This could trigger renewed international pressure on Mugabe's increasingly isolated regime, which has driven once prosperous Zimbabwe into penury and social upheaval.

The regime's clandestine efforts to retain control of the flow of diamonds from the troubled Marange field in eastern Zimbabwe have emerged as a political battle over who will succeed Mugabe, 85, heats up within the ruling Zanu-PF Party.

According to The Sunday Times of London, the security chiefs are headed by Gen. Constantine Chiwenga, commander of the country's defense forces.

The proceeds from the Marange diamond smuggling will likely go toward bankrolling any campaign by him or his associates to succeed Mugabe, it said.

"The small group of security chiefs headed by Chiwenga are thought to have the power to hold everyone else to ransom and with their involvement in Marange, they will have the money too," The Sunday Times reported.

The newspaper said that the security chiefs have moved in heavy mining equipment that is "capable of extracting thousands of carats of diamonds an hour."

It quoted one industry source as saying: "We could be talking about between $25 million and $100 million a month. It's extraordinary what they can do with that. They'll just close ranks and do what they want."

Chiwenga's henchmen were identified as "powerful people with questionable pasts."

They include former air Vice Marshal Robert Mhlanga, who has close links with Mugabe and his family. He made a fortune in diamond trading in the Congo when Zimbabwean troops led by Gen. Vitalis Zvinavashe fought in the war there.

Zvinavashe was a member of the Zanu-PF politburo and was identified by the United Nations as a key figure involved in the plundering of the Congo's diamond wealth during the ongoing conflict there.

His nephew, Lovemore Kurotwi, is one of the group involved in the Marange affair, according to The Sunday Times.

He is the registered director of Canadile, one of two foreign companies brought in to work Marange after the Kimberly Process, an international body that regulates the global trade in diamonds to ensure they do not fund conflicts, threatened to suspend Zimbabwe over the regime's seizure of the diamond field in 2008.

Canadile and another firm, a South Africa-based scrap-metal recycler named New Reclamation, were awarded the contract in defiance of a Zimbabwe High Court order that Marange was owned by a British-registered outfit called African Consolidated Resources.

The Sunday Times says the companies were elected by Zimbabwe's mines minister, Obert Mpofu, "who is on a European Union and American sanctions list of undesirable Zimbabwean figures."

"In his dealings with foreign investors, he admitted being in business with Gen. Chiwenga … and protected by him."

The regime seized the Marange fields because it needed the funds to stay in power as the country disintegrated into abject poverty from decades under Mugabe, a former guerrilla leader who led the former British colony to independence from Britain and later a white settler regime.

According to human-rights groups, who exposed the swelling diamonds scandal, Mugabe's troops massacred 200 people and took over the mining operation amid "horrific violence," running their own smuggling operation.

The Kimberly Process threatened action against Mugabe if he did not withdraw from Marange.

But it backed off after Harare pledged to bring in foreign companies to work with a subsidiary of the state-owned Zimbabwe Mining Development Corp. Canadile and New Reclamation are not established mining companies.

It is not clear whether the Kimberly Process will take any action against the Harare regime and cut off its key source of financing.

But in November, New York-based Rapaport Group's RapNet Diamond Trading Network, the world's biggest with more than 4,100 members in 80 countries, banned its affiliates from dealing in gems from Marange because of serious human-rights abuses there.

Chairman Martin Rapaport called on world diamond trading bodies to expel members who deal in Marange diamonds.

"The Kimberly Process is being used as a fig leaf to cover up human-rights abuses in the diamond sector," he declared.

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