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.
‘That’s all by the way, so that you can get a picture of the chap, but the point is that most big packets of illegal diamonds getting into Europe end up with him. He’s the big fence, and has been for twenty years, and first the Germans and now the Russians and Chinese know it, and deal with him direct.
‘He uses Antwerp as one of his headquarters and from there he has three routes through the Iron Curtain, and he has a team of professional couriers who carry for him. These people get fat salaries, but he also insures them and their families against loss of revenue during prison sentence, gets them new passports if their own are confiscated, and generally looks after their welfare.
‘His routes are, first by Russian and Polish ships from the port of Antwerp, secondly to cover addresses in Switzerland, and thirdly to West Berlin for passage through to the East.
‘He’s not the only one, of course, but he’s by far the biggest and the best organized, and he was our main target in Europe.’
I said: ‘How big is this traffic through the Iron Curtain? And why does it exist, anyway? Only the other day the Russians put out that they had discovered huge new diamond fields somewhere inside the Arctic Circle – on a tributary of the Vilyui.’
‘No one’s ever seen anything to back that story up, and at any rate the Diamond Corporation don’t think there’s anything new in it. If the Russians have got all that supply on tap, why would they be paying above world prices in Liberia and Belgium, as we know they’re doing? It happens that we’ve got a contact in the Russian zone of Berlin – in the Trade Ministry there – and just the other day he reported that for only fourteen days in February this year nearly half a million pounds’ worth of illegal diamonds had been smuggled over from West Berlin and from Hanau and Brucken and Idar Oberstein, which is where the Germans have their diamond-cutting industry.
‘Most of the stones were from Africa and the rest from Brazil, and most of them were industrial diamonds. They had been smuggled or bought all over the world. They usually originated in Antwerp, but some came from Holland and America and even England, and there was a trickle from Israel and Italy.
‘Our man in East Berlin said that the destination of about a quarter of these stones was Russia. Another quarter went to China, and the rest was divided up among the other Communist countries – all presumably for the various armament industries.
‘That’s a whole lot of diamonds in a fortnight, and if it’s typical, it adds up to about twelve million pounds’ worth a year. That’s not an impossible figure, but it does suggest that the Russians are pretty keen on the trade.
‘Anyway, our main object in Europe was to do everything we could to upset Monsieur Diamant’s sources of supply and also the leaks through the rest of Europe, and a lot of our work in Africa consisted of tipping off London or Antwerp or Paris whenever we got wind of a fat parcel on its way out of Africa towards Monsieur Diamant or his friends. There was nothing we could do against him personally. That’s what I mean about him being the greatest crook in Europe. In all his thirty years or so of operating, he’s never slipped up with a conviction. At European police headquarters, the only thing you’d find on his file would be that he made fat subscriptions to the police welfare and athletic clubs. It’s only the various Secret Services that know about him. But that doesn’t worry him. He’s above the law – a really formidable operator.
‘Mark you,’ said Blaize, and at once he became the careful, fair-minded lawyer, talking legal jargon, ‘occasionally it happened that an entirely innocent trader came under suspicion when we were trying to plug these leaks out of Africa. Perhaps this was inevitable because acts which are in fact infringements of the Customs laws are by no means always distinguishable by moral turpitude on the part of the offender. This is not to condone breaches of the Customs law when they are proved, but simply to say that the laws of most countries, especially the Customs laws, are so highly complex, that sometimes the determination of the legality or otherwise of certain acts in the course of international trading is not a thing that can be decided in a moment. That goes for other offences too. So it’s no reflection on the persons taking part in legal proceedings or the investigations leading up to them that it’s sometimes only after a good deal of argumentation that an unfortunate trader suspected either of a crime or an infringement of the civil law, but guiltless of both, gets his innocence proclaimed.
‘One such case was that of Philip Schreiber. Schreiber was, as it turned out, in perfectly lawful possession of certain diamonds. By now, however, IDSO had its finger so firmly on the pulse of the world diamond trade that often it could not only follow but also forecast the movement of both illegitimate and legitimate diamonds. So it was that IDSO, as a matter of routine, were able to tell the customs at Yoff Airport, Dakar, of the impending arrival of diamonds to the value of 18,000 carats on the person of one P. Schreiber. Schreiber arrived at Dakar with his diamonds, as forecast early in April 1956. A dispute arose about their liability to duty, and the outcome was that Schreiber was detained for six weeks at Dakar, and was then released on what the French call “provisional liberty” which is a form of bail without a money bond – in other words, freedom pending the hearing of the case. Meanwhile the diamonds in question had been valued by experts, who eventually estimated their value at £120,000, though their original estimate had been as much as £900,000.
‘When the case came on, at first the decision went against Schreiber, but he appealed. A year later, the Appeal Court found that the diamonds were being conveyed in transit, and it was only because the plane had been delayed in Dakar that they had not continually been so.’ [N.B. In fact, on May 15th, Schreiber was acquitted purement et simplement. The Court had ordered that the diamonds be restored to him. And so they were. Schreiber came out of it all without a stain on his character. I.F.]
‘In 1956 three other cases began, all of which resulted in the traders involved establishing their innocence. On September 6th, 1955, on, as they say, ‘information received’, IDSO, London, had telephoned IDSO, Paris, to say that two men called Amschel Benny Engel and Solomon Cukrowicz would shortly be leaving Monrovia for Paris. They would be carrying with them a large quantity of diamonds. They were to take the Air France service from Dakar to Orly Airport – the famous “Etoile de Dakar” flight – and would arrive there on September 17th.
‘As a matter of routine we passed this information to M. Lallet, Commissaire de la Police de l’Air. Cukrowicz and Engel duly arrived with their diamonds, and also a third passenger by the name of David Gollansky, who had declared a package he had with him as containing rough diamonds. The package bore the seal of the Government of Liberia. Our man went over to Orly with M. Mario Pinci, the French diamond expert. M. Pinci examined Cukrowicz’s and Engel’s diamonds, and pronounced them to be of Sierra Leonean origin, amounting to 265 carats and valued at £9500. Our man, supported by the police, as an officer of IDSO and as a representative of Selection Trust, made a formal claim to the stones on the ground that they were the property of his buying company and must at one time or another have been stolen.
‘Gollansky’s packet was not opened, but, to cut a long story short, a charge was subsequently made by Selection Trust against Cukrowicz and Engel and Gollansky of theft and receiving vol et recel.
‘Cukrowicz, Engel and Gollansky first saw examining magistrates on September 16th. In the end a non-lieu was returned on June 12th, 1956, and it was confirmed by the Chambre de Mise en Accusation – that’s roughly the French equivalent of a Grand Jury – on October 19th, 1956. In other words, the case was dismissed and the diamonds returned to the men. All three, Cukrowicz, Engel and Gollansky, had been in lawful possession, and their honesty was established.
‘Then,’ continued Blaize, doffing, much to my relief, his wig and gown, ‘in 1956 two successful coups came off in quick succession at different points in West Africa, each of which was in small or large degree made possible by IDSO.
‘In the first case, one of the big couriers tripped up. This was an Indian whose principal was financed by Hungary. Incidentally he possessed a British passport issued in Monrovia, as well as two Indian passports issued in Cairo and Damascus. He was a regular traveller between Liberia and Beirut whom we’d been watching. On this occasion he had been for some months in Monrovia, and steadily buying industrial diamonds at prices well above the market. Now he was on his way out, and he had got as far as Conakry Airport in French West Africa, in transit to Paris and Budapest.
‘The Director of Customs at Conakry was tipped off. When he was interrogated, the Indian cheerfully yielded up his parcel and triumphantly pointed out that it bore the seal of the Bureau of Mines of Monrovia and the signature of the Director of the Bureau. When asked what the packet contained he foolishly said that there were a mere 800 stones, instead of the true and majestic total of 119,000, which were subsequently valued at £35,000.
‘The courier wasn’t charged with any offence, but his diamonds were seized and he was ignominiously packed off back to Monrovia. Shortly thereafter, his principal, the dealer acting for Hungary, flew down to visit him, and I can imagine that the occasion must have been extremely unpleasant for him.
‘The heat was kept on, and in the same eventful month another bird fell. This was a certain Alhaji Mustafa Ibrahim, the bearer of three British passports issued in Lagos, Accra and Dakar, and travel certificates issued in Lagos and Freetown. In the days when our old friend Finkle of Freetown was a prohibited immigrant, this character acted as his courier with Beirut, and we’d often wanted to catch up with him. Now, on April 24th, he arrived at Accra Airport from Freetown with a policeman as his shadow. At the airport, Mustafa hired a taxi driver named Alio Giwa to take him over the frontier into French West Africa, and the Gold Coast police, under the instructions of their well-known Commissioner, Mike Collins, chased after him and stopped his car just before the frontier village of Aflao. The car was searched and a parcel of diamonds weighing 712 carats was found taped to the steering column. Mustafa came up for trial and his diamonds were confiscated. He was also sent to jail for eight months on a charge of obtaining one of his many passports under false pretences – a sentence which caused many of his friends to weep in court.
‘And so, in a brief blaze of glory and to much weeping and gnashing of teeth in Monrovia and among Monsieur Diamant’s friends in Europe, IDSO wound up its activities and prepared to disband.
‘Once the Diamond Corporation had set itself up in Sierra Leone and was ousting the IDB by straight commercial methods there was nothing more for us to do that couldn’t be done by the mine security staffs and by the local police forces in Africa. The next few months were spent tidying up loose ends and discussing with De Beers the retention of a skeleton organization to keep a watching brief. After the excitement of the previous two years and the tension there was nothing but anticlimax as our men gradually drifted off to other jobs. Some have gone back to intelligence or security work and others to appointments with De Beers and the Anglo-American Corporation.
‘So far as I’m concerned’ – Blaize shrugged his shoulders – ‘I’m sick of crooks and sick of spying on them. All I want is a nice quiet job as a country lawyer or administrator in a university, or some other job where I can clear all this muck out of my mind.’
He grinned. ‘As you said in the last sentence of one of your books: “It reads better than it lives.”’