Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (15 page)

On 27 December, he pens a note to Crooke: ‘P.B. [Prince Bernhard] phoned me on Christmas Eve to confirm that the balance of the initial £100 000 was on its way to you.’

Over the next year, plans are drafted and redrafted and strategies devised to infiltrate and gather intelligence on poaching syndicates. Crooke chooses the code name ‘Lock’ for the operation. It is his wife’s maiden name. Stirling discusses the project with Sir Laurens van der Post, the South African author
and conservationist best known for his books about the Kalahari and the San Bushmen. Van der Post, who served in the British Army during the Second World War, is also a close friend of Prince Charles, an unofficial advisor to British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, a supporter of the Zulu nationalist movement Inkatha, and a vocal critic of the African National Congress (ANC).

A dozen men, the majority of them retired SAS soldiers, are selected to participate in Crooke’s little African adventure. Among them is Ken Edwards, a KAS director and a man later described in a newspaper report as ‘a professional arms dealer who also dabbles in pornography’.

Harry Taylor is a former British Royal Marine, SAS commando and veteran of Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’. In 1988 he had become the first person to conquer Mount Everest’s ‘unclimbed ridge’. In the years that follow, he will mount another five Everest expeditions.

Eddie Stone, a tough-as-nails staff sergeant, had served in Northern Ireland, the Falklands, the Middle East, and South and Central America. Thirteen years after Lock, he would make a name for himself as a presenter of a BBC reality television series called
SAS: Are You Tough Enough?

Then there’s Nish Bruce, a respected and ‘glamorous, all-action hero’, who had served in the British Paras, the SAS and been a member of the Red Devils parachute team. He’s a secretly tortured man, haunted by horrors that ‘most people would not believe’.

‘In the Falklands I saw dead men so deformed that their own mothers wouldn’t recognise them – boys of eighteen who had tried to slit their own throats because they had been so badly burned.’

Bruce will kill himself in January 2002, leaping 1 500 metres to oblivion from a light aircraft piloted by his girlfriend.

Kauata ‘Fred’ Marafono, known as ‘Big Fred’ and ‘Fearless Fred’, is a likeable Fijian with a legendary reputation in the regiment. He always carries a Boeing hunting knife, tucked in at the back underneath his shirt. There are jokes that he’d never cut someone’s throat without apologising first. Marafono had been awarded an MBE by the Queen, although he remained purposefully vague about the reasons. On the point of being demobbed from the SAS, he was snapped up by Stirling. He will go on to work with
the South African mercenary outfit, Executive Outcomes, eventually settling in Sierra Leone, where he will play a role in ending the country’s ‘Blood Diamond’ wars of the 1990s.

Finally, there is Evelyn le Chêne, a favourite of Stirling’s. He affectionately calls her ‘Blondie’. For a time, she seems to have been Lock’s keeper of secrets and is said to have even conducted some of the early reconnaissance for the project. (She will later claim that she was ‘never a member of KAS staff’ and was ‘only retained as a consultant to produce an initial report’.) Her ties to Britain’s intelligence services date back more than four decades to her marriage to Pierre le Chêne, a British agent in Nazi-occupied France who had survived the Mauthausen death camp.

A historian who documented the horrors of Mauthausen in a 1971 book, she had testified against Klaus Barbie, the Nazi ‘Butcher of Lyon’ during his 1987 war-crimes trial. Le Chêne, a dedicated ‘anti-communist campaigner’, also belongs to the exclusive Special Forces Club. Membership of the club is limited to current and former members of military and intelligence services. She is reputed to be ‘very good at running agents’. In 2003, Le Chêne will be exposed by Britain’s
Sunday Times
as the ‘mastermind of a vast private-intelligence-gathering network that collated the identities and confidential details of nearly 150 000 left-wing activists and offered them at a price to British industrial companies’, including arms giant BAE Systems.

As Operation Lock develops, regular progress reports are supplied to Bernhard. KAS operatives, including Crooke, visit the prince at the Soestdijk Palace near Utrecht to brief him in person. Marafono remembers accompanying Crooke to meet the prince and spending the best part of a day talking about the project. The completed feasibility study finds – unsurprisingly – that Johannesburg is ‘growing in importance as an entrepôt for rhino horn and ivory’. The KAS team feels the project should be based there.

Hanks asks Frans Stroebel, the executive director of WWF’s South African affiliate, the SA Nature Foundation (SANF), to help pave the way and make introductions. A former private secretary to South Africa’s foreign affairs
minister, Pik Botha, Stroebel had also served as a diplomat at the South African mission to the United Nations in the 1970s. He is close to Anton Rupert, who is the SANF’s president.

Stroebel agrees to allow the SANF to be used as a conduit for funds to the Lock team once it’s in place. KAS also has its own, more questionable, connections in southern Africa. One senior KAS employee had assisted the Angolan rebel movement UNITA with a propaganda campaign and had close ties with the South African military attaché in London. Stirling had also published and disseminated pro-UNITA propaganda material through an organisation known as the Better Britain Society.

These ties are significant, given Craig van Note’s July 1988 accusations that South Africa and UNITA were complicit in a ‘massive smuggling ring’ and that UNITA had virtually exterminated Angola’s elephant and rhino populations. Despite this, Hanks and Bernhard press ahead with KAS.

In December 1988, Sotheby’s auctions off two oil paintings on behalf of Bernhard – ‘The Holy Family’ by the seventeenth-century Spanish Baroque painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, and ‘The Rape of Europa’, by Murillo’s Italian contemporary Elisabetta Sirani. Both belonged to Queen Juliana. Together, they fetch £610 000 from an anonymous buyer. On Bernhard’s instructions, the proceeds are donated to WWF International. Weeks later, Bernhard calls the administrator of the 1001 Club and asks her to transfer an amount of £500 000 from the WWF to his wife’s account in the Netherlands. The money is routed to Lock.

18 January 1989

Two former SAS ‘hard men’ cross the tarmac at Jan Smuts Airport in Johannes burg, wending their way through a crowd of weary passengers disembarking from the London flight. Ray Harris and Jim Hughes are Crooke’s advance party. They have reservations at the Mariston Hotel in the Johannesburg central business district, and a shopping list. The team will need vehicles, safe houses and, most importantly, information. Stroebel is their fixer, introducing the Lock men to key conservationists and police
officials, among them Captain Piet Lategan, head of the police’s Endangered Species Protection Unit (ESPU).

The ESPU is only a few months old. Lategan, the desk officer at the police’s Stock Theft Unit, had been approached in 1988 by the then Minister of Law and Order, Adriaan Vlok, and asked to establish a specialised wildlife crimes unit. There were growing concerns about the levels of poaching in South Africa and in the Kruger National Park, Vlok said. He asked Lategan to come up with a name for a new unit. ‘All I could think of was the Endangered Species Protection Unit. I gave the name to Vlok, he made an announcement at a wildlife conference and that was it. But for a year or two all the unit consisted of was me and the stock-theft guys,’ Lategan recalls in an interview in 2012.

Van Note’s accusations and the revelations of the Lukman case in late 1988 increase the pressure. Vlok and the South African government need to save face and they want results. And Lategan – with his limited resources – will take any help he can get. The arrival of the SAS team seems like manna from heaven.

‘Stroebel got hold of me one day and told me there are some guys coming to South Africa who are going to be working with us, and that the minister is aware of it.’ The Lock team provides Lategan with an equipment ‘wish list’.

‘It was stuff I didn’t even know about or how to get, like earpieces and night-vision equipment.’

The list is daunting. Lock’s surveillance team will require half a dozen vehicles, a motorbike, micro-cassette recorders, 35-mm cameras, long lenses, video equipment, night-vision gear and false passports. A computer will have to be purchased so that intelligence can be collated and sifted into a usable database. The more sophisticated military-grade surveillance equipment will also have to be imported into South Africa in violation of international sanctions. Lategan helps where he can.

He introduces the men to a journalist at South Africa’s
Sunday Times
newspaper, De Wet Potgieter. Lategan and Potgieter had bonded over a campfire and beers during an operation in Swaziland the year before and had become firm friends.

‘In those days, I was basically alone, so old De Wet was my back-up,’
Lategan says. The journalist latches onto the Lock team in the hope of a scoop. It is a relationship that quickly turns incestuous. He slips them names and details about smuggling networks he has been investigating and makes arrangements with an estate agent to find them a property in Pretoria they can use as a safe house.

Harris and Hughes become regular visitors at the
Sunday Times
offices in Pretoria, and Potgieter a frequent fixture at the house in Arcadia in Pretoria and, later, at another Lock safe house in Johannesburg.

The rest of the Lock team, led by Crooke, arrive in South Africa in late January and early February 1989. Stroebel introduces Crooke to executives at the Rhino and Elephant Foundation (REF) and asks that he be given support. The operation has the blessing of the WWF, Stroebel says. The Foundation’s president is Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the controversial KwaZulu homeland chief minister and leader of the Inkatha movement.

Two years later, Buthelezi will be mired in scandal when the
Weekly Mail
newspaper reveals that Inkatha received covert funding from the South African police to oppose the ANC. There will be other revelations of Inkatha ‘hit squads’ trained at secret bases by South African Military Intelligence agents. A senior officer in the REF is also reputed to have been in the pay of Military Intelligence.

Crooke’s point of contact at the Foundation is Dr Jeremy Anderson, who also serves as director of the Parks Board in the KaNgwane homeland on the border between South Africa and Mozambique. Anderson, a highly regarded conservationist, is instrumental in introducing the KAS men to a range of contacts. He believes they have a key role to play in training anti-poaching teams.

Anderson notes in a report: ‘There is tremendous scope for KAS to carry out training tasks on behalf of the National Parks of Mozambique, Central African Republic and Togo … this training cannot be carried out by South African personnel for obvious political reasons. The South African Foreign Affairs department is prepared to fund the bulk of this training.’

As the months progress, Lategan’s unit becomes increasingly reliant on the Lock operatives. According to a secret KAS report from June 1989: ‘It is evident that the Stock Theft Unit rely completely on the KAS surveillance
team to develop their information and the intelligence acquired by both KAS and the SAP.’