One of my heroes when I worked in Africa as a journalist and foreign correspondent during the Cold War years was Sir Percy Sillitoe, the former head of Britain’s MI5 spy agency.

I first met up with Sir Percy when he arrived on the Dark Continent in 1953 after being made head of the International Diamond Security Organisation established by de Beers to stem the vast illegal sales of stolen diamonds from South Africa, Bechuanaland, South West Africa and Tanganyika.

I met with this very genial undercover investigator on many occasions, always under an embargo not to mention him by name. On occasions, he would have a disguise indicating that he was merely a holiday making tourist or an agitated but genial fuddy- duddy professor with a bundle of books under his one arm.

Our initial get-together was in East Africa when a diamond mine owner at Mwadui, on the shores of Lake Victoria, threatened to swamp the world’s jewellery markets with gemstones at highly cut-rate prices, thus opening the door to the sale of Africa’s stolen diamonds.

During his highly secret activities in tracking down illegal diamond supply lines out of the African continent, Sir Percy would often use his famous Second World War ll technique of “double-cross espionage” in which German spies in Britain were converted into British agents or double agents, feeding the Nazi hierarchy totally wrong ‘secret’ information.

While working in Africa, this arch detective of the diamond underworld managed to subtly turn many illegal diamond sellers into his organisation’s paid ‘intelligence agents.’ These assistants to the master spy were used to actually sell diamonds to their own illegal buyers — but the difference was that the diamonds they sold were covered with radioactivity and were then followed by miniature geiger counters to eventually catch the ‘Mr Bigs.’

One of these agents who had been turned by Sir Percy was Jamil Mohammed from Sierra Leone who, at one time, was that country’s richest and most influential man.

My friendly spy chief was also partly responsible for catching Tanganyika’s Police chief buying and selling stolen diamonds from Police headquarters in Dar es Salaam. This man had always claimed that he had moved to Africa from Australia.

As a man, I really liked Sir Percy for his great intellect, his wicked sense of humour and the fact that he was fearless in confronting some of the world’s most dangerous criminals involved in the illegal diamond trade.

He also had incredible connections very useful to a journalist and foreign correspondent always on the hunt for a good story.

One person I met through Sir Percy’s suggestion was Otto Scorziny, a Nazi war hero and wartime enemy of Sir Percy as Britain’s top spymaster. Sir Percy was eager that Scorziny be publicly unmasked in Africa through publicity of his crooked and criminal political life.

A part-Polish colonel in the vicious German SS during the Second World War, Scorziny later became an unscrupulous dealer in illegal arms to African terrorists, sometimes for Communist sources but generally for his own tainted pocket.

Sir Percy hated the man, as he told me during his illegal diamond working days in Africa, but I believe he used him to gain essential information on the illegal sales market as a whole.

I interviewed Scorziny while working in Africa and much later in 1969 in Spain where he lived.  Although I could never get him to open his mouth too wide, I did research his life as a political and black-market scoundrel.

My notes taken at the time show that Otto Scorziny carried out an unsuccessful mission in the 1940s to rescue the deposed Italian Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, held at the time by the new Italian Government.

He also managed to infiltrate Allied army lines during the war and was awarded Hitler’s Iron Cross for bravery while fighting in Russia. Another one of his escapades was to parachute into Persia (now Iran) to create political havoc there on the strict orders of the Third Reich.

After the war, he began selling illegal arms into various politically unsettled countries before turning his attention to helping African terrorists with firepower against Colonialism.

He also became a member of post-war Germany’s cut-throat Werewolf guerilla movement but managed in 1948 to flee from imprisonment in that country to France before living in Odessa, in Ireland (with Irish terrorists) before finally settling in Southern Spain.

There, in Alicante, he formed a Neo-Nazi political group known as the Cedade Spanish Fighters and the Paladin Squad to assist Libya’s dictator, Giddafi, in his unsuccessful terrorist attempts against the West with Al Qaeda’s bin Laden.

Scorziny is also reported to have been involved in an unsuccessful Nazi plan to assassinate Britain’s wartime Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, the United States’ President, Roosevelt and Russia’s Stalin when they met at Yalta to attempt to discuss eventual world peace.

When I happened to meet Scorziny again in Spain in the late 1960s while on my way to Australia, he was boasting that he had assisted hundreds of former SS men escape a defeated Germany after the war when Jewish organisations started hunting down these people for their wartime atrocities. I was told that the escapes were organised by Scorziny’s ‘Die Spinne’ underground “charity” which helped Nazi war criminals settle in South America and remote parts of Spain.

This abhorrent man with blood on his hands — the total opposite to Sir Percy, his former wartime enemy — later planned to set up a totally Fascist state in South America after serving for a time as adviser to President Juan Peron in the Argentine and acting as bodyguard to Peron’s well-known wife, Eva.