Hubert Julian’s home overlooked the Harlem River in New York. The Bronx townhouse was crowded with elephant tusks, vintage rifles, Abyssinian medals, photographs of Julian with Marcus Garvey and Haile Selassie, souvenirs from Guatemala, books of newspaper clippings, a menagerie of parrots and a pet monkey. On Sundays his extended family turned up for inch-thick steaks flown in from South America, with African fruits for dessert.
Julian obviously had money – ‘[I’m] richer now than a yacht full of Greeks,’ he told reporters – although how much was the subject of conjecture among interested parties.1 An FBI report from the late 1950s claimed that he ‘was subsidised by wealthy white women’.2 Julian insisted he earned his cash. Both may have been true.
Julian had no objections to being supported by women, even when he had an income of his own. He proved it forty years earlier when he first arrived in America. The madam of a well-known Harlem brothel fell for his story of being a penniless medical student. She took Julian into her bed only to discover a few weeks later that her medical student had a suitcase full of cash and no knowledge of medicine. Julian was lucky she never discovered he had crossed the border from Canada in a plush McFarland touring car driven by a white chauffeur.
In early 1962, the Bronx townhouse was empty. Any FBI agents or angry madams looking for Julian, a towering athletic figure with his chin habitually held up at a forty-five degree angle to the rest of the world, would need a plane ticket to Elisabethville.
The Katanga secession was not big news in America. The papers ran regular pieces on Tshombe’s adventures but there was no sign that their readers were paying much attention. Those who did read the foreign news sections tended not to like the Katangese leader.
Condemnation was fiercest in the African-American community. Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam called him ‘a curse … an insult to anyone who means to do right’.3 Malcolm’s fiery radicalism made him a divisive figure on most issues but his views on Katanga were strictly mainstream, shared by respectable organisations like the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa (ANCLA), whose most famous supporter was Martin Luther King, Jr.4 The ANCLA stood firmly behind President Kennedy’s position of reintegrating the renegade province, by force if necessary. Even the politically inoffensive Negro World magazine described the men behind Katanga as ‘white power interests’.5
The few white Americans who followed Katangese politics did not disagree. Liberals damned Tshombe as a tool of Belgian mining companies and the right blamed him for opening the door to communism. Support for Léopoldville from both sides was dampened but never extinguished by suspicions about the United Nations’ role as world policeman.
Only a small but vocal collection of right-wingers supported Katanga. Michel Struelens, an expatriate Belgian on the Elisabethville payroll, was behind a torrent of press releases aimed at influential faces in Washington from Katanga Information Services on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. Struelens was helped by Sid Hershman, who had ties to Cuban exiles in Miami, and David Martin, an administrative assistant of Senator Dodd. The Committee for Aid to Katanga Freedom Fighters was co-ordinated by Martin Liebman, a gay Jewish ex-communist turned PR man for conservative causes, out of his New York offices. Richard Nixon, who had recently lost the presidential election to Kennedy, was a member; so was Barry Goldwater, a major figure for conservative Republicans. In December, the Committee spent $6,000 on a full-page New York Times advert that declared: ‘Katanga is the Hungary of 1961.’6
Other pro-Tshombe efforts included the film documentary Katanga: The Untold Story, made by the obsessively anti-communist John Birch Society, which told the truth without telling the full story and was shown at private events. Senator Thomas J. Dodd, recovered from his close shave with the Brian Urquhart kidnapping during his November visit to Elisabethville, continued a one-man crusade for Tshombe in the Senate. When he was not haranguing other politicians, Dodd appeared on William F. Buckley’s syndicated television talk show to push the same point.
Philippa Schuyler, the pianist who played for Congo’s leaders in June 1960, turned her experiences into Who Killed the Congo?, a vivid pro-Katanga account of the secession. She attacked the West for not giving Tshombe more support, painted his opponents as Marxists and claimed that democracy would never succeed in Africa. The book got good reviews from American conservatives and bad ones from liberals. By the time it was published, Schuyler had already left Africa behind. In Europe, she was calling herself Felipa Monterro y Schuyler, a pianist from South America or Portugal depending on her mood, and passing as white.7
Tshombe supporters were marginal figures in the America of the early 1960s but support for Katanga could sometimes sneak through disguised as populist anti-communism. Eighteen thousand New Yorkers cheered the words of William F. Buckley’s brother-in-law, red-haired Yale man L. Brent Bozell, at 1962’s Conservative Rally for World Liberation from Communism: ‘To the Joint Chiefs of Staff: prepare an immediate invasion of Havana. To the Commander in Berlin: tear down the wall. To our Chief of Mission in the Congo: change sides’.8
Bitter words were exchanged between pro and anti-Tshombe camps. The ANCLA claimed Katanga’s American supporters were motivated by knee-jerk anti-communism or ties to interested business. Martin Liebman and his friends argued that Katanga was a young nation whose struggle for independence had been aborted by UN bully boys and American hypocrisy. It was irrelevant that the John Birch Society made a virtue of failing to see both sides of the argument or that the only pro-Tshombe voice in the Kennedy administration, token Republican Douglas Dillon, had substantial investments in the Congo. And what made the ANCLA an expert on Africa? Léopoldville’s US supporters had no clue about the role played by tribal conflict in the secession.
Liebman had a point. Slavery had rinsed away African cultural and ethnic affiliations from black Americans. The fratricidal nature of Congolese society, in which different tribes fought like cats in a sack, was as much a mystery to them as to their white counterparts.
It was doubly mysterious to Julian, a Trinidadian infused with British culture and brought up in middle-class comfort, but that did not stop him leaping into the situation feet first.
Julian was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad in 1897, to a family of comfortably well-off plantation managers. Like Zumbach, the flying bug bit early, when he saw an air show in 1913 and immediately discarded plans for a career in the family business. The death of American pilot Frank Boland after his biplane spiralled into the ground halfway through the performance did not faze Julian. He wanted to be airborne.
Family money subsidised a private school education, a pre-war trip to London and a few years in Canada learning French. It was there, in 1919, that the 22-year-old Trinidadian learned to fly. His mentor was William Bishop, a fighter ace at a loose end after the war, and one Sunday in November Julian completed a solo flight to become one of the first black pilots in the world.
The death-defying nature of early flying inspired Julian to invent a device to aid aeroplanes in trouble: a spinning blade reminiscent of a helicopter that opened a huge parachute canopy to bring the biplane gently to the ground. The money he made from the device (which never entered commercial production) funded Julian’s trip to America.
Bishop gave him an introduction to a broad-minded pilot in New York State who would provide further training, and the Trinidadian set out to make a splash in Harlem society. He got his name in the newspapers with a series of parachute jumps over New York City, although the notices turned mocking after one jump saw him crash through a window miles off target and be immediately placed under arrest. Julian had landed in a police station.
Julian’s achievements were remarkable in the face of fierce racial prejudice but throughout his life he made a habit of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. American journalists made sure everyone knew when that happened. ‘The Black Eagle’ nickname invented by the New York Telegram newspaper was half-sarcastic.
In New York, Julian linked up with Marcus Garvey, another expatriate Trinidadian, and his United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). To publicise Garvey’s Back to Africa ideas, Julian offered to fly to Abyssinia in a seaplane and collected money from supporters to fund the trip. When the flight failed to happen, he was threatened with arrest for mail fraud and forced into an unprepared attempt from the Harlem River which dumped him into Flushing Bay five minutes after take-off.
UNIA washed their hands of him and Julian’s career zipped through one scheme after another as he barnstormed for money, gave talks on self-improvement to railway porters, ran bootleg liquor and drugs for New York gangster Owney Madden, and tried and failed to start his own black American improvement association.
In 1930, as the Depression bit hard, Julian caught a break when an emissary of Ras Tafari, an Abyssinian leader about to be crowned Emperor Haile Selassie, requested his presence in Addis Ababa to organise an air display at the coronation. The Black Eagle lived well for several weeks, until he crashed Ras Tafari’s private plane into a tree and was banished in disgrace. Back to New York (‘I can state categorically that the Emperor and I were the best of pals when I left’) and more money-spinning schemes until the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 returned him to Haile Selassie’s side.9 The Emperor refused him permission to join the air force and put him in charge of training ground troops.
The shoeless Africans were no match for the tanks, bombers and mustard gas of Mussolini’s fascist legions. Julian was with his troops at the front, enduring shell fire with his usual buoyant self-confidence, but even he considered the Emperor’s cause lost when he discovered the army’s ammunition did not fit its guns. In November 1935 he gave up his colonel’s uniform and left Abyssinia after a fist fight with another black mercenary, John Robinson, a Chicago pilot known as ‘the Brown Condor’ (the newspaper headlines in New York were predictable). On a final drive around Addis Ababa, Julian’s car knocked down a pedestrian and a crowd of Abyssinians stoned him.
The Second World War was spent in relative quiet by Julian’s standards. He fought for a week in Finland against the Soviet invasion of late 1939, then returned to New York as a Finnish military attaché, in which role he gave interviews but did little else. In 1940, he challenged Luftwaffe head Hermann Göring to a dogfight after hearing Adolf Hitler had made insulting comments about Africans (‘I therefore challenge and defy you Hermann Goering as head of the Nazi air force to meet me Hubert Fauntleroy Julian at ten thousand feet above the English Channel to fight an aerial duel to avenge this cowardly insult to the honour of my race’), which Berlin ignored.10 He failed to get into the Canadian Air Force. He sold used cars. Along the way, he picked up American citizenship.
It was after the war, when newspapers paid less attention to him, that things came good. He became an arms dealer. Selling weapons of death tends to bring out the worst in people. Julian had always cared more about his own well-being than doing the right thing but on entry to the high stakes world of international munitions supply, the Black Eagle’s moral compass lost its north and began to spin.
He supplied weapons to the leftist regime of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, finding time to chat with expatriate revolutionaries Fidel Castro and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara in Guatemala City’s corridors of power. That bit of business did not stop him selling weapons to right-wing Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista or repressive Dominican leader Rafael Trujillo, who had made himself godfather to every child born in his country.
Julian supplied Guzman’s increasingly repressive regime right up until the CIA-backed invasion of June 1953, a contract which earned him a place in the agency’s files on subversives. The file got thicker when he came close to a deal with Castro’s regime after it overthrew Batista in 1958. That deal soured and Julian spent the night in jail after his pre-revolution dealings with Batista were discovered. Undeterred, Julian continued to sell weapons to whoever wanted them, regardless of politics or body count.
The road led to Katanga. Julian became interested in the Congo while on arms dealing business in Paris for Haiti’s Papa Doc Duvalier in May 1960; news of the Belgian colony’s impending independence was all over the French newspapers. With his usual impulsiveness, Julian flew off to Léopoldville, where he got an audience with prime minister designate Patrice Lumumba and convinced him that a Congolese Air Force with African, not Belgian, pilots was possible after independence. Lumumba was enthusiastic, but a day later sent a note to Julian’s hotel calling off the agreement. Julian was the tall and elegantly dressed man whose presence at Lumumba’s side had sent alarm bells ringing through CIA Congo station.
It was a year before Julian paid much attention to the Congo again and by that time Lumumba’s body had been dismembered and burned, the prime minister’s front teeth placed in the pocket of Gérard Soete. In October 1961 a new PR company, International Broadcasting System Inc (IBS) of New York, contracted Julian to be its representative in Africa. The company wanted to represent emerging African states on the world stage and had fixed on Katanga as its first client.
Julian flew into Elisabethville, where gendarmes on leave from the humid northern jungles were enjoying the dry heat and cold beer, and pitched the deal to Tshombe. Katanga’s leader was enthusiastic about an American PR firm handling his battered public image and signed a $500,000 deal. It collapsed when the December fighting convinced IBS that the job was too dangerous. Julian resigned and signed on with Tshombe. The idea of a small state fighting for its freedom against overwhelming odds appealed to his romantic imagination, fed on very British tales of knights and dragons from his childhood. Tshombe’s frequent boasts that money was no object also helped.
During Operation Unokat, Julian became a familiar figure to foreign journalists covering fire fights in the capital’s streets. John Nugent, Newsweek’s bureau chief for Africa, saw him saunter, impeccably dressed, out of a building on rubble-strewn Avenue President Youlou and into a hail of mortar fire. Julian adjusted his tie and calmly hailed his limousine, whose driver was cowering behind the wheel further down the road. The Black Eagle waved to the crouching journalists, strolled to his car through flying concrete chips and rolling clouds of dust and headed off to another secret meeting.
For once, Julian’s business was not weaponry. Tshombe asked him to recruit Caribbean medical staff for his overstrained hospitals. Staff shortages were so extreme that a Welshman in Elisabethville who claimed to be a doctor was sent immediately to the front line.
‘Is it alright to cut penicillin with water, mate?’ he asked a wounded mercenary with a bullet in his side.11 The doctor turned out to be an unqualified British Railways dining car waiter.
Operation Unokat was over before Julian’s mission of mercy took flight and Tshombe diverted him to another pressing matter: guns and ammunition. The Katangese war machine was scrap metal after the UN onslaught of December 1961. Brussels was nervy about providing more weapons and without a complete refit Tshombe was at the mercy of his enemies. Shortly before he left for Geneva to meet Zumbach, the Katangese leader asked Julian to rearm his ground forces. The Trinidadian agreed but, always a self-publicist, asked for a flashy title to go with his secret mission.
It was as Katangese ambassador-at-large that Julian went to Europe on a three-month $10,231,500 spending spree. Arms manufacturers in Belgium, France and Portugal were happy to make appointments. They pretended to believe Julian when he said the arms would be shipped to customers in South America. During his round of meetings with foreign bureaucrats at anonymous government offices, Julian failed to notice the United Nations had taken complete control of Elisabethville airport. Every new arrival was screened and searched.
Oblivious, the Black Eagle continued his deals. As he passed racks of black sub-machine guns at a Portuguese arms factory, he decided to take a sample with him when he returned to Katanga in April. What could go wrong?
Hubert Fauntleroy Julian is the subject of John Peer Nugent’s biography The Black Eagle (Bantam, 1972). Additional information comes from contemporary articles in Jet magazine and article ‘The Black Eagle of Harlem’ in the online History of Flight section of Air & Space Magazine (1 January 2009).
1 Julian, ‘The Black Eagle of Harlem’.
2 Julian, ‘The Black Eagle of Harlem’.
3 The Speeches of Malcolm X at Harvard, ed. Archie Epps (William Morrow & Co., 1968), p. 167.
4 Mjagkij, Nina, Organizing Black America: An Encyclopedia of African American Associations (Taylor & Francis, 2001).
5 Negro World, October 1962.
6 Gérard-Libois, Katanga Secession, p. 181.
7 Talalay, Composition in Black and White, p. 223.
8 Scheider, Gregory, Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of the Contemporary Right (NYU Press, 1999), p. 52.
9 Nugent, The Black Eagle, p. 69.
10 Nugent, The Black Eagle, p. 115.
11 Nugent, The Black Eagle, p. 175.