DIPLOMACY: Magnificent Obsession

Atop the windswept roof of Manhattan’s United Nations headquarters one afternoon two years ago, four men clustered solemnly around a portable incinerator. A tall, somber-faced U.N. political officer named Povl Bang-Jensen dropped three sealed envelopes into the flames, watched intently as the documents withered into ashes.

To Bang-Jensen (pronounced bong-yensen), longtime counselor at the Danish legation in Washington before he joined the U.N. staff in 1949, the burning of the papers was a victory for honor and principle. Inside the envelopes were the names of 81 Hungarian refugees who, at hearings of a U.N. committee in Geneva and Vienna in the spring of 1957, had testified about Communist atrocities during the Hungarian uprising of 1956. As deputy secretary of that committee, Bang-Jensen had promised witnesses that their names would never be revealed. Convinced that if Communist agents within the U.N. got hold of the witnesses’ names, relatives still in Hungary would suffer reprisals, Bang-Jensen held on to the documents, refused to obey U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold’s orders to turn them over to the U.N. Secretariat. After a long and bitter wrangle, Hammarskjold finally agreed to let Bang-Jensen destroy the papers.

For Bang-Jensen himself, the victory proved to be costly. Shortly after the rooftop burning, Hammarskjold fired him for “insubordination.” Nearing 50, despondent Povl Bang-Jensen set out in search of a new career to support his American wife and five U.S.-born children. He finally found a job with the CARE international relief organization in Manhattan.

One morning last week, two men walking their dogs in a wooded park two miles from Bang-Jensen’s Long Island home came across Bang-Jensen’s body sprawled beside a leaf-strewn bridle path, a bullet hole in his temple. Near by lay a stubby, .25-cal. automatic. In his pocket police found a farewell note addressed to his wife. The police verdict: suicide.* Said the Danish newspaper Information: “This is murder, in whatever way it happened.”

The U.N. bureaucracy refused to forgive Bang-Jensen even in death, belittled his fight over the list of Hungarian witnesses as the obsession of an unstable crank. But if Bang-Jensen was obsessed, it was a magnificent obsession.

* In tracing the history of the .25-cal. automatic, the police uncovered a bizarre twist of circumstance: the same pistol had been used as a suicide weapon in Washington back in 1934 by a Commerce Department official who had borrowed it from the owner. The owner got it back from the District of Columbia police, later sold it to a gun shop, where Bang-Jensen bought it in 1941 to use in case he found Nazi agents prowling around the legation of the Danish government in exile.