The Hatton Garden Heist.

On Tuesday (7/4/15) it was revealed that over the four day Bank Holiday weekend robbers had broken into the vaults of the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit company making off with some GBP200million (USD300million) of diamonds and other precious stones. It has been said that this was like the plot of a movie and it was certainly the plot of the 4th episode of the 2nd series of the brilliant but sh*t UK TV show "Ultimate Force."

In the show British special forces are tasked with breaking into a safe deposit vault in order to steal a list of Islamic terrorists who are operating in secret across the World. In real life the purpose of the Hatton Garden heist was to allow the UK to reach out to Israel of the Iran nuclear talks. Around 70% of those working in London's Hatton Garden diamond trade are Jewish and a significant proportion of them will have either relatives or business contacts living in Israel.

Back in 1979's Saddam Hussein's Iraq was building a nuclear reactor at the Al Tuwaitha Nuclear Center just outside Baghdad. First the Iranians decided that this was part of a nuclear weapons program and unsuccessfully bombed the site in 1980. Then in 1981 Israel came to the same conclusion and carried out airstrikes that succeeded in destroying the site. The Iranians took note of this and when they began their own nuclear program they took the precaution of building their nuclear sites deep underground beneath many metres of reinforced concrete. In comparison a safety deposit vault seems like a soft target.

The main hook of the story though seems to be me. During the GermanWings story that dominated the Lausanne round of Iran talks I mentioned that I'd spent far too much of my life at Spain's Barcelona airport. The reason for this delay was that there had been a massive diamond robbery at Schipol airport in the Netherlands that shut down much of European airspace. Looking back Rihanna's hit "Diamonds (in the sky)" could well have been an attempt to muscle in on that.

My delay in Barcelona occurred just before the start of a 6 year UK research project that was scheduled to complete in 2012. With it now being 2015 it is fair to say that this research project has been a horrific failure for the UK producing a disaster similar to losing the Crown jewels. A smart nation would be seriously considering changing its approach before it incurred even more serious losses.

A significant part of that project has been a series of robberies and violent incidents directed against me and my associates that the police at first failed to respond to then failed to record as crimes and finally failed to investigate. Therefore all the elements of the Hatton Garden story about alarms being ignored by the police and the suspects being identified on CCTV are references to that. At one point a lowly police constable even tried giving me a lecture about "target hardening" which I found rather cute.

The real work of the negotiation - if Israel decide to participate - will be done quietly in the background over the arguments about compensation over losses. Almost by definition the vault owner doesn't keep any record of what is held in safety deposit boxes and the diamond trade is very much a gentleman's business with few written records kept of who owns what and how much it is worth. Therefore working out the insurance claims from this robbery is going to be a nightmare. I suspect that a few people with strong Israeli contacts are going to have particular problems.

13:20 on 12/4/15 (UK date).