Free Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade by Julian Rademeyer

including a Spider-man action figure, which he gave to Meiring.
    ‘He had tears in his eyes. He took those back with him for the kids. I felt really sorry for the children, because they had nothing to do with this whole thing.’
    When they parted company, Meiring extended an invitation: ‘Rich, if you ever get to South Africa, find me and I’ll have you over for dinner.’ Moulton replied: ‘Yeah, probably, but I don’t think your wife would want me there.’
    Lukman emerges from prison after nine months, supposedly a ‘changed man’. He starts a company called African Investments Ltd, which he claims ‘works on legitimate investments in Africa’. He tells journalist Edward R. Ricciuti: ‘I’m sorry for my past transgressions. I regret them terribly.’ Speaking to Steven Galster – at the time an investigator with the Washington-based sector of the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) – Lukman claims that the smuggling was not an isolated incident. He says it formed a ‘major part of the covert war in Angola’ and involved ‘high-ranking South African officials’. And he makes the startling claim that ‘the biggest traffickers of rhino horn in the area were Americans operating out of Kamina’ – a reference to the abandoned Kamina Air Base in the then Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), where CIA operatives providing support for UNITA were stationed.
    Lukman says a company called Southern Air Transport – once a CIA front company – regularly flew in and out of Kamina and Jamba carrying illicit cargoes of diamonds and rhino horn.
    Lukman’s claims may have some credence. Acquired by the CIA in 1960 and later sold to an aviation lawyer who had worked for the agency, Southern Air Transport had documented links with arms shipments to Panama and the contras in Nicaragua. In September 1987, the
New York Times
revealed details of secret airlifts of arms and materiel to Angola’s UNITA rebels. The shipments had all been routed via Kamina.

    Lukman vanishes into quiet obscurity and the case is quickly forgotten, consigned to collect dust in court and newspaper archives. Nothing further is heard of Meiring until May 2003, when a letter defending him is published on the website of the Australian newspaper
Green Left Weekly
. The writer identifies himself as Steve Thornton. He lives in Australia and describes himself as an ‘extremely close friend of the Meiring family’. Meiring is dead, he writes, killed in a motor-vehicle accident shortly after his return to South Africa.
    ‘He was a warm, compassionate and caring man … Marius was entrapped … Marius had obtained one rhino horn from a curio shop legallyand was not a “supplier” of parts from endangered species. Knowing that this item was illegal in the USA, Marius had the package labelled differently. A few AK-47s were also mailed to the USA. Anyone doing a thorough investigation into Marius’s affairs would realise that he could never have been a ringleader, nor play a major role in smuggling. His bank account would prove that.’
    The true extent of Meiring’s involvement in the smuggling of weapons and rhino horn will probably never be known. But the case shone an uncomfortable spotlight on a hidden corner of the SADF’s war in Angola; one that the Defence Force was determined to keep secret.
    *  Acknowledgement is given to the following articles, which, along with an extensive interview with Rich
Moulton, provided much of the basis for this chapter:
Ricciuti, Edward R. ‘Guns ’n Roses’.
Wildlife Conservation
95 (1), 1992
Galster, Steven R. ‘The trail leads to South Africa’.
The Nation
, 15 February 1993

3
Apartheid’s Secret
    January 1979
    A twenty-three-year-old intelligence officer returns to base at Rundu in Namibia after an operation deep inside Angola. Des Burman is strung out and exhausted. A lieutenant in the SADF, he’s been working closely with elements of Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA movement as a military