‘Argo’ in the Congo: The Ghosts of the Stanleyville Hostage Crisis

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/11/23/argo-in-the-congo-the-ghosts-of-the-stanleyville-hostage-crisis.html

Fifty years ago, African mercenaries, American pilots, Belgian paratroopers, and Cuban CIA contractors converged in the deep jungle to attempt one of the largest hostage rescue missions in history.

KISANGANI (formerly Stanleyville), Congo —

Captain Mack Secord surveyed the thick jungle from his cockpit window and steered the Lockheed C-130 transport plane along a smooth cut made by the snaking Congo River. Dawn was rising on November 24, 1964, and there was a slight fog but otherwise clear visibility. From the height of 700 feet, a lush uniform green obscured the destruction unfolding below him.

Eight days earlier, Secord—a 32-year-old father from Birmingham, Alabama—had traveled from France to Belgium to Spain to an isolated island in the Atlantic, about 1,000 miles off the coast of Africa. He’d been told this was an exercise to bring warm clothes overseas, but along the way he and the pilots of 12 other planes had been instructed to pick up hundreds of commandos, weapons and ammunition, and a fleet of vehicles. Then they’d flown to an abandoned Belgian air base in the Congo.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/11/23/argo-in-the-congo-the-ghosts-of-the-stanleyville-hostage-crisis.html