Chapter 8. The Private Agent

Some excepts are given as tasters for the whole chapter... lean about the Mr. Diamond-fingers of the diamond trade...

Maurice Tempelsman's barter deals, swapping surplus farm products for diamonds, explained how he became a millionaire but not how he became an advisor of American presidents. I have shown how he was valued by the Oppenheimers as their private agent and expert dealer but not how be became a valued private agent for the White House, for the Kennedies, Johnson and for Clinton....

Declassified secret US government memos, cables and letters and interviews in Africa and the US revealed to me a man that was much more than a trader of glitter. This somewhat stout, balding diamond merchant headed a small private diamond company that operated throughout Africa from the 1950s until today and was so staffed with American intelligence experts that it could be mistaken for a government spy network. ..

... I learnt from formerly secret State department documents that Tempelsman's office in Ghana had been close to the CIA as far back as 1957. I discovered that he had advance knowledge of a coup attempt that year against Ghana's first elected leader, Nkrumah. The coup leader had in fact contacted the US Government through Tempelsman's diamond trading office rather than though the US Embassy. after that plot misfired...

...I queried why this connection between Tempelsman and President Kennedy's children when I visited Senator Ted Kennedy's Washington office in 1988. I was told by a Congressional staffer that, after the murder of President Kennedy, Tempelsman had practically 'brought up' the Kennedy children. He had formed a close personal bond with Jacqueline Onassis Kennedy and frequently escorted her. She had even modeled for him his diamond jewellery. He was beside her when she died in 1994.

...The Tempelsman story does not end there. When I investigated the Russian diamond industry in 1995, I found ... he and Jacqueline Onassis entertained President Clinton on Tempelsman's yacht. Then in 1995 Tempelsman traveled to Moscow with President Clinton on Air Force One after which he won financing from the governmental Ex-Im Bank for his ventures in Moscow.