The Diamond Smugglers (Vintage Classics) Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Ian Fleming

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Preface

  John Blaize’, Formerly of the International Diamond Security Organization

  1. The Million-Carat Network

  2. The Gem Beach

  3. The Diamond Detectives

  4. The Safe House

  5. Enter Mr. Orford

  6. The Million-Pound Gamble

  7. Senator Witherspoon’s Diamond Mine

  8. The Heart of the Matter

  9. ‘Monsieur Diamant’

  Postscript

  The History of Vintage

  Copyright

  About the Book

  ‘One day in April 1957 I had just answered a letter from an expert in unarmed combat writing from a cover address in Mexico City, and I was thanking a fan in Chile, when my telephone rang …’

  The Diamond Smugglers is the true story of an operation responsible for smuggling millions of pounds worth of precious gems out of Africa. Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, drew on interviews with the reluctant hero of the diamond companies’ counter-attack to explore the world of the real master criminals of his time. The result rivals Fleming’s greatest spy novels.

  See also: Thrilling Cities

  About the Author

  Ian Lancaster Fleming was born in London on 28 May 1908 and was educated at Eton College before spending a formative period studying languages in Europe. His first job was with Reuters news agency, followed by a brief spell as a stockbroker. On the outbreak of the Second World War he was appointed assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral Godfrey, where he played a key part in British and Allied espionage operations.

  After the war he joined Kemsley Newspapers as Foreign Manager of the Sunday Times, running a network of correspondents who were intimately involved in the Cold War. His first novel, Casino Royale, was published in 1953 and introduced James Bond, Special Agent 007, to the world. The first print run sold out within a month. Following this initial success, he published a Bond title every year until his death. Raymond Chandler hailed him as ‘the most forceful and driving writer of thrillers in England.’ The fifth title, From Russia with Love, was particularly well received and sales soared when President Kennedy named it as one of his favourite books. The Bond novels have sold more than sixty million copies and inspired a hugely successful film franchise which began in 1962 with the release of Dr No starring Sean Connery as 007.

  The Bond books were written in Jamaica, a country Fleming fell in love with during the war and where he built a house, ‘Goldeneye’. He married Anne Rothermere in 1952. His story about a magical car, written in 1961 for their only child Caspar, went on to become the well-loved novel and film, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Fleming died of heart failure on 12 August 1964.

  www.ianfleming.com

  Also by Ian Fleming

  The James Bond Books

  Casino Royale

  Live and Let Die

  Moonraker

  Diamonds are Forever

  From Russia with Love

  Dr No

  Goldfinger

  For Your Eyes Only

  Thunderball

  The Spy Who Loved Me

  On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

  You Only Live Twice

  The Man with the Golden Gun

  Octopussy and The Living Daylights

  Non-fiction

  Thrilling Cities

  Children’s

  Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

  INTRODUCTION

  WHEN THE DIAMOND Smugglers was first published Ian Fleming had a copy bound for his own library. On the flyleaf, as was his custom, he wrote a short paragraph describing its genesis. It started with the alarming words: ‘This was written in 2 weeks in Tangiers, April 1957.’ As the ensuing tale of woe made clear, he didn’t consider it his finest fortnight. He ended with the dismissive verdict: ‘It is adequate journalism but a poor book and necessarily rather “contrived” though the facts are true.’

  It should have been a golden opportunity. The Sunday Times had acquired a manuscript from an ex-MI5 agent called John Collard who had been employed by De Beers to break a diamond smuggling ring. Fleming, whose Diamonds Are Forever had been one of the hits of 1956, was invited to bring it to life. Treasure, travel, cunning and criminality: here were the things he loved. Flying to Tangier – home to every shade of murky dealing – he spent ten days interviewing Collard, for whom he had already prepared the romantic pseudonym ‘John Blaize’ and the equally romanticised job description of ‘diamond spy’.

  The glister tarnished swiftly. He visited neither the diamond fields of Namibia or Sierra Leone, with which the story was primarily concerned, but sat in the Hotel Minzah typing up his notes. It rained constantly and he found the landscape dull. There was little scope for literary flair, his more extravagant flourishes being blue-pencilled routinely by Collard. When the final version was serialised by the Sunday Times in September and October 1957 further material had to be excised under threat of legal action by De Beers. ‘It was a good story until all the possible libel was cut out,’ Fleming wrote gloomily.

  Yet if The Diamond Smugglers was a disappointment to its author it still contains flashes of Fleming-esque magic. Amidst the Tangerian alleys he strays unerringly to the thieves’ kitchen of Socco Chico, ‘[where] crooks and smugglers and dope pedlars congregate, and a pretty villainous gang they are.’ Travelling with ‘Blaize’ to the Atlantic coast he encounters a forest of radio masts – still one of the world’s communication hubs – where they ‘could imagine the air above us filled with whispering voices.’ Later, as they walk down the beach they stumble (literally) on a shoal of Portuguese Men of War driven ashore by a storm. Alone on the tip of Africa, with the coast stretching 200 miles to Casablanca, the sea running uninterrupted to America, and a carpet of jellyfish beneath their feet, the two men conduct what has to be one of the most surreal interviews in history. ‘It amused Blaize to stamp on their poisonous-looking violet bladders as we went along,’ Fleming wrote, ‘and his talk was punctuated with what sounded like small-calibre revolver shots.’

  Today The Diamond Smugglers is one of Fleming’s least known works. But in its time it was one of his most commercially valuable. It sold in its hundreds of thousands. No sooner was it in print than Rank bought a film treatment for the princely sum of £12,500. (Further misery: he had to split the proceeds with Collard and the Sunday Times.) Nothing came of the project. But in 1965, by which time Fleming was dead and Bond a worldwide phenomenon, it flared briefly into life. Items concerning its progress featured in the press: a thrusting young producer had it in hand; ‘John Blaize’ would emerge as a new Bond-like character; Kingsley Amis had been hired to write the script; the drama would be intense. After a while the announcements became slightly plaintive. And then they stopped.

  More than forty years later it remains something of a conundrum; a journalistic chore that its author disliked but which nevertheless became a best-seller and very nearly his first film; a book that is neither travelogue nor thriller but combines the discarded hopes of both; a tale of international intrigue and exploding jellyfish that leads to the final question: ‘Who wouldn’t rather play golf?’ It is a wry, unplaceable thing, but all the more interesting for that. Certainly it doesn’t live up to Fleming’s self-damning critique. Take this sentence from the opening paragraph: ‘One day in April 1957 I had just answered a letter from an expert in unarmed combat writing from a cover address in Mexico City, and I was thanking a fan in Chile, when my telephone
rang.’ If you’re given a line like that you can only read on.

  Fergus Fleming, 2009

  PREFACE

  THE FISHING AND game-watching holiday in the St. Lucia estuary of Zululand was something I had been looking forward to for a very long time. I had just locked the front door of my house in Johannesburg and was getting into the car for the 450-mile drive to the coast when a grey uniformed postman pedalled up with a telegram. I felt a strong temptation to leave the thing unopened, but luckily thought better of it and found it was from Ian Fleming. Fleming’s cryptic message was to lead to one of the pleasantest episodes I have had in a varied career and, what was more important, it involved no interference with my trip to Zululand. Fleming merely wished to know what time and where he could contact me by telephone within the next few days. I cabled back ‘St. Lucia Hotel Zululand any evening’ and, hardly expecting to hear any more, off I drove with my fishing-rods.

  I did, in fact, hear quite a lot more, and after a spate of telegrams between London, St. Lucia and Tangier my meeting with Fleming took place just as he describes. On arrival at the El Minzah Hotel, Tangier, I was greeted by the porter with a note which I still have (alas, I have been taught to keep even the most trivial notes!):

  ‘Welcome! I’m in Room 52. Would you give me a ring when you arrive and we’ll have a drink. Good to have you here.’

  IAN F.

  This seemed a promising beginning and I was not to be disappointed. Fleming’s company during the next ten days or so was a stimulating experience.

  One of the things I liked about him was his informality. He was known to quite a few members of the British community in Tangier and he automatically included me in the various luncheon and dinner parties they gave for him.

  This is where my ‘cover’ came in, and now is my opportunity to offer an apology for my part in the deception practised on a lot of charming people who were much too well-bred to ask awkward questions at the time.

  Polite formalities at the Minzah soon gave way to down-to-earth discussion about the form and scope of this book.

  I made it plain from the start that, although the decision to tell the story was taken entirely on my own authority, I wanted to be sure that the published version would be free from security and all other objections. Ian Fleming, as a former naval intelligence officer, entirely agreed and, as things turned out, had to tone down a few of my rather critical opinions, and some interesting names and details had to be withheld altogether. It was my desire that the story would offend no one but the crooks; and that, I think, has been achieved. To some extent Fleming was helped by the fact that I had brought with me a private diary of my own activities which I had been compiling in idle moments over a long period, and it was these notes and my memories which he has most skilfully forged into a connected narrative.

  This bizarre meeting in Tangier had its origins in November 1953, when Sir Percy Sillitoe had retired as head of MI5. He told me when he asked me to join him how it had all come about. He was enjoying his leisure at Eastbourne when a letter arrived from Sir Reginald Leeper, the former British Ambassador, and then, as now, Chairman of the London Committee of De Beers Consolidated Mines.

  Sir Ernest Oppenheimer had asked him, as he put it, to see if Sir Percy would be interested in giving his advice and assistance on a matter which he hoped to have an opportunity of putting before Sir Percy.

  ‘The matter’ turned out to be the enormous illicit traffic in diamonds, and Sir Ernest Oppenheimer’s desire that Sir Percy should set up an organization to combat it.

  Who would not have been interested? Sir Percy at once flew out to Muizenburg, just outside Capetown, where Sir Ernest was spending his summer holiday.

  Sir Percy was immensely struck by Sir Ernest Oppenheimer – by his charm and by his razor-sharp mind – and he couldn’t understand why his biography had never been written: the story of the man who started in Kimberley in 1902 as the representative of a small diamond firm and who, in less than fifty years, built up the largest combined diamond, gold, coal and copper empire in the world.

  It seems that Sir Ernest was indulgent about Sir Percy’s total ignorance of the diamond industry up to the moment when diamonds get set into engagement rings. He explained the basic process of mining and marketing diamonds and the points at which, in his opinion, there were possibilities of leakage. He then suggested that Sir Percy should make a personal examination of the mines themselves all over the African Continent and return to Johannesburg and report on the prospects of plugging the leaks at least at the producing end of the business.

  Sir Percy agreed and, in March 1954, set off with two of the team he had by that time selected, on an itinerary which in six weeks included Accra, Aquatia, Freetown, Yengema, Leopoldville, Tshaikapa, Bakwanga, Luluabourg, Dundo, Elizabethville, Lushoto, Dar-es-Salaam, Mwadui, Lusaka, Salisbury, Pretoria and Johannesburg – a journey I am astonished that, at the age of sixty-six, he managed to complete without collapsing by the wayside.

  Unfortunately there had already been leakage to the Press, as the amusing cartoon reproduced shows; and Sir Percy thought it advisable to call on his old friend Mr. Swart, Minister of Justice, and also Major-General J. A. Brink, the Commissioner of the South African Police, and tell them in confidence of his assignment. He gave them his assurance that in no circumstances would he employ an agent or informer for use in South Africa without the consent of the Commissioner of Police. He also endeavoured to meet Brigadier Rademeyer, then head of the CED. It was he who had set up the Diamond Detectives branch of the South African Police with headquarters at Kimberley. As ill luck would have it he was on holiday at that time, and it came as an unwelcome blow to Sir Percy to read in one of the South African newspapers that Brigadier Rademeyer was very critical of his proposed and alleged activities and had commented adversely on the fact that he had not paid him a visit. But I must say that later, when IDSO (we called ourselves the International Diamond Security Organization) was in full operation, all of us found Brigadier Rademeyer most co-operative and helpful, particularly when he had succeeded Major-General Brink as Commissioner of Police.

  In his six weeks’ tour of the diamond mines Sir Percy told me that he was dazzled by the thousands upon thousands of diamonds, from pea to walnut in size, which were laid out for his inspection at the different mines, and he began to absorb some of the sinister fascination which has always surrounded these coldest of all gems. Objects so small and at the same time so valuable were obviously destined for ever to have crime, and even murder, attached to them and, having seen the way they were handled up to the moment when they were posted to London for sale by the Diamond Corporation, Sir Percy said he was only surprised that the annual leakage by theft, smuggling and illicit digging did not add up to many more millions than the figures which had been given him. Not only Sir Percy but all of us acquired real admiration for the various company officials through whose hands pass every day gems worth perhaps a hundred times their annual salary.

  Sir Percy’s plans were approved and he flew back to London and took me on to complete his team, and that was how, three years later, I came to meet Ian Fleming in Tangier. I treated my time in Tangier rather like the reward of a chocolate after swallowing a dose of medicine. The main difference was that Tangier was unexpected. Working for the International Diamond Security Organization was not ‘fun’. The only ‘prize’ was the satisfaction of Sir Percy Sillitoe – a man who is not easily satisfied, but who, from time to time, sent us signals of encouragement as we set about our main tasks. These were, first, to increase security at the mines and, secondly, to discover beyond doubt the major channels of leakage to Europe, the Middle East and the Iron Curtain countries.

  The latter task was the more difficult of the two, but at least we had the advantage of being able to adopt one method of attack – buying from the smugglers themselves – which was not available to the police forces owing to lack of money. Our undercover buying in Liberia and Rhodesia was not expected to lead
directly to convictions, but it did result in the penetration and exposure of whole networks of smuggling rings which had hitherto been hidden.

  The normal police system of attacking the IDB [Illicit Diamond Buying] problem had in the past largely relied on the ‘trap’ method whereby a selected suspect is approached by a plain clothes policeman and invited to buy ‘police’ diamonds. At the critical moment, when the suspect falls for the policeman’s offer, he is arrested. The operation is concluded without gleaning a single item of genuine intelligence.

  The persistent operation of the trap method no doubt served the useful purpose of preventing IDB from establishing the upper hand in countries like South Africa, but the police inevitably came in for severe criticism from the Bench after instituting proceedings based on a trap. Thus, in the High Court of South-West Africa in September 1953, Mr. Justice Claasens, in finding a father and son named Vlok not guilty of IDB, said there were two kinds of trap. One was for those suspected of dealing in diamonds and the other was to induce innocent people to do what they normally would not do. This case, he pronounced, was of the latter type, with the additional aggravation that the decoy was a relation of the accused. ‘These cases,’ said the Judge, ‘come close to the prostitution of the police and of the Courts.’ We in IDSO agreed with this view and thought very little of trapping of any sort.

  During its short life, IDSO’s relations with most police forces, particularly those of British Colonial territories and protectorates in Africa, were extremely happy. Most of these forces had more serious problems on their hands than IDB, but of those plagued by the latter, Sierra Leone had easily the worst of it. The Commissioner of Police, Bill Syer, and the head of the CID, Bernard Nealon, could not have been more co-operative and, from Sir Percy down, we were deeply grateful for their attitude.

  As we have lately seen, the situation in that unfortunate territory is still far from good, though many of IDSO’s recommendations for improving security have been gradually implemented. The permission granted by the Sierra Leone government to the Diamond Corporation to set up diamond buying posts in the vast diamondiferous areas of swamp and jungle in the interior has completely altered the legal and commercial basis of diamond mining and dealing. The basic issue now resolves itself into a straight commercial fight between the Diamond Corporation on the one hand and the IDB on the other. The winner will be whichever side captures the goodwill and output of the thousands of recently legalized African diggers. The IDB have the advantage of being able to fix their prices without taking into account export duty and, in some cases, they are backed by unlimited resources from behind the Iron Curtain. The Diamond Corporation on the other hand has the advantage of official government support, stable prices and, I hope by this time, adequate deterrent measures against smuggling across the Liberian frontier.