The Congo: The Hostages

Spurred on by white mercenaries, Moise Tshombe's reinvigorated army drove hard against the Congolese rebels. Loading their equipment aboard an ancient river steamboat, two commando units pulled out of their staging area at Kindu, crossed the Lualaba River, and, in 35 U.S. Army trucks, five Swedish troop carriers and four British armored cars, began their 350-mile march up the rutted rain-forest road to the rebel capital of Stanleyville. E.T.A. hopefully announced by Congolese Army Commander Joseph Mobutu: some time this week.

But victory might come high. As the week wore on, desperate rebel "President" Christophe Gbenye made the price look stiffer and stiffer.

All-Fronts Alarm. Since September, after the war began to turn against them, the rebels had been holding a U.S. medical missionary, Dr. Paul Carlson, 36, on absurd charges that he was "an American spy and an American major." Carlson, member of the Evangelical Covenant Church of America, had seen military service only as a seaman, for 22 months in the 1940s. He voluntarily stayed behind rebel lines to minister to their wounded, living in a village of 50 inhabitants called, in the native dialect, "The End of the World." But Gbenye announced that Carlson had been "tried" as a spy and sentenced to death. The missionary and the rebels' other white prisoners—60 Americans and 800 Belgians—would be released only after the U.S. and Belgium withdrew all aid to Tshombe's army. Last week Radio Stanleyville reported that Carlson's execution had been delayed in order to negotiate his release and the fate of the other prisoners directly with Washington. The rebels obviously wanted to gain time to get more outside help, presumably from their Red Chinese backers.

The U.S. agreed to "discuss" the prisoners' release, at the same time warning that the rebels would be held "directly and personally responsible" for the safety of all foreigners in their area. But the U.S. could not even find anyone from the Stanleyville regime with whom to negotiate. Meantime, both Washington and Brussels had put out an all-fronts alarm. Working through Arab and African nations, they piled diplomatic pressure on the Gbenye regime to release the hostages. U.N. Secretary-General U Thant appealed in vain for a mercy mission to Stanleyville. The Belgian government got Premier Moise Tshombe to offer the rebels a halfhearted amnesty.

860 Would Die. There was always the chance that the rebels were bluffing. But a battalion of 600 crack Belgian paratroopers was loaded aboard U.S. C-130 turboprop transports at Belgium's Diest airbase, flown to a little-used U.S. military base on Ascension Island, a British outpost in the South Atlantic only six air hours from Stanleyville. If necessary for humanitarian reasons, the Belgian government later announced, the paratroopers would be dropped on Stanleyville.

That got Moscow back into the act, after a long Russian silence on the Congo, with a demand that "all foreign interference be ended at once." As for Gbenye, spouting fury he ordered the evacuation of all hostages from Stanleyville. Each hostage, he announced, had been turned over to three trusted rebels—and "at the slightest attack" on the city, all 860 would die.