Years later Robbie Hawthorne, the principal nature conservator for the southern port of South West Africa, tells Owen-Smith that elephants are being ‘killed on a massive scale in Angola, and that those involved [include] senior government officials’. One of Hawthorne’s key informants is Muller. When he is killed in the collision with the grader, Hawthorne remarks bitterly to Owen-Smith: ‘They got him.’
Hawthorne also tells him about a strange incident that occurred when security forces ambushed a group of men they believed to be SWAPO guerillas. One was killed and others were wounded in an exchange of fire. A large quantity of ivory and rhino horn was recovered. The men, it seemed, were ‘just a gang of poachers’. But among their number was an odd grouping of ‘white Angolan refugees’. The case was quashed before it could go to court. ‘They couldn’t be charged, because they knew too much,’ Hawthorne says.
By the mid-1980s, Owen-Smith recalls, ‘Strong rumours were surfacing of elephants and other wildlife being decimated in south-east Angola, where South African forces were operating in support of UNITA.’
In 1980, Clive Walker, then director of the Endangered Wildlife Trust (EWT), red-flags the ‘large-scale destruction of wildlife and, in particular, of elephants and rhinoceros’ throughout northern Namibia in a paper presented at a conference in Nairobi. He expresses concern about the status of the animal population in Angola, and notes that there are ‘considerable rumours and allegations’ about the perpetrators of the poaching. An aerial survey of the Kaokoland, an arid, mountainous region in northern Namibia known for its striking beauty, reveals that there are fewer than fifty elephants and fifteen rhinos left. The mummified carcasses of five elephants, their tusks removed, are discovered. Spent cartridge cases from automatic weapons litter the ground around them.
In 1982, Hawthorne ignores a standing instruction prohibiting Frama trucks from being searched. He pulls one over, breaks open the locks of the container and discovers it is filled with green army trommels. Before he can inspect the cargo, the driver makes a call to Pretoria. The SADF sends Hawthorne a message via Polla Swart, the head of nature conservation in Namibia: the truck must be allowed to proceed.
Swart is aware of the agreement between the SADF and his department that Frama trucks will not be subject to searches. Shortly after his appointment in 1981, he had been visited by an SADF colonel attached to Military Intelligence. The man reminded him that Frama trucks conveying wood and ivory were not to be stopped – on instruction from ‘the highest authority’ in South Africa.
Further evidence pointing to South African government complicity in the trafficking of rhino horn and ivory emerges in 1982, when another conservationist and a leading authority on the illicit trade, Dr Esmond Bradley Martin, publishes his book, Run Rhino Run. His investigations reveal that South Africa’s officially reported exports of rhino horn don’t tally with the corresponding import records in Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan.
In 1978 – the year following the imposition of an international trade ban on rhino horn by CITES – South Africa reports exports of 149.5 kilograms of horn to Hong Kong. Records show that the horn originated from the Natal Parks Board. But careful scrutiny of trade data in key Asian countries shows there have been other undeclared exports. Between June 1978 and February 1979, 344.7 kilograms of horn were imported into Hong Kong from South Africa. Japanese records show imports of 350 kilograms of horn for 1978. In Taiwan, there are records showing a further 166 kilograms originating from South Africa that year.
The Natal Parks Board – which until then had been the main seller of rhino horn in South Africa – stops trading after the 1978 sale to comply with the CITES ban. More than 100 horns are locked away in a safe in Pietermaritzburg. By late 1979, authorities in most South African provinces officially prohibit the export of rhino products. Despite this, Japan’s statistics show 587 kilograms of horn imported from South Africa in 1980. Bradley Martin believes the horn is being routed from Angola, Namibia, Zambia and Tanzania through South Africa and on to Asia. But who is doing the killing?
Johannesburg ivory and rhino horn traders tell Bradley Martin that the nexus of trade lies in Rundu. One of them claims that between 1976 and 1979, he bought a ton of dried rhinoceros hide and 600 kilograms of horn there. He estimates that his purchases accounted for 40 per cent of the trade in Rundu at the time.
The shroud of secrecy surrounding the South African military and government’s role in ivory and rhino horn smuggling is shattered in June 1988. Craig van Note’s testimony to a US congressional oversight committee and his accusations that South Africa is ‘one of the largest wildlife outlaws in the world’ sends the SADF brass scurrying. In a clear reference to the ‘Rundu mafia’, Van Note says: ‘The Angolan ivory trafficking is managed by two former Portuguese colonists from Angola who have close ties with the South African military … Remarkably, nobody in Africa – or even in CITES – wants to talk about this scandal, which makes other, more publicised poaching in East Africa pale by comparison.’
Just over five months later, the SADF completes its cover-up. A sham military board of inquiry, chaired by Brigadier Ben de Wet Roos, completely exonerates them, saying there is ‘no evidence to prove the Defence Force was responsible for or involved in’ poaching. The only concession is that, over an eighteen-month period beginning in 1978, ‘small quantities of ivory, captured by UNITA from poachers and others in Angola, were transported by the Defence Force on behalf of UNITA … This practice was stopped by the Defence Force and UNITA at the end of 1979.’ As far as the SADF is concerned, the matter is closed.
But not for Breytenbach. Behind the scenes, he lobbies senior SADF generals, asking them to confront what they don’t want to know – that the allegations and rumours are true. He writes a letter to the Minister of Defence, Magnus Malan, setting out his concerns. The letter is ignored.
Finally, on 28 October 1989, Breytenbach breaks ranks and does the unthinkable. He drafts a letter, attaches an emotional account of what he saw in northern Namibia and Angola, and sends it to Sunday Times editor Tertius Myburgh. Weeks later, the Sunday Times publishes Breytenbach’s devastating revelations of the ‘ivory and rhino horn smuggling racket’ and an exposé of Frama Intertrading under the headline: ‘Veteran links SADF to UNITA ivory slaughter’. But it will take the death of apartheid and another six years for the veil of secrecy to finally be lifted.
In October 1994, five months after South Africa’s historic first democratic elections, the country’s new president, Nelson Mandela, signs an order appointing a commission of inquiry into the allegations. It will be chaired by appeal court judge Mark Kumleben. At sixty-seven, Kumleben is one of South Africa’s most highly regarded judges; a man of unimpeachable honesty, known for his razor-sharp intellect, fairness and gentle manner.
By then, Frama is no more. The SADF had discovered, somewhat belatedly, in 1986 that Lobbs and Maia had been ripping them off and owed the Defence Force R3.2 million. In February 1988, days before the SADF approached a court for an order liquidating the company, its name was abruptly changed to Elegant Food Distributors. The SADF did not want Frama to feature as a respondent in proceedings. On liquidation, the company’s only asset was a cash amount of R2 599, hidden in a trust account.
The Kumleben commission’s terms of reference are unusually broad, allowing it to investigate the smuggling of ivory and rhino horn, particularly of Angolan and Mozambican origin, through South Africa; the involvement of South African citizens in the illicit trade; and the illegal trade of ivory and rhino horn of South African origin. But while it can make recommendations, it is not empowered to bring the guilty to book. Witnesses are also able to rely on the legal privilege against self-incrimination.
Twenty-three people are called to give evidence at public hearings held in Durban in August and September 1995. Breytenbach, who is there every day, listens with growing anger to the ‘lies’ of some of the country’s top generals. So is Burman, who is flown to Durban and booked into the Holid
ay Inn Garden Court at the commission’s expense. Kumleben’s quest for evidence is a mammoth task. Over the course of a year, the commission approaches nearly 140 potential witnesses, from government departments and organisations across southern Africa, the United States and Europe, for information.
At the heart of its inquiries are the allegations that South Africa, from the 1970s, had served as a ‘clearing house’ for the covert, illicit and large-scale handling and disposal of ivory and rhino horn originating from other African countries and sent overseas, principally to the Far East’; that the SADF was ‘covertly involved in the receipt, transportation, sale and export of inter alia ivory and rhino horn’; that the SADF ‘aided and abetted the slaughter and destruction of elephant herds and rhino … in Angola and Mozambique’; and that these operations were ‘sanctioned by highly placed personnel of the SADF, State officials and Ministers of State’.
In January 1996, Kumleben releases his report. Running to 226 pages, it reads, despite the dry legalese, like a thriller. It unsparingly strips apart the Defence Force’s lies. The SADF, Kumleben finds, ‘officially, though covertly, participated in the illicit possession and transportation of ivory and rhino horn from Angola and Namibia’ to South Africa between 1978 and 1986. ‘The evidence establishes that the SADF involvement in the handling and transport of ivory and probably rhino horn, directly and in conjunction with Frama, was illegal.’
The SADF was involved in Frama from ‘the womb to the tomb’, he finds, and the ham-handed Roos inquiry was a ‘charade’ that can accurately be described as ‘slapdash and superficial’.
Breytenbach and Burman are vindicated. But no arrests or prosecutions ever flow from the commission’s findings. Breytenbach will never forget the ‘inherent deviousness’ of the SADF and the ‘calculating way in which those beautiful animals were appraised by the scheming eyes of South African Military Intelligence officers … To them, an elephant was a huge piece of worthless, mobile meat, carrying towards its front end valuable tusks under its ludicrous, hosepipe nose.’
4
Operation Lock
The file was meant to have been destroyed twenty-two years ago. But the old man kept it, hoarding it among a stack of documents in a locked filing cabinet. ‘I felt at the time that it was important,’ he explains. The creased manila folder is marked in red, ‘Private and confidential’, and stamped: ‘Investigations. Subject: Operation Lock’. There’s a note pencilled on the cover: ‘Illegal rhino horn smuggling’.
He opens the file, crooked fingers grasping at yellowed pages. ‘You didn’t get this from me,’ he says softly, as if the ghosts of a forgotten scandal might hear us. He leafs through it. ‘Secret: No unauthorised dissemination … Warning. Compromise of contents or part thereof of this document could lead to the death of personnel involved in the operation.’
The folder contains details of a disastrous covert operation aimed at targeting, and even killing, rhino and ivory-poaching kingpins in the late 1980s. The ensuing scandal reached into the highest echelons of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the Dutch royal family and a British mercenary firm staffed by some of the most decorated veterans of Britain’s Special Air Service (SAS). It is the story of gamekeepers turned poachers and men who may well have become the willing pawns of apartheid’s spies.
The seeds for what became Operation Lock are planted in early 1987, when Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, the WWF’s founding president, embarks on a field trip to visit conservation projects in Nigeria. He is accompanied by the organisation’s head of Africa programmes, Dr John Hanks, an internationally respected biologist and conservationist with a doctorate from Cambridge. Hanks had worked as a biologist in the Kafue and Luangwa Valley national parks in Zambia, had headed the biological sciences department at Natal University and been director of research at Natal Parks. Few could match his experience or credentials.
Bernhard is appalled by the plight of the continent’s rhino population. Black rhinos, in particular, are under severe threat. At the start of the 1970s there had been an estimated 65 000 of them. Twenty-seven years later, only about 4 000 remain. Millions of dollars have been spent on security and rangers, but little is being done to gather intelligence on the middlemen and kingpins driving the illicit trade.
Bernhard asks Hanks if he knows of an organisation that can be tasked with tracking down and exposing the smugglers. It will be ‘extremely dangerous and sensitive’ work, he says. He is prepared to fund the project and, according to Hanks, ‘he stressed that he wanted to do this in his personal capacity, using his own money, because he realised it was a sensitive topic and one that he felt should not be registered by the WWF as a project and the funds should not go through WWF books’.
Dubbed the ‘flying prince of conservation’, Bernhard, the German-born consort of Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, was president of the WWF for fourteen years until his disgrace in a 1976 bribery scandal. He had accepted a $1.1-million kickback from the Lockheed aircraft company to promote the sales of its fighter jets to the Dutch Air Force. He later claimed he had donated the money to the WWF. A commission of inquiry found that the prince had ‘shown himself open to dishonourable favours and offers’ and had ‘harmed the interests of the State’.
Bernhard was forced to resign from all public offices, including the WWF, and also as inspector-general of the armed forces. Humiliatingly, he was stripped of military honours and forbidden from wearing a uniform.
Bernhard had been dogged by controversy before. His insatiable appetite for money was matched only by his appetite for women. The prince kept a mistress in Paris and had numerous extramarital affairs that produced at least two children. As a young university student in Berlin, he had been a member of the Nazi SS. After his marriage to Queen Juliana, he resigned from the party, reportedly signing his resignation letter, ‘Heil Hitler’. He later vocally denounced Hitler, renounced his German citizenship and, during the Second World War, served as a pilot with the British Royal Air Force before taking charge of the Dutch resistance to the Nazis.
Following the 1976 scandal, Bernhard remained an influential figure in the WWF and its secretive 1001 Club. The club – which never really existed as a physical entity – was the brainchild of Anton Rupert, one of South Africa’s wealthiest businessmen. He had made his millions as owner of the Rembrandt Group and the Rothmans International tobacco company. Bernhard was a close friend of Rupert’s and was seen as sympathetic to the apartheid government.
Rupert, who joined the WWF board of trustees in 1968, is credited with conceiving a plan to raise vast sums of money for the then struggling organisation. It would be called the 1001 Club. Bernhard would be the ‘one’; the other thousand members would be a moneyed elite: billionaires, bankers, financiers, politicians and international wheeler-dealers. Many of them were drawn from Bernhard’s extended network of business associates and friends.
‘Bernhard had an extraordinary circle of friends,’ says Stephen Ellis, a professor and researcher at the African Study Centre in Leiden, Holland. ‘He knew everybody, from gang bosses to crowned heads of state. There were Nazis, crooks, fraudulent merchant bankers and Third World heads of state. He was even in with the CIA.’
Each member of the club would be persuaded to part with $10 000, ensuring them lifetime membership of an elite association whose membership list would be a tightly controlled secret. The fees would provide WWF with an endowment of $10 million.
Details of the membership list were first leaked to the British satirical magazine Private Eye in the 1980s. The generous patrons included men like Henry Ford II, the former president and chairman of the Ford Motor Company, former US defense secretary Robert S. McNamara, San Francisco businessman and political power broker Cyril Magnin, beer billionaire August A. Busch Jnr, and former IBM president Thomas Watson Jnr. There were other, far less savoury members, among them Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire’s corrupt and murderous president, Agha Hasan Abedi, the former president of the Bank of Credit and Comme
rce International (BCCI) and the perpetrator of one of the largest frauds in financial history, Daniel K. Ludwig, a reclusive billionaire whose companies obliterated thousands of kilometres of rainforest in the Amazon, and Tibor Rosenbaum, a reputed Mossad agent whose Swiss bank laundered drug money for organised crime cartels.
The club also attracted an influential grouping of at least sixty South Africans. Many of them were members of the Broederbond, the secretive Afrikaner-nationalist society that exerted a powerful presence in South African politics and business. Among them were Johannes Hurter, the chairman of Volkskas bank, Pepler Scholtz, the former MD of insurance giant Sanlam, and Etienne Rousseau, an influential businessman who, at various times, had held directorships at Sanlam, Sasol, the Reserve Bank and Afrikaans mining finance and exploration company Federale Mynbou. Both Rousseau and Hurter had served on the Broederbond’s executive council.
Hurter and another 1001 Club member, Dr Frans Cronjé, sat on an advisory body that counselled the government on the armament requirements of the SADF. Louis Luyt, Rupert’s former business partner and a prominent figure in the Information Scandal, which ended the political career of South African prime minister John Vorster, was also a member of the club, as were seven of Rupert’s relatives.
For the South Africans, the 1001 Club was about more than conservation. Veteran New York Times investigative journalist Raymond Bonner observed that, at the time, ‘Not many international clubs welcomed South Africans, and membership in the 1001 provided them [with] an opportunity to mingle and do business with tycoons, as well as with Prince Philip [the head of the British chapter of the WWF] and Prince Bernhard.’
South African influence extended further. In 1971, Rupert suggested that Charles de Haes, an executive at Rothmans International, be seconded to work at WWF headquarters as Bernhard’s personal assistant. De Haes, a Belgian national, had studied at the University of Cape Town and lived in South Africa for many years. Rothmans would pay his salary.
Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade Page 8
