Just Jackie by Edward Klein (trending books to read TXT) 📕

of those mourners, Maurice Tempelsman, was described in secret State Department cables as a key intermediary between the Oppenheimers and President Mobutu. Although Tempelsman always denied the charge that he functioned as an Oppenheimer agent, he was regarded by his business competitors—who referred to him by his initials M.T.—as an important “link man” in black Africa for the De Beers cartel.

“M.T. always tried to be an intermediary to the rulers in black Africa,” said one competitor. “After he succeeded in setting up the connection, he would go to De Beers and say, I’ve done this thing. Now, what’s my cut?’ ”

In particular, the farsighted Tempelsman established personal ties with the “Binza Boys,” the powerful, informal caucus of high-ranking officials who lived in the exclusive Binza residential area of Kinshasa and dominated politics in Zaire. As his man in Kinshasa, Tempelsman hired Larry Devlin, a former CIA station chief, whose office had been implicated in the plot to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the democratically elected prime minister, and who helped install President Mobutu Sese Seko, who was one of the most rapacious and bloodthirsty dictators in Africa.

“This is a chapter in M.T.’s life that is a big question mark,” said a major player in the international diamond business, who agreed to speak to the author on condition of anonymity. “The CIA wanted to have an invisible presence in Kinshasa, and that presence, as far as most of us could tell, was M.T.’s office. It was supposed to be a diamond buying and export office, but during those years not one diamond was bought or sold. It was entirely a front.”

It was a well-established fact that the CIA made payments to Mobutu, who had created a cult of personality called Mobutisme, and that the size of those payments depended on the level of his activity against the Russian presence in central Africa. Less well known was the exact nature of Tempelsman’s arrangements with Mobutu on behalf of De Beers. Each month, the Zairian government’s mine sold diamonds to De Beers, and it was thought that Mobutu received an overriding commission, and that Tempelsman got a percentage as well for handling the Mobutu account.

“In any case,” said the anonymous source, “M.T.’s fortunes took a sudden turn for the worse in the 1970s. I was summoned by Mobutu out of the blue. I flew to Kinshasa, and was taken in one of Mobutu’s private planes to Gbadolite. There, I was shown to my room in the palace. Eventually I was called into Mobutu’s presence.

“He received me in a large state room, very gaudy, all marble and gilt brought from Italy, phony trappings. We spoke French.

“ ‘I’m fed up with my arrangement with De Beers,’ Mobutu told me. ‘I’ll take the diamond business away from De Beers and give one third of the shares to each of three people, one of whom will be you.’

“‘To what do I owe this honor?’ I asked.

“‘We have a mutual friend,’ said Mobutu. ‘And his name is Kebe.’

“Kebe was Mobutu’s witch doctor, a religious leader from Senegal, who was a trustee of lots of Mobutu’s assets. Mobutu trusted him implicitly. I knew Kebe through my past activities in Sierra Leone and Guinea. I accepted Mobutu’s offer.

“It was a terrible embarrassment to De Beers, whose shares plummeted. De Beers summoned M.T. and told him that he had to go and negotiate with Mobutu, and get the concession back. And that is exactly what he did. It is my understanding that, on behalf of De Beers, he offered Mobutu $5 million for starters, plus $1 million a month. Mobutu asked me if I could match the offer, and I said no, it didn’t make any economic sense. I dropped out. And that was how M.T. got back into business with Mobutu.”*

Even by black Africa’s standards, the extent of Mobutu’s corruption was breathtaking. He shamelessly looted his country and amassed a personal fortune that was estimated at $5 billion. But although Tempelsman was the foreigner who knew the Zairian dictator best, he always denied any firsthand knowledge of Mobutu’s venality.

In fact, Tempelsman did everything he could to distance himself from the rough-and-ready world of the diamond business. As a man who had admired the elegant Sydney Lamon, Tempelsman preferred to think of himself as a lofty financier rather than a lowly trader.

He held luncheons in his office, and invited politicians, artists, editorialists, and academicians as his guests. They sat around his mahogany table and enjoyed the excellent food prepared by his private chef. While they ate, Tempelsman held forth, impressing everyone with the breadth and scope of his knowledge.

“The very qualities that caused us to rave about Maurice are the qualities that made him valuable to De Beers in Africa,” said Brendan Gill. “The charm, the attractiveness, the many languages, the suavity—all this made him indispensable. When it comes to Maurice’s relationship with some of the worst dictators in black Africa, I think we’re treading on the territory of Balzac. I mean, The Human Condition. There’s a huge novel about good and evil in Maurice’s story.”

* In a letter to the author, Maurice Tempelsman declined to participate in the research for this book, or to comment on any matter relating to his business or his relationship with Jacqueline Onassis.

ON THE STREET WHERE SHE LIVED

Tempelsman’s relationship with Jackie was complicated by the fact that he already had a wife. Back in the late 1940s, when he was barely out of his teens, he had married a seventeen-year-old girl by the name of Lilly Bucholz. She was an observant Jew of Polish extraction, and, like Maurice, a refugee from Hitler’s Europe. Her father, like Maurice’s, had dealt in diamonds in Antwerp before the war; he was a minor player in the diamond business in America.

Maurice and Lilly were the products of the close-knit Jewish immigrant community that flourished after the war in Washington Heights on New York’s Upper West Side. It was a culture that made Lilly feel comfortable