Congo: Dinner for the Senator

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For Katanga's secessionist regime, it was a trifle embarrassing. Here was its stout U.S. supporter. Connecticut Senator Thomas J. Dodd, in town only three days after Katanga President Moise Tshombe was calling on his people to fight the United Nations troops with "poison arrows, spears, axes and picks." To smooth things over, Tshombe and some of his Cabinet ministers mingled pleasantly with U.N. officers at the U.S. consul's cocktail party honoring Democrat Dodd's arrival. But neither Tshombe nor anyone else could control the erratic, excitable Katanga soldiers who had been listening to the President's inflammatory speeches.

Milling Mob. Hardly was the consulate reception over when a group of heavily armed paracommandos of Katanga's ''elite corps." on guard at a Katangese general's residence in another part of town, noticed dozens of "suspicious" foreigners arriving at a house a few doors away. This was the home of Mobil Oil's representative, who was giving a dinner party for Dodd, U.N. and diplomatic guests, and the best of Elisabethville society. When a sedan with U.N. license plates drove up, the soldiers were sure some kind of plot was being hatched. Quickly they surrounded the car, shouting and gesticulating wildly at the two startled occupants. Australian-born George Ivan Smith, acting U.N. chief in Katanga, and Brian Urquhart, a Briton transferred to the Congo from U.N. Manhattan headquarters only a few days before.

Breaking through the angry, milling mob. Smith, 46, and Urquhart, 43, ran into the house, where the first guests were already sipping their drinks. The screaming troops were right on their heels; grabbing the hapless pair, they smashed Urquhart's nose, pommeled Smith into submission, then dragged them both toward a truck outside. When a woman official from the Irish Foreign Office tried to intervene, the soldiers cuffed her roughly, bloodying her dress, ordered her to stay out of the fight or die.

Heads Down. It was at this point that a car arrived with U.S. Consul Lewis Hoffacker and Dodd. Sizing up the situation, Hoffacker jumped out, grabbed Smith and hauled him semiconscious into the sedan. "Lie on the floor and keep your heads down!" Hoffacker yelled to Smith and Dodd; then he gunned his motor and drove away at full speed before the confused soldiers could stop him.

But Urquhart was still their prisoner. They hauled him to a military camp outside town, beat him on and off for two more hours. Every time a car approached the camp, the soldiers, fearing the arrival of the U.N.'s tough Gurkha soldiers of the local Indian contingent, put submachine-gun muzzles to Urquhart's head and vowed to shoot if the U.N. tried to intervene. Not until angry U.N. aides induced Tshombe and two of his Cabinet ministers to drive to the camp was Urquhart released. "I was sure I was going to die there,'' he said after he left the hospital, where he got patchwork on his smashed nose, bruised skull and battered ribs.