Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (16 page)

The Lock team is given unfettered access to police ‘intelligence on all matters relating to the illegal horn and ivory trade’. This includes ‘routine research checks’, including criminal records, vehicle registration numbers, addresses, company registration details, export licences, identity documents, and passport and visa details of targets. It is a ‘two-way affair and of immense mutual benefit to both parties’, the Lock report notes diplomatically. The police supply KAS with ‘false passports for infiltration of the smuggling network as well as sensitive information which could affect KAS activities in foreign countries’.

With the aid of the police, the SAS men set about compiling dossiers on suspected smugglers and rhino horn dealers. A target list is drawn up and code names assigned to key figures in the wildlife trade. A copy of the list contains thirty-two names, including some of the largest ivory and curio dealers in Africa. Among them is Hans Beck (code-named Hotel 2), a German-born ivory trader and curio-shop owner based in Botswana; John Ilsley (Delta 1), an ivory dealer and owner of a Johannesburg company called Bushcraft Trading; Ian Parker (Charlie 1), a former Kenyan game warden turned ivory consultant; Chris Huxley (Lima 1), a zoologist and CITES ivory-trade expert; George Poon (Charlie 2), a notorious Hong Kong trader who made a fortune from poached ivory; Marius Meiring (Echo 2), the South African army major caught up in the Lukman scandal; and Chong Pong (Bravo 2), a Pretoria-based ivory dealer the police have tried unsuccessfully to entrap.

Also named is Tony Viera (Papa 2), a smuggler who was charged and convicted in 1988 after Botswana customs officials seized a truck registered in his name. Inside they found 382 raw ivory tusks, 34 carved tusks, 94 black rhino horns, 50 ivory bangles, 73 ivory necklaces, 10 pairs of earrings, 20 elephant sculptures, malachite and copper ingots. Part of the shipment was later linked to Pong.

But the list suggests that Crooke has a vindictive streak. Anyone who crosses him can be considered a legitimate target. This is true of Rowan Martin (Juliet 1), a respected conservationist and then director of research
in the Zimbabwe Wildlife Department. Martin had rebuffed Crooke’s approaches for information on the illegal trade in ivory and rhino horn, later telling a Reuters reporter that Crooke had been vague about his sponsors and objectives ‘and seemed more interested in military technology than wildlife’. Crooke also hinted at ‘some irregular methods’, he said.

Another ‘target’ is Dr Richard Bell (Bravo 1), who runs anti-poaching operations in Zambia’s Luangwa Valley and who had been a senior researcher in Malawi’s wildlife department. Crooke had visited Bell in February 1989 and asked him for advice on investigating the trade in Zambia.

‘I responded by asking whether their activities were known to the Zambian government and its security agencies,’ Bell told Reuters. ‘On being informed that such contacts had not been made, I informed them I could not be of any assistance to them until I was assured they had government approval.’

A secret situation report covering Lock’s first four months of operation states: ‘Unfortunately the presence of the KAS team on the ground was leaked to their [Zambia’s] National Intelligence Service – probably by Dr Richard Bell – before the KAS team could laydown [
sic
] their basic infrastructure on the ground.’

The report also reveals that, in a bid to gain a foothold in Zambia, Stirling personally intervenes and enters into negotiations with President Kenneth Kaunda to secure a KAS contract to train a presidential guard. ‘The scope in Zambia to combat poaching could be enormous, providing KAS secures the presidential contract and becomes indispensable to Kenneth Kaunda … Once a foot has been well and truly secured in the office of the president, then it is time to diversify into anti-poaching areas.’

In Zimbabwe, Crooke enlists the aid of Glenn Tatham, the chief warden of Zimbabwe’s national parks and the progenitor of Operation Stronghold, the country’s controversial shoot-to-kill war against poachers. Tatham feeds Lock with ‘a lot of information’ about poaching syndicates operating in the Zambezi Valley and across the border in Zambia. Crooke – who appears to have no qualms about whom he’ll do business with – begins developing ‘unofficial’ ties to spies in Zimbabwe’s notorious Central Intelligence Organisation. Lock, operating on a ‘need-to-know’ basis with a ‘small group’ of CIO officers, has grandiose plans to entrap North Korean embassy officials
in a rhino horn deal. The Lock team plans to smuggle the horn into the country from South Africa. The CIO will ‘provide the right black man specially selected by it to carry out this deal’.

Crooke also turns his attention to Swaziland, the tiny landlocked kingdom bordered by South Africa and Mozambique. ‘All intelligence indicates that Swaziland has become a major smuggling route into the RSA – not only for horn and ivory, but also for all types of illicit trophies and goods.’ A key target is the Taiwanese embassy in the kingdom’s capital, Mbabane. The previous Taiwanese ambassador ‘was known to be involved in [the] smuggling of horn and ivory through diplomatic bags [and] intelligence indicates that members of his staff are still involved in this illicit trade’.

The June 1989 Lock report reveals that ‘KAS has at last developed a small team with the necessary credibility to infiltrate the smuggling network. It has taken a lot of time, patience and hard work to develop this credibility that is so essential to anyone operating within the smuggling ability.’

Crooke’s plan appears simple, but it transgresses the bounds of legality. In order to catch the smugglers, Lock’s ‘infiltration team’ will have to become smugglers and dealers themselves. To do this, they obtain 178 rhino horns. The bulk is sourced from stockpiles in Namibia. The Lock report states that, of that number, ‘78 [horns] are immediately available to KAS and is [
sic
] being held in a secure place within [the] RSA’.

According to Ellis, who, as a journalist, dug deeply into Lock’s activities: ‘Internal KAS documents show that KAS hoped to eventually become self-financing by the purchase and sale of rhino horn, which would have made it itself one of the region’s biggest traders … According to one South African who worked with KAS, shortly before Namibia’s independence elections in 1989, the company acquired some seventy-five rhino horns, which were in official hands in Namibia. Some of these are believed to have been horns cut from live animals as part of a programme to de-horn rhinos so as to discourage poaching.’

Lategan says he recalls helping them to obtain ‘no more than twenty horns’ from the Natal Parks Board (NPB). The figure is closer to fifty. Dr George Hughes, the NPB’s director, supplied the horn only after receiving approval from the head of the police’s criminal investigation division and
Vlok. But he didn’t part with it for nothing. A price of R250 000, in the form of a donation to the Natal Parks Board Trust, was agreed on. The money was paid by the SA Nature Foundation.

‘The KAS infiltration team is now ready to commence smuggling operations in both Swaziland and Mozambique where the required contacts have now been set up and business deals agreed in principle,’ Crooke’s report reads. ‘In [the] RSA there is an on-going deal concerning 2 tons of ivory smuggled into the Northern Transvaal from Mozambique.’

He adds that the police ‘will only allow KAS to carry out illegal dealings in horn and ivory within the RSA providing the operations are monitored by a surveillance team, which covers them legally in this type of covert operation’.

But the South African police have limited control over KAS’s other planned smuggling operations in Swaziland and Mozambique. In Swaziland they make approaches to dealers, and establish ‘good links into the Taiwan embassy’.

The team’s ‘main aim will be initially to infiltrate the Swazi and Mozambique smuggling network to enhance their reputation for future operations’. Secondly, they will ‘commence dealing with the Taiwan embassy in order to get irrefutable proof of their involvement through photographic evidence gained by the KAS surveillance team’.

In his autobiography, Marafono describes their work as ‘very, very enjoyable’.

‘We were attacking at two levels: one group was to do the training with game wardens … And then the other group were [
sic
] stationed in a base and had to try and get to the people who were actually dealing in those endangered animals.’

But it was by trying to get to the dealers that Crooke and his men would lose their way.

Of all the bad decisions that dogged Operation Lock, one stands out.

It is early 1989. Crooke is in a meeting with the head of a private security company in Johannesburg. The man seated across from him is bearded and grossly overweight. He has an easy charm and a keen intelligence. His gaze is direct, inquisitive. Marafono will later describe him as ‘very nice’ and ‘very helpful’. The businessman ‘used to work for the South African intelligence service … [Y]ou cannot operate in South Africa without the approval of the South African government. Whether you like it or not, that is the reality.’

The man’s name is Craig Williamson. In South Africa, he is known as ‘apart-heid’s superspy’. How Crooke and the KAS team made their initial contact with Williamson remains unclear. There are suggestions that Le Chêne provided the introductions. It is a claim she has never denied, although she is on record as stating that it would be ‘unprofessional to respond to unsubstantiated claims’.

It was an unlikely alliance. A former police spook who ran covert operations for Military Intelligence, Williamson had been at the heart of the National Party government’s bloody covert war against the ANC. In a security establishment dominated by Afrikaner nationalists, Williamson cut an incongruous figure. The product of privilege, he was an English South African from an upper-middle class Johannesburg family who had been privately schooled at St John’s College in the city. An exceedingly bright student, he was accepted to study law and politics at the University of the Witwatersrand. By then, he was already on the payroll of the South African police’s Security Branch.

In 1975 Williamson was elected vice-president of the anti-apartheid National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), all the while feeding reports back to his security-police handlers. He wormed his way into the
International University Exchange Fund (IUEF) in Geneva and used it to establish contact with the ANC. One of the fund’s primary objectives was to assist students who were political refugees from southern Africa. Williamson, who became the IUEF’s deputy director, went on to represent it at a number of anti-apartheid conferences and meetings with Geneva-based United Nation’s organisations.

Ironically, it was Williamson’s lobbying that led the IUEF to recognise the ANC as South Africa’s primary liberation movement. It was all in aid of ‘Operation Daisy’, a plan hatched by Williamson and his handlers to disrupt the ANC and gain high-level intelligence on the organisation.

And Williamson, abusing his trusted position, seized the opportunity to loot the fund, diverting vast sums of money away from humanitarian causes to the Security Branch, political entities with links to the South African government and South African projects of questionable veracity. Some of the money was used by the Security Branch to buy a farm near Pretoria. They named it Daisy.

Williamson’s cover was blown in 1980. On his return to South Africa, apartheid’s propagandists lauded him as a hero who had achieved the impossible and infiltrated the ANC. His new-found status precipitated him even deeper into the dark nexus of the secret war. In 1982, Williamson – now head of Section C2, the Security Branch’s foreign division – ‘commissioned’ the letter bomb that killed Ruth First, the wife of Joe Slovo, a leader of the South African Communist Party, in Mozambique.

Two years later, Williamson was instrumental in another parcel-bomb attack in Angola. It killed Jeanette Schoon, an exiled South African whose husband, Marius, was an ANC activist, and their six-year-old daughter, Katryn. Williamson knew his victim. Jeanette had served alongside him on the NUSAS executive in the 1970s, unaware that he was a spy.

Williamson would later tell South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission that ‘[I]t made very little difference to me whether Joe Slovo was killed or Ruth First was killed or Jeanette Schoon was killed or Marius Schoon was killed, but I never in my life targeted an innocent child.’

In 1985, Williamson left the police, ostensibly to pursue business interests. But that, too, was a ploy. He established Longreach (Pty) Ltd, a Military

Intelligence front company that was used to carry out foreign intelligence and sanctions-busting operations. Williamson would later be implicated by his close friend, Eugene de Kock – the commander of the Vlakplaas police death squad – in the assassination of Swedish prime minister Olaf Palme in February 1986. It is a claim Williamson has dismissed as ‘pure fantasy’.

By 1987, Williamson had become a National Party member of the State President’s Council, an influential advisory body reporting directly to South Africa’s finger-wagging head of state, P.W. Botha. Williamson would later stand as a National Party candidate for the wealthy constituency of Bryan-ston in northern Johannesburg.