Forty years ago, on Thanksgiving Day, November 24, 1959, two men walking through Alley Pond Park in New York discovered the body of man, shot through the head. The police wrote it off as a suicide, ignoring evidence of assassination in a case that the United Nations prefers to forget, and which remains an unfinished chapter of the Cold War.

The dead man in the Queens park was Povl Bang-Jensen, 50, a Danish diplomat who provided key aid to the United States and the West before incurring the wrath of the Soviet Union and its friends at the UN.

Povl Bang-Jensen came of age during the rise of National Socialism and became a staunch anti-Nazi during his student days in Denmark. He came to United States in 1939 to study international law and after war broke out joined the Danish embassy in Washington. There he helped set up the Danish resistance and kept Danish shipping under its own flag and in service to the Allies. He negotiated a treaty that established the United States as a protector of Greenland until Denmark was liberated. This deprived the Nazis of key bases in the north Atlantic. After the war, he aided Denmark’s entry into NATO.

Though opposed to Communism, Bang-Jensen was a liberal and devoted to the United Nations, which he joined in 1949, becoming Deputy Secretary. He labored out of the public eye until the Hungarians revolted against their Soviet oppressors in 1956. The UN, then occupied with the Suez crisis, ignored the pleas of Hungarian leader Imre Nagy and did nothing as Soviet tanks crushed the revolt. For their part, Hungarians began calling the UN the “tomb of mankind.”

As part of a UN special committee, Bang-Jensen traveled to Vienna and took testimony from 81 Hungarian revolutionaries. These agreed to testify on condition that their identities not be revealed because they still had relatives in Hungary. The occupying Soviets punished and in some cases executed the family members of those who had fled the country. In his report, Bang-Jensen had included a reference by Imre Nagy to “Russian imperialism.”

UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold demanded that Bang-Jensen release the list of names. To do so would be to breach his promise, and the Dane refused. He soon found himself the object of a vicious smear campaign orchestrated by Andrew Cordier, Hammarskjold’s American assistant. UN staff tagged Bang-Jensen as an alcoholic, a homosexual and McCarthyite and the UN’s report characterized him as an “oversensitive, highly emotional man, given to exaggeration and falsehood, driven out of his mind by cruel facts and overwork.” Bang-Jensen’s conduct, the report said, “departed markedly from normal and rational standards of behavior.”

The American Nobel laureate Ralph Bunche also vilified Bang-Jensen and Eleanor Roosevelt attacked his defenders. She wrote to Arthur McDowell of the Council Against Communist Aggression that “what you write is nonsense and rather wicked.”

But despite the pressure, Bang-Jensen did not betray the Hungarians. Indeed, he took further steps to protect them.

On January 24, 1958, on the roof of the UN building, Bang-Jensen burned the list of names. Knowing that he could be trusted, Eastern Bloc defectors began seeking out Bang-Jensen, giving him information about Soviet penetration of the UN. He told his wife that under no circumstances would he commit suicide, which would be “contrary to my religious convictions.” If were killed and a note found, he said, it would be a fake.

On July 3, 1958, Dag Hammaskjold fired Bang-Jensen. Though denied access to the records he needed to defend himself, the former Deputy Secretary turned down a generous offer to write a book critical of the UN, believing he would be vindicated and reinstated. It was not to be.

He secured a job, at less than half his UN salary, with CARE, (Cooperative for American Remittances for Europe). Bang-Jensen was last seen leaving for that job and three days later, on Thanksgiving Day 1959, found dead. The body was found lying face down, his hands outstretched and a pistol in his right hand. Those who discovered the body said it looked as though it had been placed there. A suicide note was found in his pocket, in Bang-Jensen’s handwriting.

The Hungarian refugees Bang-Jensen had sought to protect had no doubt that he had been abducted, interrogated, forced to write a note, and then murdered by Soviet intelligence, the only group with motive, means and opportunity. Defectors have testified that faked suicide was a favorite method of assassination with the KGB. In its November 29, 1959, editorial, the Washington Post noted similarities between Bang-Jensen and Walter Krivitsky, a defector who had exposed Soviet espionage in Europe, and who was found dead in a Washington Hotel in 1941.

The bottom corner of Bang-Jensen’s note bears the figures “6A,” and it was at 6A Wallnerstrasse in Vienna where Bang-Jensen had taken testimony from the Hungarian refugees. For his supporters, this detail confirmed that he had indeed been murdered. Though a hero in Hungary, Bang-Jensen and his supporters continue to be the victims of a double standard.

Western governments have marshaled their efforts to find those who murdered and ran concentration camps on behalf of a German National Socialist regime that lasted for 12 years and ended in 1945. The advanced age of the murderers is not considered an object to their pursuit, prosecution and punishment. But Western governments, particularly the United States, have made no similar effort to expose those who murdered and ran concentration camps on behalf of a Soviet Communist regime that lasted from 1917 until 1991, even though some of the murders took place on U.S. soil.

With their selective amnesia, our leaders have acted shamefully, betraying the victims of Communism, just as the UN betrayed Bang-Jensen.The organization, headed for years by a Nazi war criminal, should issue an apology, and Western leaders should seize the opportunity to redeem themselves.

The files of the former KGB hold the ultimate answers to the cases of Bang-Jensen, Walter Krivitsky, Juliet Stuart Poyntz and many others, but the United States and the West, despite their enormous leverage, show little inclination to secure the documents. Indeed, they continue to lend the Russian regime billions, much of which has wound up in the Swiss bank accounts of corrupt former KGB agents and the Russian mafia. Before squandering more money, the time has come to demand conditions for further Western aid and cooperation, including full revelation of all Soviet assassination campaigns.

A good place to start would be the case of Povl Bang-Jensen, a man who, as the Washington Post said, “kept his word at the price of his job, and, as some are now saying, of his life.”

Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley is editorial director of the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco and the author of From Mainline to Sideline: The Social Witness of the National Council of Churches. He can be reached via email at klbillingsley@pacificresearch.org.