In early May 2004, a new book will hit stores across the United States. It is called “Blood from Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror.” The launch of the book scares me. Mass media products have a far wider grassroots impact than trade or industry communications. This book promises bad news. It is written by the very same Washington Post foreign correspondent who was the first to ever suggest a link between diamonds and al Qaeda.

Just as the two words ‘conflicts’ and ‘diamonds’ present a most distasteful association, it pales with the connection of ‘diamond’ and ‘al Qaeda’. Conflict diamonds and terror diamonds may have similar connotations, but they are quite different from a consumer perception angle. It is fair to say that consumers remained largely unaware of the conflict diamond issue when the civil wars in Angola and Sierra Leone were still very much being waged. After the devastating strife had come to an end something else happened: James Bond’s adventure, Die Another Day, featured conflict diamonds.

Co-starring Halle Berry, who made history when she became the first-ever African-American woman to win a best actress Oscar, Berry also must have been the only woman in the world seen making love in a bath of conflict diamonds, in a movie in which the evils of the world were paid for by – or caused by – conflict diamonds. As the NGOs will confirm, nothing brought the issue more to the consciousness of the consumer-at-large than this movie.

Awareness is not necessarily negative. The movie was actually rather entertaining, and, as most James Bond epics, quite amusing. Since by the time the movie was released jewelry retailers and the diamond trade were on top of the issue and the audit trail of diamonds was firmly established, the movie didn’t create collateral damage to consumer demand for diamonds, as far as we were able to ascertain.

Conflict diamonds and terrorism are two different issues altogether: conflict diamonds, in all their cruelty, were perceived by the public-at-large as largely an African problem; terrorism, in contrast, is something that hits every consumer at home. And al Qaeda represents the worst in terrorism.

It may be recalled that a few days before the Clean Diamond Trade Act passed in the U.S. Congress, Washington Post reporter Doug Farah reported on a link between al Qaeda and diamonds. Congressman Tony Hall, the acknowledged front-runner and principal legislator fighting conflict diamonds, ‘needed’ (or, at any rate, he ‘used’) the al Qaeda linkage to garner the broadest possible support for the conflict diamond legislation.

No Congressman could ignore Hall’s October 2001 warning that “our country cannot afford to let this [diamond] resource, which has channeled billions of dollars into black-market economies, turn into easy money for terrorists - whether they belong to organizations like Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front, that terrorize Africans; or to al Qaeda, whose cells are involved in a range of money-making activities that includes diamond trading.

I do not know the extent of al Qaeda's activities, and do not want to be an alarmist. But I do know that diamonds - the most concentrated source of wealth ever known to mankind - should be put off limits to anyone bent on destruction. Especially Osama bin Laden.

It is important to see the fine nuance: Hall states as a fact that al Qaeda is involved in diamond trading, but he doesn’t know the extent of the activity. Hall’s information came from Farah’s article. Since then there has been ample recycling of Farah’s remarks and one or two incidental anecdotal additional reports supporting the supposition. Farah’s forthcoming book may well further solidify the link. Anyone remembering the impact of Edward J. Epstein’s best-selling “The Rise and Fall of Diamonds: the Shattering of a Brilliant Illusion” way back in the 1982 diamond crisis period, would be concerned about the forthcoming Farah book.

The book will show that President George Bush’s freezing of terrorist assets in traditional financial institutions and money channels in the aftermath of 9/11 was not effective. “Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups have long followed a diversification strategy that has rendered the crackdown by the U.S. and other governments almost useless. “Blood from Stones” promises to become “the first book to uncover, through on-the-ground reporting, the interlocking web of commodities, underground transfer systems, charities, and sympathetic bankers that support terrorist activities throughout the world.”

Doug Farah, who is also consulted by the U.S. Department of State on diamond affairs, is said to have “ventured into the dangerous and uncharted world of terrorist financing—a journey that took him across four continents. The information he gathered was far ahead of what U.S. intelligence agencies knew as they scrambled to understand the 9/11 attacks. In unprecedented detail, Farah traces the movement of money from the traffickers of ‘blood diamonds’ in West Africa to the world diamond exchange in Belgium and homegrown money merchants in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Karachi, and Lahore who turn cash into commodities and commodities into cash.”

The original Farah story fingers a Belgian of Lebanese descent, Samih Ossaily, who was born and raised in Koidu, Sierra Leone, one of the richest diamond mining areas of Sierra Leone. He claims that Farah’s information on him is 90% false and attributes his problems to his seven years when he, to quote his website, “was married to a Belgian woman and had two children with her. A very ugly custody battle turned in to a battle against the world. It was all started by my ex-wife in the battle for visitation rights of my 2 children. She told the judge that I was a terrorist and he ordered an investigation. She wants at all costs the full custody of the children but she never knew the consequences of those words.”

The accusations of links with terrorists got Ossaily some 15 months in jail; but he was released without being charged with any crime. That certainly seems to suggest that there is more than a reasonable doubt about that link. None of this, however, would prevent the publishing of books or dissemination of stories.

In his forthcoming book Farah probes charities that siphon off money to pay for such essentials as false identification cards and safe passage for operatives. And the book is said to reveal how the funding of terrorist activities is integrated into the age-old hawala network, a trust-based system that has operated for generations across Arabia and Southeast Asia.

The publisher of the 288-page book, in its pre-publication promotion, promises that “focusing on this critical aspect of the war on terrorism, “Blood from Stones” not only shows how terrorists are able to orchestrate complex and expensive attacks, but also makes it clear why the war will be so difficult to win.”

The rather conservative diamond industry historically tends to react and to respond; it is only recently that the industry has shown it can be proactive as well. We know now – five months ahead of the actual event – that this story will hit the public. Though the author, undoubtedly, has no intention of causing damage to the diamond business, it is not his responsibility to minimize collateral damage. That’s the task of the diamond and diamond jewelry industries.

We don’t often have the luxury of learning of possible ‘bad news’ well in advance. The issues raised in the book are real ones. The question is: what can responsibly be done to mitigate the possible negative impact on either the industry or on the consumer? It is far easier to pose the question than to provide the answers.