Immediately, plans were drawn up for a UN force, like the one that had been deployed during the Suez crisis to order the Belgian troops out of the country and keep the situation from deteriorating any further.

Hammarskjold feared that if the Congo collapsed into civil conflict, many of the surrounding countries with similarly fragile government would follow until the entire region went up in flames.

But it soon became clear this wasn't going to be like the Suez situation at all.

The Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba wanted the UN troops placed under government control so that he could use them to crush the Katanga's secession by force.

Hammarskjold flatly refused, saying that his troops were there to stop a war not to start one.

Lumumba, a fierce nationalist and anti-colonialist, then threatened to ask for military help from the Soviet Union.

He saw Hammarskjold's refusal to help him as a sign that he was in the pocket of the imperialist west.

The already delicate situation was made worse by behind the scene meddlings from foreign spies.

In subsequent decades, it would come to light, the Western intelligence agencies in particular.

The Americans and the Belgians had been working covertly to manipulate the situation in the Congo to their advantage.

The Congo was of great strategic interest to the U.S.

For one thing, most of the uranium used in the Manhattan Project had come from mines in the country.

And, of course, Cold War games were being played as the U.S. and the Soviet Union jockeyed for an influence in the Congo while the interests of native citizens were barely considered at all.

Propped up by the CIA, the new head of the ANC Joseph-Desire Mobutu declared a coup in September, taking over the country and dismissing both Lumumba and President Joseph Kasa-Vubu.

It was a cynical Cold War calculation.

Lumumba always seen as too left-wing and he had to go while Kasa-Vubu who favored the West was eventually restored to his position.

Now there were four governments in the Congo all claiming to be legitimate.

Kasa-Vubu's government in the capital Leopoldville today called Kinshasa, the Katanga succession under Tshombe in the southeast,

another secessionist government in South Kasai province and in the northeast at Stanleyville today Kisangani were supporters of Lumumba,

even though the man himself was effectively under house arrest in Leopoldville protected from troops by U.N peacekeepers.

It was in this increasingly complex and confusing environment that Dag Hammarskjold and his Congo club of diplomats attempted to keep the lid on a pot that was dangerously close to boiling over.

He put pressure on Belgium to withdraw its army, which it eventually did only for it to be replaced by an army of mercenaries, many of whom came from France or Belgium and were violently right-wing and white nationalist.

The CIA, meanwhile, was plotting to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, convinced he was still a threat to turn the country over to the Soviet side.

The only reason that this failed was because Lumumba's other enemies got to him first.

Attempting to break out of his house arrest, Lumumba was arrested on the first of December by Mobutu's troops.

He was imprisoned and regularly beaten until six weeks later Mobutu and Kasa-Vubu handed him over to Moise Tshombe in Katanga who hated him.

Patrice Lumumba, who might have become a great statesman like NASA, had he been given the time to mature as a politician, instead became a martyr executed by December's Belgium officers at the age of 35.