Complete Works of Ian Fleming, page 291
Brasseur and Belcher visited us at Johnson Hotel on May 30th, one and a half hours before we left the country and in rather a truculent mood asked what we had been doing up-country. We referred them to the Honourable Witherspoon and they said Witherspoon had sold all his interests in the mine to them in return for 10 per cent of any profits made and could produce documents to prove it. I answered that our lawyers would, of course, wish to peruse all relevant documents before starting mining operations. At this stage Witherspoon arrived and escorted us to the airfield.
14:00 hours – flew to Freetown.
When I had finished reading Blaize commented sourly: ‘So much for Senator Witherspoon’s diamond mine and so much, incidentally, for the millions of pounds’ worth of “Liberian” diamonds that pour out into the world every year.’
Chapter 8. THE HEART OF THE MATTER
FOR THE MOST part, blaize’s comments on the men he had met during his three years were kindly. He referred to the smugglers in the amused, fatherly way that policemen often use when they talk of the crooks they have caught. Blaize showed no resentment over the occasional obstructiveness of officials. They were doing their jobs, and he realized how irritating it must have been to have this mysterious man from London, with Sir Ernest Oppenheimer behind him, poking about asking questions and making recommendations which reflected on their efficiency.
But Blaize was scathing about Liberia – with good cause as we have seen. He despised many of the comic opera Negroes in official positions, but he thought even less of the white men who backed them and often incited them in their venality. Liberia was, after all, the first Negro State, and Utopia in the imagination of coloured peoples all over the world, and if this was to be the pattern of Negro emancipation Blaize didn’t hold out much hope for the future of Ghana and the Federation of the West Indies.
Blaize was also critical of certain members of the former Government of Sierra Leone. He hadn’t liked the way they had seemed to avert their gaze while the whole of a British colony disintegrated. In the account of the wide-open illicit digging and diamond smuggling in Sierra Leone which follows, I have considerably watered down Blaize’s criticisms of the Guilty Men who stood and watched while a whole British colony lost its name.
‘You can see,’ said Blaize, ‘that by halfway through ‘55 we’d more or less got the whole picture of what amounted collectively to the greatest smuggling operation in the world. There were the small leaks from the Kimberley mines and perhaps occasionally from Consolidated Diamond Mines at Oranjemund. There was a trickle from the Belgian Congo and from Williamson’s mine in Tanganyika. These were mostly problems of physical security, and we’d made our various recommendations which generally amounted to reducing the number of men who had a chance of handling the diamonds between the mine-face and the manager’s safe. So far as the IDB population was concerned – the smugglers and illegal buyers and cutters – we had seen quite a lot of arrests made and hundreds of names blacklisted, but all this was nothing compared with the flood from Sierra Leone which was not so much organized smuggling as a complete collapse of law and authority throughout the whole of a British colony nearly as big as Ireland. It was certainly not Sierra Leone Selection Trust’s fault. The diamond industry in Sierra Leone might never have been heard of but for Selection Trust’s pioneering. It was the fault of drift, of weak local government and of ignorance in Whitehall. At the time we came on the scene in 1954, nobody, even in Selection Trust or the Sierra Leone Government, appreciated the extent to which illegal mining in the interior was getting out of control; but within a matter of months the situation had so deteriorated that anyone reading the local papers would have thought it was Sierra Leone Selection Trust rather than the illegal diggers who were breaking the laws and ruining the country. All this ended with a partial collapse of administration and with the serious rioting which broke out over most of Sierra Leone at the end of 1955, which led to the Commission of Inquiry under Sir Herbert Cox. You can read all about it in the Cox White Paper, but this passage –’ Blaize was leafing through the White Paper, and he now ran his pencil down one long paragraph – ‘will give you the picture. This is what the Commission says:’
We have found, and, therefore we have described, a degree of demoralization among the people in their customary institutions and in their approach to the statutory duties with which they have been entrusted, which has shocked us. Dishonesty has become accepted as a normal ingredient of life to such an extent that no one has been concerned to fight it or even complain about it. The ordinary peasant or fisherman seems originally to have accepted a degree of corruption which was tolerable; at a later stage he has been cowed into accepting it; finally he rebelled … there has developed such a lack of confidence in others, such a mistrust of authority that the restoration of self-respect and of some belief even in the possibility of integrity will be hard to achieve.
‘Anyway, all that’s politics, and I’m only trying to show you that there was no point in doing any intelligence or security work in that sort of atmosphere. We did what we could to help the police and we formed up again and again to the Government to try and get something done. But the officials we saw did little but nod sagely and maintain an attitude of enigmatic neutrality – even when there was a general strike and rioting in Freetown and at Yengema in February ‘55 and several hundred of the rioters tried to smash up the mine. It was only thanks to the guts of John Gundry, the mine manager, and people like Harry Morgan, that the European families at the mine weren’t all hacked to death. Guns and tear gas kept the hordes at bay, and in due course they disappeared into the bush and returned to their illicit pot-holing for which all these disturbances had provided excellent cover.
‘At about that time the Commissioner of Income Tax decided to require all IDB suspects to disclose what remittances they had received from overseas during the previous three years, and what they’d done with the money. He had reason to believe that the local banks had received more than three million pounds from abroad during the past twelve months alone, and apart from our interest on the IDB side, he wanted to extract his meed of taxes. He was a man of action. Early in March he sent out a circular letter to suspects, requiring a full disclosure of remittances from overseas within one month. Panic spread throughout the Freetown diamond racket, and several leading suspects made preparations to emigrate to Liberia. One Lebanese trader let it be known that he was prepared to find £50,000, but whether as a bribe or as tax he didn’t explain. Unfortunately, a group of Ministers complained to the Governor that the demand note was upsetting the country’s trade and might lead to trouble, and the Commissioner was called to heel and made to withdraw his circular.
‘IDSO, Freetown’s comment was that the Government might just as well have issued orders to the Customs not to search IDBs at the airport on the grounds that they might be caught and jailed and have their diamonds seized and thus affect local trade.
‘As 1955 sped on, things went from worse to worse in the territory, though various means of tightening up security at the mines began to take effect and production had increased from 25,000 carats in December 1954, to 42,000 carats in July 1955. Morgan caught quite a lot of thieves in the mines, but there was an endless supply of them. After an arrest, production would immediately improve but then die away again as another thief took over. The chaos in the country was affecting Morgan’s African guards, particularly in the Concentrator House, where the stones passed through the final stages of recovery and sorting. For instance, one day Morgan arrested the senior guard, together with a grease-table boy, and found 24 carats of diamonds in their pockets. Both men cheerfully pleaded guilty and paid a fine of £300 without turning a hair.
‘But these losses were nothing compared with the wholesale rape of the diamond soil outside the mines, and finally Selection Trust decided to launch a local buying operation. Lyall, one of their senior prospectors, pitched camp near an illicit site where there were about 300 illegal miners, and on the grounds that he was prospecting, offered these men five shillings a day to dig for him. They were quite happy to do for five shillings a day what they would otherwise be doing for nothing, and when they found that Lyall’s prices were better than anything they could get from the Mandingo traders, they were delighted, and dug away with a will. Only the Mandingo and Lebanese buyers in the neighbouring villages were furious. Lyall was flooded with stones, both from the diggings he was “prospecting” and from all over the country, and at the end of the experiment the pattern was set for what was to prove the solution to the whole problem – the setting up by the Diamond Corporation of buying posts throughout Sierra Leone.
‘But meanwhile Sierra Leone Selection Trust had been persuaded to surrender their monopoly mining rights. Meetings were going on in London which resulted in September in Selection Trust accepting £1,570,000 for their rights and limiting their lease area to 450 square miles for a maximum period of thirty years. On their side, the Government proposed to legalize the illegal diggers by giving them mining and prospecting licences, while the Diamond Corporation would set up machinery for the legal purchase of the previously illegal stones.
‘On the whole, although this was certainly unfair to Selection Trust and to the shareholders of the Consolidated African Selection Trust – the Sierra Leone parent company – the scheme was a good one from IDSO’s point of view. There would now be no point in smuggling diamonds into Liberia if the native digger could obtain the world price quite legally in Sierra Leone. Short of exterminating the illegal diggers, the only solution was to legalize them. This was duly done, and early last year – on February 6th to be exact – all prosecutions against diamond diggers and dealers were suspended and licensed digging and dealing began. By the end of March fifteen hundred mining licences had been issued and the number later rose to around five thousand, and licences were issued to dealers, one of whom, I was interested to note, was our old friend Finkle, who had lost no time in returning to Freetown from Beirut and setting up shop.
‘The sole export licence was granted to the Diamond Corporation, and I was astonished at the way they coped with the problem of swallowing up this huge new flood of stones. They opened trading posts at Freetown and in the interior at Bo and Kenema, built houses for the staff and fixed up air and radio communications. They manned these posts with junior valuers – young University Englishmen under the overall command of an experienced diamond man, and flung them out into the bush with thousands of pounds in bank-notes. The responsibility and danger were considerable. The native miners and dealers insisted on being paid in cash, and there was no question of getting a second opinion on a value. One young man, just arrived from England, was awoken one night by a Negro with a huge diamond wrapped in a dirty handkerchief. Without hesitation – but I guess with trepidation – the young man offered him £10,000, and the notes were forthwith counted out on the table and the Negro disappeared again into the night. The possibility of making an expensive mistake with a stone of that size was great, but I’m glad to say the young man’s valuation was accurate, and he earned great kudos with the Corporation.
‘As an example of the flood, during the first three months of its dealing the Diamond Corporation bought £600,000 worth of diamonds at Bo alone, and since then the total of these jungle purchases has swollen into millions.
‘Today, although IDB into Liberia still goes on, it’s not as bad as it was in the days when we came on the scene, and the exports from Sierra Leone have leapt astronomically. For instance, in 1955, before the new regime, the diamond exports from Sierra Leone amounted to £1,400,000. Last year the figure was about three million, and when more trading posts are opened and the outlying territories are brought into the legal channels, the total annual figure is likely to be double that. These figures can’t be very palatable to Selection Trust shareholders who have been forced to sell their seventy-seven-year rights for a mere one and a half million, but at least the buyers in Liberia, Beirut and Antwerp have been put out of business and the war against the biggest smuggling leak in the world is on the way to being won.’
Blaize smiled grimly. ‘Or, rather, not quite. Here’s a cutting from the officially sponsored West Africa of May 5th, 1956:’
The news that diamonds reported to be worth £750,000 have been seized by the French West African Police in Dakar from two air travellers, an Austrian and a Lebanese, en route from Monrovia, makes us wonder just how successful our new arrangements for mining and marketing diamonds are. For there is little doubt that these diamonds came from Sierra Leone even if that will be difficult to prove. …
Since the Diamond Corporation began buying diamonds in February there have been rumours that their purchases were much lower than expected. But the truth seems to be that the Corporation are buying a very high proportion of diamonds being won by Sierra Leoneans who have licences to mine; on the other hand there is still a great deal of illicit mining, since it takes time for the new scheme of licensed local diggers to be put into effect all over the country … In the long run the Corporation MUST win. It really VALUES stones and pays for them according to their value.
‘As you can see, there were still some big leaks to be closed, and tomorrow I’ll tell you about the last shots IDSO fired before we packed our knapsacks and left the battlefield.’
Chapter 9. ‘MONSIEUR DIAMANT’
IT WAS OUR last day together. The Sun was Shining and we decided to hire a car and drive out for luncheon to the Grottoes of Hercules, just south of Cape Spartel, where the Mediterranean sweeps out through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Atlantic.
On the way we made a detour through the so-called Diplomatic Forest – about ten square miles of eucalyptus and cork trees and mimosas in bloom. Apart from solitary men or women in the fields we met no living thing except an occasional tortoise crossing the road and from time to time a pair of mating storks, which made a brief run and took off gracefully at the noise of the car.
It is a curious corner of the world. Here, among Roman and Phoenician ruins and scattered encampments of Moors and Berbers and Riffs, is one of the great centres of the world’s radio communications. The skyline is everywhere pierced by the radio masts of RCA and Mackay and by the pylons in the closely guarded compound from which the Voice of America speaks to Europe and penetrates the Iron Curtain. For some reason this romantic top left-hand corner of the African continent is ideal for radio reception and transmission, and as we drove peacefully along we could imagine the air above us alive with whispering voices – an uncanny feeling.
The Grottoes of Hercules and the near-by reconstructed Roman village where, our driver assured us, Hercules had lived, was not much as tourist attractions go, and we sent the car away and spent the morning trudging along the empty, endless sands that disappeared in the heat haze in the direction of Casablanca, 200 miles to the south.
The levanter had blown shoals of Portuguese men-of-war on to the beach. It amused Blaize to stamp on their poisonous-looking violet bladders as we went along, and his talk was punctuated with what sounded like small-calibre revolver shots.
His story was nearly finished, and as we walked along he emptied his pockets of the notes and scraps of paper he had used to jog his memory and document his story over the previous days. These he tore up into small pieces, occasionally stopping to throw them into the surf and watch them being pulped by the waves.
Any writer would have appreciated the scene – the two lonely figures striding along the immense empty sweep of beach with the African continent on our left hand and, on our right, across the water, the Americas. And the agent destroying his records.
As we walked south into the sun, like two people in the dream sequence of a film, Blaize wound up his story:
‘While all this was going on on the African continent, IDSO hadn’t been idle in Europe and the Middle East. I’d been concerned entirely with the producing end – stopping the smuggling and IDB at its source, and I think you’ll agree that we’d been pretty successful. In the process we’d built up huge intelligence files and a card index of over 5000 names, and IDSO was in constant contact with London and Paris and Antwerp, trying to block up the receiving end in Europe.
‘Of course we could do nothing about parcels of stones which had been legally exported, like the flood from Liberia, but there were subsidiary streams flowing northwards that I could often warn, say IDSO Paris, about, and hope that something could be done about them from their end. Sometimes Paris and Antwerp would get advance information of parcels being dispatched and the process was reversed.
‘Very soon a picture of the big operators in Europe began to emerge, and particularly of the biggest of all, whom I’ll call “Monsieur Diamant”. Of course this isn’t his real name, but it’s the name, or rather title, we gave him.’
Blaize stopped in his tracks. He looked at me and smiled wryly. ‘You’ve written about some pretty good villains in your books, but truth is stranger, etc., and none of your villains stands up to Monsieur Diamant. I should say he’s the biggest crook in Europe, if not in the world – not only big, but completely successful. He’s getting on now, must be over sixty, a big, hard chunk of a man with about ten million pounds in the bank.
‘We think he’s a German by origin. He’s one of the most respected citizens of Europe – and certainly the most feared – and if I were to tell you all I know about him, and you were to publish it, and you happened to find yourself in his neighbourhood, he’d have you bumped off.’
I said: ‘I don’t believe it.’
Blaize shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, I’m not going to take a chance. I’m not even going to tell you his real name or where he lives, so that you won’t be tempted to start sniffing around. I’m not exaggerating about this man, and you must simply take it as read and we’ll get on with the story.’
Blaize started walking on again down the beach. ‘Well, the great thing about Monsieur Diamant is that he’s completely respectable. He’s a name to conjure with in many communities beside the diamond world. Just after the war, when the diamond business was reorganizing itself and it was important for him to get his own machine working again, he was always flying over to London. He’d suddenly appear in the best suite in the grandest hotel. It wasn’t easy to live well in London in those days, so Monsieur Diamant used to bring over his own raw meat and butter and cream and so on, and get it cooked for him by the hotel chef. In the evenings, he’d keep open house for his cronies with endless champagne and caviar and half a dozen girls that some agent used to procure for him. They always had to be young, and they were paid fifty pounds a night each. I don’t know if they thought it was worth it. Monsieur Diamant had peculiar ways with girls – not a very attractive man, really.
