THE WORLD OF spies is as full of Jargon as motor racing or film making, but when Blaize used one of the terms of his trade he did so with irony, making the phrase sound as if it was in quotation marks. Most secret agents are snobbish about their calling. They enjoy ‘name-dropping’ about cut-outs, postboxes, burnt contacts, double agents, conscious and unconscious agents, de-briefing and the rest. But Blaize regarded the life he was now leaving with healthy scepticism. He had been in it for fifteen years, and he considered that many of its denizens were ‘phonies’ and much of its products ‘bull’ – a favourite expression of his.
In all his talks with me Blaize never struck a note that didn’t ring true. There were no heroics; successes were strokes of luck and the word ‘danger’ was never mentioned. He discussed his cases clinically and when, in turning them into prose, I heightened a fact or a situation, he politely but firmly put me right with a mild, ‘It wasn’t quite like that’.
My difficulty was to make him realize that what was humdrum to him was strange and exciting to me. It wasn’t easy to clothe the skeleton of his story with flesh, and such background detail as I have been able to achieve was extracted from him during our interminable walks through the Kasbah and in the country round Tangier and over drinks in bars and night-clubs.
We somehow got on to the subject of spy jargon after a round of golf at the grandly named Diplomatic Country Club. Blaize had said his handicap was nine. I also am nine, but Blaize was a far better nine than I, and in fact I didn’t win a hole from him. His ball was always straight down the fairway, while I was too often in the impenetrable rough, ablaze with irises and asphodel, which lines the dry watercourses around and over which the course has been constructed.
After the game, as we sat outside the deserted clubhouse sipping gin and tonic, some chance remark of mine started Blaize off about IDSO’s ‘safe house’.
‘Clausewitz’s first principle of war,’ he said, ‘was to have a secure base, and as soon as I and the rest of the team arrived in Johannesburg we set up what’s known in spy jargon as a “safe house”, well away from our headquarters. This was a flat in the back streets of Johannesburg where we could meet our contacts, particularly the dubious and dangerous ones. We told the Diamond Detective Department that we’d got this place, and said they could use it, too, if they wanted to. They seemed very grateful because, oddly enough, they had nowhere like this themselves, but I don’t think they did in fact ever use it. It wasn’t much of a flat. Just a living-room with a few sticks of furniture and a sofa, and an alcove bedroom off it divided from it by a curtain, and a lavatory next door. The only sign of comfort was a sideboard with drinks.’
‘Was it wired for sound?’
‘No. I had something better than that. A gadget called a Minifon. You can buy them on the open market, but it was actually the Gestapo who invented them. You carry the recorder in your waistcoat pocket or under your armpit, and wires lead down your sleeve to the pick-up, which to all intents and purposes is a wrist-watch. It’s one of those tricky gadgets that actually works. It came in pretty useful from time to time.
‘Oddly enough, one of the first people to come to the safe house was William Percival Radley – “Tony” Radley. Remember the name? A year later he turned Queen’s Evidence in the £200,000 jewel robbery at the house of Harry Oppenheimer. We’d been tipped off by London that a man of this name was believed to have arrived in Nairobi. London suggested that it might be worth keeping an eye on him. We drew a blank with the Kenya police, but then we saw in a Johannesburg paper that a certain Tony Radley was running a dance hall called the ‘Palais’ on Commissioner Street.
‘We were still going very carefully with the South African police, so we followed protocol and told the Diamond Detective Department in Kimberley what we knew of Radley, and that we thought he might be a good contact for IDSO. The police didn’t react to our tip-off, and we went ahead on our own and contacted Radley in the hubbub of juke-box music and taxi-girls at the “Palais”. Later, Radley met us at the safe house and seemed willing enough to help, but in fact he had only fag-ends of information on IDB which he tried to make sound important with the typical blarney of that kind of man.
‘By early in 1955 we’d got all we could out of Radley and we discarded him. The next time he cropped up was in the Oppenheimer robbery.
‘By chance, the other defendant in the Oppenheimer case also turned up about that time. This was Donald Miles, the ex-Palestine policeman and Festival of Britain Security Officer, who was later to be charged with Radley. In a way I feel rather responsible for the trouble he was to get into. He came to see me in July of ‘55 wanting a job as a mine security officer. He’d had a good war record and had a wad of fine testimonials from his previous jobs. He had just the qualifications we needed, but as luck would have it there were no vacancies and I had to turn him down. Six months later he was charged in connection with the robbery. I’m glad to say he was found innocent.
‘But to go back to the safe house. To begin with, we had a regular flow of visitors passed on to us from various sources. They generally came at night – all kinds of people, most of them bogus, and most of them wanting money. Sometimes they had scraps of information for which we paid a pound or two. Sometimes they wanted to work off old scores against an official in one of the mines or a private enemy, and very occasionally there was a gold nugget in the dirt. One of these turned up in February ‘55.
‘It came about like this. In September of ‘54 a certain character I’ll call Kutze had been arrested at Beit Bridge, which is the frontier post on the Limpopo between Southern Rhodesia and the Union. In Kutze’s waistcoat pocket was a fine rough diamond of over eight carats, and in November he came up for trial for unlawful possession and was fined £200. The Diamond Trading Company bought the stone. They decided it was alluvial and from West Africa, and that it had probably been peddled right across Africa before being sold to Kutze in Rhodesia. The fact that he’d been convicted was a much more serious blow to the man than his fine or even the loss of his stone. It meant that he was now a marked man in Rhodesia, which was his field of operations, and he complained bitterly about his luck to an old friend called Karl, with whom he’d once been associated.
‘Now it happened that Karl had once been a police informer in Kimberley, and he had not forgotten the fat rewards you could get for successful informing. Kutze gave him plenty of ammunition about IDB in Rhodesia, and in February ‘55 Karl went along to have a chat with Detective Constable Grobbelaar, head of the Johannesburg branch of the Diamond Detectives. Grobbelaar was a first class policeman and when he heard Karl’s story, he thought that Karl might get further with IDSO than with the South African police, and he telephoned me and suggested that we should see Karl at the safe house. If you know anything about Afrikaners you’ll know that they are the worst sufferers in the world from verbal diarrhoea. They talk in torrents, and the more they talk, the more intoxicated they are with their own eloquence. When Karl sat down with a drink in his hand in the safe house and started talking, I was smothered in a jabbering cataract of words of which I could only understand about one in ten. Gradually, by banging on the table to stop him and firing questions which required only a “Yes” or a “No”, I began to sort out the oral jigsaw puzzle, and in the end the effort was worth while.
‘According to Karl, the diamond which Kutze had lost on Beit Bridge was a mere drop in the ocean. The Copperbelt was lousy with IDB smuggled stones. They were being brought in from the Gold and Ivory Coasts, from Williamson’s mine in Tanganyika, and from the Belgian Congo, and there was a steady stream of Europeans coming up from the Union to buy these stones from the native runners and make huge profits when they got them back to the cutters in Jo’burg. Karl proposed to use the names and contacts divulged to him by Kutze to penetrate the racket for IDSO.
‘I took Karl on with the object of running my own little double-agent spiel on much the same lines that had failed with Desmond. I had to square the South African and the Northern Rhodesian police, and tell them what I intended to do, and I agreed to keep everybody fully informed of progress, and finally it was fixed. Karl would travel up the pipeline into Rhodesia, contact the IDB ring Kutze had told him about, buy diamonds and bring them over the frontier into the Union. There they would be taken from him and sold to the Diamond Corporation, and he could keep any profit he made in exchange for full information on the Rhodesian ring.’
Blaize paused. ‘Mark you,’ he said, ‘at that time I wasn’t quite certain where I stood with Karl. The South African police had absolutely nothing against him, but it was a dangerous thing for me to connive in smuggling diamonds from Rhodesia into the Union. I’d persuaded the South African and the Rhodesian police to leave Karl alone, and I was really in the position of making him a licensed smuggler. And the trouble with diamonds is that every stone carries the germ of crime in it. Karl was a perfectly honest man, but what would be the effect on him of buying cheap IDB diamonds with IDSO money and being faced with the chance of making a fortune if he could get them back into the Union without us knowing?
‘I thought the position over and finally decided that we wouldn’t finance Karl on his first trip, but that he would have to raise a thousand pounds or so through his own resources. This made the picture a little better from our point of view, but it still was anything but watertight. It was in the early days of IDSO, and I kept my fingers crossed.
‘I wasn’t made any happier by my last meeting with Karl in the safe house before he took the plane for Ndola. He said that Kutze now refused to give him the names of his contacts in Rhodesia. Kutze must have smelt trouble, or perhaps Karl talked too much. It was too late to change my plans, so I gave Karl the name of a man living in Kitwe who had written to IDSO offering to act as an informer. Also, since we were going to pay all Karl’s expenses and if the spiel was a failure I didn’t want it to be an expensive one, I told Karl to report progress after two weeks, by sending one of three telegrams, according to the situation.
They were:
ONLY SMALL BUSINESS AVAILABLE SO FAR WILL CABLE AGAIN ON …
BUSINESS NOT WORTH WHILE RETURNING ON …
and
BUSINESS GOOD SALES EXPERT REQUIRED ON …
‘The last was in case such big stones were turning up that Karl needed an expert valuer.
‘Well, Karl flew off for the Copperbelt on March 7th, and on the 18th I got the Number 2 telegram: BUSINESS NOT WORTH WHILE RETURNING ON MARCH 22.
‘This seemed too bad to be true. IDB was rife in the Copperbelt, and it was unthinkable that Karl hadn’t managed to penetrate the market. My worst suspicions were aroused. I felt sure my double-agent had turned triple, and that he’d spent his whole thousand pounds on cheap stones and would now try to smuggle them under cover of IDSO and make his profit. I talked the position over with the helpful Detective Constable Grobbelaar, and I suggested that Karl should be put through the wringer by the Customs on his arrival. Grobbelaar agreed.
‘On March 22nd Karl duly disembarked at the Jan Smuts airport from the Ndola plane, and was impressed to find that he was the first passenger to be selected to pass through the Customs – a distinction usually reserved for VIPs. He must have been struck with the importance and influence of IDSO. His illusions were shattered when he and his suitcase were taken into a separate room and ignominiously and thoroughly searched.
‘Karl, highly indignant, addressed himself to a man in plain clothes, complaining of his insulting treatment. The man introduced himself as Sergeant Smith of the Diamond Detective Department. “I thought you’d be here to save me all this!” Karl shouted angrily, and then, with less bravado, “The diamonds are in the handle”.
‘Stolidly, Smith examined the handle of the suitcase and carefully unstitched the leather to reveal fifty-two diamonds packed in cotton-wool. He then told Karl that the stones would have to be declared. This was done, and the diamonds duly impounded and sealed and left in the possession of the Customs.
‘All this while Karl was assuring Smith that the whole matter could be satisfactorily explained, but that he must be brought to me, and in due course Smith escorted him to the safe house and the interrogation began.
‘Karl reported that he had arrived in Ndola airport and had hired a taxi to take him the forty miles to his hotel in Kitwe. He at once started talking to the native driver about buying diamonds in the neighbourhood, and the driver had given him the name of another taxi man who he said knew the whole diamond market in the Copperbelt as well as the names of the native runners.
‘Karl couldn’t believe his luck, and thought that either the driver was boasting wildly or that IDB was wide open in Rhodesia. In fact, Karl had tumbled on just the right contact, and the other taxi man arranged a series of fruitful meetings. But, according to Karl, although he listened to endless talk and a lot of promises, after ten days in Kitwe he hadn’t bought a single diamond, and he had decided to force the issue by sending me his negative telegram and telling his IDB contacts that as there was nothing for him to buy he was packing his bag and leaving in three days.
‘The ruse certainly worked, and during the last three days he was deluged with diamonds from Europeans and from native runners coming across the Congo-Rhodesian border.
‘In the process of these deals Karl was able to compile a formidable list of names, both of the smuggling network into Rhodesia and of the European pipeline over the frontier into the Union.
‘Karl said that the people he’d had to deal with were a pretty grisly crew, steeped in treachery and double-dealing. Not only did they buy the stones from the native runners and sell them to the smugglers from the Union, but they supplemented their profits by informing to the Northern Rhodesian police not only on their competitors, but also on their own customers.’
Blaize added: ‘Incidentally, this habit of working for both sides in IDB is an old story, and makes running agents a complicated and risky business. Anyway, Karl had certainly done his stuff, and the only two questions were why he hadn’t sent a second telegram cancelling the first when the diamonds began to flow, and why he’d hidden the diamonds in the handle of his suitcase.
‘Karl said that there had been no point in sending another telegram as anyway his money had run out. As to the business with the handle of his suitcase, he had expected to be met by the Diamond Detective Department at the Customs, and had only gone to the trouble of hiding the stones in the handle of his suitcase to show how easy it was to fool the Customs. He made no attempt to conceal the stones once he had met Sergeant Smith.
‘This sounded fair enough to me and the Diamond Detectives were satisfied. In the end Karl had done very well, and both the Northern Rhodesian police and the South Africans were very pleased when they got the IDSO report.
‘We didn’t actually use Karl again, and I’m afraid the poor chap didn’t make much money out of his stint. He hadn’t bought very well, and when the diamonds were released by the Customs and legally imported by the Diamond Syndicate, they identified the whole parcel as typical Belgian Congo boart – low grade industrial stuff – and valued it at just about the money Karl had spent on it. Karl was very put out by this, and I tipped him £10 for his trouble and bid him goodbye.
‘Karl’s lists of names and channels resulted in my flying up to Elizabethville and to Dr. Williamson’s mine in Tanganyika to see what we could do to block the traffic at its origin. Both mines admitted that they were only too aware of the traffic, and that a steady stream of local prosecutions were taking all the time of their security staffs. Some of this traffic seemed to be following the Nairobi–Salisbury–Lourenço Marques–Durban air route of East African Airways, and while I was in Rhodesia I decided to do something about blocking this channel.
‘It happened that an ex-BOAC steward, whom I will call Patrick Sullivan, was flying on this route. He’d been interviewed by IDSO in London after he’d given evidence for the Crown in the prosecution of other BOAC aircrew for smuggling, and when he came to Africa he contacted me and agreed to work for us.
‘Nairobi was the headquarters of East African Airways, and it was also the supply and transport centre for the Williamson Mine, and Sullivan became a regular customer at one of the transit hotels, where he believed one of the waiters was acting as a post-box for the IDB ring working out of Williamson’s. Although Sullivan had been mixed up in the London case and so was to a certain extent compromised in the eyes of the local IDB he seemed to the waiter to be a possible carrier, and on my instructions Sullivan agreed to take on the job, for which the smugglers would pay him a fat commission.
‘Again I was faced with the danger of turning a man into a licensed smuggler. Although he promised to wire me whenever he was carrying diamonds down to Durban, there was always the possibility that he’d conveniently forget to do so from time to time, and on these occasions would be protected by his work for IDSO. To cover myself, I warned Sullivan that whether he tipped us off that he was carrying stones or not, he would be liable to the usual Customs search, and Sullivan accepted the position.
‘Then something very odd happened. I don’t say that the IDB had got on to Sullivan’s double role, but Sullivan’s fate was certainly a curious coincidence. One day I got a cryptic cable from Sullivan asking me to meet him in Durban “to discuss new developments”. What these developments were, I never learned, but I guess they were something pretty big.
‘Anyway, on the round trip just before the date of our meeting, the East African Airways Dakota in which Sullivan was the steward crashed into the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa, and all the passengers and crew were killed.’
Blaize shook his head doubtfully, ‘I suppose it was just bad luck, but it was certainly good news for the IDB ring operating out of Tanganyika and the Belgian Congo.’