By Steven R. Galster
The call on Richard Moulton's undercover telephone line was from El Salvador. On the other end was a man known as "Wiseguy", the subject of a federal sting operation that Moulton was conducting from his small sixth-floor office in downtown Hartford, Connecticut.
"Rick, it's John", the voice said, addressing Moulton by his cover name, Rick Moore. "I'm calling to let you know that Marius was just in Angola and inspected the product, and there's plenty available." The caller added that as soon as "Rick" agreed to pay, he would fly to Africa to pick up the "product", which was being secured by an army special forces unit. Moulton gave the caller the green light, hung up and smiled. Wiseguy was hooked.
On July 16, 1992 — four years after that call — Moulton, a special agent of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, saw the biggest case of his 16-year-old career climax in a Connecticut courtroom where Marius Meiring, a former South African military officer, pleaded guilty to charges of running an illegal and highly unusual smuggling operation between Africa and the US. But Moulton's investigation had stumbled upon much more.
The affair provided a rare glimpse into the sleazy underworld of the endangered species trade. The trail Moulton pursued led to or passed near the South African government and US mercenaries. It also revealed another instance of the familiar overlap between CIA-backed covert warfare and smuggling. In most cases, the booty is drugs. In this instance, the prize was the horn of a prehistoric species close to extinction — the black rhinoceros.
Wiseguy — his real name is John lukman — was Meiring's American partner, and had first come to Moulton's attention in early 1988 when he advertised an African leopard head for sale in a Hartford newspaper. Moulton, Fish and Wildlife's only special agent in Connecticut, phoned Lukman and, posing as a potential buyer, arranged to meet him.
He had expected just another small-time smuggler, but the tall, dark, lean, thirtyish Lukman boasted that he had leopard skins obtained directly from his personal friend Ian Smith, the former prime minister of laimed he had South African military contacts in Namibia who could secure weapons used in the war in Angola and "anything else" he wanted.
For the next eight months, Moulton and his colleague, Bob Clifford of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, met Lukman in local car parks to exchange thousands of dollars for Russian AK-47s and cheetah and leopard skins. Lukman came to trust his new clients and related odd stories about his life. The agents discovered, for instance, that Lukman travelled extensively to some interesting places, such as El Salvador, where he had visited "friends" stationed at Ilopango Air Base, the launching pad of US mercenaries involved in supplying the contras in Nicaragua. But the agents never could determine if Lukman was doing more than just "sightseeing", as he claimed.
One day Moulton decided to see just how serious a smuggler Lukman was by asking for a more precious item: rhinoceros horn. Prized in Asia as a fever reducer, horns can fetch up to US$10,000 per kilo (one pair of horns can weigh between two and five kilos). As the population of the African black rhino plummets — from 65,000 in 1970 to 2000 today — the price has soared. Lukman said it would be difficult to obtain the horn, but that he would contact his supplier, Marius Meiring.
For five years, the Environmental Investigation Agency, a private, non-profit Washington-based organisation that monitors the illegal trade in endangered species, has been compiling evidence of the South African military's involvement in the ivory and rhino horn trade as part of Pretoria's regional strategy of destabilising neighbouring states opposed to apartheid, particularly Angola and Mozambique, where the South African Defence Force has armed the insurgent groups, UNITA and RENAMO. The South African government has consistently denied the charges, but last September the London Observer reported that a secret SADF death squad was funding assassination operations against the African National Congress with the profits from illicit drug and ivory sales. In early November the Johannesburg Weekly Mail revealed that an anti-apartheid professor had been assassinated by South African intelligence officials after discovering a secret ivory and rhino horn smuggling operation out of Mozambique. No South African official, however, had ever been caught red handed is such deals until the US Fish and Wildlife Service nabbed Meiring. Meiring was an officer of the 32 Battalion of the SADF, an elite special forces unit assigned to carry out sensitive covert operations. The 32 was stationed in Namibia, where it helped and sometimes fought alongside the anti-communist UNITA rebels in Angola led by Jonas Savimbi and aided by the CIA.
The South African-born Meiring was well suited for such operations, having fought in the 1970s with the Rhodesian Special Air Services against the black nationalist insurgency threatening Ian Smith's white-
ruled government.
Lukman met Meiring in 1988 through a mutual friend in South Africa active in the Rhodesian Veterans Association, and they soon entered into a business relationship. They started with weaponry. Meiring had access to SADF warehouses in Namibia that, according to Lukman, "were loaded with Soviet and Cuban weapons" taken from Angola. Some of the arms, Lukman said, were shipped to South Africa to be funnelled to RENAMO. Meiring was able to sign out weapons for his unit's cross-border operations in Angola. He took some of the weapons to his home in Windhoek, eventually filling his garage with war relics, which he sold to his contacts in the US connected to Soldier of Fortune magazine.
When Lukman arrived at Meiring's house in October 1988 looking for rhino horns, Meiring knew just where to take him: Rundu, the dusty town that straddles the Namibian-Angolan border just south of Jamba, UNITA's headquarters in south-eastern Angola. When South Africa couldn't secretly fly supplies into Jamba, they trucked them through Rundu. According to officers and private business people involved in this operation, the same SADF supply vehicles smuggled timber, ivory and rhino horn out of Angola back into South Africa.
In Rundu, Meiring introduced Lukman to a friend who would act as middleman in the deal. He was Willie Snyder, a South African colonel who served as liaison officer between the SADF and UNITA and who supervised South Africa's covert supply line to Savimbi's rebels.
The source of the horn destined for Moulton was an Angolan who had a cache of 40 of them, worth nearly $1 million, buried in a pit. Meiring sent several members of his battalion into Angola to bring the horn to Lukman, who took it to Zimbabwe, where a friend packaged it for smuggling into the US. He would sell it to Moulton for $58,000.
While in Zimbabwe, Lukman visited Ian Smith and dropped off, as he occasionally did, a letter from ived in Washington. Schaaf was an old friend of Smith's. The two had met after Schaaf left the US Navy and tried to go into business in Rhodesia. Schaaf's son, Tom Schaaf Jr, has been the Washington representative of the RENAMO guerillas since 1985 and is an associate of Lukman's. Lukman claims he still has no idea what was in the wax-sealed envelopes he delivered for the elder Schaaf. "I didn't want to know. I just know Smith didn't trust his phones or mail because he lived next door to the Cuban Embassy, which could hear him taking a piss."
Lukman was friendly with another American involved with RENAMO, Robert Mackenzie, a former commanding officer of the Rhodesian SAS in the 1970s, who fought alongside Meiring for the Smith government. In 1977 he helped organise RENAMO rebels. Today, Mackenzie occasionally consults for his father-in-law, former CIA deputy director Ray Cline, now head of the Washington-based US Global Strategy Council, which conducts research on Mozambique and other international hot spots. Mackenzie still supports RENAMO and sometimes stops in Jamba to visit UNITA rebels.
Moulton was unaware of Lukman's ties to Schaaf and Mackenzie, but he did become curious in July 1988, when in the middle of striking a deal for the purchase of a machine gun, Lukman was suddenly summoned to Washington to attend a special White House social event. Later, he showed Moulton photos taken at a reception. Pictured were several Reagan administration officials, UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, the Schaafs and the guest of honour, Jonas Savimbi.
By October 1988, when Lukman flew to Windhoek to collect the rhino horn for Moulton, the Fish and Wildlife agents had gathered sufficient evidence to indict both Lukman and Meiring on charges of lying to the US government and violating the Endangered Species Act. Lukman had smuggled trophies of endangered animals into the US, and Meiring had mailed AK-47s in packages labelled "brass candlesticks" to a federal undercover post office box in Hartford. Lukman was arrested immediately upon his return on November 2, 1988.
Lukman avoided a trial by pleading guilty. To Moulton, he remained something of a mystery as he departed Hartford in early 1989 to serve a 27-month sentence at a federal prison in Pennsylvania. After nine months he was released on probation.
Meanwhile, assistant US attorney James Genco and his nitiated efforts to extradite Meiring. After nearly four years, Genco won the first extradition of a person accused of a wildlife-related crime.
On July 16, 1992, after spending two months in a Hartford jail, Marius Meiring pleaded guilty to charges of making false statements about the contents of the packages he had mailed to the US. None of the other crimes he committed were covered by the US-South Africa extradition treaty, so Meiring would not be held accountable for a criminal practice — condoned if not supported by the South African regime — that jeopardises the African rhinoceros. Since Meiring had given information to US investigators about other wildlife smugglers, federal Judge José Cabranés sentenced him to the minimum eight months in jail. The judge then credited Meiring for jail time served in South Africa and the US and set him free. John Lukman now maintains that US investigators only got part of the story. The smuggling, he acknowledges, was not an isolated incident. In fact, he claims, it was a major part of the covert war in Angola and involved not only Colonel Willie Snyder, one of the men overseeing the secret war, but other high-ranking South African officials. Sources close to the investigation say that under interrogation, Meiring complained of being a scapegoat in the affair.
Higher officials in Washington — outside the Fish and Wildlife Service — showed no interest in fully investigating Lukman's activities. Lukman, who says he regrets his past activities, has offered "to help out in any way possible".
But his assistance is probably not welcomed by everyone in the federal government, for he claims that "the biggest traffickers of rhino horn in that area [Angola] were Americans operating out of Kamina" — referring to Kamina Air Base in Zaire, where the CIA's UNITA-support outfit was stationed. Lukman contends that cargo airplanes owned by Southern Air Transport — once a CIA front company — and other companies working for the US government were flying in and out of Kamina and Jamba regularly, and that American operatives took advantage of the flights to transport diamonds and rhino horns out of Angola illegally.
Recently, a leading South African conservationist was talking in Johannesburg to an executive of a South Africa air cargo firm that is leasing planes to UNITA. The topic was Jonas Savimbi. In late September when the rebel leader realised he was about to lose the ons to the party of President José Eduardo dos Santos, he pulled his troops out of the combined army that had been established by a 1991 peace accord. Fighting then resumed between UNITA and the government forces. "How will Savimbi survive?", the conservationist asked the airline executive. It won't be too hard, he replied. The planes that fly from South Africa to Jamba with supplies for UNITA return loaded with diamonds, ivory and rhino horns.
["Big-game smugglers: The Trail Leads to South Africa", by Steven R. Galster, The Nation magazine. 1993 The Nation Company, Inc. Reprinted with permission. Subscriptions to The Nation are US$44 per year (47 issues), from 72 Fifth Avenue, Box P, New York, NY 10011, USA.]