Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (19 page)

Ellis doesn’t fall for it.

Behind the scenes, other letters and statements are hastily being drafted. On 6 January 1991, two days before Ellis’s story breaks, Stroebel writes to Prince Philip. De Haes, WWF’s director-general, received ‘a number of comprehensive briefings on the project since I first became involved’, Stroebel writes. ‘In May 1989, I gave him full details. He then went to HRH Prince Bernhard to confirm that Prince Bernhard was indeed the sponsor. Mr de Haes satisfied himself with the developments, and in subsequent discussions with me he never expressed any concern about my involvement, or, for that matter, the covert programme itself.’

In a separate letter, Stroebel writes: ‘The funds for Operation Lock were actually WWF funds.’

The ghosts of Lock are resurrected in 1995 during the Kumleben Commission of Inquiry into the smuggling of ivory and rhino horn. Hanks testifies and is adamant that WWF officials were not party to it. Judge Mark Kumleben is unconvinced. He writes:

That WWF had knowledge of, and an association with Lock for an undetermined period of time can hardly be gainsaid. On the evidence available to this commission, one must conclude that Lock was not a WWF venture but that the latter cannot contend that it had no knowledge of Lock or was totally divorced from it.

Although Lock was initiated with a worthy aim, its fatal flaw was that it was a covert operation involving persons with a reputation for
carrying out unorthodox exploits to achieve their goals. They were accountable to no one. Thus suspicion regarding them was inevitable, particularly since there has been no disclosure of the fate of rhino horn delivered and not recovered. With the benefit of hindsight, Hanks candidly conceded that this operation was not a propitious one.

Two unrelated projects in which the WWF became involved demonstrate that the organisation was not averse to controversial and questionable operations. In the late 1980s, the organisation gave funds to Zimbabwe’s national parks, enabling them to buy a helicopter, which was used with deadly effect against poachers in the Zambezi Valley. Dozens of poachers were reported to have been killed in ‘contacts’ with anti-poaching units dropped into combat, sparking an outcry from human rights groups.

In the early 1990s, the WWF and other conservation organisations actively encouraged the hunting of saiga – an antelope that thrived on the steppes of Central Asia – and promoted the animal’s horns as an alternative to rhino horn. In the course of a decade, the saiga population was virtually exterminated, falling from a population estimated at over a million in 1993 to just 30 000 in 2003. The journal
New Scientist
reported that ‘[s]ince the collapse of the Soviet Union, a lucrative market in [saiga] horns has opened up, with hunters using motorcycles and high-powered weapons to chase and kill their quarry’.

‘In China … horns fetch around $100 a kilogram. Organised gangs illegally export the horn by train from Moscow to Beijing, or across the border from Kazakhstan.’

The strategy to promote saiga horn as an alternative to rhino horn had been spearheaded by rhino trade expert, conservationist and WWF consultant Esmond Bradley Martin. Later, after the devastation of saiga herds became apparent, he publicly recanted the idea. The WWF has since tried to distance itself from the fiasco.

Today, the WWF lists the saiga as a ‘priority species’ and says it is facing extinction.

Two decades after Operation Lock came to its ignominious end, an embarrassed code of silence still binds the few surviving participants. John Hanks, who at the time of writing was contracted to the WWF, says that the ‘true story has never been properly told’. He claims that he is planning to write a book about the operation ‘when I find the time’, and says he would rather not speak about it.

Craig Williamson is equally reticent to discuss either his past or Lock. ‘I’m out of that now,’ he says. Pressed for more, he answers reluctantly. ‘I was on the President’s Council at the time and was involved with liaison when the idea came up. I was involved in discussions between them [Lock] and the security and political establishment. Everybody was suspicious of everybody at the time, so obviously one would keep an eye on them.’

He won’t be drawn on whether Lock was exploited by apartheid’s spies, saying only: ‘The thing fell to pieces mainly because everyone thought these people, operating in Africa against poaching, would be gathering intelligence for the dreaded apartheid regime.’

Marafono also declines to be interviewed. In a message he sends via the ghostwriter of his autobiography, Hamish Ross, he says bluntly that he ‘does not want to be in contact about Project Lock’. Richards is dead, killed in a car crash.

Crooke, now seventy, has never recovered from the parachute accident that stripped him of his faculties and his memory. ‘He can hear what you are saying, watch television and laugh at the funny bits, watch rugby and so on, but he can’t talk very well,’ one former associate says of him. Says Anderson: ‘He’s not in a position to talk, really. It was a nasty accident. Very, very sad.’

‘My husband’s recall is pretty much zero,’ his wife, Lesley, tells me. ‘The fact that he’s made any sort of recovery is remarkable, considering that he landed on top of his parachute from God knows how many feet. Not many people survive that.’

As for the others who were involved, ‘most have died’, she says.

‘It’s pretty much just a row of dots now.’

Ellis says he can understand why ‘certain people remain embarrassed about it, especially John Hanks’.

‘Hanks really got hung out to dry. He was made the fall guy. I think he never really understood what it was all about. He’s not a military man. Despite
this, he remains on very good terms with the WWF. If Hanks had been a really bad boy and done this without their knowledge, I think the WWF director would have said: “Hanks, you’re fired and I never want to see you again.”

‘I say this with some reluctance, but Lock had all the hallmarks of a conspiracy – a small group of people running an operation and trying to keep it quiet. But in the end, they achieved almost nothing,’ Ellis says. He believes their silence now is an indication that they ‘don’t want to be associated with something quite so incompetent or something that was such a total and utter fiasco’. There may be another reason, he speculates. ‘Perhaps there was also something we don’t know that was deeply unpleasant about Lock.’

Piet Lategan, who oversaw the ESPU until 2000, is one of the few prepared to discuss Operation Lock and its failings.

‘We got a lot of information out of Lock,’ he says. ‘A lot of surveillance photos were taken and a lot of information was obtained. But did it lead to any arrests? Not really. Was any of the information usable? I can’t remember that it really was.’ Despite this, Lock’s influence seems to have continued long after its demise, and permeated many of the ESPU’s subsequent undercover operations.

The ESPU demonstrated remarkable successes in its early years. Between 1991 and June 1995, for example, it investigated 792 reports of ivory and rhino horn smuggling, confiscated 403 rhino horns, 34 000 cubes of ivory and more than 1 000 tusks. Its investigations resulted in 529 prosecutions and a reported 90 per cent conviction rate. There were spectacular arrests: a Taiwanese national found with 115 rhino horns; two men caught trying to flog fifty-five rhino horns; the arrest of an American businessman in Cape Town who illegally exported twenty-nine tusks to Kobe in Japan in 1992; the seizure of nearly 10 000 cubes of ivory packed into a shipping container in Durban harbour; and the arrest of thirteen suspects linked to rhino poaching in Kwa Zulu-Natal. South Africa lost only seventy-eight rhinos and eighty elephants between 1990 and 1995; most of the horns and tusks seized by the ESPU originated north of its borders.

‘We had to think creatively,’ Lategan tells me. ‘That’s what we tried to do with undercover operations. For the first time, the Chinese buyers didn’t
know who they were buying from: was it a genuine seller or a police trap?’ In executing its plans, the ESPU emulated Operation Lock’s attempts to infiltrate smuggling networks. Between 1989 and 1993, the unit set up ‘front shops’, using existing curio dealerships, to entrap ivory and rhino horn smugglers. The primary front was a company called Around the Clock Import-Export, which had offices on the fifth floor of Pan African House in central Johannesburg. Lategan adopted the cover name ‘Piet Pieterse’. In hindsight, Lategan says, it was an ‘amateurish’ scheme, but it nevertheless worked well.

The front operations proved ‘remarkably successful’, Judge Mark Kumleben noted in his 1996 report, and led to the exposure of various smuggling syndicates, 300 arrests and the recovery of at least 500 tusks and large quantities of rhino horn. But critics denounced the operations on the grounds that they encouraged poaching by, in effect, creating a market for ivory and rhino horn. Kumleben wrote that it ‘seems a fair inference that these “front shops” may well have contributed to the perception that trading in tusks and rhino horn was a flourishing business in [South Africa] which was not receiving sufficient police attention’.

By the late 1990s, the ESPU was struggling financially. In the years following the collapse of apartheid in 1994, South Africa’s government had steadily slashed funding for environmental programmes in favour of a strong socioeconomic agenda. A trust was established by a group of businesspeople in response to the unit’s appeals for funding. Then, in 1999, a scandal erupted after the ESPU was secretly thrown a R2-million ‘lifeline’ by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), a controversial US-based NGO. In exchange, Lategan effectively allowed the unit to be privately contracted by IFAW to carry out a year-long investigation into the illegal ivory trade in ten African countries. It was code-named ‘Operation Jumbo’.

‘The fact that the investigating activities of the ESPU, a branch of the SA Police Service, were dictated by a foreign organisation is of grave concern,’ the Rhino and Elephant Foundation said in a January 1999 statement that revealed details of the operation for the first time. A report produced by the ESPU following its investigations was ‘largely anecdotal’ and an ‘absolute waste of donors’ money’. South Africa’s EWT also weighed in on
the controversy, raising concerns about the secrecy that had accompanied the funding (the ESPU Trust was not made aware of it, despite the fact that an IFAW representative was a trustee), the fact that photographic and video evidence obtained by the ESPU had been handed over to IFAW and, perhaps most significantly, that the ESPU had joined forces with an organisation whose views were ‘diametrically opposed to official South African policy on sustainable wildlife utilisation’.

Lategan defended the operation, saying that the funding had been officially declared to the Minister of Safety and Security, that the ESPU’s trips to ten African countries had been sanctioned by their governments, and that IFAW had ‘never attempted to influence’ the ESPU or its report. But the damage was done.

Nine months later, another scandal erupted when
Rapport
newspaper published shocking stills of a ‘hunting orgy’ on a private game reserve in Northern Province. These included images of a lion being shot six times in an illegal ‘canned hunt’. The owner of the Kapama Game Reserve, where the hunt took place, was a businessman named Johann Roode. He was also a founder of the ESPU trust and a prominent member of South Africa’s National Parks Board.

It wasn’t the first time Kapama had been linked to ‘canned’ lion hunts. In 1997, Britain’s ITV had broadcast an investigative documentary in which the reserve’s resident professional hunter, Keith Boehme, told an undercover reporter that lions were ‘drawn in’ using bait and could be shot from a hide, if necessary.

Not long afterwards, Lategan left the ESPU. ‘I realised it was a dead-end street,’ he tells me. ‘I just saw all these promotions passing me by.’ He later took early retirement and left the police. Today he works as an investigator for South Africa’s Road Accident Fund.

In 2002, the ESPU fell victim to police commissioner Jackie Selebi’s controversial strategy to disband specialist police units and deploy their staff to police stations. According to research conducted by the Institute for Security Studies, the demise of the Endangered Species, Anti-corruption, Child Protection, Sexual Offences, Crime Combatting and suchlike units contributed to large increases in crime. This was also true of wildlife crime.