Dag Hammarskjold mystery clearing up at last

  In her book Williams provides the account of an American naval pilot, Commander Charles Southall, who was working at the NSA listening station in Cyprus in 1961.  Shortly after midnight on the night of the crash, Southall and other officers heard an intercept of a pilot's commentary in the air over Ndola – 3,000 miles away.

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

  Williams said:  "We need to know if the US state department holds the raw intelligence that led Gullion to think [the plane could have been shot down] and  … if there is other intelligence, notably in the form of intercepts, that is held by the NSA in relation to Hammarskjöld's flight on the night of 17-18 September 1961. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/04/dag-hammarskjold-plane-shot-down-mercenary-cable

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  Pierre Coppens, who got to know Van Risseghem (shown above) four years later when he was back in Belgium flying for a parachute training centre, said his friend told him those unspecified wider tasks also included attacking Hammarskjöld.  He said he was simply ordered to bring down a plane and didn’t know who was inside, Coppens told researchers working on a new film about the crash, Cold Case Hammarskjöld.  It premieres at the Sundance film festival in two weeks’ time, and names Van Risseghem as the attacker.  Full details of the filmmakers’ research are revealed here for the first time.

  Those details emerged over many conversations, in bars or waiting for the rain to clear, and Coppens was sceptical at first, he said.  Just slightly too young himself to have fought in the second world war, he was used to older men regaling him with tall stories of conflict. “At the start I was believing it was a joke,” he says.  But he eventually came to think his friend was utterly serious.  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/12/former-raf-pilot-shot-down-un-chief-dag-hammarskjold-1961-plane

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      Is life so wretched? Isn't it rather your hands which are too small, your vision which is muddled?  You are the one who must grow up.     -Dag Hammarskjold
https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/dag_hammarskjold