Assassination by Plane April 5, 2018
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
Assassination by plane. This is opening a new tag on instances where state actors have deliberately killed marked individuals by shooting down or, otherwise destroying, the plane that they happened to be travelling on.
Operation Vengeance
A couple of examples just to get the ball rolling. First, Operation Vengeance. Early April 1943 the US picked up and decoded (Magic etc) intelligence that Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was visiting the Solomon Islands and also part of his itinerary. 18 April 1943 eighteen P38s were sent to intercept the two bombers on which Yamamoto’s entourage were travelling and brush their fighter escort aside. The two bombers were rapidly dispatched, one into the sea, Yamamoto’s into the jungle. He was later discovered seated in his chair, which had been thrown clear of the plane and remained upright under a tree, his hand on his sword. He had been killed, not from the crash, but from an American bullet that had passed through his head.
Yamamoto had been a lone voice of reason in the Japanese military 1939-1941 , arguing against a suicidal conflict with the United States. In some senses it is rather unfair that he take the blame for the Japanese aggression that he had tried to counter for so many years. But there is, likewise, no question that, vengeance aside, the US was wise to remove Yamamoto from the board. Yamamoto had proved one of the more capable of the Japanese leaders in the early months of the war (even at Midway): 1943 promised more of the same.
The Loss of BOAC Flight 777-A
At 7.35 1 June 1943 a British civilian flight took off from Lisbon heading for Bristol in the UK. Civilian planes were, according the rules of war, safe in the air. But as the plane was far out over the sea it was attacked by eight JU-88s. The British plane never stood a chance and plummeted into the waves with all seventeen on board. The passengers include the famous British actor Leslie Howard and a number of other notables: there were also two children.
There have been many hypotheses about why the German planes attacked a British civilian flight in the middle of the Bay of Biscay. The most regularly repeated, popularized by Churchill, is that German agents had been informed that the British Prime Minister himself had got on the plane to fly secretly back to Britain from his tour of North Africa. It has also been bandied about that Howard, a charismatic actor who had been a useful voice for Britain in the war, had been targeted: see the video below for a sense of how impressive Howard could be when he had Nazi Germany in his crosshairs.
Axis agents certainly observed British planes at Lisbon airport, so all of this is credible. However, there is another explanation that though less colourful might have something to it. The British civilian planes had been attacked before on the Lisbon-Bristol route: in fact, the plane that was shot down just before 1100 am, 1 June, had been strafed twice by German fighters on previous flights and limped home. There is every possibility that German planes had, 1 June 1943, run into what was clearly an enemy plane and had not understood that it was a civilian flight or had not cared. (The attack, note, took place in mist.) Postwar testimony from the pilots, when there would have been no reason to lie, suggests that no special orders had been given.
Challenge
Any others? Both of these are from WW2: I would be as interested in any from peacetime: drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com
5 Apr 2018: Stephen D. sends the following cases and possible cases.
1961 Ndola United Nations DC-6 crash (see also now Guardian)
Władysław Sikorski’s death controversy (I should have got this one)
Death and state funeral of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq
Assassination of Juvénal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira
5 Apr 2018: Southern Man on Bruce Mackensie (Kenyan minister killed on Idi Amin’s orders)
5 Apr 2018: Javin with a conspiracy theory but given the alleged assailants… 2010 Polish Air Force Tu-154 crash ‘one-third of Poles think it is possible that the Smolensk crash was an assassination’
5 Apr 2018: Oldhouse, quoting 6 Assassination Attempts ‘One of the most audacious plots unfolded on March 13, 1943, when Hitler arrived at the Smolensk post of Henning von Tresckow—a disillusioned German military officer—for a brief visit. Before the Führer and his entourage boarded their plane for the return trip, Tresckow approached a member of Hitler’s staff and asked if the man would take a parcel containing two bottles of Cointreau brandy to a friend in Berlin. The officer obliged, not knowing that the package actually held plastic explosives rigged to a 30-minute fuse. Tresckow and his co-conspirator Fabian von Schlabrendorff hoped Hitler’s death would be the catalyst for a planned coup against the Nazi high command, but their plan went up in smoke only a few hours later, when they received word that the Führer’s plane had landed safely in Berlin. “We were stunned and could not imagine the cause of the failure,” Schlabrendorff later remembered. “Even worse would be the discovery of the bomb, which would unfailingly lead to our detection and the death of a wide circle of close collaborators.” A panicked Tresckow phoned the staff officer and told him there had been a mistake with the package. The next day, Schlabrendorff traveled to Hitler’s headquarters and exchanged the concealed bomb for two bottles of brandy. Upon inspection, he found that a defective fuse was all that had prevented Hitler’s plane from being blown out of the sky.’
5 Apr 2018: Jones remembers an attempt on a presidential candidate that killed 107 people. The bloodiest in this list.
5 Apr 2018: Stephen D. redux, Stephen points to Itavia Flight 870: quoting from Wikipedia, my (Beach’s italics) ‘Major sources in the Italian media have alleged that the aircraft was shot down during a dogfight involving Libyan, United States, French and Italian Air Force fighters in an assassination attempt by NATO members on an important Libyan politician, perhaps even Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi, who was flying in the same airspace that evening.[11] This version was supported in 1999 by investigative magistrate Rosario Priore,[12] who said in his concluding report that his investigation had been deliberately obstructed by the Italian military and members of the secret service, in compliance with NATO requests.[12] According to the Italian media, documents from the archives of the Libyan secret service passed on to Human Rights Watch after the fall of Tripoli show that Flight 870 and the Libyan MiG were attacked by two French jets.[13] On 18 July 1980, 21 days after the Aerolinee Itavia Flight 870 incident, the wreckage of a Libyan MiG-23, along with its deceased pilot, was found on the Sila Mountains in Castelsilano, Calabria, southern Italy, according to official reports.[14]’
5 Apr 2018: Yaron sends in would I’d simply never heard of (most of the ones above involved remembering) Operation Tarnegol
3 May 2018: Ricards writes ‘OK, here we go: 4th December 1980, Portugal prime-minister dies in airplane crash with defense minister. not fully accounted for, stories abound: (1), (2). Namely with this connection… Samora machel, from Mozambique, airplane crash
