An ill-fated plan to expose rhino kingpins
In 1987, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands funded and planned Operation Lock, a secret initiative staffed by ex-British SAS soldiers to stop rhino poaching in southern Africa. When the project was unmasked, the World Wildlife Fund, founded and presided o
ONE OF the major problems that Operation Lock ran into was its association with nefarious people in apartheid South Africa’s security establishment. This was the period of “Total Onslaught”, in which South Africa’s political leaders saw themselves as defending a white Christian civilisation against a terrorist assault planned from Moscow and spearheaded by the liberation movements, namely the PAC, the SACP and the ANC with its military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe.
Nevertheless, when the team began their work in 1988, I had no alternative but to make sure that they operated with the knowledge of the relevant South African authorities.
The team established cordial relations (based on mutual self-help) with various government agencies active in the country in the last years of apartheid, but once information about these relationships started to circulate, suspicions inevitably arose.
Probably the most significant mistake was the decision to meet with Craig Williamson, who at the time was an active member of president PW Botha’s State Security Council, to see if his likely network of connections could help – especially considering that this was a man who was later exposed as being involved in state-sponsored overseas bombings, assassinations and propaganda during the apartheid era.
According to published accounts, including an interview with Williamson in the April 19 1995 edition of the UK’s Observer, he was recruited as a spy for the South African security police in the early 1970s, while a university student, and was assigned to infiltrate radical student organisations, especially groups involved in the anti-apartheid struggle.
By the end of the 1970s, Williamson had manoeuvred himself into a leadership position in the International University Exchange Fund headquartered in Geneva, a group that specialised in routing money to the ANC. In January 1980, he returned to South Africa, remaining in the Special Branch as an officer until 1985, when he retired with the rank of major.
He immediately joined a special unit of the South African paramilitary police in a number of terrorist attacks against the ANC. In the Observer interview, Williamson named six other South African Special Branch officers who participated with him in the March 1982 bombing of the ANC headquarters in London.
The bomb, Williamson stated, was assembled at the South African embassy in London from components that had been smuggled into the country. According to the interview, Williamson was second-incommand of the London bombing operation. His commander was Colonel Piet Goosen, who had achieved his own notoriety as the man in charge of the interrogation of the activist Steve Biko when he was beaten to death in detention in 1977.
Also on the team was Eugene de Kock, whose trial on 126 charges of murder, fraud and arms smuggling was prompted by the Goldstone report into the causes behind the political violence of the early 1990s.
Among the crimes to which Williamson confessed were the 1982 assassination of anti-apartheid activist Ruth First, in Maputo, Mozambique, and the mail-bomb killings of Jeanette Schoon and her 6-year-old daughter, Katryn, in Lubango, Angola, in 1984. The actual target of the 1984 mail-bomb attack was Jeanette’s husband, Marius Schoon, another prominent anti-apartheid activist.
Establishing sound contacts was always going to be difficult for Ian Crooke, who had to approach and confide in a number of key people, but involving Williamson was a big mistake – although, of course, at the time the contact was made Williamson’s nefarious background had not yet been exposed.
(Journalist) De Wet Potgieter, who spent time with the team, told me many years later that when he heard about the meeting with Craig Williamson, he was extremely cautious and warned Crooke against further involvement. At the time, neither I nor Prince Bernhard were aware of the meeting between Crooke and Williamson – it was simply impossible and unrealistic for us to attempt to manage sensitive intricacies from so far away in Europe.
I have no doubt whatsoever that the contacts that the team made were part of a genuine attempt to optimise their field activities, but they should indeed have been far more aware of the sensitivities of these links and the potential problems they could cause. It was only in 1996, when the Kumleben Commission completed its work some six years after Operation Lock ceased its activities, that I heard for the first time about the alleged role of Mike Richards, who had been instructed by South Africa’s Military Intelligence to infiltrate Crooke’s team under the pretext of providing intelligence on those involved in illegal trading activities. It was even later, in 2014, that I met an ex-member of Military Intelligence who had worked very closely with Richards and who explained to me the link with Craig Williamson.
As with many of the individuals involved in dark assignments in the closing years of apartheid – even more so when there were suspected links with the notorious Civil Co-operation Bureau (CCB) 7 – he wishes to remain anonymous, so I will simply refer to him here as AB.
His story is worth repeating as it sheds considerable light on the enormous obstacles Ian Crooke encountered in South Africa, obstacles we had certainly not anticipated at our first meetings in Audley Street in London.
More importantly, AB’s story reveals for the first time the extent to which Richards was committed to using Operation Lock’s network to help either Military Intelligence or the CCB.
Like many young South African men of the time, AB completed his military service and returned to civilian life where he started his tertiary education.
At a social function late in 1984 he met Renée, a very attractive woman who, after a couple of meetings, introduced him to Mike Richards. What AB did not know was that Renée was actively recruiting operatives for Richards, who also operated under the name Harry Stevens and who had himself been recruited from the South African Police into Military Intelligence.
AB was soon inducted into the shadowy world of “intelligence gathering”, with Richards teaching him a range of basic surveillance skills, including phone tapping, bugging meeting rooms and photographing potential suspects.
Posing as a student at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, AB was tasked initially with looking into the people behind the End Conscription Campaign, an organisation formed in 1983 to oppose the conscription of all white South African men into military service. Renée remained AB’s handler in all these activities, with their regular liaisons gradually evolving into a love affair, which was further complicated by AB’s discovery that Renée was Mike Richards’s wife.
AB soon realised that Richards was being controlled by Craig Williamson, who had close links with the CCB, and it was on the instructions of Williamson that Richards started to report back to the CCB on where Operation Lock was working and what they were doing.
The CCB was highly skilled at recruiting operatives from the defence force and the police, but in such a way that few of the operatives knew who controlled them or were even aware of the link to the CCB. Trusted operatives were encouraged to start private security companies, particularly in the field of investigations into busi- ness activities and were allowed to keep the proceeds of their endeavours.
Richards set up R&TG Consultants, operating initially from offices in Wynberg, a suburb of Johannesburg, and appointed his mother Rita Richards as bookkeeper. The CCB provided them with credit cards and opened bank accounts under various names. Some of AB’s colleagues at the time still have their own security companies today.
AB worked closely with Richards, often acting as his bodyguard and assistant. At the time, Richards was investigating the drug trade, buying and selling drugs (in much the same way as Operation Lock traded in rhino horns) to infiltrate the trade. He was very successful in his probes and brought about a number of convictions, at the same time managing other field operatives for Military Intelligence.
But AB was always uneasy about Richards, who remained a control freak when it came to those reporting to him and often gave the impression of being ambivalent in his relations with Williamson, playing one side off against the other.
A considerable amount of money passed through the books of R&TG Consultants, and AB would take boxes of banknotes, sometimes well over R1 million at a time, to be deposited in various accounts. Richards seemed to have been seduced by his new-found wealth, a quantum leap from his life in the police force, and started splashing out on lavish parties and material goods. He divorced Renée, ending what others described as a “tumultuous relationship” and had a number of affairs before marrying again.
Before the dawn of the new South Africa in April 1994, both AB and Richards had ceased their undercover activities for the government and had started working together in their own private security company. Then, early in 1995, South Africa’s Reserve Bank began to ask questions about the large amounts of money in foreign cur- rency that were being put through some dubious accounts still managed by Mike Richards’s mother, but nothing came of the initial investigations.
Not long afterwards, AB and Richards attended an afternoon meeting related to their security business, and after a few drinks in the evening, set off to drive home in two separate cars, Richards in front in his BMW and AB following in his doublecab pick-up. On a quiet street in the suburb of North Riding, Richards stopped his car and turned on his hazard lights after calling AB on his phone, saying he wanted to talk to him.
AB pulled up behind him, and as he climbed out saw four men rushing towards the two vehicles. At least one was armed and opened fire on AB. Richards ran off as fast as he could to get help, leaving AB to face the attackers. He opened fire on the armed attacker, killing him, and the other three then fled. The police eventually arrived, but no arrests were made, and like many other “hijacking incidents” in Johannesburg, the case was closed.
It was indeed extraordinary that the four “hijackers” should appear so quickly at precisely the place Richards chose to stop. Was this perhaps arranged to take out AB, who knew a little too much about Richards’s financial activities?
We will never know. About six weeks later, Richards was killed outright when he drove his BMW at high speed into the back of a truck. Those who arrived early at the scene of the accident were convinced that nobody could have survived such a crash, and noted that the inside of the car smelt strongly of alcohol.
Like the “hijacking” incident, the case was closed and nothing more was heard of it.
This is an extract from Operation Lock and the War on Poaching by John Hanks published by Penguin at a recommended retail price of R250