And it was De Haes – a skilled fundraiser – who set in motion Rupert’s idea for the establishment of the 1001 Club, creating the endowment that ensured the WWF’s international headquarters could be financially independent from its national sections. Six years later, De Haes would be rewarded with an appointment as WWF’s director-general.
On his return to WWF headquarters in Gland, Switzerland, John Hanks begins making a ‘number of discreet inquiries about suitable candidates for the re quired undercover work’. In July 1987, he discovers the existence of a shadowy British private security and intelligence firm, KAS Enterprises. The company had been established by Sir David Stirling, the legendary founder of the SAS. Its name was derived from Kilo Alpha, the SAS call sign, and it formed part of a loose network of private security, risk-assessment and body-guarding entities run by retired SAS operatives, known collectively as ‘The Circuit’.
One former SAS soldier later wrote: ‘KAS was obviously the Rolls-Royce of security companies – the right address, the right contacts and the right people at the top. It was like the civilian wing of the Regiment. Another squadron, only better pay.’
In October 1987, Hanks flies to London for a meeting with Sir David and his men. KAS’s offices are situated at 22 South Audley Street in London’s chic Mayfair district. The address is an in-joke among KAS employees. Reduced to an acronym, it reads ‘22 SAS’.
Stirling, at seventy-one, is an imposing six-foot-six figure with an aristocratic bearing and the quiet authority of a man who is used to being obeyed. Hanks is impressed. He gives the men ‘some background literature and information on the rhino poaching problem’ and commissions KAS Enterprises to produce a feasibility study ‘on ways of investigating the illegal trade’. Stirling’s man for the job will be KAS’s managing director, Colonel Ian Crooke.
In the annals of the SAS and the rah-rah hagiographies of the British tabloids, Crooke, known to friends as ‘Crookie’, is portrayed as a dashingly heroic figure. A rare photograph shows a man in an immaculate grey suit with a beakish nose, neatly parted hair and sun-wrinkled eyes. A British tabloid once quoted a former SAS officer, Colonel Clive Fairweather, as describing Crooke as a man who ‘really didn’t give a damn. He liked to brawl and raise hell … but he always got the job done … He was a drinker, a fighter, a womaniser and a genuine rogue to a certain degree. But he was born to be a soldier.’
Crooke had risen through the ranks of the SAS, eventually becoming the officer commanding 23 SAS. In May 1980, he is said to have played a pivotal role in the planning stages of the raid that ended the siege of the Iranian Embassy in London. Five hostage-takers were killed and nineteen hostages freed.
His most famous exploit came a year later, when 400 Marxist rebels seized control of The Gambia in West Africa. Five hundred people would be killed in the ensuing fighting. Crooke, who had been sent to the country’s capital, Banjul, along with two other SAS officers with strict instructions to ‘observe and advise’, spectacularly exceeded his remit. Members of the president’s family and other senior government officials were being held hostage at a hospital. Crooke and his men donned white coats and stethoscopes and caught a taxi. They took the rebels by surprise, disarmed them and freed the hostages.
Next, Crooke assumed command of a unit of French-trained Senegalese paratroopers who had been sent to the country to help crush the coup. He led a counter-attack that dislodged the rebels from key positions and drove them from Banjul. His military superiors in the UK were appalled and threatened him with a court martial. In the end, they gave him a Distinguished Service Order.
16 November 1987
Hanks writes a letter to Crooke. The letter – as with so many others that eventually leak out – is marked ‘confidential’. Thanking Crooke for his proposals on the poaching investigation, Hanks arranges to meet him in London in December for ‘detailed briefings on our requirements’.
‘On receipt of the signed contract, I will authorise payment of fifteen thousand pounds to KAS Enterprises Ltd, the balance of five thousand pounds to follow on receipt by me of an acceptable report and one or more meetings with your operator. I would like to confirm that this whole operation should NOT be regarded as a WWF-funded activity. I can also confirm that none of the WWF staff knows of this project nor will they be informed of any of the activities until the project has been completed and the operators have left the field.’
But the following month, Hanks prepares a discussion paper for consideration by WWF’s conservation committee. He calls for ‘a major effort to halt the illegal trade by supporting intelligence gathering and the resulting follow-up operations. ‘Anecdotal and unsubstantiated reports of involvement of government officials and foreign diplomats are no substitute for well-documented specific information incriminating the individuals concerned.’
Such an intelligence-gathering operation is ‘not the domain of committed amateurs but that of the professional investigators who should be commissioned accordingly to undertake this work’, Hanks says, adding that ‘immediate action’ is required. He states that within six to nine months, ‘comprehensive dossiers should be assembled on the whole illegal trade network’.
Then, in a clear reference to KAS, he writes: ‘Professional investigations as described, funded by external sources, were initiated in November 1987. The investigating team has been provided with the information and contacts presently available to the WWF. The first report from the team will be made available by 1 March 1988.’
Hanks believes that ‘this is a major and significant new development, which should have far-reaching consequences for conservation activities in Africa’.
On 27 December, he pens a note to Crooke: ‘P.B. [Prince Bernhard] phoned me on Christmas Eve to confirm that the balance of the initial £100 000 was on its way to you.’
Over the next year, plans are drafted and redrafted and strategies devised to infiltrate and gather intelligence on poaching syndicates. Crooke chooses the code name ‘Lock’ for the operation. It is his wife’s maiden name. Stirling discusses the project with Sir Laurens van der Post, the South African author and conservationist best known for his books about the Kalahari and the San Bushmen. Van der Post, who served in the British Army during the Second World War, is also a close friend of Prince Charles, an unofficial advisor to British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, a supporter of the Zulu nationalist movement Inkatha, and a vocal critic of the African National Congress (ANC).
A dozen men, the majority of them retired SAS soldiers, are selected to participate in Crooke’s little African adventure. Among them is Ken Edwards, a KAS director and a man later described in a newspaper report as ‘a professional arms dealer who also dabbles in pornography’.
Harry Taylor is a former British Royal Marine, SAS commando and veteran of Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’. In 1988 he had become the first person to conquer Mount Everest’s ‘unclimbed ridge’. In the years that follow, he will mount another five Everest expeditions.
Eddie Stone, a tough-as-nails staff sergeant, had served in Northern Ireland, the Falklands, the Middle East, and South and Central America. Thirteen years after Lock, he would make a name for himself as a presenter of a BBC reality television series called SAS: Are You Tough Enough?
Then there’s Nish Bruce, a respected and ‘glamorous, all-action hero’, who had served in the British Paras, the SAS and been a member of the Red Devils parachute team. He’s a secretly tortured man, haunted by horrors that ‘most people would not believe’.
‘In the Falklands I saw dead men so deformed that their own mothers wouldn’t recognise them – boys of eighteen who had tried to slit their own throats because they had been so badly burned.’
Bruce will kill himself in January 2002, leaping 1 500 metres to oblivion from a light aircraft piloted by his girlfriend.
Kauata ‘Fred’ Marafono, known as ‘Big Fred’ and ‘Fearless Fred’, is a likeable Fijian with a legendary reputation in the regiment. He always carries a Boein
g hunting knife, tucked in at the back underneath his shirt. There are jokes that he’d never cut someone’s throat without apologising first. Marafono had been awarded an MBE by the Queen, although he remained purposefully vague about the reasons. On the point of being demobbed from the SAS, he was snapped up by Stirling. He will go on to work with the South African mercenary outfit, Executive Outcomes, eventually settling in Sierra Leone, where he will play a role in ending the country’s ‘Blood Diamond’ wars of the 1990s.
Finally, there is Evelyn le Chêne, a favourite of Stirling’s. He affectionately calls her ‘Blondie’. For a time, she seems to have been Lock’s keeper of secrets and is said to have even conducted some of the early reconnaissance for the project. (She will later claim that she was ‘never a member of KAS staff’ and was ‘only retained as a consultant to produce an initial report’.) Her ties to Britain’s intelligence services date back more than four decades to her marriage to Pierre le Chêne, a British agent in Nazi-occupied France who had survived the Mauthausen death camp.
A historian who documented the horrors of Mauthausen in a 1971 book, she had testified against Klaus Barbie, the Nazi ‘Butcher of Lyon’ during his 1987 war-crimes trial. Le Chêne, a dedicated ‘anti-communist campaigner’, also belongs to the exclusive Special Forces Club. Membership of the club is limited to current and former members of military and intelligence services. She is reputed to be ‘very good at running agents’. In 2003, Le Chêne will be exposed by Britain’s Sunday Times as the ‘mastermind of a vast private-intelligence-gathering network that collated the identities and confidential details of nearly 150 000 left-wing activists and offered them at a price to British industrial companies’, including arms giant BAE Systems.
As Operation Lock develops, regular progress reports are supplied to Bernhard. KAS operatives, including Crooke, visit the prince at the Soestdijk Palace near Utrecht to brief him in person. Marafono remembers accompanying Crooke to meet the prince and spending the best part of a day talking about the project. The completed feasibility study finds – unsurprisingly – that Johannesburg is ‘growing in importance as an entrepôt for rhino horn and ivory’. The KAS team feels the project should be based there.
Hanks asks Frans Stroebel, the executive director of WWF’s South African affiliate, the SA Nature Foundation (SANF), to help pave the way and make introductions. A former private secretary to South Africa’s foreign affairs minister, Pik Botha, Stroebel had also served as a diplomat at the South African mission to the United Nations in the 1970s. He is close to Anton Rupert, who is the SANF’s president.
Stroebel agrees to allow the SANF to be used as a conduit for funds to the Lock team once it’s in place. KAS also has its own, more questionable, connections in southern Africa. One senior KAS employee had assisted the Angolan rebel movement UNITA with a propaganda campaign and had close ties with the South African military attaché in London. Stirling had also published and disseminated pro-UNITA propaganda material through an organisation known as the Better Britain Society.
These ties are significant, given Craig van Note’s July 1988 accusations that South Africa and UNITA were complicit in a ‘massive smuggling ring’ and that UNITA had virtually exterminated Angola’s elephant and rhino populations. Despite this, Hanks and Bernhard press ahead with KAS.
In December 1988, Sotheby’s auctions off two oil paintings on behalf of Bernhard – ‘The Holy Family’ by the seventeenth-century Spanish Baroque painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, and ‘The Rape of Europa’, by Murillo’s Italian contemporary Elisabetta Sirani. Both belonged to Queen Juliana. Together, they fetch £610 000 from an anonymous buyer. On Bernhard’s instructions, the proceeds are donated to WWF International. Weeks later, Bernhard calls the administrator of the 1001 Club and asks her to transfer an amount of £500 000 from the WWF to his wife’s account in the Netherlands. The money is routed to Lock.
18 January 1989
Two former SAS ‘hard men’ cross the tarmac at Jan Smuts Airport in Johannes burg, wending their way through a crowd of weary passengers disembarking from the London flight. Ray Harris and Jim Hughes are Crooke’s advance party. They have reservations at the Mariston Hotel in the Johannesburg central business district, and a shopping list. The team will need vehicles, safe houses and, most importantly, information. Stroebel is their fixer, introducing the Lock men to key conservationists and police officials, among them Captain Piet Lategan, head of the police’s Endangered Species Protection Unit (ESPU).
The ESPU is only a few months old. Lategan, the desk officer at the police’s Stock Theft Unit, had been approached in 1988 by the then Minister of Law and Order, Adriaan Vlok, and asked to establish a specialised wildlife crimes unit. There were growing concerns about the levels of poaching in South Africa and in the Kruger National Park, Vlok said. He asked Lategan to come up with a name for a new unit. ‘All I could think of was the Endangered Species Protection Unit. I gave the name to Vlok, he made an announcement at a wildlife conference and that was it. But for a year or two all the unit consisted of was me and the stock-theft guys,’ Lategan recalls in an interview in 2012.
Van Note’s accusations and the revelations of the Lukman case in late 1988 increase the pressure. Vlok and the South African government need to save face and they want results. And Lategan – with his limited resources – will take any help he can get. The arrival of the SAS team seems like manna from heaven.
‘Stroebel got hold of me one day and told me there are some guys coming to South Africa who are going to be working with us, and that the minister is aware of it.’ The Lock team provides Lategan with an equipment ‘wish list’.
‘It was stuff I didn’t even know about or how to get, like earpieces and night-vision equipment.’
The list is daunting. Lock’s surveillance team will require half a dozen vehicles, a motorbike, micro-cassette recorders, 35-mm cameras, long lenses, video equipment, night-vision gear and false passports. A computer will have to be purchased so that intelligence can be collated and sifted into a usable database. The more sophisticated military-grade surveillance equipment will also have to be imported into South Africa in violation of international sanctions. Lategan helps where he can.
He introduces the men to a journalist at South Africa’s Sunday Times newspaper, De Wet Potgieter. Lategan and Potgieter had bonded over a campfire and beers during an operation in Swaziland the year before and had become firm friends.
‘In those days, I was basically alone, so old De Wet was my back-up,’ Lategan says. The journalist latches onto the Lock team in the hope of a scoop. It is a relationship that quickly turns incestuous. He slips them names and details about smuggling networks he has been investigating and makes arrangements with an estate agent to find them a property in Pretoria they can use as a safe house.
Harris and Hughes become regular visitors at the Sunday Times offices in Pretoria, and Potgieter a frequent fixture at the house in Arcadia in Pretoria and, later, at another Lock safe house in Johannesburg.
The rest of the Lock team, led by Crooke, arrive in South Africa in late January and early February 1989. Stroebel introduces Crooke to executives at the Rhino and Elephant Foundation (REF) and asks that he be given support. The operation has the blessing of the WWF, Stroebel says. The Foundation’s president is Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the controversial KwaZulu homeland chief minister and leader of the Inkatha movement.
Two years later, Buthelezi will be mired in scandal when the Weekly Mail newspaper reveals that Inkatha received covert funding from the South African police to oppose the ANC. There will be other revelations of Inkatha ‘hit squads’ trained at secret bases by South African Military Intelligence agents. A senior officer in the REF is also reputed to have been in the pay of Military Intelligence.
Crooke’s point of contact at the Foundation is Dr Jeremy Anderson, who also serves as director of the Parks Board in the KaNgwane homeland on the border between South Africa and Mozambique. Anderson, a highly regarded conservationis
t, is instrumental in introducing the KAS men to a range of contacts. He believes they have a key role to play in training anti-poaching teams.
Anderson notes in a report: ‘There is tremendous scope for KAS to carry out training tasks on behalf of the National Parks of Mozambique, Central African Republic and Togo … this training cannot be carried out by South African personnel for obvious political reasons. The South African Foreign Affairs department is prepared to fund the bulk of this training.’
As the months progress, Lategan’s unit becomes increasingly reliant on the Lock operatives. According to a secret KAS report from June 1989: ‘It is evident that the Stock Theft Unit rely completely on the KAS surveillance team to develop their information and the intelligence acquired by both KAS and the SAP.’
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.
Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade Page 9
