Complete Works of Ian Fleming, page 289
‘There was a pause on the Orford front, and then he was back with this letter:’
Dear Mr. Staples,
I wish to inform you that my husband now is coming along very well after being badly wounded in an air crash. For this reason you have not received any orders from him.
My best regards,
Yours very truly,
MRS. ORFORD
‘J. Staples came into action with a shipment of five carats in a plain envelope direct to the old German address.
‘But by this time Henry Orford’s intelligence machine – which must have been a good one – had caught up with J. Staples, and we received this sharp rap over the knuckles:’
June 11th, 1956
Dear Mr. Staples,
Our general policy with our suppliers is to be truthful. You have sent us 5 carats of merchandise which were seized by the German authorities. We can get this back very easily, but the fine would cost us more than we can win. In any event, we will have this merchandise free.
Your case is a different one. We have information that you are co-operating completely with the English authorities, both in England and South Africa. For this reason we are not sending you 20 South African pounds, as you requested.
For us, if we can trust a supplier in South Africa, it is not a question of his making half a million pounds a year without any risk. Give us proof of your loyalty to us that you really mean to do business with us and we will change our opinion about you, and we will give you the greatest opportunity, such as comes once in a lifetime.
We are awaiting your reply,
Yours very truly,
H. ORFORD
‘Mr. J. Staples was thoroughly “blown” so we regretfully handed the whole case over to the American Customs. One of these days I shall be interested to hear what finally happened to the ingenious Mr. Orford.’
Chapter 6. THE MILLION-POUND GAMBLE
BLAIZE WAS LATE for his rendezvous in the garden of the Minzah. When he turned up, he said he had spent most of the night in a night-club. There he had found himself buying interminable Cuba libres, which is rum and Coca-Cola, for one of the girls in the cabaret. He was pretty sure there had been no rum in the Coca-Cola and that the drink was just a substitute for the traditional ‘whiskies and water’ which are really weak tea. The girl had been attractive, but Blaize had disgraced himself by falling asleep during the cabaret and missing her act (Blaize said he always fell asleep during cabarets in night-clubs). The evening hadn’t been a success, and Blaize had finally got back to his hotel at five in the morning after the girl, much to his relief, had parted with the also traditional ‘Pas ce soir. Peut-etre demain.’
This was my cue to ask Blaize if he had come across many women in the smuggling racket – beautiful couriers, glamorous shills in the mining towns, and so on. Blaize said sadly that the only beautiful girls he had come across had been on the side of the angels. They were the girls in the Sorting-Room on the top floor of the Diamond Corporation’s headquarters in Johannesburg. One day he was leaving the building when the girls were clocking out. It was pouring with rain and Blaize had given one of the girls a lift home. She knew that Blaize had something to do with security (he was the subject of much gossip in the Diamond Corporation), and she admitted that boy-friends sometimes jokingly propositioned her to get them some diamonds. One of the ways they’d suggested was that she should grow her fingernails long and pack them with wax.
Every day she’d be able to pick up a few tiny stones. The small loss of weight from her day’s production wouldn’t be noticed, but the stolen carats would mount up fast. The girl told Blaize that she didn’t think anyone had fallen for this sort of trick. The girls were well paid and took a lot of pride in their work.
In general, Blaize said that diamond smugglers didn’t trust women. They had found that the stones were too much of a temptation. Only one woman, and an entirely innocent one at that, had crossed the path of IDSO and she had been incidental to IDSO’s biggest coup – a coup so big they had had to call in the Government to finance it. Blaize said: ‘Up to now I’ve tried to give you some idea of what I and the rest of the IDSO team had been doing in South Africa and in the East, and I’ve put off talking about West Africa, and particularly Sierra Leone, where there’s been the biggest smuggling operation in the world.
‘The position there is that Sierra Leone Selection Trust used to own the mining and prospecting rights over the whole country. But Sierra Leone is more or less solid bush and jungle, and in fact Selection Trust had been concentrating on about 130 square miles round a place called Yengema. This was supposed to be a Diamond Protection Area, where nobody can live or work without a licence from the District Commissioner, but in practice you can’t fence and patrol 130 square miles of bush, and the place was more or less wide open to illicit diggers. The position was farcical. For instance, when I found my way round the area, I saw a fine new saloon parked outside a broken down store in one of the villages. I asked John Gundry – he was the mine manager at Yengema at the time and a splendid chap – who it belonged to. He said: “Well, I got one of those not long ago, and the local IDB regarded it as a matter of pride to keep at least on a par with the mine manager.”
‘You see, for years the Government hadn’t enough money or police to do anything about it. Gundry had got his security staff, but Bernard Nealon, who is head of the CID in Freetown, had only one assistant, and although the Sierra Leone police force, under an excellent Commissioner – Bill Syer – are a fine lot of men, there was a general idea among the illicit miners that the soil of Sierra Leone belongs to the Sierra Leoneans.
‘And Sierra Leone is littered with diamonds, mostly along the courses of the rivers – the Bafi and Sewa, for instance, and smaller streams like the Woa, Tavi and Moa – hundreds of miles of streams and swamp. Even with thousands of police and helicopters and God knows what, you couldn’t do much about illegal mining over that sort of area. The gangs of pot-holers came along every night and got to work along the banks of these rivers. They slept during the daytime. If you flew round in a small aircraft or hacked your way through the bush, you could see the banks freshly pockmarked with diggings every morning.
‘I had a bad attack of fever in October ‘54 and then went up to Freetown to look into the shambles. It was called Freetown at the end of the eighteenth century when we populated the Colony with 400 freed Negro slaves and sixty white prostitutes from the English ports. Extraordinary story. Other tribes from French Guinea and Liberia and God knows where else seeped into the country at various times, and now there’s a fantastic mixture of natives plus a handful of English officials and business men. There are practically no other European visitors except an occasional commercial traveller putting up in the one hotel – the City Hotel – which has twelve bedrooms. It’s not much of a town. One’s almost ashamed of its being an English possession – particularly after visiting Leopoldville or Elizabethville in the Belgian Congo, which are as spick and span as Brussels or Antwerp. Of course, the Belgians haven’t got a big colonial empire, and they can afford to spend plenty of money and energy on what they have got. We’ve got bits and pieces of territory all round the world, and not enough money and enthusiasm to go round. At any rate, there’s no doubt that Sierra Leone comes pretty near the bottom of the pile.
‘Luckily, I was put up at the Selection Trust rest-house at Hill Station, above Freetown, where Government officials have their bungalows. It’s the Ritz compared with the stews of Freetown. But it’s on the edge of the jungle – as I was reminded by finding a king cobra on the veranda one morning. The servants killed it. I sat up there for several days talking things over with Nealon of the CID, and then went up through the jungle to Yengema to hear the Selection Trust side of the story. They’re wonderful men, working away for their company in this godforsaken place, but from the point of view of security the position was hopeless. The screening plants are miles apart and very isolated. If the local security officer wanted to contact one of these plants or the police he had to send a jeep through the bush and across a river practically paved with crocodiles by a ferry which operated only by day, and not at all when the river was in spate. There wasn’t even a walkie-talkie system. When I was there the Security Chief, Harry Morgan, got a message from an informer that digging was going on a few miles away from Yengema. He got some of his men together and sent a call for a few African police to help make arrests. By the time they’d found their way to the scene of the digging, the miners had vanished into the night, leaving more than two hundred pits behind them. The canisters full of diamonds from Yengema reach the airport at Freetown twice a month after an incredible trek in a train that averages eleven mph over a single track that’s always washing away. Just before I arrived two fat consignments had disappeared somewhere between Freetown and England, and one loss hadn’t been noticed until days later.
‘So you see the picture – utter confusion, and the country wide open to illicit mining.’
I asked: ‘Where does the smuggling come in? How do the miners get their stones out of the country, and where to?’
Blaize said: ‘There’s 200 miles of open frontier with Liberia, and a continuous stream of Mandingo natives crossing over. They’re a very bright tribe, and buy the stones from the diggers for a pittance and take them over the first stage of the smuggling route to Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. There they sell them to the hordes of Antwerp and other dealers. Monrovia’s crawling with these types from Belgium and Beirut. These dealers put up the Mandingoes in hotels and pay all their expenses and carry them round in taxis and lush them up with wrist-watches and fat cigars and buy their diamonds quite openly and – for that matter – quite legally. The Liberians turn a blind eye to the whole traffic. The sale of export licences and dealers’ permits brings a fortune into the country and into the pockets of Negro officials, and there’s a perfectly respectable whitewash. You see, the myth is that these diamonds are Liberian diamonds from the Liberian diamond mines. These mines don’t exist, of course. I’ll tell you later about the only one that does.’
I said, ‘How big was the traffic?’
Blaize shrugged his shoulders. ‘Even the Governor of Sierra Leone admitted it was around seven million pounds – far more than the annual production of Sierra Leone Selection Trust. But I put it at nearer ten million. That was only a guess, and based on the buying operations we got started in Monrovia. I’m coming to that. You see, about this time we had a stroke of luck. A German diamond dealer from Monrovia whom I’ll call Willy Rosen contacted Nealon and gave him the whole picture, and Nealon passed on the gist of Rosen’s story to me. I saw the light, wrote out my report, packed my bags and flew to London. One factor put the wind under my tail. Willy Rosen had told Nealon that he would come over to our side.
‘I don’t know exactly what Willy Rosen’s motives were and I still don’t now – partly money, but more important probably, Rosen, who’d been a refugee for most of his life, wanted to get away from Liberia and settle in the West. He wanted a passport into British business and – for both he and his wife had social ambitions – into British society.
‘Willy Rosen was born in Stuttgart. His parents were German Jews. His father died when he was thirteen and he went to school for three years in Switzerland. By the time he was seventeen Hitler had started his pogroms, and Rosen fled to South Africa, where he tried various jobs. After the war he met Lisl, his future wife, who was working in Johannesburg. Lisl is the woman I was telling you about, but she has only a walk-on part in the story. After various vicissitudes, they set up an agency business in Liberia, and Willy’s energy and charm, combined with Lisl’s intelligence, made them stand out in the sleazy community. Rosen got hold of some good import agencies, and by 1954, when we met up with him, he had six German clerks working for him. And he’d gone into the diamond business. He’d also invested in local property. This showed that, unlike other European traders, he had a genuine stake in the country. And Rosen’s meticulous adherence to import and export regulations and his reputation for expecting only a small profit on his turnover had made a favourable impression in Liberian Government circles from which he and, incidentally, we were later to profit.
‘When this was reported to Sillitoe in London, it was agreed that we should use Rosen and finance his activities. We passed this information back to Freetown CID. Any doubts we might have had about Rosen’s effectiveness were quickly dispelled. Rosen flew up to Freetown on November 25th, made a secret rendezvous with Nealon, and disclosed that a Lebanese diamond dealer, one of whose many names was Finkle, had invited Rosen to inspect a packet of illegal diamonds with a view to running them into Liberia.
‘Rosen was due to see Finkle on the night of Sunday the 28th and he suggested that Nealon should raid the meeting. Nealon agreed, and on that night, in the stinking heat, he had his men round the house. Unfortunately, as it turned out, he wasn’t able to block all possible escape routes for fear of attracting attention.
‘After giving Rosen twenty minutes to get into the negotiations, Nealon and three of his men who had been waiting in the garden smashed down the door and burst into the living-room. Pandemonium broke out, and there was a free-for-all fight. Finkle, a smart fighter with quick reactions, kicked Rosen in the face and, helped by three other Lebanese, dived through the window. He crashed twenty-five feet on to a watering-can in the next-door garden, but nothing was broken and he disappeared into the night. His wife, Dolores, who was heavy with child, showed signs of giving premature birth, but was calmed by Nealon and his men. When order had been restored, thirty five diamonds were picked up from the floor and next day Finkle was traced and arrested on a charge of illegal possession. The charge was never heard. Somehow Finkle fled the country. He was blacklisted as a prohibited immigrant, and many months later we traced him to the house of a well-known diamond merchant in Beirut.
‘Anyway, Rosen’s behaviour had proved his loyalty and in January 1955 we flew him to London to talk business – and it was interesting business. In London Rosen revealed that over the previous three months his exports of diamonds from Monrovia had progressively risen until his last parcel in December had been worth nearly $100,000. Rosen assured us that he could maintain his purchases at least at the December level and after a certain amount of palaver it was agreed in London that we should use Rosen as our secret buyer in Monrovia. We would try to buy up the entire Liberian leak and funnel the smuggled diamonds out of the black channels into the legal sales organization in London.
‘There was one big snag. Rosen had to pay out dollars in Liberia for his diamonds and he would have to be supplied with dollars to purchase for the Diamond Corporation. But dollars to the amount we needed were hard to come by and the only solution was to take the whole story to the British Government and put our cards on the table. Thanks to the importance of the diamond trade to Britain, Whitehall needed very little persuading. They were particularly influenced by the fact that industrial stones being sold in Monrovia were being bought up by an agent for Russia and were going via Antwerp and Zurich through the Iron Curtain to be used in the Russian armaments industry. They were also impressed by the fact that we would be taking off the black market huge consignments of diamonds which ought to be earning dollars through legitimate British trade with America.
‘To cut a long story short, the powers that be agreed to back us with an initial half a million pounds in dollars, and later, when we’d spent this huge sum, they put up another half-million.’
Blaize chuckled. ‘Not bad, getting Her Majesty’s Government to have a million-pound fling! These Civil Servants have plenty of guts. There was practically no arguing, and the gigantic scheme was put through in a matter of hours.’
Chapter 7. SENATOR WITHERSPOON’S DIAMOND MINE
FROM THE FIRST, tangier had been passionately intrigued by our presence in the town. It is a small place, and a new English face is a novelty. Blaize and I and the admirable Miss Dorothy Cooper, who had been in the Foreign Service and who typed my manuscript, went through a daily inquisition. My own presence was explicable. I was probably writing a thriller based on Tangier or perhaps articles on Morocco for my paper, but who was Blaize? It was quickly discovered – by an inquiry at the airline offices perhaps – that he had flown up from Zululand, and it was clear from his conversation that he knew his Africa. But what did he do? Blaize was non-committal: ‘Sort of research work,’ he would say vaguely, and change the subject. I did not get off so lightly. I had several good friends in Tangier and they were determined to penetrate the secret of me and my ‘Zulu’.
With my back to the wall I hinted that I was writing a book on a scientific subject. Had they ever heard of the coelacanth? It could be that Blaize was an expert on this famous ‘missing link’ fish.
How boring! My friends, their eyes glazing with indifference, dropped the subject. No one in Dean’s Bar – the bar of Tangier – cared about coelacanths, and no one knew enough about them to ask questions. It soon got about that Blaize was the man who had discovered the coelacanth. He had caught one alive. It was in his bath at the hotel.
Blaize was delighted with his ‘cover’. He suggested we should have built a curious-shaped oblong container which he would carry about. Occasionally he would lift the lid and peer in, and perhaps drop in scraps of exotic food. We agreed that this would be going too far. Blaize didn’t often laugh; but he laughed about the coelacanth and he also laughed when he told me the story of Senator Witherspoon’s diamond mine. He told me the story in a café in the Socco Chico, which is the ‘thieves’ kitchen’ of Tangier. It is here that crooks and smugglers and dope-pedlars congregate, and a pretty villainous gang they are. Blaize said: ‘The Rosen operation went along smoothly, and by the end of June we’d spent most of our million-pound fund and succeeded in upsetting the whole underground diamond trading fraternity of Monrovia. Several dealers found the crumbs of business left over from Rosen’s feast inadequate to pay their overheads, and they packed up and left. We’d also got a pretty good estimate of the total leakage through Liberia, and we agreed that the amount of smuggling from Sierra Leone Selection Trust concessions was at least three times the total production of the mines. ‘Rosen had done well for us, but also for himself, as he was paid a bonus of £15,000 for running the operation and Lisl Rosen was presented with a diamond ring fit for a duchess. On the other hand it gradually leaked out that Rosen was operating for us, and his position in Monrovia became not only invidious but even precarious, and he received constant threats of violence from gangsters hired by his rivals.
