In an interview on Crime and Terror

Your next book is Blood Diamonds by Greg Campbell.

This is a tale about diamond smuggling and what a curse diamonds have been to Sierra Leone and how diamond smuggling funded one of the most brutal rebel movements in modern history – the Revolutionary United Front.

I became particularly interested in it when I read the book and learnt to my astonishment that in July 2001, just two months before the 9/11 attack , a Lebanese diamond broker named Aziz Nassour arrived in Liberia with Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a 24-year-old from Tanzania, who was a member of the al Qaeda network.

Ghailani was accused by the FBI of buying the truck that destroyed the US embassy in Dar-es-Salaam in 1998. Nassour and Ghailani met up with the RUF rebels that controlled the diamond fields in neighbouring Sierra Leone and told them that they needed to convert large sums of cash into easily convertible, non-traceable commodities. They purchased 20 million dollars' worth – enough to finance 40 attacks on the scale of 9/11. Nobody really knows what happened to those diamonds.

It is also interesting if you look at the intelligence failures that led to 9/11. If they had spent more time studying the administration of al Qaeda and following its financial links, it is possible that they could have prevented the attacks. Follow the money – I think that is the lesson.

All the books you have chosen were actually research for your new book, A Loyal Spy. What got you interested in Pakistan, Afghanistan and al Qaeda?

Really that came out of my time as an aid worker. I spent six years working with the HALO trust – which is the big mine clearance organisation, then four years running Landmine Action. So I worked in a number of these countries. I was up in the tribal areas of Pakistan surveying Soviet minefields on the border area in 2005. Then I was in Afghanistan looking at the road networks there and the threat from IEDs (improvised explosive devices). I’ve worked in Liberia and Western Sahara. I have been to a lot of these places and seen the landscape and that has helped me to try and make my novels more convincing. And for me that is part of the art of writing thrillers. There is a line in the book which says ‘the most convincing lies are sandwiched between truths’ and I think that is right – you need to get the detail so people can be drawn into your book and find them believable. I love reading thrillers and yet I am unconvinced by most of them, so I try and write the kind of thriller that I would want to read.

On the issue of Afghanistan and Pakistan, I am concerned that that the ongoing role of Pakistan’s ISI in destabilising Afghanistan is not fully appreciated. The ISI was responsible for channelling billions of dollars of Saudi and American funds to the most unsavoury and extremist elements of the mujahideen during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, including their pet islamopath Gulbuddin Hekmatyr.

Hekmatyr now runs the fastest growing terrorist network in Afghanistan, the group behind recent Kabul bombings. It is inconceivable that he is no longer in touch with his former masters and it is entirely credible that the ISI is using Hekmatyr to conduct a proxy war against India. The targets of recent bombings have included the Indian embassy and guesthouses frequented by Indians.

Furthermore the recent arrest by the Pakistanis of Mullah Baradar, the Afghan Taliban’s No 2, should not necessarily be interpreted as a great success. At the time of his arrest, Mullah Baradar was engaged in secret talks with the UN to find resolution to the war. The ISI moved swiftly and ruthlessly to close that channel of communication. The ISI’s ongoing support for the Taliban and associated networks is the elephant in the room. Our fear of instability in Pakistan prevents us from confronting the root cause of Afghanistan’s current and historical woes.

Blowback from the cold war abounds and as long as it does espionage writers like me will have rich sources to draw on!