INTELLIGENCE AND UNDERCOVER OPERATIONS IN THE FIGHT AGAINST WILDLIFE CRIME

ilarivers Editorial July 7, 2022

BOOK REVIEW

INTELLIGENCE AND UNDERCOVER OPERATIONS IN THE FIGHT AGAINST WILDLIFE CRIME
I J Larivers

Back in 2017, I was asked by an NGO which was involved with training for National Parks rangers operating in the Zambezi Valley to create a basic training course for wildlife crime scene management. It was envisaged that the course itself wouldn’t be more than a day long; the main emphasis would be on first-responder anti-poaching teams preserving the crime scene rather than managing it. The Zimbabwe Republic Police has a very capable CID wildlife unit which would carry out any in-depth investigations, together with the National Parks Intelligence and Security section.

As conservation enforcement in Africa was becoming more private-sector, working with the authorities, I had some very good material to look through to augment what I already knew. The gold standard in such manuals is the late Rory Young’s A Field Manual for Anti-Poaching Activities. Sadly, Rory was KIA in Burkina Faso in 2021, while training their government’s anti-poaching units. There is no question he walked the talk.

The main problem I encountered when I started cobbling an aide memoir together was that the scope of any meaningful presentation went far beyond an aide memoir – or a one-day training course.

During Zimbabwe’s post-independence Operation Stronghold, to fortify the Zambezi Valley and other border areas against incursions of poaching gangs, I had worked with the then National Parks Investigations Branch on the covert side – mainly undercover sting operations – but my current business partner, former National Parks warden Chris Pakenham, had done the boots-on-the-ground bit in the Zambezi Valley with the Department’s Tracker Unit. So we had a pretty balanced perspective on both types of operations, but there was a lot of innovative work being done since then, too.

2017 was the year that documentary film director Shaul Schwarz and Christina Clusiau’s Reel Peek Films brought out Trophy, a documentary on the hunting industry in southern Africa. Shaul and Christina said to me that they had a lot of the “normal” pre-conceived First World ideas about blood sports when they first decided on the project. But to their credit, once they were on the ground and getting a first-hand look at the hunting industry, they rose above any ideas they had brought with them, and Trophy is about as balanced as a documentary gets.

A large part of the film centres on the African Conservancies operation in the Omay, adjacent to Lake Kariba.

My good friend Chris Moore was at the time heading up the anti-poaching operations there, with great success. He was using pioneering techniques, like “pseudo” teams reminiscent of the Rhodesian Selous Scouts. His teams operated in the Valley using a rusty old .303 rifle and a set of fake elephant tusks expertly crafted by TCI Taxidermy in Bulawayo. They would go so far as laying down cached meat, so they could be on hand to welcome local villagers responding to the tell-tale arrival of vultures. (It should be stressed here that their purpose was only to gather intelligence from the villagers about extant poaching gangs, and not to entice anyone to poach.)

So it was that I decided, with Chris and Chris’s help, to expand on my mandate and bolt together a manual on this facet of wildlife crime enforcement; I had previously not seen such a thing, and, between the three of us we had decades of experience.

The result was Intelligence and Undercover Operations in the Fight against Wildlife Crime. Being a dynamic field, new innovations have come along in the last 5 years, and a second edition is now in the planning phase.

Available from Amazon for $10.00.

https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Undercover-Operations-Against-Wildlife/dp/1986524027/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1525776851&sr=1-1&keywords=intelligence+and+undercover+operations+in+the+fight+against+wildlife+crime

PHOTOS

1. Most die of old age.
2. Following and undercover sting in Harare.
3. CID Detective Superintendent Charles Haley scanning a poached rhino with a metal detector.
4. Bullets recovered from carcasses in the Zanbesi Valley.
5. CID man undercover as a security guard in an undercover sting in Harare.
6. Cyanide and oranges: elephant npoaching in the 21st Century.
7. A poacher who paid the ultimate price in a contact with an anti-poaching unit.
8. An undercover sting in Harare that recovered a live pangolin.
9. Illegal rhino horn trafficker just before his arrest.
10. Cleverly crafted fake elephant tusks for use in sting operations.
11. Various poaching scenes.
12. A former Selous Scout and friend in the Zimbabwe Lowveld.
13. A South Africa rhino horn trafficker arrested in a sting operation in Harare in 2019.