraft ... may have overheard or relayed communications from or about flight SE-BDY." Gaylor referred to his "unique intelligence operations" and reports to the Pentagon, was in the Ndola control tower on the night of the crash, and according to his accounts was among the first to locate the wreckage the next day; no reports of his activities on September 18 have been disclosed.³⁵

The 1961 and 1962 inquiries

The Rhodesian Federal Department of Civil Aviation set up an air accident investigation two days after the crash. Its Board of Investigation, which sat in private, concluded that the approach had been normal and correct except that the aircraft was about 1,700 feet lower than it should have been. It found that the evidence did not allow a "specific" or "definitive" cause, and while pilot error was a possibility it was unable to rule out a "wilful act of some person or persons unknown which might have forced the aircraft to descend or collide with the trees." A Rhodesian Commission of Inquiry chaired by the Chief Justice, Sir John Clayden, reported in February 1962 that "the aircraft was allowed by the pilots to descend too low, so that it struck the trees and was brought to the ground."³⁶

A United Nations Commission of Investigation, chaired by Rishikesh Shaha, reported in April 1962 that it had found no evidence of sabotage or attack, but that these possibilities could not be excluded. It could not exclude material failure or human failure either. The bibliography of the Commission of Jurists dates the report, document A/5069, to April 24, 1962.³⁷ The Foreign Relations editorial note dates a report of the Commission of Investigation to March 8, 1962.³⁸ On October 26, 1962 the General Assembly adopted resolution 1759 (XVII), which requested the Secretary-General to inform it of "any new evidence which may come to his attention."³⁹

The Hammarskjöld Commission, 2013

In July 2012 an enabling committee chaired by Lord Lea of Crondall, which included the former Commonwealth Secretary-General Emeka Anyaoku and the Archbishop Emeritus of the Church of Sweden, K. G. Hammar, set up a commission of jurists chaired by Sir Stephen Sedley. Its members were Hans Corell, Richard Goldstone and Wilhelmina Thomassen. The commission's report was made public on September 9, 2013. The Secretary-General transmitted it to the General Assembly as document A/68/800 on March 21, 2014, stating that he had "the duty to inform you that new evidence has come to my attention."⁴⁰

The commission did not determine the cause of the crash. Its essential purpose was to consider whether the evidence pointing to a wilful act merited fuller consideration. It noted that the work of Susan Williams, whose 2011 book Who Killed Hammarskjöld? was the principal published account of the case, "marshalled a striking quantity of evidential material."⁴¹

The commission rejected the theory of an infiltrated seventeenth passenger who hijacked the aircraft, on the ground that only sixteen identified people were found at the site.⁴² It recorded the allegation of Soviet responsibility made in the August 1978 issue of Penthouse, which quoted a purported CIA report to President Kennedy that "the explosive device aboard the aircraft was of standard KGB incendiary design," and wrote that there was no evidence from any source known to it to support the claim, while noting that it would be of value to know on what evidence the CIA report, assuming it was accurately quoted, was based.⁴³ The Associated Press had reported on June 3, 1978 that the magazine's account rested on unnamed CIA sources and a six-month investigation by the reporters Joe Trento and Dave Roman.⁴⁴

The commission wrote 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 did not consider the sabotage claim "capable of verification," and added that this "is not the same thing as saying that it is untrue." It did not recommend that the sabotage evidence be further investigated by the United Nations for the present, and wrote that the United Nations "would be justified in reopening its 1961-2 inquiry for the initial purpose of confirming or refuting, from intercept records, the evidence indicating that the descent of the Secretary-General's plane was brought about by some form of attack or threat." It added that such records "appear, on the evidence currently available, to be held, if anywhere, in the United States."⁴⁵

The National Security Agency and the intercept records

On the intercepts, the commission wrote that "both from the specific evidence of a physical US presence at Ndola airport with radio monitoring equipment, and from the broader evidence of the US National Security Agency's worldwide monitoring activities in and about 1961, 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." It added that any cockpit narrative or tower dialogue should in the ordinary course have been monitored, recorded, logged and archived by the National Security Agency, and that authenticated recordings would furnish "potentially conclusive evidence of what happened to the DC6."⁴⁶

The National Security Archive at George Washington University submitted Freedom of Information Act requests on the commission's behalf for any recording or transcription of radio traffic intercepted by the NSA at its Cyprus station or any other station on the night of September 17 and 18, 1961 appearing to relate to one aircraft firing upon another, and for any radio message intercepted between 2130 GMT on September 17 and 0030 GMT on September 18 concerning the landing or approach of an aircraft at Ndola. The NSA's initial response indicated that two of three documents "responsive" to the request appeared to be exempt from disclosure by reason of "top secret" classification, and that the third was not held by the NSA. On July 19, 2013 the National Security Archive's public service coordinator wrote to the commission, relaying the view of the Archive's CIA specialist, John Prados, that NSA intercepts "have always been highly guarded by declassifiers," and an appeal against the continuing classification was lodged.⁴⁷

The Independent Panel of Experts recorded in 2015 that the NSA advised that two files in its possession were "responsive" to the request, and that they could not be released because doing so "could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security." The Swedish newspaper SvD Nyheter reported on November 21, 2014 that the United States had given Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt access to the two files, and quoted him as saying that the information in them was "trivial and unimportant." In response to the Panel's own request, one member of the Panel, of Australian nationality, was afforded full access to the two files under the bilateral security information-sharing arrangements between the United States and Australia; she assessed that they would not help establish the cause of the crash and contained no information on the interception of communications about an attack on SE-BDY. In a letter of June 9, 2015 the United States told the Panel that its search of NSA and CIA records had not found documents matching the materials the Panel had described.⁴⁸

Southall and the Cyprus listening post

Charles Southall was a former United States Navy commander who, according to the commission, had been in September 1961 at the NSA's naval communications facility in Cyprus, which maintained a listening post near Nicosia, where his task was to read and if necessary decrypt intercepted messages. He described a recording played back over a loudspeaker shortly after midnight on the night of the crash. In the commission's rendering of his account, a single male voice, described as "cool and professional," said: "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 DC6. It's the plane." The sound of cannon-fire followed, and then a more animated voice: "I've hit it. There are flames. It's going down. It's crashing." The commission recorded that Southall was positive the traffic was consistent only with a deliberate shooting down, while noting that on its face the narrative he recounted "is not inconsistent with an accidental shooting-down."⁴⁹

The Independent Panel of 2015 quoted the passage with the wording "I'm going to go down to make a run on it." Southall told the Panel that his communications watch officer, or another officer present, had told him that a Belgian pilot known as the "Lone Ranger," flying a Fouga Magister used by Katangese forces, made the transmission and that the pilot "must be waiting for Hammarskjöld's plane."⁵⁰ The Panel recorded that an analyst at the State Department, Karen Engstrom, contacted Southall on December 8, 1992 in connection with a request from Sweden for assistance with its own investigation, which was headed by the Swedish diplomat Bengt Rösiö.⁵¹

The United States confirmed to the Panel in 2015 that Southall was an active member of the Navy at the time, without saying where he was stationed. Southall declined an interview with the Panel for health reasons. The Panel described his account as "solitary witness information," because no colleague present had corroborated it. In correspondence of July 28, 1993, a colleague who was then a diplomat was reported to have told a journalist that he had "no special memory of" an incident that night.⁵² The 2019 report recorded that the United States confirmed he joined the Navy in 1955, was released from active duty in 1969 and retired as a commander from the Naval Reserve in 1978, and gave no information on whether he worked in support of NSA.⁵³ The 2022 report wrote that it had not been disputed that he held a specialization as a "processing and reporting" officer assigned at a naval communications facility near Nicosia in 1961, and that he consistently attempted to convey the information to officials between 1967 and 2013.⁵⁴

The 2019 report recorded that a Swedish assistant air attaché in Rabat reported in 1967 that Southall had heard a radio message from a Belgian mercenary, and that Edelstam, deputy director at the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, replied that "nobody had ever claimed that the plane was shot down from the ground." In the early 1980s Southall met the Scandinavian academic Sten Thore and told him about the crash. Thore's letter of October 21, 1992 to Rösiö stated that Southall "declares categorically that all the circumstances were known in detail within the CIA." The Panel had assessed Southall's information about an attack as having moderate probative value in 2015, and the 2019 report wrote that the new information received that year "is consistent with and supports his previous statements."⁵⁵

Paul Abram

The Panel also received an account from Paul Abram, a former United States Air Force security services officer, who was attached to an NSA listening post in Iraklion on Crete, Greece. He said that on the night of the crash he heard a voice say "Here comes the plane ... the plane is well lit," and that a second voice, which he judged to be non-American, then said "the Americans just shot down a UN plane." He said the transmissions were followed by a significant increase in "radio chatter." He assessed from the high frequency network that the aircraft had been shot down by ground fire. Abram first provided the additional information when he contacted the Hammarskjöld Commission in 2014, after it had concluded its work.⁵⁶ The Panel was given a discharge record describing him as a "voice intercept procedure specialist" and "interpreter," and assessed that his claim to have performed special duties appeared to be valid. It could not confirm that he had been posted to Iraklion at the time.⁵⁷ The 2017 report recorded that the United States confirmed his service record only in July 2017, along with information that disputed his location at the time he reported hearing the intercept.⁵⁸

In 2019 the Eminent Person assessed Abram's claims as of strong probative value regarding the proposition that the United States was monitoring radio traffic and of moderate probative value insofar as they related to an attack on SE-BDY, and assessed the claims of both men as of strong probative value that the United States was monitoring radio traffic and that relevant transcripts were highly likely to have been created. The 2022 report retained that assessment.⁵⁴

The reports give different accounts of the two men's deaths. The 2017 report records that Southall died in 2015, and the 2019 report that the Eminent Person was informed in 2017 that he had died since the Panel completed its work.⁵³⁵⁸ The reports of 2019, 2022 and 2024 state that both men had passed away as of 2018.⁵⁹ The 2022 report states in one paragraph that the Eminent Person was informed in 2020, after the 2019 report, that Abram had died, and in another that he was advised in 2019; the 2024 report states that he was informed after the 2019 report was published.⁶⁰ The 2024 report wrote that the failure of the United States to take up the opportunity to contradict Southall and Abram "tends to have the effect of supporting those claims."⁵⁹

The Independent Panel of Experts, 2015

General Assembly resolution 69/246, adopted December 29, 2014, requested the Secretary-General to appoint an independent panel of experts to examine new information and assess its probative value.⁶¹ The Secretary-General appointed on March 16, 2015 Mohamed Chande Othman, then Chief Justice of Tanzania, as head of the Panel, with Kerryn Macaulay of Australia as an aviation safety expert and Henrik Larsen of Denmark as a ballistics expert. The Panel worked from March 30 to June 12, 2015, and the Secretary-General transmitted its report on July 2, 2015.⁶²

The Panel assigned moderate probative value to nine new eyewitness accounts that more than one aircraft was in the air, to the claims of two persons who heard or read alleged intercepts, to new information on the air capability of Katangan forces, to the possibility that communications sent from Hammarskjöld's CX-52 cryptographic machine were intercepted, to crew fatigue, and to new information that called into question the time of discovery of the wreck. It found that "claims made by mercenaries, or their interlocutors, and other agents that they shot or otherwise forced down SE-BDY in an aerial attack" lacked credibility, and wrote that the new information "may also provide an appreciable lead in pursuing the truth of the probable cause or causes of the air crash and tragic deaths."⁶²

The CX-52 and Crypto AG

Hammarskjöld's party used CX-52 cryptographic machines, which were produced by the Swiss company Crypto AG. The 2017 report recorded a claim made to the Panel by a brother-in-law of Boris Hagelin, the founder of Crypto AG, that the NSA had covertly monitored communications sent from the CX-52 by way of a "backdoor" in the encryption, and had shared the intelligence with the CIA, Government Communications Headquarters and possibly other services. The claimant said that Hagelin's memoirs carried full details but were scheduled for publication no earlier than 2033, fifty years after Hagelin's death. The Panel assessed the claim as having moderate probative value.⁶³ The report also recorded that Lord Alport "peculiarly ... refused to return to the UN representatives coding machines and books which the Federal authorities had recovered from the wreck," according to a United States dispatch from Lusaka transmitted from Salisbury on September 27, 1961.⁶⁴ The 2022 report recorded that United Nations officials were suspicious when the CX-52 machines were not immediately returned after the crash, despite the entreaty of ONUC Colonel Björn Egge.⁶⁵

The 2019 report stated that communications sent from the CX-52 "appear to have been intercepted by British and United States signals and intelligence agencies as a result of a secret interception and decryption setting that those agencies held that enabled them to intercept surreptitiously."⁶⁶

In 2020 the Eminent Person was given new information on reporting by SRF (Swiss television), the Washington Post and ZDF (German television) on the involvement of the CIA, the NSA and the BND in an operation designed to let the United States and West Germany secretly read encrypted communications in devices made by Crypto AG, which were said to have been sold to the United Nations and to governments. The 2022 report recorded that this reporting was "stated to be based on a 96-page account completed in 2004 by the CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence and an oral history compiled by German intelligence officials in 2008," and that it alleged a joint operation of the CIA and the BND known in the CIA first as "Thesaurus" and later as "Rubicon."⁶⁷ In 2017 the United States had advised the Eminent Person that it "ha[d] no comments on this item," and in the 2022 mandate the United Kingdom and the United States, invited to comment, gave no comment or clarification.⁶⁸ The Eminent Person wrote: "I consider it to be established that communications sent from Hammarskjöld's CX-52 cryptographic machines were covertly intercepted by or shared with specific Member States. I assess it to be of strong probative value that those Member States were monitoring the Secretary-General's confidential communications." He also considered it highly likely that records of those communications were created but have not been disclosed.⁶⁷ The claim that the CIA or NSA monitored United Nations communications under the names "Thesaurus" and "Rubicon" "has not been refuted by the Member States concerned."⁶⁹

The Swiss parliamentary Control Delegation reported on November 2, 2020 on a history of the operation prepared by American services after 2000 with representatives of the German intelligence service, titled MINERVA. It describes how the American services used Crypto AG, which had manufactured encryption devices in Switzerland from the 1950s, in agreement with its Swedish owner, and records that in 1970 the company passed into the joint ownership of American services and the German service, that the German side withdrew at the end of 1993, and that the account closes in 1995.⁷⁰ The 2024 report stated that the United States and West Germany "appear to have had covert and direct 'backdoor' access" to messages sent with the CX-52, and recorded that Germany's sole clarification, received in 2024, was that German archives did not reveal any indication that West German intelligence agencies had access to Hammarskjöld's communications before the crash.⁷¹

The 2017 and 2019 reports

Othman's first report as Eminent Person, under resolution 71/260, was transmitted by the Secretary-General, António Guterres, on September 5, 2017. The report recorded that it was "almost certain" that Hammarskjöld and the members of the party with him were not assassinated after landing. It considered it "plausible that an external attack or threat was a cause of the crash," and stated that "it is not possible at present to conclude whether sabotage was a cause of the crash." The transmittal letter said that the burden had "now shifted to Member States" to show that they had reviewed their records and archives, including those that remain classified.⁷²

The 2017 report dealt with an unauthenticated claim by a Belgian pilot, "Beukels," made to Claude de Kemoularia in 1967 that Beukels had shot down or otherwise forced SE-BDY to crash. The report found that De Kemoularia's agendas appeared to verify his meeting with "Beukels" and other mercenaries that year, but that the identity of "Beukels" could not be verified.⁷³ The 2019 report, transmitted on September 12, 2019, wrote that de Kemoularia's notes of a June 16, 1993 meeting with the former mercenary Bob Denard do not mention Beukels. It recorded that the military archives of Belgium did not contain any reference to a pilot named Beukels, and concluded that the new information "goes to disproving this hypothesis," while noting that "it may still be that parts of the story are true, while others are false."⁷⁴

The 2019 report stated that "it appears established that British and Northern Rhodesian officials attempted to influence the findings of those inquiries to conclude that the crash was the result of pilot error, rather than any type of external interference."⁶⁶ It also recorded that the two United States personnel who claimed to have overheard a transmission about an attack had both passed away by 2018, and that the United States had not responded to their claims substantively.

Operation Celeste and the SAIMR

In July 1998 the South African National Intelligence Agency passed to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) a file concerning the 1993 assassination of the leader of the South African Communist Party, Chris Hani. The TRC's researcher found in it about a dozen documents, on the letterhead of the South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR), relating not to Hani but to an operation codenamed Celeste. The TRC's chairman, Desmond Tutu, released copies of eight of them at the commission's final press conference in August 1998, and the originals were passed to the Minister of Justice, Dullah Omar, who died in 2004 without making further comment. Attempts by Susan Williams and others to examine the originals failed, and a search made by the Ministry at the request of Justice Goldstone on behalf of the commission was unsuccessful. The Commission of Jurists noted that the assassination of Hani was not the work of the National Intelligence Agency.⁷⁵

The Commission of Jurists reproduced the documents' text. An order dated September 14, 1961 states that a DC-6 in Transair livery is parked at Léopoldville to be used for transport of "subject," and that "our technician has orders to plant 6 lbs TNT in the wheelbay with contact detonator to activate as wheels are retracted on taking off." An undated typescript, evidently relating to early September 1961, purports to record the decisions following a meeting between "M.I.5, Special Ops. Executive, and SAIMR": "UNO is becoming troublesome and it is felt that Hammarskjöld should be removed. Allen Dulles [head of the CIA] agrees and has promised full cooperation from his people." It adds: "If McKeown and O'Brien can be dealt with simultaneously it would be useful but not if it could compromise the main operation." The last document, headed "Operation Celeste 18.9.61," reads in part: "1. Device failed on take-off. ... 3. Device activated [........] prior to landing. 4. As advised O'Brien and McKeown were not aboard. 5. Mission accomplished: satisfactory," and is marked as from "Congo Red."⁷⁶ The Commission wrote that there was nothing on the face of the documents that could be confidently shown to be false, and nothing in them that could not have been known to, or invented by, a forger, and that "by themselves neither the SAIMR documents nor their contents can be treated as trustworthy."⁷⁷

The 2017 report recorded that the Panel had found the Operation Celeste documents lacked probative value. Their authenticity could not be established, their chain of possession was uncertain, and it had not been confirmed that the institute existed in 1961. The Panel wrote to South Africa on June 23, 2015 to request that it search for and share any records relating to the documents, and had not heard back from South Africa when it completed its work. South Africa wrote to the United Nations on July 1, 2016 that a "revelation made during the Republic of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings in the 1990s" had pointed to the possible involvement of the institute in Hammarskjöld's death.⁷⁸

The 2019 report accepted that the institute "appears to have existed in South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s," and wrote that it could not confirm whether it existed in 1961.⁷⁹ A former South African soldier told the Independent Appointee in 2019 that he had joined the institute around 1990 after answering a newspaper advertisement. At a recruitment meeting in Johannesburg the recruits were introduced to two individuals, one of whom was Keith Maxwell, known as "the Commodore." The recruits were shown photographs of an operation that Maxwell said had taken place in the Congo in 1960.⁸⁰

The 2019 report recorded a handwritten version of Maxwell's memoirs, obtained through a film team. Its extract "Johannesburg 1961" describes a meeting at which an "Acting Commodore Wagman" tells officers that three men are to be "removed," and a technician who plants explosive material in the Transair DC-6, the device of which fails to harm the aircraft. The report noted internal inconsistencies, including a letter dated "12 July 1960" that refers to Fouga jets that were not delivered to Katanga until months later. Several sources in the film team claimed that some of the Operation Celeste documents were in Maxwell's handwriting. The report's author wrote that this was an untrained analysis, and that if the handwriting was Maxwell's the documents could also have been forged. In a 1998 statement reported by the BBC, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office answered allegations of British involvement with the words: "intelligence agents of the United Kingdom do not go around bumping people off. At this time during the Cold War, Soviet misinformation was quite rampant so [the letters] may have been put out by them."⁸¹

The 2022 report recorded that South Africa's renewed search of its archives produced no originals: "despite a thorough and diligent search the original documents could not be located." It recorded that the address and telephone number on the SAIMR letterhead did not match the Johannesburg directory listings for 1960 and 1961, and wrote that this "may be another flag suggesting that the documents are not authentic." It also recorded that a former mercenary who had been in Ndola on the night of the crash told a journalist that he had never heard of the institute.⁸²

The 2022 report summarized the argument of Greg Poulgrain's 2020 book, JFK vs. Allen Dulles: Battleground Indonesia, which posits that Dulles formed a motive to remove Hammarskjöld because of a policy conflict over the dispute concerning the sovereignty of West New Guinea, and that the Operation Celeste documents show Dulles's involvement. Poulgrain compared the documents' wording with the Church Committee's account of Dulles expressing a "wish [to] give every possible support" to the plan against Lumumba. The report recorded that Conor Cruise O'Brien and George Ivan Smith, who had both been senior United Nations officials in the Congo in 1961, had expressed to Poulgrain their view that Hammarskjöld had been intentionally killed. The Eminent Person wrote that the information focused on a motive and did not require an assessment of probative value at that stage, and that it underscored the importance of "proving or disproving the veracity of the Operation Celeste hypothesis and Dulles's alleged involvement."⁸³

The 2022 and 2024 reports

Othman was reappointed Eminent Person in March 2020 under resolution 74/248, and the General Assembly extended his mandate in December 2020. His report of August 25, 2022 (A/76/892) stated that "it remains plausible that an external attack or threat was a cause of the crash." It found no evidence of mechanical failure or of an incorrect altimeter setting, that crew fatigue may have affected the co-pilot and flight engineer, that pilot error could not be excluded, and that it would be unsound to rule out an external attack "in circumstances where it is clear that not all relevant evidence has been disclosed." It recorded that the United Kingdom, the United States and Northern Rhodesia intercepted and received interceptions of confidential United Nations communications throughout 1961 without the knowledge or consent of the United Nations, and that encrypted communications sent by Hammarskjöld using the CX-52 "appear to have been intercepted and read by Member States' signals and intelligence agencies."⁸⁴

The report of September 9, 2024 (A/78/1006) repeated the findings on the Dakota aircraft and the NSA, and recorded that "almost all new information provided between 2020 and 2024 has originated from individual researchers and non-State entities." It stated that "I respectfully consider that the burden of proof assigned to key Member States remains to be discharged," that the non-cooperation of Member States "may be seen to be approaching intentional obstruction of the full truth of the circumstances and events," and that it was almost certain that further relevant information exists, including radio or other communications.⁸⁵

Responses of the Member States

In April and May 2017 the Eminent Person asked eight Member States identified as most likely to hold relevant information: Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, the Russian Federation, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. Responses came from Belgium, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States.⁸⁶

Germany appointed Thomas Fitschen as its Independent Appointee in 2018; he confirmed that Germany had given him full access to all files and archives, including those of the BND and of the intelligence service of the former German Democratic Republic.⁸⁷ South Africa appointed Mxolisi Nkosi as a focal point in 2019. In 2021 its Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Grace Naledi Mandisa Pandor, advised that "no documents relating to the death of former UNSG Hammarskjöld" had been found, and the Eminent Person stated that he had requested searches for the transfer of personnel and equipment from South Africa to Katanga, South African mercenaries and intelligence personnel who served in Katanga, and links between Katangan, Belgian and South African entities. By 2024 he had received no new information or specific responses from South Africa and considered that there were grounds to believe that further undisclosed information existed in its archives.⁸⁸

The United Kingdom stated in November 2018 that it did not intend to appoint an independent appointee because all information of direct value had already been made available. In June 2019 it appointed Graham Hand, who stated that all responsive documents had been provided. The Independent Appointee of Zimbabwe noted that, before Zimbabwe's independence, Rhodesian authorities under the direction of British colonial authorities had "meticulously removed almost every record or archive associated with the Dag Hammarskjöld Crash." In 2022 the United Kingdom responded without addressing the specific requests or listing the archives searched. In April 2024 Phil Dixon of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office wrote that "our firm assessment (independently confirmed by Mr. Hand) remains that all information of value to the Inquiry has already been provided to the Inquiry itself or has been released to The National Archives at Kew and is available to the public there." The Eminent Person considered that there were grounds to believe that further undisclosed information existed in British archives.⁸⁹

In April 2019 the United States Independent Appointee stated that searches had been comprehensive and included intelligence, security and defence archives, and sent a single document. In November 2021 the Independent Appointee, David McFarland, stated that the Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, had tasked the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency to search contemporary and archival records, that the only result of the search coordinated by the CIA was two issues of the "President's Intelligence Checklist" dated September 18 and 19, 1961, and that "no holdings reviewed then, or acquired since, mention the crash or Hammarskjöld's death," notwithstanding searches by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Eminent Person's requests for information at a more granular level, and for a list of the archives searched and the search terms applied, were not answered. In March 2024 McFarland wrote: "I am not aware of any additional information pertaining to the specific questions in your request, but will reconfirm with relevant agencies." The Eminent Person considered that there were grounds to believe that further undisclosed information existed in United States archives.⁹⁰

No response had been received from the Republic of the Congo, to requests for airport and air force records from Brazzaville in September 1961, or from Ethiopia, to requests for records relating to a Swedish instructor with the Ethiopian Air Force who reported overhearing a short-wave radio conversation at about midnight on the night of the crash in which flight controllers, one of them at Ndola airport, expressed surprise that one plane was being followed by another. Italy confirmed it had commenced enquiries.⁹¹ The Eminent Person has had unrestricted access to all United Nations archives; all files of the United Nations Operation in the Congo are public except twenty-three that remain "strictly confidential."⁹²

General Assembly resolutions

Resolution 1759 (XVII) of 1962 is the basis of the reopened inquiry. Resolution 69/246 (December 29, 2014) recalled it, acknowledged the commission's report, and requested the Panel. Resolution 70/11 (November 19, 2015) asked the Secretary-General to pursue the Panel's pending requests for information and to explore the feasibility of a central archival holding for records of the death.⁹³ Resolution 71/260 (December 23, 2016) requested an eminent person, and called on Member States to ensure that records "that remain classified, more than 50 years after the fact, are declassified or otherwise made available for review."⁹⁴ Resolution 72/252 (December 24, 2017) requested the Secretary-General to reappoint the Eminent Person, asked Member States to appoint independent, high-ranking officials to review their intelligence, security and defence archives, and asked the United Nations to review its own specific records and archives for possible declassification.⁹⁵ Resolutions 74/248 (December 27, 2019) and 77/252 (December 30, 2022) reappointed him again.⁹⁶⁹⁷