Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (18 page)

Operation Lock is in trouble. Towards the latter half of 1989, its funds begin to dry up. According to Richards, there is talk of severe ‘internal’ problems and suggestions that finances for the project, amounting to £250 000, have been misappropriated by Crooke’s London partners. To sustain Lock and generate an income, the focus of some of the operations is diverted to training programmes. In Namibia, the Lock team assists in retraining former
members of the notorious police counter-insurgency unit Koevoet as game wardens.

Eddie Stone is dispatched to help the KaNgwane Parks Board train a group of fifty Mozambican men as game scouts for parks in the south of their country. There are rumours that the men will be used by South African Military Intelligence in ‘third-force’ operations to destabilise the Mozambican government, a claim Anderson, the KaNgwane Parks Board director, dismisses as ‘the biggest load of crap out there’. Lock also trains bodyguards for Enos Mabuza, the KaNgwane homeland’s chief minister.

Lock’s training programmes are the subject of some controversy. Were they legitimate exercises or part of something more sinister?

Since 1987, a bloody civil war had raged in townships and rural communities across the Natal Midlands. Thousands had died in a struggle for territorial sovereignty between Inkatha and the ANC-affiliated United Democratic Front. By 1990, following the unbanning of the ANC and the release of Nelson Mandela, the violence – much of it fomented by the National Party government’s security forces – would sweep north into townships, squatter camps and mining hostels around Johannesburg. In a desperate last-ditch bid to prevent the inevitability of an ANC government, apartheid’s covert warriors and counter-insurgency specialists had thrown their weight behind Inkatha.

In October 1990,
City Press
newspaper revealed that unemployed young men seeking work as game scouts in the Gazankulu homeland had received military training from white army officers at a secret camp. More than 800 Zulus linked to Inkatha were also being trained there. In subsequent years there would be more revelations of covert funding to Inkatha by the police’s Security Branch, and disclosures that the movement’s so-called ‘self-protection units’ received vast quantities of materiel from Eugene de Kock and the Vlakplaas death squad. The weapons included AK-47 and SKS assault rifles, pistols, thousands of grenades, AK-47 rounds, hundreds of kilograms of explosives, mortars and even anti-tank mines. There will be evidence, too, that the SADF secretly trained a 200-strong Inkatha ‘impi’ in the Caprivi in northern Namibia – a paramilitary unit that would later be at the heart of the bitter conflict between Inkatha and the ANC.

Although there is little evidence that Lock participated in training similar ‘third-force’ elements, Ellis believes they may have served another purpose.

‘Operation Lock was known in conservation circles to have WWF backing, and the South African press gave some publicity to its work, training game wardens in KaNgwane. The presence of such a high-profile training programme, run by foreigners and having the blessing of the Mozambican government … provided a perfect cover for SADF Military Intelligence officers or others concerned with supporting Inkatha and RENAMO in paramilitary operations to train personnel … in the pretence that they are training game wardens for use against poachers in a legitimate environmentalist operation.’

On 5 July 1989, Lock’s cover is blown by Robert Powell, a Reuters news-agency correspondent in Nairobi, Kenya. The story carried by the agency’s wire service to its clients around the world reads: ‘Former British commandos based in South Africa say they are conducting a secret drive against elephant and rhino poachers in several neighbouring black states. But wildlife officials in Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Zambia have declined to cooperate with them, suspecting their motives.’

The report quotes Zimbabwean security minister Sydney Bekeramayi expressing his concern that Lock could be used by South Africa ‘in an intelligence-gathering role as part of destabilisation activities against Zimbabwe … Security authorities in Zimbabwe have been aware for some time of the activities of these former SAS men … Zimbabwe has no use for the purported anti-poaching unit.’

Contacted prior to publication, Stirling had attempted to dissuade Powell from running the report. Crooke was hastily dispatched to Nairobi to talk to Powell. During their meeting, Crooke refused to identify the operation’s sponsors, saying only that they were based in Britain, Europe and the United States. ‘What the sponsors said was we do not want any more bloody papers written. We want some effective action on the ground,’ the article quotes Crooke as saying.

Powell is unable to link the WWF to the operation. Hanks tells him that the WWF is ‘not funding any intelligence-gathering operation on the trade in rhino horn or ivory’.

Ellis, then the editor of
Africa Confidential
, a fortnightly newsletter devoted to the continent’s politics, picks up where Powell’s article leaves off. On 28 July, he publishes further details about the operation, linking KAS and Longreach, the South African Military Intelligence front company run by Craig Williamson. Stirling goes ballistic.

‘The owners of
Africa Confidential
,’ Ellis says, ‘were old friends of David Stirling’s and they basically said to me: “You foolish boy. What have you done now? Just print a damn apology.” I was humiliated, but that’s what happens to journalists.’

Crooke heads to London for a crisis meeting with Stirling and KAS executives. Growing increasingly senile, Stirling is wasting away from a lung disease and spends most days bedridden in his Chelsea flat, the Lock files close at hand. KAS sues Reuters and
Africa Confidential
for libel. Both defendants settle, in large part because Britain’s notoriously stringent defamation laws are heavily skewed in favour of the plaintiff. Should the case go to court, there will be no legal onus on KAS to prove that the contents of the articles are false. The company merely has to show that its reputation has been harmed.

In a note to subscribers, Reuters says it ‘regrets any implication in its story that KAS was set up to destabilise black African countries under cover of wildlife conservation’. Ellis also publishes an apology to KAS, Stirling and Crooke, saying that
Africa Confidential
is ‘happy to emphasise their commitment to wildlife preservation’.

But Ellis isn’t finished with them yet. Commissioned by Britain’s
Independent
newspaper to investigate Lock, he digs ever deeper.

Despite the fallout from Powell’s article, Lock’s operatives press ahead. Between February and July 1990, according to a report compiled by Richards, Lock’s ‘penetration team’ sells ninety-eight rhino horns to smugglers, netting
about R210 000. In the same period the team purchases two horns, paying just over R19 000 for them. None of the transactions leads to arrests and the money is never properly accounted for.

By now, Lategan is at his wits’ end. ‘I’d never really felt that comfortable with the whole thing. Some of the transactions just didn’t look right to me,’ he says. Late one night in mid-1990, with Potgieter in tow, he raids the Lock safe house in Johannesburg and seizes the sixteen remaining horns from the operation’s stockpile.

Gradually Lock’s activities sputter to a halt. Stone continues training programmes in KaNgwane. Marafono is headhunted by the mercenary firm Executive Outcomes. In November 1990, not long after being knighted, Stirling dies. Crooke settles in Johannesburg with his wife. They buy a modest house in the Johannesburg suburb of Rivonia. It is not far from Liliesleaf, a farm the ANC used as a safe house in the 1960s and where many prominent ANC figures were arrested, leading to the 1963 Rivonia Treason Trial.

In March 1993, during a Special Forces get-together in the city, Crooke participates in a free-fall parachute jump. He suffers a stroke mid-air, loses consciousness and falls hard, landing on the canopy of his parachute.

‘He was a vegetable for nearly two years,’ his wife Lesley says in May 2012. ‘He’s still far from right, but at least he’s alive.’

On 8 January 1991, the
Independent
publishes Ellis’s article, revealing the extent of Prince Bernhard and the WWF’s links to Lock for the first time. The article, a much lengthier version of which is published later that year in the Dutch newspaper
De Volkskrant
, is damning.

The World-Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) approved and participated in a covert operation which employed former members of an elite unit of the British Army and collaborated with members of the South African security services, some of whom were major traders in ivory and rhino horn …

The WWF has consistently denied any responsibility for it.

However, according to documents seen by the newspaper, the
Conservation Committee at the headquarters of WWF International in Switzerland was told in December 1987 that the project was being set up to investigate the trade in poached rhino horn in southern Africa.

In fact, the British soldiers who worked on Operation Lock, and who received at least £800,000 from Prince Bernhard, one of the initiators of the project, went far beyond investigating the rhino horn trade. They bought and sold rhino horn themselves. They made plans to assassinate suspected traders. They imported sophisticated military equipment to South Africa in defiance of international sanctions. Using millions of rands’ worth of military equipment, which they had purchased from the South African Defence Force (SADF), and working closely with the South African authorities, they set up camps for giving paramilitary training to game warders in Namibia – while it was still under South African colonial rule – and in South Africa.

Ellis reveals that, in January 1988, Hanks wrote a note, on paper bearing a WWF letterhead, to someone with whom he had discussed the plan that ‘the operation has started … Our involvement in this project was conveyed to you by CITES.’

In the days leading up to the publication of Ellis’s article, the WWF attempts, unsuccessfully, to convince him to ‘refrain from publishing his story’. In a statement faxed to Ellis on 5 January 1991, WWF spokesman Robert San George claims: ‘It is, and always has been, the policy of the WWF not to engage in clandestine or covert operations which might be considered unethical by governments, the public, or supporters of WWF.’

John Hanks, he claims, initiated the project and ‘involved himself in the operation without the knowledge or approval of WWF International’s management or executive committee … WWF wishes to make it clear that, while it accepts that Dr Hanks behaved with the best intentions, WWF never theless does not accept that any member of its staff should in matters of this sort act on his or her own initiative.’

Attached to the fax is a statement from Hanks and a terse note from Bernhard confirming its contents and stating that he had ‘ceased to fund or be involved with Operation Lock since 1989’. Hanks claims, unconvincingly,
that Lock was conducted ‘without the knowledge of any of the WWF staff or board members in Switzerland or anywhere else in the world’.

The Nature Foundation’s involvement also took place ‘without the knowledge or approval of WWF International’, he claims, and he pleads with Ellis not to publish because ‘he could jeopardise a process that was carefully built up over a three-year period, and by so doing hasten the decline of the remaining populations of elephants and rhino’. He offers to provide Ellis with ‘exclusive information and interviews when details can be divulged without threatening ongoing undercover operations and the lives of those involved in trying to stop the illegal trade’.