Duncan went to the hotel with Agent Harold Smith, another veteran investigator with whom he had worked on scores of cases. The Sabena radio operator was waiting for them in his room.
“You have some information for us?” Duncan asked.
“I think so,” the operator said. “I want you to understand why I’m giving you this information. I’m damned tired of being under suspicion every time I come into New York. I’m fed up with being searched and questioned and delayed. I want to see this thing cleared up.”
“We don’t like it any more than you do,” Duncan said. “We’ll let up on the pressure as soon as we can.”
The operator said that earlier in the year he had been approached in Belgium by a pilot with whom he had flown as a member of the Belgian air force. This man had told him he could earn a large sum of money if he would merely wear a pair of specially made shoes into the United States and then turn the shoes over to a man who would call for them. It was obvious to the operator that he was being asked to smuggle diamonds into the United States.
“I turned them down,” he said to Duncan. “I didn’t want to get mixed up in anything like that.”
“Do you know anyone who is carrying diamonds?” Duncan asked.
“No,” the operator said, “I don’t. But I presume the same offer was made to someone else. Probably another Sabena crew member with whom this man had flown in the past.” He gave them the pilot’s name.
The conversation tended to support Duncan’s suspicion that the smuggling was being done by a person connected with Sabena. He sent a cable to the Treasury representative in Antwerp, Bill Beers, a gregarious, bilingual agent with a remarkable talent for cultivating sources of information in Europe. He asked Beers to furnish a list of the names of Sabena employees who once had been fliers in the Belgian air force. He got the list, but at the time it wasn’t much help, even though one of the names was Robert Edmund Deppe.
When the search of Deppe’s luggage was completed at the airport, an agent said, “That’s all. You may go now.”