Complete Works of Ian Fleming, page 285
‘But who are these big people? I still don’t get the picture of ten million pounds’ worth of diamonds getting smuggled every year. It’s a huge operation. Where are they actually smuggled from and to?’
Blaize said, ‘I’ll tell you about the people as we come to them. As for the smuggling channels’ – he searched among his papers – ‘here’s a copy of a map we drew up showing the principal routes to places all over the world. It’ll only give you a rough idea, and it’s only part of the story, but you can follow it as I tell you some of the case histories that came up at places like these’ – and he took his pencil and jabbed it down from place to place across the map.
‘When we got to Jo’burg the first thing to do was to set up an intelligence network which would penetrate this underground railway round the world, and as time went on we gradually got all the junctions covered.’ Blaize chuckled. ‘We tried to keep out of the limelight, but’ – he handed me a crumpled cutting from the Rand Daily Mail – ‘this sort of thing didn’t help much. Anyway, Johannesburg was to be our headquarters, and we set up branch offices at Kimberley, Freetown, Antwerp, Paris and London. Apart from Sir Percy Sillitoe and myself, we had six other Chief Agents. You can’t publish their names, but I can tell you that they were all British with first-class backgrounds in intelligence and security work, and they were all good men.
‘It was a happy team and a tough one. We called ourselves IDSO – International Diamond Security Organization. We had an admirable girl to look after our central records and all the material help we needed. We occasionally carried guns because it would have been foolish not to, but in fact we never had to use them and as it turned out we had no casualties except the occasional case of fever.
‘We had our own private code and we found that using full rates over the normal cable system was far better than setting up our own radio.
‘We relied a great deal for local help on the security staffs of the mines themselves and, of course, on the various British and Foreign Colonial police forces whose assistance Sillitoe had ensured in advance through Whitehall.
‘In South Africa all forms of diamond crime are dealt with by the Diamond Detective Department of the South African police. They helped too, as much as they could. But the picture outside South Africa was quite another story, and when I’d taken a good look at it I wasn’t surprised Sir Ernest Oppenheimer had decided to set up his own private intelligence service under Sillitoe.
‘It didn’t take long for us to set up shop, and from the end of 1954 we were operating continuously until the spring of this year, when our job was done.’
Chapter 2. THE GEM BEACH
DURING THE NIGHT I had been thinking about Blaize and wondering why he had decided to tell his story. Spies are trained to keep their mouths shut and they don’t often lose the habit. That’s why true spy stories are extremely rare, and personally I have never seen one in print that rang completely true. Even in fiction there is very little good spy literature. There is something in the subject that leads to exaggeration, and the literary framework of ‘a beginning and a middle and an end’ doesn’t belong to good spy writing, which should be full of loose ends and drabness and ultimate despair. Perhaps only Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene and Eric Ambler have caught the squalor and greyness of the Secret Service.
After a good night’s rest some of the tension had gone from the corners of Blaize’s mouth and eyes. He diffidently suggested that we should meet somewhere else: ‘I’d like to see as much of Tangier as I can while I’m here.’
So we went to the main café, the Café de Paris. The levanter was blowing and it was cold and miserable. We sat in a corner indoors and ordered espressos, which we sipped and then forgot.
I asked him why he was telling his story, and whether there weren’t any security objections.
Blaize had obviously given the problem a lot of thought. He ran through his reasons briefly and emphatically.
Information about diamond smuggling did not fall within the Official Secrets Act and no security problem was involved, except in so far as the physical safety of a number of crooks was concerned. In Blaize’s view it was in the public interest that a bright light should be cast upon perhaps the biggest racket being operated anywhere in the world. Publicity was a weapon against these people and their methods which had not yet been used. It would certainly assist the South African and other police forces and possibly lead them to further sources of information. And, finally, the IDSO operation had been a good one and there was no reason why, like far greater wartime secrets which have since been revealed, the people concerned should not get their share of credit.
Blaize’s case seemed to me solid. He didn’t plead it, but stated it, and he obviously had no reservations.
I changed the subject and leading on from our previous talk I asked him what sort of people the smugglers had been.
‘Smugglers,’ said Blaize, ‘are all sorts of people. The most dangerous one is the perfectly respectable European mine official who goes into business for himself. He’s got no criminal record, but suddenly he likes the idea of having fifty thousand pounds in the bank and perhaps a Cadillac and a girl-friend in Paris. You haven’t anything to go on with a man like that. One day he’s honest, and then during the night he suddenly decides to be a crook.
‘The most extraordinary thing about the diamond business is that there isn’t more smuggling and thieving. The prizes are terrific – you could hide enough diamonds on your naked body to make you rich for life – and the penalties if you’re caught are extraordinarily small. Of course, if you’re caught you lose your name and get a police dossier, which is never a good idea. Nowadays, you could get on the files not only of your own country and the country where you were caught, but also on to the records of Interpol. That can be a nuisance until you’ve bought yourself a new identity and a new passport in a place like this’ – Blaize waved towards the window.
‘There’s a place down in the Kasbah where you used to be able to pick up fresh papers. It cost around £50 for a British passport and £20 for an American. Americans – the GI and merchant navy type – regard their passports as a last chunk of money to get them home when all the rest is gone. You could have a few things done to your face by a surgeon and get back into circulation again, but even false passports have to be renewed from time to time, and the whole business is pretty tricky. But there are people hiding everywhere – from the police or from their wives or from some childhood sin they think is more important than it really is. If you walk the streets of any big city you’ll probably pass one fugitive in every hour.’
Blaize paused. He said reflectively, ‘I wonder, for instance, what’s happened to a man called Tim Patterson. I shall call him Tim Patterson because from all accounts he was a likeable chap who just found the temptation too much for him. His real name wouldn’t mean anything to you and the last thing I want to do is to throw a man’s past in his face unless he’s a double-dyed villain. Tim Patterson certainly wasn’t that. He’ll be getting on with a new life somewhere. Probably doing rather well at something. He was an efficient chap and it was really damned bad luck that he got caught.’
‘What happened?’
‘Patterson was a prospector – an official one – for De Beers. He must have been in his twenties at the time I’m talking of, which was just before I arrived on the scene. De Beers had appointed him to the CDM, the Consolidated Diamond Mines of South-West Africa. If you look at the map of South Africa and run up the west coast about 200 miles, you’ll come to Oranjemund – the mouth of the Orange River. From there up the coastline is the most fabulous diamond field in the world. CDM owns 180 miles of it from the mouth of the Orange River up to Diaz Point, near a little harbour called Luderitz. Behind the coast there are thousands of square miles of barren desert with a mountain range behind it – the most forbidding landscape you can imagine.
‘Now I won’t say that the beaches on the coastline are solid diamonds, but they’re certainly well sprinkled with them, and fine gem stones at that. They’re bigger near the mouth of the Orange River, and there’s no doubt that over the centuries they’ve been washing in from some huge deposit under the sea. One day, unless it’s been exhausted, some bright chap with the right kind of submarine or diving tender will locate that deposit, and, if he can invent a way of mining under the sea, he’ll start digging into his diamond nest-egg. When that happens it’s just conceivable that the scarcity value of diamonds will be blown to smithereens and they’ll become just another semi-precious stone, like sapphires.
‘Even now the production of CDM is fabulous. In ‘54, when I come into the story, they were raking 55,000 carats a month off that beach. Last year they had stepped it up to over 80,000. That’s worth more than the total production of all the De Beers mines in South Africa put together.
‘CDM’s a very big operation. The job of screening and washing the shingle at various points up the coast and the recovery plant at Oranjemund need several hundred skilled whites and thousands of blacks.
‘These blacks are Ovambos, who are brought to and from the diamond beaches by bus through the desert or by chartered aircraft. There’s no other way of getting away from the place except by sea, and you can’t walk inland across the desert. It would kill you. So you can see that despite all the amenities provided by De Beers in the mining town of Oranjemund for wives and families, the people who live there deserve a lot of admiration.
‘Well, not long before I got there, Charles Hallam – one of De Beers’s top geologists – and his team of prospectors, which included our friend Tim Patterson, had discovered such fabulous pockets of diamonds up the coast that it was decided to skim the cream off them without waiting for men and equipment to come up from Oranjemund. One of these pockets, at a place called Chamaais Bay, was allotted to young Patterson with one European assistant and a small team of Ovambos.
‘Patterson set up his tents just south of the Bay, and from January 1952 until August he was cut off from the world except for an occasional trip down to the comparative luxury of Oranjemund. And when his assistant was otherwise engaged he was solely responsible for counting, weighing and hoarding the diamonds raked off Chamaais Beach. Once a week Hallam, the geologist, paid him a visit and collected his week’s haul of diamonds and took them down to Oranjemund.
‘So there was Tim Patterson, a young Englishman with a first-class record, who had only been two years in Africa. Everybody liked him, particularly Hallam who went out of his way to mother him. But Patterson was sitting on a fortune, and in the long, lonely nights in his tent he would spread the day’s takings on his camp bed and listen to the seals barking on the beach and dream of being rich.
‘Nobody knows exactly when Patterson decided to go into business for himself, but I do know that during the months he was at Chamaais more than a million pounds’ worth of diamonds went through his hands, and around forty thousand pounds’ worth of them stuck to his fingers.
‘There was nothing to prevent Patterson helping himself to as many diamonds as he liked, as long as he did so before Hallam turned up in his Land-Rover to weigh and count them. All he had to do was to put some aside when his assistant wasn’t looking and think of a way of getting them back to civilization.
‘We know that Patterson thought of three ways of getting his stones out. When the time came for him to go on leave he would go down to Oranjemund and there go through the complete CDM security check, which in the case of CDM meant an X-ray examination of every human being, animal and article going through the high wire fence.
‘Patterson dismissed from his mind any way of dodging the security controls by trying to beat the X-rays, though he did think of trying to bribe a radiographer. He turned down the idea. It was too risky and Patterson, who was the sort of lone operator I told you about – the ones that are the most difficult to catch – wanted to avoid having obligations to anyone else. He also wanted to get out all his stones and not have to pay a quarter or half of the proceeds to an accomplice.
‘Next he thought to take a Land-Rover and, on the excuse of hunting, drive it through the desert to an unpatrolled section of the border and bury the diamonds in the sand near one of the boundary beacons. And come back and collect them when he had reached the outside world.
‘But this wouldn’t be any good either. It would mean several days away from Chamaais Bay, and in the waterless desert the tracks of the Land-Rover would be evidence against him for years.
‘So it had to be some trick to do with the coastline, and that was the way he chose. He would hide his diamond hoard near one of the beaches and come back to the coast by plane or boat. It would mean paying a fat price to a pilot, but probably a few hundred pounds would be enough.
‘Once Patterson’s mind was made up he started building up his secret stock of diamonds in a canister which he kept buried in the sand under his tent, and in due course, on August 8th, 1952, he went down to Oranjemund and was given a series of farewell parties before he went through his security checks and took the plane off to Johannesburg for the annual leave from which he had no intention of returning. There would be no more hard lying in a tent for Tim Patterson. He would be rich!
‘On November 25th Patterson resigned, and he courteously wrote to his friend Hallam to say that he would not be coming back to CDM. Hallam and his friends at Oranjemund were sorry. They had all taken to Patterson.’
Blaize paused. He shuffled through his papers and extracted a typewritten sheet. He said, ‘For this part of the story I can’t do better than read from my notes of the case. I took these down from Piet Willers, who was CDM’s Chief Security Officer. He was an efficient and most likeable chap. Although it’s nothing to do with the story, he got the job by an extraordinary fluke. The previous Security Chief had been killed by an ostrich. He’d been driving through the desert when one of a flock of ostriches panicked and rushed blindly at his Land-Rover. One of the bird’s feet went through the open window, and the central claw stabbed the man through the heart.’ Blaize shrugged his shoulders. ‘However, this is what his successor, Piet Willers, told me.’
‘On Sunday, December 21st, 1952, at 2:30 p.m., Protection Officer du Raan and Prospector Katze came down to my house in Oranjemund, bringing with them T. S. Patterson, the ex-prospector, and a man named “Blake”, said to be a pilot. Katze, who was Overseer at the Mining Camp south of Chamaais Bay, informed me that Blake and Patterson had arrived on foot at his camp at 10:30 a.m. on the same day, stating their plane had forced-landed in the neighbourhood of Chamaais Bay.
‘I proceeded to interrogate Blake, and he informed me that he and Patterson had left Luderitz by plane at 6:10 a.m., on the same day. His aircraft, an Auster Autocrat, had no wireless, and he had to fly low along the coast to keep his bearings and contacts with the ground. He eventually got in under the fog, which became so low that it clamped down on him, as he expressed it, and he was forced to land.
‘I felt suspicious about this story, and asked Blake why he should not fly through the fog or turn inland and fly outside the fog, which Patterson must have known from his experience of living at Chamaais Bay never extended farther than three to five miles inland. Blake replied that he was flying lower than forty feet and could not get out between the hills, nor could he attempt climbing as he was unaware of the height of the fog.
‘I then questioned Katze about the weather conditions that morning at his mining camp and along the sea towards Chamaais Bay. He informed me that there was very little fog low down on the sea, and added that the pilot had also told him that he had to make a forced landing owing to engine trouble.
‘After I had warned Blake and Patterson that we were going to investigate the circumstances of their forced landing, I had them removed to the local police quarters at Oranjemund. I also made a report to Mr. Louwrens, the General manager.’ Blaize shook his head sadly.
‘Poor chap. He’d come unstuck. The first thing Louwrens did was to send a certain Davis, one of his air mechanics, up to have a look at the crashed aircraft with Willers. They drove all night and found the plane just as dawn was breaking. It had crashed a few yards from the sea. That was the true part of Patterson’s story but the tracks told another tale.
‘First of all, there were two clear wheel tracks, showing that the plane had made a perfect landing, from south-west to north-east. Two men had got out of the plane, one wearing gym shoes. They had walked together along the beach and then turned and come back again and got into the plane and turned it round so that it faced south-west. Then another lot of tracks showed that the plane had started down the beach on its takeoff, but just at the moment when it was going to get airborne the left wheel hit a rock. Then both wheels struck, and the plane had crash-landed another 150 yards farther on among the rocks.
‘The pilot must have done a good job and they were lucky not to have been killed. As it was one of the wings, and the under-carriage and the propeller, had been smashed, but unfortunately for Patterson’s story the engine was intact, and when they tested it a few days later with a new propeller, there was nothing wrong with it.
‘While Patterson sat in jail the case was handed over to the Diamond Detective Department, and a certain Sergeant Cilliers took over. He was faced with the problem that no diamonds had been found on either of the men or their aircraft, and the only crime the men could be charged with was trespass.
‘But then inquiries were made at Luderitz and it was found that Patterson had bought a forty-foot fishing boat and had hired a skipper, who had no idea what he was wanted for but who knew the coast, to sail him down to Capetown – an unlikely trip to make. It had obviously been an alternative plan which Patterson had dropped in favour of the aircraft.
‘On Christmas Eve Patterson and the pilot, faced with all the evidence, owned up. They had come to pick up Patterson’s diamonds, and when Sergeant Cilliers took Patterson under guard to the beach Patterson showed him the canister under a rock where he had hidden it after the plane had crashed. Inside there were 1400 diamonds of various sizes, weighing 2276 carats. They would have been worth about £40,000.
