>>19648336

The CIA versus the UN in the Congo: The covert delivery of fighter jets to Katanga in 1961Part One

By ROAPE - June 30, 2022

An edited extract from White Malice: The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa by Susan Williams.

The events in this extract took place shortly after the assassination on 17 January 1961 of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically-elected Prime Minister of the Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo).

The new nation started to unravel almost immediately after independence from Belgium on 30 June 1960. A mutiny broke out among the ranks of the national security force, which was used by the Belgian government as an excuse to send in troops. UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld condemned this intervention and swiftly organized an operation to send a UN peace-keeping force to the Congo.

The crisis worsened the day after the arrival of the Belgian troops, when the mineral-rich province of Katanga seceded from the Congo under the leadership of Moise Tshombe. This illegal secession had the backing of the Belgian government and of multinationals – as well as the private support of President Eisenhower.

It was in Katanga that Lumumba was murdered. White Malice reveals that the CIA had a far greater involvement in the assassination of Lumumba than has been acknowledged by the US government.

The CIA continued to spread its tentacles deep into the Congo after Lumumba’s death: on land, by sea, and by air. This edited extract records one strand of its secret operations in the Congolese skies.

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.

>>19648525 (me)

The CIA versus the UN in the Congo: The covert delivery of fighter jets to Katanga in 1961Part Two

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!’

Air Congo featured prominently in the brutal treatment of Lumumba in his final weeks of life. When he was taken to Leopoldville on 2 December 1960 from Kasai, where he had been captured, he was flown in an Air Congo plane. Then, when he – along with Maurice Mpolo, the Minister of Youth and Sport, and Joseph Okito, Vice President of the Senate – were flown to their deaths in Katanga on 17 January 1961, their journey was on board an Air Congo DC-4. They were beaten so badly by Mobutu’s soldiers that the radioman vomited and the air crew, horrified, locked the door to the cockpit.

When the three Fouga Magister jets arrived in Katanga, David W Doyle, the chief of the CIA base in Elisabethville, was at the airport. ‘Not long after the Lumumba incident’, he wrote in his memoir True Men and Traitors, ‘three Fouga Magisters . . . were secretly flown in by US commercial air craft and crew, in direct violation of US policy, to join Tshombe’s forces. During a routine airport check-up, I chanced on them being unloaded from a US civilian KC97 pipeline cargo aircraft at night’. He added that when he chatted with the American air crew, it seemed to him that they were mere delivery men, with ‘no idea of the situation their cargo was about to make more tense—the aircraft were obviously there to shoot down UN planes’. Years later, Doyle identified the crew as US Air Force personnel.

The three Fougas, Doyle explained in his memoir, were training aircraft, but they were armed and perfectly able to destroy UN transport planes. ‘The UN was furious’, he said, ‘and it was suspected that was a CIA operation to help secretly build a stable, pro-Western Katanga in case the rest of the Congo were to fall under communist domination’. But if that was the case, he insisted, ‘nobody had told me anything about it—which makes CIA involvement highly unlikely’.

>>19648529 (me)

The CIA versus the UN in the Congo: The covert delivery of fighter jets to Katanga in 1961Part Three

Doyle’s version of events cannot be true. Documents show that the CIA had arranged the purchase of the Fougas and their delivery by Seven Seas. It is reasonable to assume that Doyle, as head of the CIA base in Katanga, was kept fully informed and was instructed to await the arrival of the planes. Doyle’s claim that he was at the airport that night to carry out ‘a routine . . . check-up’ is implausible, since he was not responsible in any way for the functioning of the airport, and in any case routine checks rarely happen at midnight. Equally unlikely is his claim that he ‘chanced’ on the Fougas being unloaded. Doyle may have felt obliged in his memoir to acknowledge the Fouga episode, since it had been splashed across newspapers in February 1961. And in doing so, he contrived – but unconvincingly – to dissociate the CIA from it.

On 17 February 1961 the Foreign Office in London sent a telegram to the UK’s UN mission in New York, headed, ‘Jet aircraft for Katanga’. The American embassy in London, it stated, had received reports that the three French-made Fougas were the first batch of nine to be delivered to Elisabethville.

The Stratocruiser C-97 that had been carrying the Fougas had previously been owned by US Air Force Air Materiel Command at Kirtland Field, New Mexico, and was used in a project code-named ‘Chickenpox’, in which its interior was adapted for the mobile assembly of atomic bombs. The C-97 was then assigned to the US civilian registry and ‘may have been used to ferry arms to Katangan rebels in early 1960s’, according to a flightlog. However, it was not registered under the name of Earl J Drew until 16 February 1961, which was two days after it had delivered the Fougas to Elisabethville.

Aware of the flare-up of tensions over the matter of the Fougas, the British government hastily sought to distance itself from the incident and to prevent further embarrassments. ‘In view of serious political repercussions that could arise out of Aircraft ferrying operations to Katanga’, wrote the colonial secretary to the governor of Malta on 18 February, ‘I should be most grateful if you would do what you can to prevent use of Malta by such Aircraft’.

Kwame Nkrumah, the President of Ghana, felt intense grief at the killing of Lumumba, with whom he had had a warm friendship and a strong political alliance. He was outraged: he blamed the US and the Western powers for the assassination. When he learned on 17 February 1961 from the UK press of the delivery of three Fougas to Elisabethville by a US aircraft, he was appalled. Then he discovered that the three jet trainers were merely the first of nine to be delivered to Tshombe.

Ghana’s minister of foreign affairs issued a strong statement to the US ambassador to Ghana on 20 February. If the reports were true, the minister objected, they ‘are obviously of most serious nature’. In this regard, he continued, the government of Ghana called attention ‘to statement made by president of US on Thursday 16th February to effect that unilateral intervention in Congo by one country [or] one group of countries would endanger peace in Africa’.

President Kennedy was embarrassed. He told Nkrumah: ‘The United States government did not, in fact, learn of this shipment in sufficient time to prevent a transaction which took place entirely outside the borders of the United States’. He added that Adlai Stevenson, the US ambassador to the UN, had condemned the delivery of the aircraft. Nkrumah was unimpressed—and said so.

The American embassy in London reported to the UK foreign office on 17 February that its government had little control over Seven Seas, since it operated outside the USA. The embassy added, ‘The French have apparently detained the remaining six Fouga aircraft at Toulouse’.

But there was some confusion about the intentions of Seven Seas. A week later, on 27 February 1961, the UK embassy in Luxembourg sent further information to the UK foreign office about the delivery of the Fougas to Tshombe; the information was then cabled to the governor of Malta on 3 March. The message reported that Seven Seas proposed ‘to transport to Katanga six more Fouga Magister jet trainers (with machine guns) which were awaiting shipment by them from Toulouse’. According to the US embassy in Luxembourg, however, Seven Seas had now given an assurance that it would not transport any more such aircraft to Katanga, in response to the embassy’s ‘strong representations’ after the shipment the week before.

More:

https://roape.net/2022/06/30/the-cia-versus-the-un-the-covert-delivery-of-fighter-jets-to-katanga-in-1961/

>>19648821

Sigh, specialists are sometimes forgotten

Irish Forces Raid Bulk Carrier and Find ‘Significant Quantity’ of Cocaine

Mike Schuler September 27, 2023

Irish military forces raided the Panamanian-flagged bulk carrier M/V Matthew on Tuesday and discovered a “significant quantity” of illegal narcotics, believed to be cocaine.

The raid was conducted early Tuesday morning off the coast of Cork.

The Irish Defence Forces said that the ship had been tracked for several days after traveling from South America. The Irish Navy patrol vessel LÉ William Butler Yeats fired warning shots in the ship’s direction before forces stormed the ship by helicopter, apparently as the vessel tried to evade authorities.

The Matthew was escorted to a naval base at Marino Point in Cork Harbour. AIS ship tracking data shows the ship was traveling from Willemstad, Curaçao.

BBC is reporting that police have arrested three people and the raid may be related to the grounding of a trawler on Sunday. The Daily Mail is reporting that investigators believe the M/V Matthew may have been used as a “mother ship” to transport cocaine to Ireland. Once off the coast, the vessel would transfer the drugs to smaller boats which would then smuggle them into Europe.

“This operation demonstrated the importance of all services of the Defence Forces and their ability to operate in the most challenging of conditions,” said Defence Forces Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Seán Clancy.

Officials later confirmed the seizure involved 2,253 kg (4,967 pounds) of cocaine worth an estimated 157 million euros ($166 million).

"This Joint & multiagency Op demonstrates the interoperability of Óglaigh na hÉireann, underlining the unique capability that we bring to the defence of the State. The significant intel led planning by the JTF enabled the coordination & execution of this complex multiagency Op. pic.twitter.com/2bcsZkyxdg

— Óglaigh na hÉireann (@defenceforces) September 26, 2023

Equassis data shows Matthew is owned by a one-ship company based in the Marshall Islands and changed hands as recently as August 10th.

https://gcaptain.com/irish-forces-raid-bulk-carrier-and-find-significant-quantity-of-drugs/

>>19648870

Summary

Where is the ship?

Bulk Carrier MATTHEW is currently located at UKC - Celtic Sea (reported 8 minutes ago)

What kind of ship is this?

MATTHEW (IMO: 9228150) is a Bulk Carrier that was built in 2001 (22 years ago) and is sailing under the flag of Panama.

Her carrying capacity is 50913 t DWT and her current draught is reported to be 6.5 meters. Her length overall (LOA) is 189.99 meters and her width is 32.26 meters.

>>19648922

Cooperative Engagement Capability

>>19648947

Pic released by the Irish shows four cranes

>>19649032

Newer beasts just said "screw it, mount a gantry to run the whole deck"

Pakistan Imports Its First Private-Sector Russian Crude Oil

By Ariba Shahid Reuters October 1, 2023

KARACHI, Oct 2 (Reuters) – Pakistan refiner Cnergyico CNER.PSX has imported the country’s first private-sector shipment of Russian crude oil, it said on Monday, as the cash-strapped nation takes advantage of Moscow’s discounts on its oil exports.

Related Article: Oil Tankers Stop Calling On Pakistan And Sri Lanka

The South Asian nation has started snapping up crude oil that Russia has discounted after its exports were banned from European markets over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Pakistan’s first cargo, imported by the government, arrived in June and a second government-to-governmentshipment is under negotiation.

It had been assumed that private imports would not be commercially viable because, among other things, cargoes have to be split and transferred to smaller ships as Pakistan’s ports cannot handle large tankers.

But Cnergyico used its single point mooring, which can accommodate deep-draft tankers, a company spokesman said in response to questions from Reuters. The crude is to be refined at the company’s refinery in the southwestern city of Hub.

Processing the 100,000-metric-ton shipment of Urals crude “marks an important milestone for the company and for the country as well,” said the spokesman. “It demonstrates the company’s capabilities and readiness to refine different types and complexities of crude oil.”

Cnergyico operates the largest refinery in Pakistan, with a capacity of 156,000 barrels per day (bpd), accounting for one-third of a national capacity of 450,000 bpd. It is the only refinery with its own single point mooring.

Cnergyico plans to sell gasoline and diesel refined from the Urals crude locally, and export furnace oil, or fuel oil, typically used in industrial boilers, power plants and ship engines.

“There is ample demand for furnace oil in the global market, which can help Pakistan generate foreign exchange,” the spokesman said.

Cnergyico conducted due diligence and consulted with external sanctions counsel to ensure the import of Russian oil did not violate sanctions, he said.

Pakistan aims to import 100,000 bpd from Russia this year, which would account for the bulk of its total imports, help address a foreign-exchange crisis and keep a lid on record inflation. Last year, Pakistan’s total crude imports registered at 154,000 bpd.

The government paid in Chinese yuan for its first import of discounted Russian crude, which went to state-owned Pakistan Refinery Ltd PKRF.PSX.

Cnergyico declined to comment on what currency it used to pay for its Russian cargo. A source with knowledge of the deal told Reuters that Cnergyico will also pay in yuan through a letter of credit from a Chinese Bank.

The benefits of the Russian discounts, however, are being offset by increased shipping costs and the lower-quality fuels produced from the heavy sour Urals crude grade compared with products refined from crude from Pakistan’s main suppliers, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, analysts say.

Cnergyico said it expects to make the Russian imports viable through the export of furnace oil to generate foreign exchange.

https://gcaptain.com/pakistan-imports-its-first-private-sector-russian-crude-oil/

>>19649138