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

also a colonel, heads up the Rundu office of CSI’s Directorate of Special Tasks, which oversees logistical support to UNITA.

    Burman storms out of the warehouse and heads for Fred Oelschig’s office. He’s apoplectic with rage. ‘I lost my cool so badly with that arsehole that they thought I was suffering from battle fatigue,’ he recalls thirty years later, his voice sharp with anger. ‘What pissed me off the most was that some of these guys were sitting in the backline earning a bloody lot of money and I was on the front line, getting shot at. They were running a flourishing pipeline of exploited products and pocketing the money.’
    Oelschig, convinced that Burman is going to ‘hammer’ him, backs up against a wall behind his desk. ‘I’m going to take this to the press and expose the whole thing,’ Burman threatens.
    Two weeks later, he is on a
flossie
– an air force Hercules – back to South Africa. They say he’s gone
bossies
, literally ‘bush mad’. For the next four or five months, Burman is assigned to a desk in a secret CSI building in Pretoria. It is the ‘seat of power in the intelligence sector’, but all he does is one mind-numbing army course after another. ‘Pathetic courses that meant jackshit to me … I felt like I was an animal in a cage being watched.’ When he is declared fit to return to combat, he is moved to a UNITA training camp in the Caprivi Strip, a narrow, 450-kilometre-long finger of land that extends from the northeastern corner of Namibia, thrusting eastwards between Angola and Botswana to the Zambian border. He never sees the warehouses or their contents again.

    There are other clues; hints that what Burman had seen in the warehouse is part of something far greater than he can imagine. In Jamba, UNITA’s basein Cuando Cubango Province just north of the Caprivi, he comes across a factory churning out ivory carvings of ‘outstanding quality’. He can’t recall the exact date, but it must have been some time in 1982.
    Then there are rumours about a shadowy South African Military Intelligence front company, Frama Intertrading. Run by two Portuguese–Angolans, José Francisco Lopes and Arlindo Maia, it is formally incorporated in 1980. An army general, Gerhardus Philippus Ortlepp du Preez, arranges for the company’s bank account to be opened at a branch conveniently located near military headquarters in Poynton Building in central Pretoria. Du Preez and other SADF members have signing powers on the account, in addition to Lopes and Maia. The SADF supplies the start-up capital.
    Maia is based in Johannesburg. Lopes, nicknamed Lobbs, is the man on the ground in Rundu. He’s a sergeant major in the SADF, but earns far more than the average officer of his rank. Before the war, he lived in Angola. He and his family lost everything when they fled to Namibia, but he managed to wangle a pilot’s job with CSI. A bad heart put paid to that, but they found other work for him. Lobbs has a sawmill in Rundu and another in a place called Buabuata. Within CSI, it is an open secret that Lobbs and Frama are a conduit for the SADF’s covert supplies to UNITA. Standing orders prevent soldiers and police from searching the company’s trucks that ply the road south carrying vast quantities of timber, primarily teak and kiaat. There are whispers that other contraband is hidden in the consignments.
    In 1984, Burman – now a major – is running ‘Delta teams’ in the Okavango. They are small squads of five to seven men comprising a mixture of SADF Special Forces troops and Askaris – ‘ex-terrorists’ or
terrs
who have been ‘turned’ and are now fighting against their former comrades. Burman has informants feeding him information about ‘
terr
’ movements in the Caprivi.
    ‘They picked up info that poachers were working together with
terrs
that were supposedly coming across from Zambia, through Angola and into the Caprivi. We tracked them down, but we didn’t find