The Cameo Counterfeiting Plan

The Cameo Counterfeiting Plan turns an elusive family heirloom into the object of an improvised government deception: after the original disappears, the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation arrange for two copies to be made and sent to rival claimants. The scheme appears to settle competing demands, but it does not establish the original’s whereabouts or authenticity. Instead, the replicas eventually expose a second layer of substitution and send the investigation back to its starting point.

An Object with an Unsettled Past

The plan matters because the cameo’s identity had long been difficult to establish. An old scratch obscured its engraved figure, leaving open whether it represented a mythological being or a real person. Close inspection offered only partial clues: traces of attributes, the outline of clothing, and the style of the carving. The damaged surface was not merely a flaw in the object; it complicated the effort to connect it securely to any historical record.

Régis pursued the question through a systematic study of stone carving and consultations with European specialists, presenting himself as an enthusiast without revealing the family jewel. He concluded that it was Italian work from at least the eighteenth century, perhaps the seventeenth, and that its figure represented one of the mythological twins, Castor or Pollux. If so, it was probably one half of a pair. A brief eighteenth-century catalogue placed a pair depicting the twins in the collection of the Duke of Orléans, later the Regent, but did not trace what became of them. The records left open whether the gems entered the royal collection or passed to émigré families after the Revolution.

A later exhibition in Paris brought the pair into sharper view. Its photographs and an old engraving showed the Dioscuri facing one another, each holding a horse by the bridle and carrying a spear, with a star-topped, egg-shaped cap. The catalogue described five-layer onyx with a dark upper layer and said that the gems had once belonged to the Regent’s collection before being separated after the Revolution. The missing Castor cameo was thought to have vanished during the upheaval. The family’s stone, recovered from the Founder’s grave, bore the old scratch; a manuscript account of a living infant found near St. Louis in 1842 also described a cameo in a silk purse pinned to the baby’s swaddling clothes. These clues strengthened the family’s account of the jewel’s history without resolving the later chain of possession.

The Decision to Make Copies

The immediate impetus for the counterfeiting plan was the cameo’s disappearance amid the competing efforts to recover it. In Kansas City, John Robbart was angry that the object had gone missing just as he was poised to regain the case. His superiors at the Federal Bureau of Investigation had agreed to let him take it up again, while the Central Intelligence Agency’s operation in Cuba had been following the babalao Rodrigo Lerbier to determine whether he had staged a break-in to retrieve the jewel. The agents working in Cuba had to proceed cautiously during the purges, and the expected recovery never materialized.

During a telephone conversation with Robbart, Chris proposed that the cameo might return to their hands if someone made another one. Robbart initially balked at the idea, then accepted its practical appeal: commission a convincing replacement and the missing object could appear to have been recovered. The proposal was not to create just one copy. Robbart noted that two people in different countries had claimed the jewel, so they decided to order two. The choice converted a single missing object into a problem of satisfying separate claimants without possessing the original.

The agencies could draw on contacts in illicit circles to find a discreet expert accustomed to forgery. Their central difficulty was technical: the maker would have to reproduce the cameo from photographs alone, including its image and stone. Even the material was uncertain in the conversation; Robbart recalled it as agate or onyx. A photograph could serve as a model for appearance, but it could not supply the original’s physical substance or prove the provenance that the image was meant to stand for.

Two Claimants, Two Fakes

By a twist of the affair, the agencies commissioned the same expert whom Charles de Castelmont had used in New York in 2001 to make a cast of the D’Anjou cameo. The connection joined the institutional counterfeiting operation to an earlier private effort to reproduce the object. It also meant that the two copies were not independent answers to the mystery: both emerged from one expert working from photographic evidence.

When the work was finished, the counterfeits were sent to the two people who had claimed the cameo. The D’Anjou claimant accepted the replacement as genuine and was satisfied to recover the Founder’s cameo. Charles de Castelmont saw through his copy immediately. Yet recognizing it as false brought him relief. He took the fake as confirmation that the true twin jewel of his ancestors had never belonged to a comparatively humble Canadian family, and that the D’Anjous could not sustain a claim to descend from an American branch of the Castelmont line.

That conclusion depended on a distinction the operation could not actually prove. The copy’s failure to convince Charles told him that the object he had received was false; it did not establish where the original was, or whether the family’s old cameo was itself authentic. For a time, however, the false replacement allowed Charles to treat the family-history question as settled in his favor.

The Copies Reopen the Mystery

The apparent resolution broke down when Charles later examined a clear photograph sent with a renewed claim from the D’Anjou side. He recognized the image as the Castor cameo, including its old scratch, and recalled receiving that same image from New York in 2003. On closer inspection, however, the scratch visible in the photograph looked recent and imitated, as though it had been copied from an image rather than carried by the old stone. The resemblance to the original’s distinctive damage was evidence of copying, not proof of authenticity.

Charles concluded that the D’Anjous had received the same counterfeit as he had: the New York authorities had apparently sent two false cameos, one to each claimant. His earlier relief dissolved into bafflement. The question was no longer simply whether the D’Anjou family possessed the genuine Castor cameo; it was how two replicas had been supplied and who had substituted them for the jewel. Charles reasoned that someone in New York might have taken the valuable antique and replaced it with copies, perhaps through a subordinate handling the matter mechanically. The duplicated fakes, which should have satisfied two claims, instead made the substitution harder to conceal and returned the provenance dispute to square one.