Spies in the Congo: America's Atomic Mission in World War II by Williams Susan

Author:Williams, Susan [Williams, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610396554
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2016-08-08T22:00:00+00:00

17

A DEAD SHOT

Once Bob Laxalt, the code officer, had been told by Hogue about the mine at Shinkolobwe, he started to notice that special arrangements were always made for communications relating to uranium, which went out in a confidential code that the legation ‘protected with its life’. After ‘uranium entered the picture’, he wrote in his memoir, his job was never ordinary again.1

One day, Hogue did not turn up for a scheduled meeting at the legation in Léopoldville with Vice Consul Harry Schwartz. They called Hogue’s telephone number at his bungalow, but there was no answer; later, they discovered that the line had been cut. Then Schwartz, Laxalt and Withers, the economic attaché, got ready to drive to Hogue’s bungalow. Schwartz invited Withers along because he expected trouble—and Withers was ‘big and burly’.

They were just about to leave when the Legation secretary called them back to take a phone call from the Belgian gendarmerie. They had been told by Hogue’s ‘houseboy’, who slept in the native quarter, that the front door was open when he arrived. He had made the report three hours earlier, but the gendarmerie had done nothing about it until now.

They drove swiftly to the bungalow and Schwartz ‘braked to a squealing stop’ in the alleyway that ran next to the bungalow. They found just one gendarme inside—‘no detective squad searching for evidence, dusting for fingerprints, as in the United States or by the French Sûreté’. The living room looked no different from normal, but the bedroom door had been broken down and there was a trail of blood leading out of the kitchen door into the alleyway. Laxalt was horrified, especially since Hogue’s bedroom ‘looked like a small war had been fought there during the night’. Hanging lamps, a clock, and pottery were in fragments, and the wall beside the bed was pockmarked with bullet holes. ‘But what was most curious,’ noticed Laxalt, was that the mattress ‘had been tipped over toward the wall like a protecting buffer’. Hogue, they assumed, had used this as a shield when the shooting started. To their great relief, they saw there was no blood on the mattress. But they were puzzled: what had happened to Hogue?

Laxalt asked the gendarme if the neighbours had seen or heard anything, at which the gendarme looked at him as if he was an ignorant child. ‘Even if they did,’ he said, ‘Belgians would say nothing. They don’t want to be involved with espions, which these people obviously are.’ He told the three Americans that there had been no dead bodies and no noise. ‘Obviously,’ he said, ‘they used silencers.’ He added that he had the shell casings for the bullets that had been dug out of the wall, but they were in his pocket—and he was not going to show them, as they were police evidence. Just then, Laxalt realised he was standing on a shell casing. After the gendarme had left, he picked it up and handed it to Schwartz, who looked at it and passed it to Withers.

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