But by the 1960s and 1970s, with the help of a CIA instruction manual, PIDE officers in Portugal and its colonies had adopted subtler methods, perfecting techniques of sleep and sensory deprivation and ‘positional torture’, where prisoners would be made to stand or kneel in stress positions for hours, and sometimes days, at a time. The victims left with their bodies largely intact, but their minds broken. The rare cases that didn’t crack or became too much of an inconvenience simply disappeared.
‘D’Oliviera was useless and a thief of note,’ Burman says. ‘All of them, those Portuguese, were in cahoots right down the line.’ D’Oliviera pulls Burman aside a few days later. ‘Be careful, or something bad is going to happen to you,’ he says. The emphasis is on the word ‘bad’. The rest is left unspoken, but Burman gets the message. ‘I could meet with an accident … or get taken out somewhere on the highway, in an ambush, on the aeroplane. Whatever. I’d disappear.’
Some time later, D’Oliviera vanishes. It is said that he’s gone AWOL. The Defence Force will eventually claim he’s resigned. Burman hears he is in Lisbon, still working for CSI. It’s deep-cover stuff. There are also rumours that police are investigating D’Oliviera in connection with the murder of four people in the Caprivi. One of them was the reputed ‘contact man’ at a De Beers mine for a diamond smuggler linked to the Rundu mafia. The man’s car had been stopped at a roadblock by ‘Angolans’ dressed in police uniforms. He, his wife, daughter and a hitchhiker were all murdered, their throats slashed and the bodies dumped next to the side of the road.
Police tracked down the killers, who implicated D’Oliviera and a cop in the killings. But when police went looking for him, they were told he had disappeared.
Burman keeps his head down and his mouth shut, for now.
In the mid-1970s, before joining CSI, Burman served in what would become the SADF’s most decorated and most notorious unit: 32 Battalion. Known as the Buffalo Battalion, it had been knocked into shape, in great secrecy, from what its commanding officer once described as the ‘most miserable, underfed, ragged and villainous’ remnants of the FNLA. Its motto, Proelio Procusi, means Forged in Battle. What made the Buffalo soldiers unique, besides their ferocity on the battlefield, was that in the Defence Force, which mirrored the vicious racial segregation of apartheid South Africa, they were the first outfit in which white South African officers and black Angolans fought side by side.
The unit’s founder, Colonel Jan Breytenbach, was a living legend. Despised by many SADF top brass and mistrusted as a maverick, Breytenbach fostered unstinting loyalty in the troops he commanded. He led them from the front, not from the safety of the backline. ‘He was, and still is, highly unorthodox and eccentric,’ Burman says. ‘Whatever he put his mind to, he pulled off. He was an absolutely powerful man, legend-wise, and not to be crossed. Even today, if he puts out a call, the boys will be there, for whatever circumstances.’
In conservative Afrikaans society, Breytenbach was regarded as an oddity. He’d served with the Engelse in the British Royal Navy, participated in the Suez landings in 1959 and, shockingly, married an Englishwoman. His brother, Breyten – one of South Africa’s great literary figures – was deemed a ‘terrorist’. A committed opponent of apartheid, he left South Africa in the 1960s and settled in Paris, where he married a French–Vietnamese woman. Apartheid legislation classified her as ‘non-white’, and in terms of the Immorality Act – a law that criminalised interracial marriage – they could be arrested if they travelled to South Africa. In 1975, while Jan Breytenbach was leading the men of 32 Battalion into battle, Breyten, travelling on a false passport, was taken into custody at Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg and charged under the Terrorism Act. He was convicted of high treason and would spend seven hellish years in jail, later publishing a prison memoir, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist.
Jan Breytenbach was a ruthlessly efficient soldier. Conversely, he was also an avid conservationist who hand-reared three lions and a leopard while the war raged. Military Intelligence officers thought he had a ‘screw loose’ because he ‘befriended big cats’. In the mid-1980s, while overseeing training camps for UNITA guerillas in the Caprivi Strip, Breytenbach was appointed as a conservator by the Department of Nature Conservation in Windhoek. The western Caprivi, where Breytenbach had a base on the banks of the Cuando River, is a declared nature reserve. He argued, somewhat quixotically, that military training in the area had to be ‘conducted with minimum disturbance to wildlife’. The brass scoffed at him. There was no place for conservation in wartime.
Breytenbach has vivid memories of the time he spent in the southern Angolan province of Cuando Cubango, north of Rundu, in the 1970s, when South African troops invaded during Operation Savannah. This was where UNITA was based. But it was also an area of staggering beauty, teeming with game.
‘It was breathtaking,’ he would say years later. ‘I’d never seen anything like it in my life before … The number of animals and the diversity of wildlife species were such that it put the Kruger National Park completely in the shade. When we’re talking about elephants, we’re talking about tens of thousands of elephants roaming around all over the place, hundreds of rhino, huge herds of buffalo, especially along the Luiana River, sables, roan antelope, tsessebe, blue wildebeest, zebras. There were just vast numbers of game. I think the reason for that is that … there’s a lot of tsetse fly there, so people didn’t go there much. At night, you could barely sleep because of the noise of the elephants and rhinos storming up and down.’
In the western Caprivi, Breytenbach set up a camp that became known as ‘Rhino Base’, named after the twenty black rhino that lived in the vicinity. There must have been several hundred more in the western Caprivi as a whole.
‘On various occasions when we went into Angola and crossed the kaplyn, we came across black rhino bulls. The damn things would chase us,’ Breytenbach laughs. ‘We would be in a Land Rover in the sand trying to drive like madmen because the rhinos were catching up with us. There must have been dozens of them in that area.’
In the winter of 1986, Breytenbach returns to Cuando Cubango as a military advisor to Savimbi. Accompanied by some of his men, he drives north in a convoy of heavily armoured Casspirs. The landscape is still as beautiful as he remembers, but it is eerily quiet. ‘The teeming herds of the past had completely disappeared,’ he later writes. ‘Now there was nothing at all, not even a duiker or a steenbuck ducking and diving to get away from the labouring Casspirs. The tall red syringas were as profuse as ever … The extensive reed and papyrus swamps were still there. But over it all hung an atmosphere of utter desolation. There was no life.
‘The further north we went … the stronger the contrasts became. As the tree canopies got higher and the forests got thicker, the silence in them became deeper and more oppressive, like the deathly silence of the grave … Where did they go? There was no doubt in my mind that they were shot, brutally exterminated in their thousands in ten to fifteen years.’
After his return to base, Breytenbach tallies up the score. On the 4 000-kilometre journey, he had seen the spoor of five elephants and one kudu, and noted sightings of an owl, a sitatunga, two reedbuck and a dozen pairs of wattled cranes.
Often wounded elephants cross south over the ‘cut-line’. Many are riddled with bullets. In the sand one can see the drag marks left by a wounded animal. In 1986 or 1987, Breytenbach flies by chopper to a base in the western Caprivi. From the air, he counts twenty elephant carcasses – the tusks removed – scattered over ten square kilometres.
Journalists flown on propaganda junkets to meet Savimbi in Jamba are regularly shown pockets of elephant, giraffe, buffalo and zebra as proof of UNITA’s commitment to conservation. But Breytenbach knows the conservation areas are also used as hunting grounds for Savimbi and his cronies, as well as visiting delegations of politicians, army generals and economists. He also knows that ivory and rhino horn is being stockpiled at Jamba. But how is it getting out?
One of Savimbi’s admirers at the time is the British journalist Fred Bridgland. He gains unprecedented access to the man supporters called O Mais Velho, The Eldest One, and will later be accused of being a Savimbi apologist. In 1986, Bridgland – who subsequently grows increasingly disenchanted with UNITA’s inherent totalitarianism – publishes a biography, Jonas Savimbi: A Key to Africa. It includes a telling admission. ‘We export ivory, rhino horn and leopard and antelope skins to help pay for our war,’ Savimbi is quoted as saying. ‘But we have declared some conservation zones where hunting elephant, giraffe and black sable is banned.’ He also claims that South Africa has to be paid for its assistance in ivory and diamonds.
Breytenbach is astounded by Savimbi’s claims. ‘I know that the support budgeted by Military Intelligence in 1986/87 amounted to R400 million … [W]ith that money, the South Africans bought virtually all [of] Savimbi’s military hardware, fuel and clothing.’
It is to Breytenbach that Burman eventually turns. He tells him the story about the CSI store, his confrontation with Oelschig, the threat from D’Oliviera and the poachers he was forced to release. Breytenbach is enraged. ‘I was the fucking bliksem in,’ he recalls in March 2012. ‘I was the moer in.’ The pieces of a disturbing puzzle are beginning to take shape.
One of Breytenbach’s sergeants hears that Lobbs has bought a small shop and service station in Katima Mulilo, the commercial centre of the eastern Caprivi. Situated on the banks of the Zambezi River, the town provides easy access to Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana. In the centre of the town is a strategically important SADF base. Breytenbach regards it as the ‘most corrupt place’ he has ever come across.
‘Virtually everyone in town was involved [in] some racket or another, be it the illegal export of wood, smuggling of ivory and rhino horn, selling unlicensed and unroadworthy second-hand vehicles to the local inhabitants, diamond smuggling, dealing dagga, smuggling Mandrax from Lusaka to Johannesburg, or providing the black market in Sesheke, in Zambia, with luxuries stolen from government stores and warehouses on the Namibian side of the Zambezi River.’
A man named Coimbra manages the shop for Lobbs. Coimbra’s two sons are both in the SADF. Breytenbach’s sergeant, who is friendly with one of the sons, tells him that they have a ‘pipeline’ to smuggle consignments of ivory, rhino horn, diamonds and Mandrax to Lobbs in Rundu.
A Namibian police (SWAPOL) inspector, Hennie Brink – head of the Diamond Branch – tells Breytenbach he knows about the ‘pipeline’ and has been investigating it for some time; all the evidence points to Frama, the MI front company. Brink claims that senior SADF officers are involved in the trade.
‘It goes very, very high up in the hierarchy,’ he tells Breytenbach, adding: ‘As a matter of fact, I thought you were one of them, otherwise I would have approached you long ago.’ A decade later, Brink is killed in Cape Town – blasted in the back with a shotgun.
Manie Grobler, a biologist and nature-conservation officer who is friendly with Breytenbach, approaches him one day and asks if he has any knowledge of a consignment of ivory, worth several million rand, which is apparently waiting to be picked up at an airstrip in the Caprivi. Breytenbach suspects it is a dirt strip in Buabuata, used by Military Intelligence, and that the consignment forms part of the UNITA stockpiles. He gives Grobler the name of a colonel to contact. Via a middleman, the colonel sends Grobler a message: Lay off or you will ‘get sorted out’.
There are also questions about the death of a senior nature-conservation official. The man, Jan Muller, obtained ‘incriminating tapes’, which he tells Grobler implicates SADF officers in the smuggling of ivory and rhino horn. He’s taking them to Grootfontein, a 250-kilometre journey from Rundu on the Golden Highway. The tapes are in his briefcase. Suddenly, a grader pulls into the road in front of him. His car slams into it head-on and he is killed instantly. The tapes are never found.
A friend of Breytenbach’s, a commandant in 32 Battalion, tells him that some of the former FNLA troops who had served in the battalion started working for Lobbs after they were discharged from the Defence Force. They are being used as poachers, he says. One of them has been caught with eighty-two elephant tusks in his backyard. The case is quashed.
‘This was the sort of thing that was going on the whole time,’ Breytenbach says in an interview. ‘Every time something crops up, you know somebody’s caught with ivory or somebody’s caught with this, that or the other, then it gets squashed, or they pay a fine and that’s the end of the story.’
In 1987, the head of the roads department in Namibia approaches an army brigadier and requests permission to stop Frama trucks plying routes along the highway. He says he suspects that they are carrying contraband, but each time they are stopped, the drivers display military-issue cards, saying that they have the right of passage.
‘Be my guest,’ the brigadier says. A truck is stopped. Inside it is a cache of ivory and the driver is arrested. The brigadier is hauled over the coals by a general. ‘Leave this alone,’ he’s told. ‘It’s got nothing to do with you.’
Breytenbach had earlier scoffed at a series of ‘incredible’ investigative reports written and published in the Windhoek Observer by its eccentric editor, Hannes Smith, better known as ‘Mal Smittie’ or ‘Mad Smittie’. Week after week there were lurid revelations about the underworld activities of the ‘Godfather’ of Rundu. It was Lobbs. Matters came to a head when Smittie scaled the security fence surrounding a property belonging to Lobbs. The next day, the front page of the newspaper carried a photograph of a scowling Portuguese man in a cowboy hat waving a rifle at the editor.
But Smittie pressed on, revealing that seventy elephant tusks had been dug up in the home of one of Lobbs’s employees. Another stash of ivory – 270 tusks in all – was nabbed in Namibia. The two smugglers, both Angolans, escaped with a ‘ludicrously small fine’. Both men worked for Lobbs.
Breytenbach, who once ‘laughed with the best of them over the editor’s fertile imagination’, is now coming to a grim conclusion: ‘The picture that gradually began to emerge was an ugly one and, at first, I found it hard to believe. Not in my worst nightmare could I have imagined that officers in the SADF would get involved in something that would be worthy of the Mafia. This extremely effective and secret pipeline was operating under the protection of the Official Secrets Act for the illegal export of ivory and rhino horn.’
Breytenbach, who planned to retire from the army in 1987, accepted a post as park warden for the eastern Caprivi. One night, over beers and the glowing coals of a fire, he tells a senior intelligence official about his ‘suspicions and misgivings, including the Mandrax that was being transported along the pipeline from Lusaka to Johannesburg’. He urges the man to crack down on the smugglers, get rid of the ‘Portuguese mafia’ and ‘take urgent steps, since the elephant herds and few remaining rhinos were being slaughtered’.
The man says little. A few weeks later, Breytenbach is informed that his appointment as park warden has been withdrawn at ‘the insistence of the SADF’. He appeals to the Chief of the Defence Force, General Jannie Geldenhuys, and is reinstated. But Military Intelligence officers have other ideas and lean on the man who offered Breytenbach the job. Somehow they succeed in having the appointment withdrawn again. There will be no reprieve this time.
For years, mutterings of SADF involvement in elephant and rhino poaching have been swirling in conservation circles in southern Africa. Animals are being decimated in southern Angola, it is said. But there is little hard evidence and Angola remains off-limits and largely ‘opaque to the media except for military propaganda’.
In 1974, Garth Owen-Smith, a lanky, bearded conservationist, is hiking near the Otjihipa Mountains on the border between Angola and Namibia. The trek takes him along the Kunene River on the last 100 kilometres of its journey to the sea. The silence is shattered by the ‘clatter of a helicopter flying upstream’. From a rocky ridge, Owen-Smith spies a tented camp, ‘presumably belonging to the SADF, where the h
elicopter landed’. The hikers press on and soon forget about the intrusion. They camp overnight.
‘[A]n hour before sunrise, we again heard the helicopter’s aggravating racket as it flew downriver,’ Owen-Smith writes in his book, An Arid Eden. ‘This time we just stood beneath a large winter thorn tree and let it go overhead before continuing our walk. An hour later it came back, and in the course of the day flew over us another four times … I assumed it was patrolling the river to make sure no SWAPO guerillas infiltrated the Kaokoveld from this part of Angola. But I was wrong.
‘The next morning we discovered the real reason why the helicopter had flown over us so many times the previous day. On the bank of the Kunene was the fresh carcass of an elephant bull. A chainsaw had been used to cut through the skull to remove its tusks. All four feet had also been sawn off, and a piece of skin cut from its flank. On closer examination I found a number of bullet holes in the carcass, at least one of which was fired from directly overhead. There were also boot prints from the site to a rocky ledge where the helicopter had landed …
‘About six kilometres further west, we found the clear imprints of a helicopter’s wheels in the soft sand. Nearby, in the dense vegetation, were more boot prints, and close to the riverbank a pool of dried blood indicated where a large animal had been killed. Around the site was the fresh spoor of at least one lion. I also picked up four empty 7,62 cartridge cases of South African military origin. It was clear that one or more lions had been shot there, and a drag mark to the place where the helicopter had landed showed that at least one carcass had been loaded onto it.’
Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade Page 7
