The Death of Dag Hammarskjöld, the Congolese Civil War, and decolonisation in Africa, 1960–65

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

 1. The mercenary Mike Hoare wasnot averse to calling up the Norwegian Colonel Bjorn Egge, who was in charge of UN intelligence in Elizabethville in order to try and trace two of his mercenary soldiers who had gone missing and been presumably captured by the feared Baluba ‘Jeunesse’. Hoare, The Road to Kalamata, 81.

 2. The most recent prominent case in Britain being that of the ex-Etonian Simon Mann who was imprisoned in Zimbabwe for attempting to topple the dictatorial regime of Teodorio Obiang Nguema in Equatorial Guinea in 2004. Mann was later deported to Equatorial Guinea where he received a 35-year jail sentence in 2008 but was released on a pardon the following year.

 3. Meredith, The State of Africa.

 4. Gavshon, The Last Days of Dag Hammarskjöld.

 5. George Ivan Smith and Conor Cruise O'Brien, ‘Foul Play on the Albertina’, The Guardian and ‘Hammarskjöld Plane Crash “No Accident”’, The Guardian, 9 November 1992.

 6. Julian Border, ‘“There Has Always Been a Question”: Nephew Urges UN Chief Death Inquiry’, The Guardian, 27 September 2011.

 7. Kenyon, The Popish Plot.

 8. Aaronovitch, Voodoo Histories, 5.

 9. Though the 1993 ‘Waldegrave Initiative’ signalled a more liberal approach to the opening up of classified documents.

10. Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics.

11. For Wannsee, see in particular Roseman, The Villa, The Lake, the Meeting.

12. Ramsay, Conspiracy Theories, esp. 21–36.

13. Knight, Conspiracy Culture.

14. Justin Elliott, ‘Bush Pentagon Hired Conspiracy Theorist as Al Qaeda Specialist’, http://www.informationonclearinghouse.info/article24502.htm (accessed 27 October 2011).

15. Summers and Swan, The Eleventh Day, 109.

16. For a critical assessment of this theory, see Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism.

17. For a careful assessment and cogent rejection of this view, see Smith, The Origins of the South African War; ‘The Origins of the South African War’.

18. For details, see Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost.

19. Boyd, United Nations, 117

20. Tinker, Race, Conflict and the International Order, 109.

21. Legum Congo Disaster, 126.

22. Thornton, Imperialism in the Twentieth Century, 286.

23. Reynolds, Britannia Overruled, 224.

24. See, for example, Pease, ‘Midnight in the Congo’ where we are asked to believe that CIA involvement in Hammarskjöld was inevitable since the organisation behaved like some medieval flesh-eating ogre and ‘could not have been satisfied solely with the death of Lumumba’.

25. Ranelagh, The Agency, 342–3.

26. Hersch, The Dark Side of Camelot, 194

27. The best account can be found in De Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba.

28. Cited in Schlesinger A Thousand Days, 458. For more details of the Kennedy administration's African policy, see Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa.

29. For a general account of the CIA at this time, see Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA & American Democracy, 127–30.

30. Devlin, Chief of Station, Congo, 166 and passim.

31. Gibbs, ‘Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations and the Congo Crisis of 1960–61’.

32. Gibbs, ‘Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations and the Congo Crisis of 1960–61’, 171–2.

33. Gibbs, ‘Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations and the Congo Crisis of 1960–61’, 173.

34. Rosio, ‘The Ndola Crash and the death of Dag Hammarskjöld’, 670.

35. Mazower, No Enchanted Place.

36. Fanon, ‘Lumumba's Death’, 204.

37. Conor Cruise O'Brien made this comparison in Memoir, 233. For details of Ben Bella's seizure, see Horne, A Savage War of Peace, 159–60.

38. Bullets so heated are unlikely to penetrate anything stronger than cardboard, http://www. cartridgecollectors.org/faq.htm

39. O'Brien, Memoir, 234

40. Rosio, ‘The Ndola Crash and the death of Dag Hammarskjöld’, 663.

41. The Guardian 25 September 1992 quoted in Williams, Who Killed Hammarskjöld, 167.

42. Johnson, ‘Heart of Darkness’.

43. Rosio, ‘The Ndola Crash and the death of Dag Hammarskjöld’, 662.

44. Gerard-Libois, Secession Au Katanga, 241–2.

45. See, in particular, Chanock, Unconsummated Union, 259–63.

46. Sampson, Macmillan, 189

47. See, in particular, Darwin, The Empire Project, 632–8.

48. The book contains just one reference to the role of intelligence when, in a footnote, it points out that a member of the British Embassy in Leopoldville, Daphne Park, was actually working for MI6. James, Britain and the Congo Crisis, 114, n.8.

49. Murphy, ‘Intelligence and Decolonization’, 114. See also Hughes, ‘Fighting for White Rule in Africa’.

50. Patrick Cosgrave, ‘Obituary: Lord Alport’, The Independent (4 November 1998); Lord Alport, The Sudden Assignment, 20 and passim.

51. Lord Alport, The Sudden Assignment, 102.

52. Lord Alport, The Sudden Assignment, 120–1.

53. Williams (p. 254, n. 23) cites a letter from Alport to Lord Salisbury 22 September 1961 ascribing blame at this stage solely to the UN.

54. Lord Alport, The Sudden Assignment, 94.

55. O'Brien, Memoir, 23.

56. Cited in Gavshon, The Last Days of Dag Hammarskjöld, 227.

57. Colvin, The Rise and Fall of Moise Tshombe, 88. Williams tends to dismiss Colvin's work due to his supposed sympathy for the mercenary leader Faulkes – a case perhaps of where ideological inclinations are allowed to override historical judgment (Williams p. 167).

58. Gavshon, The Last Days of Dag Hammarskjöld, 61.

59. Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, 101–2.

60. Gavshon, The Last Days of Dag Hammarskjöld, 167.

61. The Congo under its extraordinarily corrupt and predatory government in Kinshasha remains a signal exception to the path of many other African states. It belies the rather easy optimism of Stephen Ellis that Africa has now moved beyond the problems of post-colonialism into an era of new-found growth and economic progress, See Ellis, Season of Rains. For a shocking journalistic account of just how far Eastern Congo has de-developed in the decades since independence, see Butcher, Blood River.