Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (14 page)

Dubbed the ‘flying prince of conservation’, Bernhard, the German-born consort of Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, was president of the WWF for fourteen years until his disgrace in a 1976 bribery scandal. He had accepted a $1.1-million kickback from the Lockheed aircraft company to promote the sales of its fighter jets to the Dutch Air Force. He later claimed he had donated the money to the WWF. A commission of inquiry found that the prince had ‘shown himself open to dishonourable favours and offers’ and had ‘harmed the interests of the State’.

Bernhard was forced to resign from all public offices, including the WWF, and also as inspector-general of the armed forces. Humiliatingly, he was stripped of military honours and forbidden from wearing a uniform.

Bernhard had been dogged by controversy before. His insatiable appetite for money was matched only by his appetite for women. The prince kept a
mistress in Paris and had numerous extramarital affairs that produced at least two children. As a young university student in Berlin, he had been a member of the Nazi SS. After his marriage to Queen Juliana, he resigned from the party, reportedly signing his resignation letter, ‘Heil Hitler’. He later vocally denounced Hitler, renounced his German citizenship and, during the Second World War, served as a pilot with the British Royal Air Force before taking charge of the Dutch resistance to the Nazis.

Following the 1976 scandal, Bernhard remained an influential figure in the WWF and its secretive 1001 Club. The club – which never really existed as a physical entity – was the brainchild of Anton Rupert, one of South Africa’s wealthiest businessmen. He had made his millions as owner of the Rembrandt Group and the Rothmans International tobacco company. Bernhard was a close friend of Rupert’s and was seen as sympathetic to the apartheid government.

Rupert, who joined the WWF board of trustees in 1968, is credited with conceiving a plan to raise vast sums of money for the then struggling organisation. It would be called the 1001 Club. Bernhard would be the ‘one’; the other thousand members would be a moneyed elite: billionaires, bankers, financiers, politicians and international wheeler-dealers. Many of them were drawn from Bernhard’s extended network of business associates and friends.

‘Bernhard had an extraordinary circle of friends,’ says Stephen Ellis, a professor and researcher at the African Study Centre in Leiden, Holland. ‘He knew everybody, from gang bosses to crowned heads of state. There were Nazis, crooks, fraudulent merchant bankers and Third World heads of state. He was even in with the CIA.’

Each member of the club would be persuaded to part with $10 000, ensuring them lifetime membership of an elite association whose membership list would be a tightly controlled secret. The fees would provide WWF with an endowment of $10 million.

Details of the membership list were first leaked to the British satirical magazine
Private Eye
in the 1980s. The generous patrons included men like Henry Ford II, the former president and chairman of the Ford Motor Company, former US defense secretary Robert S. McNamara, San Francisco businessman and political power broker Cyril Magnin, beer billionaire
August A. Busch Jnr, and former IBM president Thomas Watson Jnr. There were other, far less savoury members, among them Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire’s corrupt and murderous president, Agha Hasan Abedi, the former president of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) and the perpetrator of one of the largest frauds in financial history, Daniel K. Ludwig, a reclusive billionaire whose companies obliterated thousands of kilometres of rainforest in the Amazon, and Tibor Rosenbaum, a reputed Mossad agent whose Swiss bank laundered drug money for organised crime cartels.

The club also attracted an influential grouping of at least sixty South Africans. Many of them were members of the Broederbond, the secretive Afrikaner-nationalist society that exerted a powerful presence in South African politics and business. Among them were Johannes Hurter, the chairman of Volkskas bank, Pepler Scholtz, the former MD of insurance giant Sanlam, and Etienne Rousseau, an influential businessman who, at various times, had held directorships at Sanlam, Sasol, the Reserve Bank and Afrikaans mining finance and exploration company Federale Mynbou. Both Rousseau and Hurter had served on the Broederbond’s executive council.

Hurter and another 1001 Club member, Dr Frans Cronjé, sat on an advisory body that counselled the government on the armament requirements of the SADF. Louis Luyt, Rupert’s former business partner and a prominent figure in the Information Scandal, which ended the political career of South African prime minister John Vorster, was also a member of the club, as were seven of Rupert’s relatives.

For the South Africans, the 1001 Club was about more than conservation. Veteran
New York Times
investigative journalist Raymond Bonner observed that, at the time, ‘Not many international clubs welcomed South Africans, and membership in the 1001 provided them [with] an opportunity to mingle and do business with tycoons, as well as with Prince Philip [the head of the British chapter of the WWF] and Prince Bernhard.’

South African influence extended further. In 1971, Rupert suggested that Charles de Haes, an executive at Rothmans International, be seconded to work at WWF headquarters as Bernhard’s personal assistant. De Haes, a Belgian national, had studied at the University of Cape Town and lived in South Africa for many years. Rothmans would pay his salary.

And it was De Haes – a skilled fundraiser – who set in motion Rupert’s idea for the establishment of the 1001 Club, creating the endowment that ensured the WWF’s international headquarters could be financially independent from its national sections. Six years later, De Haes would be rewarded with an appointment as WWF’s director-general.

On his return to WWF headquarters in Gland, Switzerland, John Hanks begins making a ‘number of discreet inquiries about suitable candidates for the re quired undercover work’. In July 1987, he discovers the existence of a shadowy British private security and intelligence firm, KAS Enterprises. The company had been established by Sir David Stirling, the legendary founder of the SAS. Its name was derived from Kilo Alpha, the SAS call sign, and it formed part of a loose network of private security, risk-assessment and body-guarding entities run by retired SAS operatives, known collectively as ‘The Circuit’.

One former SAS soldier later wrote: ‘KAS was obviously the Rolls-Royce of security companies – the right address, the right contacts and the right people at the top. It was like the civilian wing of the Regiment. Another squadron, only better pay.’

In October 1987, Hanks flies to London for a meeting with Sir David and his men. KAS’s offices are situated at 22 South Audley Street in London’s chic Mayfair district. The address is an in-joke among KAS employees. Reduced to an acronym, it reads ‘22 SAS’.

Stirling, at seventy-one, is an imposing six-foot-six figure with an aristocratic bearing and the quiet authority of a man who is used to being obeyed. Hanks is impressed. He gives the men ‘some background literature and information on the rhino poaching problem’ and commissions KAS Enterprises to produce a feasibility study ‘on ways of investigating the illegal trade’. Stirling’s man for the job will be KAS’s managing director, Colonel Ian Crooke.

In the annals of the SAS and the rah-rah hagiographies of the British tabloids, Crooke, known to friends as ‘Crookie’, is portrayed as a dashingly heroic figure. A rare photograph shows a man in an immaculate grey suit with a
beakish nose, neatly parted hair and sun-wrinkled eyes. A British tabloid once quoted a former SAS officer, Colonel Clive Fairweather, as describing Crooke as a man who ‘really didn’t give a damn. He liked to brawl and raise hell … but he always got the job done … He was a drinker, a fighter, a womaniser and a genuine rogue to a certain degree. But he was born to be a soldier.’

Crooke had risen through the ranks of the SAS, eventually becoming the officer commanding 23 SAS. In May 1980, he is said to have played a pivotal role in the planning stages of the raid that ended the siege of the Iranian Embassy in London. Five hostage-takers were killed and nineteen hostages freed.

His most famous exploit came a year later, when 400 Marxist rebels seized control of The Gambia in West Africa. Five hundred people would be killed in the ensuing fighting. Crooke, who had been sent to the country’s capital, Banjul, along with two other SAS officers with strict instructions to ‘observe and advise’, spectacularly exceeded his remit. Members of the president’s family and other senior government officials were being held hostage at a hospital. Crooke and his men donned white coats and stethoscopes and caught a taxi. They took the rebels by surprise, disarmed them and freed the hostages.

Next, Crooke assumed command of a unit of French-trained Senegalese paratroopers who had been sent to the country to help crush the coup. He led a counter-attack that dislodged the rebels from key positions and drove them from Banjul. His military superiors in the UK were appalled and threatened him with a court martial. In the end, they gave him a Distinguished Service Order.

16 November 1987

Hanks writes a letter to Crooke. The letter – as with so many others that eventually leak out – is marked ‘confidential’. Thanking Crooke for his proposals on the poaching investigation, Hanks arranges to meet him in London in December for ‘detailed briefings on our requirements’.

‘On receipt of the signed contract, I will authorise payment of fifteen thousand pounds to KAS Enterprises Ltd, the balance of five thousand pounds to follow on receipt by me of an acceptable report and one or more
meetings with your operator. I would like to confirm that this whole operation should NOT be regarded as a WWF-funded activity. I can also confirm that none of the WWF staff knows of this project nor will they be informed of any of the activities until the project has been completed and the operators have left the field.’

But the following month, Hanks prepares a discussion paper for consideration by WWF’s conservation committee. He calls for ‘a major effort to halt the illegal trade by supporting intelligence gathering and the resulting follow-up operations. ‘Anecdotal and unsubstantiated reports of involvement of government officials and foreign diplomats are no substitute for well-documented specific information incriminating the individuals concerned.’

Such an intelligence-gathering operation is ‘not the domain of committed amateurs but that of the professional investigators who should be commissioned accordingly to undertake this work’, Hanks says, adding that ‘immediate action’ is required. He states that within six to nine months, ‘comprehensive dossiers should be assembled on the whole illegal trade network’.

Then, in a clear reference to KAS, he writes: ‘Professional investigations as described, funded by external sources, were initiated in November 1987. The investigating team has been provided with the information and contacts presently available to the WWF. The first report from the team will be made available by 1 March 1988.’

Hanks believes that ‘this is a major and significant new development, which should have far-reaching consequences for conservation activities in Africa’.