From the unexplained to the mundane, come join us on a journey to the fringe.
Hello and welcome to Journey to the Fringe, where affairs of the blackest and tiest variety
are both discussed and discerned to you, the listener.
We are your podcast hosts, with Pinkies classily, yes defiantly, in the air.
I'm Taylor and Chelsea.
And today we talk about a group that has had many a conspiracy about it, but today we're
going to talk about a real conspiracy, one that is verifiably something that needs to
be answered and likely has an answer, but it hasn't been spelled out outright yet.
And that group is the United Nations.
I thought it was going to be a cult.
Yeah, it could have been.
But for now it's going to be the United Nations, which may or may not be a cult.
I don't think people have killed themselves in the name of per se, but you know.
Let's see what you got.
So Chelsea, when I say there are conspiracies about the United Nations, what comes to mind
for you?
I can't really think of anything at the top of my head.
Maybe they're favoring certain countries.
I mean, it's politics, right?
Yeah, more or less.
In the end.
So you got to believe there's some stuff going on there.
I've been listening to too much knowledge fight, which is a podcast about Alex Jones
and how he's kind of full of shit.
It's a great show.
When you see that side of things, they really talk about how they're just the new world
order.
They're part of the economic forum and just pushing the head affairs to bring about a
changing of the guard to the powers that they want to control.
Those are the conspiracies I hear.
That is a fantastical way of looking at it.
I'm going to show you the very real UN, the conspiracies about it.
And why it kind of comes out this way.
And how we're going to look at it.
We're going to look at the history, not just of the UN, but how the UN comes out, starting
with a history from the League of Nations onwards.
And then we're going to actually talk about the story that I have here.
Okay.
Okay, that sounds good.
Now, I don't know how much of this history you remember.
I'm going to give a brief overview when there's a story that might need to be told.
But outside of that, we're kind of just trying to stick straight to the story.
Okay.
Where would I remember it from?
Like grade 11, grade 12.
No, nothing.
Okay.
Well, then you are in for a totally new ride.
Okay.
What's the word?
You've probably never heard before.
So strap yourselves in and we're going to get to this.
And of course, every talk of the United Nations starts with the League of Nations.
We'll get to kind of why.
And this, I found a BBC article that kind of outlines the League of Nations and its
history very well.
So I'm going to follow up for the most part here.
The League of Nations, born of the destruction and disillusionment arising from World War
I, was the most ambitious attempt that had ever been made to construct the peaceful global
order.
It was rooted in a comprehensive liberal critique of the pre-war international system, which
was widely believed to have been the cause of the carnage of World War I.
The story of World War I, a bunch of cousins got pissed at each other and then moved to
the side.
They had their family feud.
The idea of the League of Nations was to eliminate four flaws of the old European
states. It was in place of monarchical family stats, a world of independent nation states
was emerging and should free of outside interference.
The secret diplomacy of the old order would be replaced by the open discussion and resolution
of disputes.
It was the first two.
Third, the military alliance blocks would be replaced by a system of collective guarantees
of security.
And four, agreed disarmament would prevent the recurrence of the kinds of arms races
that had racked up international tensions in the pre-war decade.
Now there was something that kind of predate the League of Nations and it's called the
Congress system.
It was in Europe kind of exclusively and it was just basically the great powers of Europe
held occasional summits where they would chat and discuss issues they found urgent.
Didn't really do much though.
And obviously it led to World War II, World War I, sorry spoiler alert, there's a World
War II.
Wait, what?
Sorry, we'll get to that.
So the surviving Victoria's great powers from the end of the great war, mostly Britain and
France, because you know, Germany kind of didn't survive well from World War II.
World War I, gee, sorry.
We're so used to talking about World War II, just look at the time.
I'm following it though.
Surprisingly.
They would have preferred to go no further than regularizing the old Congress system.
But the reason this old Congress system doesn't end up holding up is because Woodrow Wilson,
who was president of the US at the time, is coming on the stage as another power themselves
and he says we need a new system.
He had different ideas and pushed towards the creation of a more comprehensive global
organization which would include all independent states and in which even the smallest state
would have an importance.
However, hilariously, Wilson is thinking about the way that self-determination would work
in the real world and would end up getting his idea for a community of power off the
ground or made really good.
Partly, this was to avoid alarming US isolationist opinions, which are those huge US isolationist
movements at the time, but in any case, when the League Covenant was agreed to at the Paris
Peace Conference in 1919, the US Senate refused to sign it so the US actually never gets involved
with the League of Nations because the Senate never ratifies their involvement.
That sounds about right actually.
Just stats, one party doesn't like the other so they say no fuck you, you can't do what
you like.
Just cuz.
And this is clear in the article.
How the League would have worked with American participation remains one of the greatest
what-ifs of modern history.
Mostly because you know this leads to World War II, but what would happen if the US was
actually involved?
As it was, the direction of the system was left in the hands of states, primarily Britain
and France, whose altruism was questionable and whose economic resources had been crippled.
Yet the League of Nations did work surprisingly well for a decade after the war.
By December 1940, 48 states had signed the League Covenant, pledging to work together
to eliminate aggression between countries.
A series of disputes between Germany and Poland over Upper Silesia, who knows.
I've never heard of that country.
Between Italy and Greece, and between Greece and Bulgaria, were resolved under its auspices.
And these were the kind of conflicts that triggered World War I.
So good on them.
The proliferation of League activity however carried brisks.
As one of its founders, Lloyd George put it, it had weak links, spreading everywhere,
no grip, any grip.
Grip ultimately meant the capacity to use force.
When the crucial concept of collective security was put in the acid test in 1930s, it dissolved.
Once big power started to challenge the status quo as Japan didn't mature yet, the League
found it practically impossible to reach a clear verdict on who was guilty of aggression.
And we covered that, the Manchurian Japan issue in our Japanese War Crimes episodes.
If you want to hear about that, go back there.
Kind of a hilarious story about a fake train incident.
Oh, the incidents.
There were many incidents in Japan.
There's so many.
Or still, more disastrally, in the case of Italy, pressuring Abyssinia, Abyssinia would
be pre-Ethiopia.
That's his name before it became Ethiopia.
It was putting pressure on Abyssinia.
The guilt was clear enough, but the key powers, Britain and France, were unwilling to antagonize
the guilty party because of their wider strategic views.
Italy was the guilty party.
They were invaded in Abyssinia to make it their fallen.
A failed attempt to impose an oil embargo on Italy demonstrated that any credible system
by economic sanctions was far distant, between the humiliation of seeing one of its members,
Austria, taken over by Germany in 1938 without even a formal protest, and the absurdity of
expelling the USSR after the outbreak of World War II in 1939, an event that neither the
USSR nor the League was involved, and after this, the League pretty much ceased while
World War II happens.
It's just a mess leading up to World War II.
Germany leaves it before the USSR is kicked out because Germany says they want an army,
and of course, the World War I agreement to end it says they can't really have a really
formal war with me.
Well, Germany says, screw you, we're going to do it anyways, and they just don't regret
the moment.
And then the USSR gets kicked out for invading them.
That vote, there were 15 votes, 7 in favor of kicking them out and 8 in favor of keeping
them, and to even get to 7, they had to randomly add new countries to the vote to get to 7,
and they still kicked them out.
Yeah, it was super messed up.
So anyways, World War II that happens, we've covered World War II enough around it, we're
going to cover the rest.
As World War II was about to end in 1945, nations were in ruins and the world wanted
peace.
Representatives of 50 countries gathered at the United Nations Conference on International
Organization in San Francisco, California from April 25th to June 26th, 1945.
For the next two months, they proceeded to draft and then sign the UN Charter, which
created a new international organization, the United Nations, which it was hoped would
prevent another war like they had just lived through.
Four months after the San Francisco Conference that I just talked about, the United Nations
officially began on October 24th, 1945, when it came into existence after its charter had
been ratified by China, France, Soviet Union, United Kingdom, and the U.S., which are the
five major powers in the U.S.
As of April 20th, 1946, the League of Nations ceased to exist and handed over all of its
assets to the UN, having granted the new UN Secretary full control of its library.
So that's the history of the League of Nations and how it just kind of naturally flows into
the UN.
The key difference between the UN and the League of Nations is it was all just kind of a weird
agreement between these parties in the League of Nations, whereas in the UN, they have different
departments, but most importantly, they have five parties who can just veto it, and they're
basically considered the most powerful countries.
So if they don't like something, they can just say, no, we're not going to do this, no
matter what it is.
And they couldn't do that under the League of Nations?
They could not, and that's how it kind of led to the underlining.
So is that just like incentive for them not to just leave?
To have power over them?
What do you mean in the League of Nations situation?
Like in the United Nations, like how come they can just like veto things?
They can just veto things because they have more power in theory than the rest of the
countries.
But you know, it's been going on a long time, so it's hard to say if that's still the truth
or not.
In any event, all countries are involved in the UN, and they've stayed there for a long
time, so it's a little different from that.
Okay.
And totally not anything to do with the story you're telling, I'm just curious.
So the structure of the UN was to give much stronger positions to the traditional great
powers through the UN Security Council.
The most significant thing about its creation perhaps is that this time the US did not back
away.
A significant number of the old League's aims and methods were transmitted into the
UN.
And among these were not only such low-key but effective institutions of the international
courts and the international labor organizations, but also the working assumptions of the secretariat
and some key operations, including those that would soon come to be called the peacekeeping
operations.
The UN may have almost stumbled sideways into its peacekeeping role, but the motive and
sustaining force in the process was the survival and strengthening of its expectations of international
involvement in the preservation of global security.
Gradually, this came to include the defense of human rights as well as the resolution
of territorial conflicts.
The UN's first attempt to resolve a serious conflict in Palestine in 1947-48 was unsuccessful,
some may even call disastrous, and it failed to implement its own partition plan and its
special mediator was assassinated.
That's not the story that we're going to be talking about.
But yeah, they still today have not settled down.
The Palestine-Israel conflict?
Yeah.
Are they still working on that?
No, no, most countries have clearly made sides on that.
The wildly unsuccessful.
Other UN organizations had a shorter but more spectacular life, notably the operation in
the Congo from 1960-1964, and this is actually what we're going to be talking about today,
which prefigured the alarming future of missions to states that were dissolving into civil
war.
In the Congo, the UN found itself using military force against Katongan rebels to preserve the
unity of the state of Congo.
A departure from the principle of strict neutrality, which has usually been thought vital to the
success of its peacekeeping missions.
Working with such internal conflict was a far more ambitious and demanding task than
the traditional role of assisting consenting states to observe the ceasefires, and in effect,
it showed that the UN might need to take governmental responsibility in some situations.
The development towards taking responsibility in countries at risk of disintegration was
due to a dramatic increase in the prestige and initiative of the UN Secretary General.
This was particularly true at the time when the position was held by the charismatic Deg
Hammer student, and this is the person we're going to be talking about today.
But before that, I'm just going to give you a few things so that we kind of have a bit
more stats in you.
So the UN currently has 193 member states.
Its purpose is to maintain international peace and security and to promote human rights
and to provide a forum for discussion of global issues.
The UN's system of organizations is comprised of main organs, specialized agencies, programs
and funds, research and training institutes, and a variety of affiliated and willing.
The General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the Trusty
Ships Council, the International Court of Justice, and the UN Secretary.
The Charter of the UN defines the tasks and functions of each organ.
The Secretary General is the Chief Administrative Officer of the UN and is elected by the General
Assembly.
The organization is financed by assessed and voluntary contributions from its member states.
So Chelsea, before I begin with my story, any questions about the UN?
I don't think so.
I think that was fairly clear.
Okay.
So here we are going to tell you the story, the tale, if you will, of Dag Hammerskill.
And is this true or false?
This is a very true story.
Okay.
I wasn't sure because we said conspiracy theory.
Yes, conspiracy theory.
Never actually existed.
Just kidding.
He is very real.
Okay.
So Dag Hammerskill was a Swedish economist and diplomat who served as the second Secretary
General of the United Nations.
As of 2023, he remains the youngest person to have ever held that position.
Having been only 47 years old when he was appointed, he is the son of Helmar Hammerskull, who served
as the Prime Minister of Sweden from 1914 to 1917.
Hammerskull was and remains well regarded internationally as a capable diplomat and administrator,
and his efforts to resolve various global crises led to him being the only posthumous
recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
He is considered one of the two best UN Secretary Generals and, sorry, Secretary's General.
I hate when they do that.
It is pluralized on the first word.
It was bastard.
Secretary's General.
I've never really come across it, I think.
Okay.
Maybe I have.
The only other time that comes up is Attorney General of a state or a province.
The plural is Attorney's General.
There's so many things that don't fucking make sense.
So I guess if it's a hyphenated general, it's the first word that is pluralized, and that
is why English is a fucking terrible language.
It is.
Anyhow, back to this.
John F. Kennedy called Hammerskull the greatest statesman of our century.
Immediately following the assumption of the Secretary, Hammerskull attempted to establish
a good rapport with his staff.
He made a point of visiting every UN department to shake hands with as many workers as possible,
eating in the cafeteria as often as possible and relinquishing the Secretary General's
private elevator for general use.
He began his term by establishing his own Secretary of 4,000 Administrators and setting
up regulations that defined the responsibilities, who was also actively engaged in smaller projects
relating to the UN working environment.
For example, he spearheaded the building of a meditation room at the UN headquarters,
where people can withdraw into themselves in silence regardless of their faith, free
or religious.
So it just sounds like a really nice God to see.
Yeah, this is why he won the Nobel Peace Prize, right?
Sounds so nice.
Yes.
During his term, Hammerskull tried to improve relations between Israel and the Arab states,
a task that he clearly succeeded at, because you know, just look at that.
He was still peacefully now.
Other highlights included in 1955 visit China to negotiate the release of 11 captured US
pilots who served in the Korean War.
In 1956, he established the UN Emergency Force and used this in the intervention in the 1956
Suez Crisis, which I forgot to do a little bit of looking to, but that's okay.
It doesn't have too much to do with this.
Great.
I'll accept this.
In 1960, this is where we're getting to the newly independent Congo, as per UN aid in
diffusing the Congo crisis.
Hammerskull made four trips to the Congo, but his efforts toward the decolonization
of Africa were considered insufficient by the Soviet Union, which I find pretty rare
that you're going to see a Wikipedia article where the USSR comes off as the good guy,
where they're like, Hey, you're not taking enough steps to decolonize Africa.
I feel like that's not a bad position.
No, it's not.
It actually kind of makes the guy look real bad.
Yeah.
In September of 1960, the Soviet government announced his decision to send UN emergency
forces to keep the peace.
They demanded his resignation in the replacement of the office of secretary general by a three-man
directorate with a built-in veto called the Troika.
The objective was citing the memoir as a Soviet leader in the Kyrgyzstan to equally represent
the interests of three groups of countries, capitalists, socialists, and recently independent.
So outside of that, I'm now going to give you a little kind of info on the Congo crisis.
Okay, that would be great.
So Congo was a colony of Belgium and boy, how did they fuck it up hard?
I find most colonies are fucked up pretty good.
Yes, but this one in particular, how do I put this?
New level of fucked up?
Yeah.
Of a population of roughly 30 million Belgium killed 10 million people through disease,
through execution, through famine, and this is a wild estimate because it's anywhere from
1.3 to 13 million people that died during the Belgian rule of the Congo.
There's actually a very famous picture you can find of a father sitting on a porch looking
down at the hand and foot of his son because he was unable to gather enough rubber for
his quota for the day.
So they chopped off his son's hand and leg.
Oh my God, what?
Is this it?
Oh my God, that's really just...
I can't even look at that.
Colonizers are awful in anything I've ever heard about them and they're just kind of glossed
over for the most part, I find.
We tend to focus on World War I and World War II and not the colonizing that took place
around that time as well.
Oh, absolutely.
Okay, that's just a pretty picture.
Super dark time.
Population decreased by 1%.
That's crazy.
Anyhow, 1960s Congo finally gave its independence.
It was a little unhappy with the situation, but whatever it is what it is.
Republic of Congo became independent from Belgium in June of 1960.
The new country immediately descended into a political chaos known as the Congo crisis.
The arbitrary boundaries drawn by colonial powers combined with the leftover racial tensions
and general uncertainty led to violence along racial lines in the widespread mutiny in the
Belgian-led Congo.
Belgian troops sent in to protect Belgian citizens, clashed with Congolese forces leading
to the UN ordering the Belgian forces out of the country.
On July 11th of 1960, less than two weeks after the country formally gained independence,
politician Nino Moése de Chambé declared the southernmost province of the Congo to
be an independent nation called the state of Katonga.
Katonga, with its copper belt and lucrative mining operations, was the wealthiest province
of the Congo.
The Belgians, French, and British, wanting influence in the wealthy regions, supported
the Katonga movement in practice, if not in name.
The United States, the United States, and the United States, agreed to the UN regulations
forbidding countries from directly supporting secessionists.
Members of the European armed forces became higher mercenaries in Katonga's army.
Patrice Lumumba, Prime Minister of the Congo, appealed to the UN for forces to end the secessionist
movement.
The UN initially refused, considering the rebellion an internal issue.
Patrice Lumumba had managed to acquire Soviet weapons for the Congolese army before he was
deposed as Prime Minister by Mobuto Cese Seco in November 1960 and killed in early 1960.
This led the UN to pass Resolution 161, which authorized UN forces to take all appropriate
measures to prevent civil war in the Congo.
This essentially authorized the UN to take offensive measures against the Katonga state.
The conflict came to a close in January of 1963 after UN and US forces overwhelmed the
Katonga military and Moes Tishambe stepped down as president of Katonga.
The UN sent nearly 20,000 geesekeepers to restore order in the Congo-Kinshasa region.
Hammerscould refusal to place peacekeepers in the service of Lumumba's constitutionally
elected government provoked a strong reaction of disprovals from the Soviets as we talked
in earlier.
The situation will become more scandalous in the assassination of Lumumba by Tishambe's
troops.
In February of 1961, the UN authorized the peacekeeping forces to use military forces
during civil war, and the blue helmet attack on Katonga caused Tishambe to flee to Zambia.
Hammerscould's erratic attitude in not providing support to Lumumba's government, which had
been elected by popular votes through severe criticism among aligned countries and communists
and socialist countries.
In the end, his actions were supported by the United States and Belgium in how it was
going.
Oh, huh.
Yeah, they quite liked this.
On September 18th, 1961, Hammerscould was enroute to negotiate a ceasefire between the
United Nations operations in Congo, forces, and the Katonga troops under Moes Tishambe.
His Douglas DC-6 airline, SEBDY, crashed near Nidola, northern Rhodesia, now Zambia.
Hammerscould perished as a result of the crash, as did all 15 of the passives on board.
Hammerscould's death set off a succession crisis at the UN, as there was no line of
succession and the Security Council had to vote on a successor.
In 1962, a Rhodesian inquiry concluded that pilot error was to blame, while later UN investigation
could not determine the cause of crash.
And this is where it gets interesting, Chelsea.
So Hammerscould, dead, plane crash.
Another thing that I never realized was the UN has an army.
They have peacekeepers.
They use them all the time.
It doesn't seem very peacekeeping like what they're doing.
Yeah, in this situation, they were used with force, which is actually pretty rare for a
UN involved.
Okay, so guys dead and then plane crash.
I'm kind of all over the place here, but I feel like I'm following it.
Okay, good.
And Rodisha said it was pilot error that caused it.
Okay, totally believable, I'm sure.
Then CIA comes out and actually says it was the KGB that was responsible.
The Soviet Union didn't.
No.
And then the day after the crash, now former president at the time, not now, but at the
time he was the former US president, Harry Truman, commented that Hammerscould, quote,
was on the point of getting something done when they killed him.
Notice what I said when they killed him, and quote.
The KGB.
And he's clearly emphasizing the KGB.
And then in 1998, documents surfaced suggesting the CIA, MI6, and or Belgian mining interests
involvement via a South African air and military organization.
The information was contained in a file from the South African National Intelligence Agency
turned over to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission in relation to the
1993 assassination of Chris Coney, leader of the South African Communist Party.
These documents included an alleged plot to quote, remove, end quote, Hammerscould, and
contained a supposed statement from CIA director at the time, Alan Dulles, that quote, Dague
is becoming troublesome and should be removed, end quote.
Hammerscould's mission to end the war over the mineral rich, Katonghi's, secession from
the newly formed Republic of Kanto was contrary to the interests of those organizations.
However, these documents were copies rather than originals, including substantiation or
authenticity through incantation and protestant.
So those papers come to light 30 years, 35 years after this crash actually came to light.
What?
And they were fake?
No, they're not necessarily fake.
They couldn't verify it because they weren't your leader.
Okay, that's a...
Okay.
Then in 2014, newly-castified documents revealed that the American ambassador to the Congo
sent a cable to Washington, DC, warning that the plane could have been shot down by Belgian
military pilot Jan van Riesig, commander of the small Katonghi Air Force, van Riesig
died in 2007.
On March 16, 2015, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon appointed members to an independent
panel of experts who examined new information related to Hammerscould's death.
The three member panels were led by Mohamed Chanday-Aufman, the chief justice of Tanzania,
and included Karen Mkhalli, Australia's representative to the International Civil Aviation Organization,
and Henrik Larsen, a ballistic expert on the Danish National Police.
The panel released a 99-page report on July 6, 2015, and assigned moderate value to nine
new eyewitness accounts and transcripts of radio transmission.
Those accounts suggested that Hammerscould's plane was already on fire as it landed, and
that other jet aircraft and intelligence agents were nearby.
What?
So their report found that as the plane was going down, it was already on fire, and there
were other planes into the city as it was going down.
In 2016, the original documents from the 1998 South African Investigation Service, and those
familiar with the investigation caution that even if authentic, the documents would have
been initially authored as part of a disinformation campaign.
So it turned out those documents from earlier were real, but maybe they were made fake at
the time.
Who knows?
Why are these all coming to light so long after?
They all came to light due to the assassination of the leader of the Communist Party of South
Africa in 1998.
Oh, okay.
You did say that.
Yes, okay.
And all this starts to kind of domino out because of it.
And in 2019, the documentary film Cold Case Hammerscould by Danish filmmaker Mads Bruger
claimed that Jan van Rysigum had told a friend that he shot down Hammerscould's aircraft.
That's that guy from earlier.
This went against the official stance maintained by van Rysigum's family that he was not involved
in the death of Hammerscould.
According to an interview with Rysigum's wife, he was in Rhodesia negotiating the purchase
of a plane for the Katonga Air Force with the logbooks providing proof that he was not
flying for Katonga at the time.
The documentary crew interviewed multiple colleagues of van Rysigum for the film, all
of whom supported their theory.
In an interview with Swedish historian Lee Hellström, Brad Rysigum claimed that he was
not in South Africa at the time the crash happened and dismissed the idea of his being
potentially involved in his very case.
Mostly unpublished documents continue to emerge from the UN or National Archives, one found
in France amidst the Fonds-Folkart National Archives in Périfet.
In November of 2021, they found a death warrant for Hammerscould signed by the infamous OAS,
the secret organization nestled in the French Army at the time of the Algeria's war in
the Philippines.
So the French Army had a death warrant for Hammerscould at the time.
The document reads, quote, it is high time to put an end to his harmful intrusion.
This sentence is common to justice and fairness to be carried out as soon as possible.
End quote.
The sources are to be dealt by French journalist Maureen Picard.
And I just need to make this clear.
The reason Belgium and everybody supported Katonga is because it's a small region with
all of them in Earlwell, in Congo, and they found a convenient dictator who would just
let them do what they want with these resources.
And Belgium's happy, France is happy, the US is very happy with that situation.
And that's why they were on the Katonga side for so much.
And this is an article, I'm just going to read certain key points from it because I
found it fantastic, called Day Hammerscould's Plain Crash, What Really Happened to the UN
Chief from foreignpolicy.com.
Investigators fear they are running out of time to get to the bottom of what happened.
Key witnesses from the time period are dying off, and the UN inquiry, led by former Tanzanian
Chief Justice Mohamed Chanday Althin, is set to conclude in September without having established
conclusively the circumstances of the Plain Crash.
Othman has been investigating the case on and off for the UN since March 2015.
I believe the year is 2022 on this one, it might be 2021.
Over the years, Othman has amassed a significant amount of evidence, including the testimony
of African eyewitnesses suggesting foul play was largely ignored by early investigators
in the 1960s.
That goes against claims by British colonial authorities in Northern Rhodesia at the time
that Hammerscould's death was an accident.
Othman has explored a theory that a mysterious aircraft may have either fired on Hammerscould's
plane or harassed the pilot causing it to crash, or even that the plane had been sabotaged
by South African mercenaries allegedly with the aid of CIA and other Western intelligence
agencies.
The CIA had previously desired involvement in the agency's operation Celeste.
Othman said in his two previous reports issued in 2007 and 2019 that the burden of proof
was on member states to demonstrate that they had conducted a thorough review of their records
and archives, particularly from their intelligence agencies.
Quote, the continued non-disclosure of potentially relevant new information in the intelligence,
security and defense archives of member states constitutes the biggest barrier to understanding
the full truth on the event.
End quote, Othman wrote in 2017 reports.
So he's trying to get all the evidence he can and no parties that he thinks are involved
or cooperating in having the evidence.
Yeah, it seems like everybody kind of wanted it.
Yeah, I'm going to talk about this in the end because that's the part I find so weird
about it.
Weren't there eyewitnesses that saw other planes or was that just a document altogether
that was?
No, there are.
And they are in the official reports sent to the U.N.
There are three official reports done by Othman and we'll get to that later.
That there are other aircraft?
Yes.
Okay.
The government of Zimbabwe, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have appointed
high ranking figures, including Sydney, Sakuramayee, a former Zimbabwe and defense minister to
oversee the search for documents and have provided full access to their archa.
Belgium, France and Sweden have also granted extensive access to their security files,
but the U.S. and Britain have been less forthcoming, appointing relatively low level officials
to manage the search for relevant evidence and releasing the occasional confirmation
of incidents brought to them by the U.N.
A reviews and commission of inquiry found that the pilot had miscalculated the height
of the tree line and plowed into the forest canopy.
The official story from the original time.
The subsequent U.N. inquiry could not establish the cause of the crash, leaving open the possibility
that Hamas Gold could have died either as a result of an accident or foul play.
Eye witnesses in the area recall seeing a small plane approach the Albertina before
there was a bright flash in the sky and then watching a flaming aircraft plunge into the
forest instantly killing everyone on board except the delegation's acting chief security
officer Harold Julian who died from his injuries nearly a week later.
Before his death Julian, a former U.S. Marine, suggested a threat or attack as the plane
approached Nidola, possibly involving a sudden explosion, according to Aufmann's report.
This evidence was augmented in 2018-19 by information from Zimbabwe that showed that
northern Moghesean authorities had tried to stifle those statements of Julian from being
made public.
End quote.
And that's what Julian wrote in 2019.
Aufmann has cited documents indicating that British officials had intervened behind closed
doors to persuade the U.N. to alter the conclusion of the report to rural sabotage or an external
attack.
In 1992, two of Hamas Gold's top advisers, Connors Thurzo Bryan and George Ivan Smith
wrote in the Guardian that they had evidence that their bosses plane had been shot down
by accident by mercenaries in the employ of Belgian, American, and British mining interests,
which feared hammer-skilled peacemaking would jeopardize their business interests.
Gorin Bjorkdal, a Swedish national whose father worked in the region, began researching
the U.N. chief's death and conducting interviews with local charcoal makers who had witnessed
Albertina's final dissent.
Rhodesian and U.N. emphascators at the time largely dismissed the testimony of local black
and African women.
The case received a boost when Susan Williams, a British scholar who grew up in Zambia, revisited
the crime unearthing previously unseen documents from the archived capers of Lord Cuthbert
Alford, who was the British High Commissioner of Bordesia in 1961, and who was at the Nidola
Airport on the night in Trash, including a secret report by Neil Richie, an MI6 agent
who organized the planned meeting between Hamas Gold and Tishambay.
Williams' 2011 book, Who Killed Hamas Gold?
The U.N., the Cold War, and White's premises in Africa helped spur the establishment a
year later of the Hamas Gold Commission, a voluntary body of international jurists and
lawyers chaired by the British during Stephen Sedley.
Williams has since fed documents to the U.N. investigators.
The response to the U.S. and the U.K. to judge Alford had been appalling and arrogant.
Williams told foreign policies in an email, but they are entirely consistent with the
behavior of those states at the time of the crash, when Britain was the colonial and racist
ruler of Northern Nidigia, and the U.S. was interfering in the process of decolonization
in Africa.
I shouldn't end quote.
Both the U.K. and the U.S. stated that all relevant information had been made available,
but this was not true in either case.
The Hamas Gold Commission concluded in its final 2013 report, quote, there is persuasive
evidence that the aircraft was subjected to some form of attack or threat as it circled
to land at Adola, end quote, is also concluded that it is hiding the likely that the entirety
of the local and regional Adola radio traffic on the night of September 17, 18, 1961 was
tracked and recorded by the NSA and possibly also by the CID.
These findings prompted the UN General Assembly in 2015 to adopt a resolution calling on then
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to create a panel of experts to examine the case and
determine whether there was enough evidence to merit further investigation.
At the time, Hamas Gold death, the United States and Britain had extensive intelligence
assets in the region, including CIA agents and NSA surveillance capabilities.
But much of what the UN has learned about U.S. activities in the region has come from
independent researchers, private archives or other governments.
Othman has asked the U.S. to provide access to intercepts or other evidence of communications
from Hamas Gold's plane or other U.S. aircrafts in the area at the time of the crash.
On the night of the crash, there were at least three U.S. planes, including U.S. Navy and
Army Attaché's aircrafts.
Equipped with the state of the art surveillance equipment at the airport in Adola, one of
the U.S. intelligence officials, Carl Southall, recalled in the interviews having overheard
the intercepts of a known European mercenary pilot, nicknamed the Lone Ranger, shooting
Hamas Gold's plane.
And U.S. Ambassador to Congo Edmund A. Guglion sent a report to Washington on the day Hamas
Gold was killed, stating that the plane may have been shot down.
The historical records strongly suggest that governments, including the U.S., which had
a presence in the and around the Congo region at the time, may hold such evidence.
Othman wrote in an annex to his 2019 report.
But the U.S. has provided limited confirmation for years.
Washington denied that Al Abra, a former U.S. Air Force security service officer who also
overheard transmissions of an attack the night of the crash, worked for the United States,
only acknowledging his links to the U.S. intelligence after he furnished American officials with
his government identification.
So they are absolutely not involved in this conversation, all giving absolutely minimal
information as it's clearly shown.
Yeah, and they are pointing the blame at someone else.
Oh, they're just saying we don't have anything.
We don't know.
I don't know.
But they said the Lone Ranger was there.
No, somebody did.
Somebody who worked for the government.
But they say they have none of those records or that they can even confirm that guy worked
for you.
Oh, okay.
I misunderstood.
I thought that was them being like, oh, yeah, all our planes were there and we definitely
could like pick some stuff up.
No, they're like, look, you don't have any records.
There's this other plane that was there.
And that guy who's there is like, no, we have those.
We don't even know you work for us.
A spokesperson for the US State Department said the United States takes offense in quarry
furiously and quote shares his interest in understanding the circumstances of the death
of Secretary General Big Hammerstein and quote, I cannot in quote there over the years the
US has shared over a thousand pages previously classified documents with the investigators
and quote the spokesperson said speaking on condition of handling the office of the director
of national intelligence and the official added quote, they conducted yet another exhaustive
search of the US intelligence archives and did not find any additional information that
would shed light.
So they're saying that they turned everything over the possibly book.
Was there a wink at the end?
You can't see that because it's written down.
It was super sarcastic, how they were saying British Hammer, do you change colonial intelligence
officials were also intercepting communications suggesting that they were pertinent clues
buried in their own archives.
Othman is seeking access to documents describing the activities of Richie, the MI6 agent and
other British officials who were tasked with organizing a meeting between Hammer's golden
to Shamban.
Othman also saw information about the Belgian mercenary pilot, Jan van Riesigan, whose name
has keeps coming up, who had served in the British Royal Air Force during World War
II and is alleged to be a colleague who have admitted to flying the plane with Rockdown
Hammer School's aircraft.
Keir Coppins, a colleague of the Belgian pilot, asserted in the documentary Cold Case
Hammer School that van Riesigan was known as the lone ranger.
This is where we're going to talk about Othman is also seeking information from the South
African government about an alleged plot by paramilitary group known as the South African
Institute for Maritime Research, which, man, for a terrorist group that is a weird name.
They're planning to do a satanic hammer school by placing a bomb in his plane before it left
the airfield, Leopoldville.
Now the Congolese capitol of Kinshawson, on route to Nidalee.
In a March 2019 letter to South Africa, Othman said he understood that the South African
government had located documents detailing the plan, dubbed Operation Celeste, that came
earlier with the CIN, but that those documents had never been shared with the U.S.
And this last little bit is on Jan van Riesigan.
And he has been named as possible attacker before, but has always described simply as
a Belgian pilot.
And this comes from the Observer.
So the Observer can now reveal that he had extensive ties to Britain, including a British
mother and wife, trained with the RAF and was decorated by Britain for his services in the
Second World War.
Van Riesigamp, whose father was Belgian, escaped occupied Europe at the start of the war to
join the resistance in England.
He trained with the RAF and flew missions over Nazi-held areas during this period.
He met his married British wife, cementing a lifelong connection.
For decades, Van Riesigamp appeared to have proved that he wasn't flying in the region
on the night of Hammersfield's plane, and the Albertina came down outside Nidola in
Zambia and then called Northern Maldivesh flight logs meticulous records of where and
when he flew.
The peer show of Van Riesigamp was not flying for most of that month, returning to duty
only on September 20th.
However, Roger Brackham, another mercenary flying for the Katonges, told filmmakers
that his colleagues' log books are dotted with a parent forgery.
He does not believe that Van Riesigamp shot down Hammersfield, but when asked in an interview
for the film if he considered the log book fake, he responds, quote, I won't say, but
I didn't recognize the story of Tolled.
He leafed through the book, he later directly accuses Van Riesigamp of forgery.
Well, this is fake, end quote.
Brackham says bluntly, one flight destination and goes on to add that some of the names
listed for co-pilots are not real.
A friend has also come forward to claim that less than a decade after Hammersfield's death,
Van Riesigamp told him he had attacked the plane.
Pierre Coppens met Van Riesigamp in 1965 when he was flying for a parachute training center
in Belgium.
Over several conversations, he claimed to pilot detailed how he overcame various technical
challenges to down the plane and where who was traveling.
Quote, he did not know.
He said, I made the mission and that's all.
And then I had to go back and save my life.
And that's the end of that.
So there's definitely a conspiracy, but the thing is, there are so many that it's hard
to actually say which one that happens.
Was it the British that shot him down?
Was it the CIA?
Was it Van Riesigamp?
It was probably Van Riesigamp.
But as it was going down, did the South Africans blow it up?
It could be all of them.
And this is still going on as of today.
Othman's report came out in 2022.
It's called the Othman's Imminent Persons Report.
And I found a few key quotes from it.
I just wanted to highlight.
There's three paragraphs, so it won't take long.
As mandated, I have also sought to draw conclusions from the investigations already conducted.
As in 2019, I assessed that it remains possible that an external attack or threat was a cause
of the crash.
However, it is not reasonable to reach a conclusion as to the cause of the tragic event based on
presently available but incomplete information.
This is because material information that appears to have been created or held by member
states remains disclosed.
Undisclosed.
I was just going to say disclosed.
Did I miss something?
Remained undisclosed.
In March 2020 and subsequently, I sent requests for information to the four key member states
that have been identified in 2019 that were urged by the Assembly to engage further with
the process of disclosing relevant records.
They are the Russian Federation, South Africa, the United Kingdom, a great Britain in Northern
Ireland, and the United States of America.
The 2017 and 2019 report included that burden of proof had shifted to certain member states
to show that they had conducted a full review of records and archives in their custody or
possession.
I respectfully submit that the burden of proof to conduct a full review of records and archives
resulting in full disclosure has not been discharged at present time.
Indeed, information received from other sources under the present mandate underscores that
it is almost certain that these member states created, held, or were otherwise aware of
specific and important information regarding the cause of the tragic event.
That information is yet to be disclosed.
Yeah, obviously.
And that is the story of the assassination of Dave Hamersfield.
What do you think?
I don't fucking know.
If you want to keep up to date on it, there is literally a website called Hamersfield
inquiry.info where you can learn more about this and keep up to date with the most recent
findings.
There is literally news updates.
The last one being July 19th of 2023.
They certainly picked the name that everybody could spell just hearing it.
All the streets are spellet, yeah.
And like it is definite there is foul play involved, but there are so many bad actors
that are not helping in the story that clearly have some sort of involvement that is hard
to actually say the actual story that took place.
Well it's always funny when there is just bad story and cover up when it's like obvious
that something is going on.
And it seems to happen in so many of these conspiracy things that you are just like
we can tell that something is going on and then people who are like there is no conspiracy
or like well why would it be that bad?
And there is no question there is a conspiracy here.
The literal paper to the UN about this says I don't know what happened because people
won't give me the records all I know is there was foul play.
But the problem is, is like okay, Yan shot him down.
Okay, then why is the US not handing over records?
Did they pay him?
Were they involved in setting it up?
But then why did France have this contract to kill out on Anasville?
And then why are there records showing that the South African group blew up the play?
That's why I say everyone's in full.
You may never know because even the guys said we're coming up to the point where everyone's
going to be dead.
Yeah, but like these are the actual conspiracies about the UN.
They aren't some secret organization that's controlling everything from behind.
They're very clearly a bureaucratic thing that can't do much.
These are the real stories that you need to look at.
And this is the real bad actors on that level that need to be looked at.
Or the people who are involved in that side and still won't turn over their records.
They're probably all guilty.
Oh yeah, there's a reason they're not turning over their records.
So can't the UN do what do they have no records?
No, because it involves of the four countries that won't handle the records.
Three of them are part of the security council and have veto power.
So like what are they going to do?
There's always some way around things for.
For the powerful, yes.
Yeah, for the powerful to commit atrocities.
Yeah.
Okay, I'm not really sure what to comment here.
That was a good one.
It's a very real conspiracy without an answer to this game because there's so many possible.
And yet still all of them could be right at the same time.
I know that is a really weird part.
All of them seem very plausible and you can make it fit.
So that's why I rest with all of them.
It all happens.
It's all of them.
And they probably that yeah, that I.
There was a French assassin on the plane as it was getting shot down and then so bad for
them.
That's couldn't they have like all got together and been like, let's hire this guy and then
we'll all just cover for each other.
They could have.
They won't turn over the damn records.
Then it's like that one where who drew the short straw?
Nobody knows.
So then they all just like, they'll never know.
I thought the whole point of drawing straws was so that you knew who drew the short straw.
Long straw.
Is it that nobody knows?
But no, are you talking about blanks in the rifle?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That one, you knew the one I was trying to get.
So when you're assassinating somebody by gunfire or firing squad.
Yeah, yeah, that one.
There's only a few active bullets and there's at least one blank so that nobody knows who
actually fired the killing round.
Yeah, that's a good theory.
Right.
I mean, it's not terrible and like justice possible is anything else except for pilot
error.
Unless you count the fact that a dead pilot can make errors and not piloting a crashing
plane.
Well, I mean, he's making all errors.
Should have been alive.
Yeah, it's the first rule of flying a plane.
It really is.
They will not put a dead man in the pilot seat.
Unless you believe the 9-11 theories, but that's a whole other thing that we will not
touch for a while.
Having said that, Chelsea, do you have anything else to say?
No, I don't think I can really particularly add anything on that other than it's always
refreshing when you get kind of like a non-crazy conspiracy theory, even though we're just getting
off one.
That's really not crazy.
I feel like we've been progressing from, you know, we went through the Serpo story,
we went through Britney Spears and now we're very groundy.
It's a really nice return.
I can't wait to see what we have next.
Well, speaking of that, I have been Taylor with Chelsea.
We are Journey to the Fringe.
Thank you all for listening and we will see you next week with whatever less crazy story
we have.
Okay, bye.
Thank you for listening to Journey to the Fringe.
If you have liked what you have listened to, please like, share, subscribe, or follow,
depending on what venue you are listening to us through.
Also please, if possible, leave a five-star review, as that really helps us in the algorithms.
Should you wish to interact with us, please check us out on your social media of choice.
I bet you we are there.
And if you really want to communicate with us and give us ideas for new episodes or tell
us that we're wrong and terrible, either way, please send us an email at journeytothefringe.com.
For now, I'll see you in the next episode.