The CIA versus the UN in the Congo: The covert delivery of fighter jets to Katanga in 1961
By ROAPE - June 30, 2022
Excerpts:
As reports of Lumumba’s death sank in across the world, there were revelations of deepening US involvement in the Congo. On 17 February 1961, a story broke in the British newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, that an American cargo airline was secretly shipping Fouga Magister jets to Katanga.
This was shocking news. For the French-built Fouga CM. 170 Magister was a jet-trainer aircraft that could be used for combat: with a maximum speed of 400 miles per hour, it had the capacity to carry and use rockets, bombs and two machine guns. The delivery of fighter aircraft to Katanga was in clear violation of UN Security Council resolutions and contrary to official US policy.
The British press got hold of the story by chance because a US cargo aircraft was unexpectedly forced by engine trouble to land in Malta, then a British colony, in the early evening of 9 February 1961.The aircraft was a Boeing C-97 Stratocruiser – a long-range, heavy, military cargo plane – on which the words ‘Seven Seas Airlines’ had been painted over but were still visible. Otherwise, the only marking was the registration number on the tail, which identified it as a US plane. It had flown from Luxembourg and was apparently bound for Johannesburg; it carried three Fouga jet trainers. The names of the crew members, all Americans, were given to the US consul general in Malta.
Parts for the engine were flown from the US to repair the cargo plane; once it was ready to fly again, the aircraft and its sinister freight left Malta for Entebbe, Uganda, in the night of 13 February. While in the air, the captain reported to air traffic control that it was short of fuel and needed to alter course for Fort Lamy (now N’Djamena), the capital of Chad; this was a ploy to justify flying in the direction of Katanga. It then flew to Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi), Katanga’s capital.
British authorities in Malta had not appreciated the significance of this flight until the story broke in the press. At this point they quickly shared information about the episode with the colonial office in London, generating a file of reports and correspondence which has provided many of the important details set out in this edited extract.
Seven Seas Airlines was closely linked to the CIA, either as a CIA proprietary company or as a company contracted to the agency. Set up in 1957 by the American brothers Earl J Drew and Urban L ‘Ben’ Drew, the airline based its fleet in Luxembourg. Its headquarters was in Manhattan.
In July 1960, Seven Seas had been awarded a contract with the UN for the delivery of relief goods to the Congo. The company’s four Douglas DC-4s were mainly used for flights from Europe to Leopoldville (now Kinshasa); later that year the company purchased two Boeing C-97s from the US Air Force, which were deployed to the Congo to carry UN troops and supplies around the country.
Some years later, explained Black in her article, ‘I ran across the son of the man who had identified himself to me as the manager of Seven Seas. The son confirmed what I already suspected: his father, now retired, was a career CIA officer. Both Intercontinental and Seven Seas had belonged to the CIA, he said’.
Another aircraft company linked to the CIA and operating in the Congo was Southern Air Transport, which flew DC‐6 transports. The CIA’s involvement with Southern Air became a matter of public record in 1973, when documents relating to a planned purchase of the airline were filed with the Civil Aeronautics Board in Washington, DC. The documents revealed that the CIA proprietary airlines, including Southern Air Transport and Air America, all shared the same Washington address. Southern had begun its connection with the CIA in August 1960, according to a 1973 report in the New York Times; the article quoted a Miami-based pilot as saying, ‘Everybody knows Southern was doing spook stuff’.
Another airline flying in the Congo with links to the CIA was Air Congo. On 1 June 1961, Michael Hathorn, a medical doctor escaping South Africa for exile in Accra, flew to Ghana via the Congo. ‘We boarded an Air Congo plane’, he recalled later, ‘and we were rather disconcerted at first to find that half the seats had been removed and the rear half of the cabin was filled with cases containing bank notes and ammunition!’
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