It notes that Lock’s operations are similar to those ‘needed for the collection and collation of intelligence directly related to the activities of anti– South African countries, forces and people’. Crooke’s men – ‘with their foreign backgrounds, passports and, so to speak, legitimate activities’ – have a level of credibility to operate in African countries.
‘If tasked correctly, [they] could bring back valuable information which could be put to good use by the necessary South African information-collecting departments.’ Crooke, it adds, has offered to co-operate in the ‘monitoring of anti-South African bodies which are situated overseas’.
The Lock team also apparently agrees to turn a blind eye to SADF involvement in smuggling. ‘It is known that various SADF operations make use of smugglers and smugglers’ routes to channel information from neighbouring states back to the RSA,’ the report reads. It continues:
This point is recognised by the investigation team and at the beginning of the operation in February 1989 a decision was taken to avoid any possible contact with SADF personnel … A … problem exists whereby information may be received of dealers within the rhino horn and ivory trade and upon investigation it is found that these dealers are actually permanent force SADF members …
Another problem which was recognised at the beginning was the activities of South African-backed RENAMO and UNITA, which have large-scale rhino horn, ivory and other endangered species smuggling routes in operation. Once again, a decision was taken to avoid possible confrontation in this area as far as possible.
The last and most spoken-about problem was the possibility of giving South Africa bad international publicity if the media were to take the information and put it across to the world that the South African government is tolerating the smuggling of endangered species and wild-life products as part of the destabilisation process of its neighbouring states. This point has received much attention at the liaison and command level and an early decision was taken to closely co-ordinate all investigation actions with the South African authorities to, as far as possible, avoid such a repercussion, which would have a serious detrimental effect, not only on the host country, being South Africa, but also on the British subjects involved in this operation.
By mid-1989, Lategan is growing increasingly agitated. Crooke has kept him in the dark about the rhino horn sourced from Namibia and has failed to account for the horn that Lategan arranged for them. ‘As far as I was concerned, the money they obtained [from rhino horn deals] was never declared to me … [M]y concern was mostly what was happening to the rhino horn, and there was no positive follow-up after illegal or undercover operations. It simply disappeared somewhere.’
Crooke and his men, he later tells the Kumleben Commission, ‘had all sorts of weird ideas of how to deal with people. They just thought that a “shoot-to-kill” policy would also work and they came [up] with various ideas … which I had to veto and say, “We won’t take part in that operation. It can’t work like that,” because as ex-soldiers they wanted to go with the maximum force policy and we differed on that one’.
Those ‘weird ideas’ include murder. Assassination is a relatively simple alternative to the arduous task of gathering hard evidence and entrapping and arresting a suspect. And killing is something that Crooke and his men do well. In his statement, Richards says Lock identified ‘certain key players for determination of possible assassination’. Interviewed at his home in Centurion in February 2012, Lategan says, ‘They wanted to take people out. As police, we can’t go around behaving like Rambo. We investigate a crime, make arrests and take it to court. Just because someone is said to be part of a syndicate, we can’t go and kill them and say the syndicate is now finished.’
Lock’s primary target for ‘elimination’ is Hans Beck, the German-born ivory trader code-named ‘Hotel 2’. Beck is based in Francistown in Botswana. He had been the subject of a 1988 investigation by Potgieter and the Sunday Times after his live-in lover, a supposedly ‘striking platinum blonde’, had chosen to ‘reveal everything she knew about the multimillion-dollar smuggling racket’ to the newspaper. On a copy of the Operation Lock target list that I obtained, someone has written the word “Assassinate’ next to Beck’s name.
In his 1995 book Contraband: South Africa and the International Trade in Ivory and Rhino Horn, Potgieter claims he was present, along with Lategan, at Lock strategy meetings where Beck’s ‘murder’ was discussed on ‘numerous occasions’. Initial plans to kill Beck in his Francistown home are scotched after months of planning because of concerns that the South African government could be politically embarrassed. Another plan is to lure Beck to a farm near Rustenburg in the north-western Transvaal with an ivory deal as the bait. He will then be murdered and his corpse dumped across the border in Swaziland. A dry run is carried out but, at the last moment, the hit is called off.
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 parami
litary 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 in
formation 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’.
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:
Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade Page 11