OPERATION GAME OVER

True Spies Episode 52: Operation Game Over

NARRATOR: Welcome to True Spies. Week by week, mission by mission, you’ll hear the true stories behind the world’s greatest espionage operations. You’ll meet the people who navigate this secret world. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position?

This is True Spies Episode 52: Operation Game Over.
‍
‍ANDREA CROSTA: Then he just jumped on the bag, grabbed the bag, and opened the bag in front of us. Then he sort of ripped the interior of the bag. He destroyed the bag and he found the camera and the cables and it took out everything. And that was a moment of terror, I would say.

NARRATOR: Traditionally, spies work for governments. As an avid True Spies listener you’ll already know that agents are subjected to years of intensive training, with access to some of the best intelligence and technology on the planet. Not this one, though. This True Spy doesn’t work for any government. Technically, he doesn’t work for anyone. He relies almost entirely on donations, and yet he helped bring down one of the most high profile illegal enterprises on the planet.

ANDREA CROSTA: Zambezi was a little elephant, a little baby elephant that I met in the Elephant Orphanage in Zambia. His family was of course killed and poached for the ivory and, as often happens, the baby elephant escaped this carnage, this slaughtering.

NARRATOR: Meet Andrea Crosta.

‍ANDREA CROSTA: And I heard his story and I spent some time with this little elephant and this is when, this is actually the moment when I thought: ‘What am I doing?’ I mean, I was doing just business and business and business and money. And I thought that I cannot go on like this. I would be unhappy for the rest of my life.

‍NARRATOR: Andrea’s epiphany isn’t a midlife crisis. It’s a calling. A return to his first love, conservation. And it couldn’t be more timely. 

ANDREA CROSTA: Environmental crime is the fourth-largest criminal endeavor on the planet, up to $26 bn per year. It provides money and funds for the most dangerous, organized groups in the world. They provide money to terrorist groups and militias. We were losing 35,000-40,000 elephants per year for the ivory and I saw it with my own eyes.

NARRATOR: Andrea didn’t mean to become a spy. In the late 1990s, he needed to support his family after the loss of his mother. He was soon drawn into the booming high-tech business. By 1998 he’s almost a millionaire after launching one of the first eCommerce sites in Italy. But his timing couldn’t be worse. Just two years later the dot.com bubble burst, taking everything Andrea has built with it. His internet dream might be in tatters, but Andrea’s high profile in the Italian tech community means he isn’t twiddling his thumbs for long.

ANDREA CROSTA: I went into other kinds of technologies, mostly related to Homeland Security investigation, intelligence, anti-terrorism so forth.

NARRATOR: Government? Intelligence agencies? Anti-terrorism? No surprise, then, that Andrea isn’t able to share specifics about this period of his life. All you need to know is that he worked closely with high-profile politicians from Europe, Africa and Israel. At first, he’s assisting them with their software and security, but his sharp wits and inquisitive nature soon see his role grow to include intelligence gathering. Not bad for a wannabe dot.com millionaire. The work often involves escorting his unnamed employers in Africa during some of its most volatile periods. It was around 2010, during one particular assignment in Kenya assisting a prominent politician, that he first saw the elephant corpses with his own eyes, and witnessed the collective frustration about how to stop the poaching.

ANDREA CROSTA: I could almost see a question mark on their heads, you know? They could not stop this thing, it was too much for them. You know, they were just Rangers and they do their best to protect the elephants. The demand, the power of international traffickers was so big, there was no way to stop it.

NARRATOR: The depressing scenes left an indelible mark on Andrea.

‍ANDREA CROSTA: I thought: ‘Okay, let's do something new. Let's do something game-changing. I don't want to copy anyone else. I don't want to copy another NGO. There are plenty of NGOs, for example, doing anti-poaching. There are plenty of NGOs doing awareness and advocacy, what can I do differently?’ And I thought: ‘Okay, let's merge my two parallel careers - one in conservation, and the other one in intelligence investigation and high-tech - to create a new kind of a sort of hybrid NGO that can act, that can operate as an intelligence agency.’

NARRATOR: So that’s what he did. In 2012, he went back home to Europe and told his government clients that he was no longer offering his services as a contractor. A few months later his new hybrid NGO, Earth League International, was born. But this particular mission wouldn’t take root until a year or so later. New NGO’s can’t just start poking around in Africa, you need funding and a team.

ANDREA CROSTA: I decided to start to begin a very detailed intelligence-gathering operation along the entire supply chain of illegal ivory from Eastern Africa to China through Southeast Asia. You cannot improvise something like that. So I needed to recruit the right people, of course, beginning with the undercover agents that we use to infiltrate trafficking networks. And after a few months, I found the people. I found the money and then we started.

NARRATOR: It didn’t take long for Andrea and his newly formed team to figure out what the problem was. While international trade in ivory had been made illegal over two decades earlier, there was a massive, unpluggable loophole. Despite agreeing to comply with the international restriction, China continued to allow the legal sale of any ivory obtained before the ban. Fair enough, you might think. But appetite for the material in China remained high. To feed this demand, the Chinese government controversially bought tons of pre-ban ivory at auction - the plan being to release a fixed amount each year until that supply eventually ran out. You’ve spotted the problem, haven’t you? This legal supply chain meant that all poachers and traffickers needed to do was find someone willing to turn a blind eye or gently adjust some paperwork and, hey presto, your illegal ivory is now clear to be sold in plain view.

‍ANDREA CROSTA: We're talking about officially releasing five tonnes (5.5 US tons) of ivory every year and actually the industry needs 100 or 200, or 300. So it was really... the only way to do it, from their point of view, was of course to smuggle illegal ivory in the country and then sell it as legal.

ANDREA CROSTA: With no serious accountability mechanisms or checking mechanism in place, they got along with this thing for years and years and years. So we're talking about 10, 12, 15 years of this incredibly damaging loophole that used to destroy elephant populations in Africa.

‍NARRATOR: It was time to get some of that vital intelligence. To achieve this, Andrea turned to what he knows best: the internet.

‍ANDREA CROSTA: In 2014, we also launched WildLeaks, which is the world's first whistleblowing initiative dedicated to environmental crime. So we push WildLeaks pretty much everywhere - on social media - and in the hope to receive anonymous tips, anonymous leads from people about different crimes, of course, different environmental crimes, not just ivory.

NARRATOR: It’s not quite WikiLeaks for wildlife, they don’t share their intel publicly, but you get the idea. And it isn’t long before tips actually start to come in.

ANDREA CROSTA: One day, we received this very interesting leak with a very interesting video, also with a message. It was apparently a video of a lot of ivory transiting through Hong Kong, coming from Tanzania going to China, but transiting through Hong Kong. And in the message [there] was actually this person explaining that Hong Kong - because at that time in Hong Kong, they had an even murkier and stranger legislation regarding ivory - it was actually the perfect transit point to China. Meaning you can smuggle anything pretty much but especially ivory to Hong Kong, then it was very easy to re-smuggle it into mainland China.

NARRATOR: We’ll come back to how later but for now all you need to know is that Hong Kong’s physical and political proximity to China makes it the perfect entry point for smugglers. China doesn’t need to get its hands dirty and Hong Kong’s more progressive climate provides the perfect veneer for criminals to hide behind. Andrea finally has what he needs: evidence, a lead. Which means it’s time to get some boots on the ground. 

ANDREA CROSTA: We design this operation that we called ‘Operation Game Over’ to collect intelligence on the most important players and on the modus operandi along the entire supply chain from Tanzania through Hong Kong, through Vietnam, and then into mainland China meaning to have people on the ground undercover in all those countries.

NARRATOR: His previous consultancy work means he already has contacts in the countries where illegal ivory smuggling takes place, and this is critical if he hopes to gather any serious information as westerners tend to arouse suspicion in the world of elephant poaching. Andrea’s new team of local agents and informants would be fundamental to Operation Game Over’s success and it isn’t long before they start coming up with the goods. One of his local spies has been tipped off that the port in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania is a key link in the supply chain. If they can understand why - or at the very least find some reliable indication that this is a main exit point for illegal ivory - they can follow the trail to the next step in the chain, which they believe could be Hong Kong or Vietnam. Eager to follow up on this lead, he plans a reconnaissance mission in Tanzania. But this is East Africa where he’s learned that corruption isn’t just common, it’s often the norm. He’ll need more than quick wits and a good story to avoid raising even a single eyebrow.

ANDREA CROSTA: Pretending to be someone else, we entered the port and we filmed inside Dar es Salaam port where all the containers are, where you find all the containers before being shipped to Asia.

‍NARRATOR: Beneath all the loading cranes and towering stacks of containers, their spy senses are starting to tingle. Surely someone around here knows… something? But this is a major international trading route. You can’t just walk up and ask where the ivory is. Or can you?

ANDREA CROSTA: We met someone working for the port, of course. We use a lot of deception here because he didn't know who we were. He thought we were actually executives from a mining company. 

NARRATOR: Deception? Excuse Andrea’s nonchalant tone here. Imagine you’re in what you suspect to be a hub for international organized crime. Nobody knows you're there. You don’t have the protection of your own government. They can’t help you. You don’t know if the workers are on the criminal payroll. Presumably some of them are. Could they be armed? Is it really wise to turn up, unannounced and start asking questions? Apparently, sometimes, it is.

ANDREA CROSTA: And, he explained to us how we should not be worried about getting checked at Dar es Salaam port. They don't check the containers there. There are just a couple of scanners, but they're used just from the revenue service. So we started from there.

NARRATOR: Now, they have both the proof that the ivory is in the containers and they know why Dar es Salaam is the port of choice. The lax approach to inspections makes this the perfect location. Next, they need to figure out where it goes from here. They already have intel that suggests it isn’t always going to Hong Kong. Smuggling routes are routinely changed to keep ahead of law enforcement. Their intelligence tells them that it often passes through Southeast Asia before moving onward to China. And this presents a small, but significant problem.

ANDREA CROSTA: When you... in this case, you work in China, Hong Kong, and Vietnam. You need Chinese investigators in your team because to engage Chinese traffickers you need a Chinese agent. They will never, ever talk to me, for example, or anyone else.

‍NARRATOR: Once again, Andrea’s time on the ground in Africa is about to pay off. He remembers an encounter in Kenya with a Chinese journalist and investigator called Hong who had been making a name for himself in the world of environmental crime investigation, so Andrea calls him up. And it was a big ask. Hong would need to go undercover, possibly alone, deep in rural Vietnam. Their intel is pointing them to a village called Nhi Khe, a place notorious for its criminal underbelly. Thankfully, Hong agreed.

ANDREA CROSTA: I was suspecting, but I didn't know how important Vietnam was in terms of ivory and wildlife trafficking in general, from Africa to China.

NARRATOR: Hong’s job is to find out just that. But unlike in Tanzania where the port was just an exit point, Vietnam’s role is less clear. There are many places the ivory could go. Why here? To get the answers they need, Hong would need to do more than just ask a few questions. He needs to have a meeting with the big players. He needs to earn their trust and be invited in.

ANDREA CROSTA: Hong, for example, went all the way into a remote village of Vietnam, in the middle of nowhere - literally in the middle of nowhere - and it was actually a very well- known village for trafficking. He spent a day there. He met very scary people and he did it himself, again, filming undercover.

NARRATOR: Bear in mind that Hong isn’t a big guy - bookish, might be the word - and things would get very tense very quickly. Hong has barely taken a seat when one of the traffickers decides to go through his belongings before they start talking. Hong has no choice but to sit there and put on his best poker face and pray that they don’t spot his hidden camera. Breathe in. Breathe out. Will they find it? The pat-down probably only lasts 20 seconds, but likely feels like an eternity. These traffickers might be experienced but apparently they aren’t thorough. Hong has hidden his camera too well and they don’t find it but it’s a very close call.

‍ANDREA CROSTA: He actually uncovered the super-important role of Vietnam as a transit country between Africa and China. We identify and engage directly with some of the most important ivory traffickers in Asia based in Vietnam. We understood from them how they do what they do. How easy it was actually to do it was because nobody was actually going after them. So it was... they were actually very comfortable in what they were doing. It was really eye-opening, even for me.

NARRATOR: So far, Operation Game Over is going to plan. A clearer image is starting to emerge from what started out as little more than a handful of rumors and suspicions. If they can complete the picture, they might just secure enough intelligence to present to governments both east and west - enough to force the Chinese to close their gaping loophole - but they’re not there yet figuratively and literally. Remember that tip-off? The video of ivory passing through Hong Kong? 

ANDREA CROSTA: In Hong Kong the task of the mission was a little different because in Hong Kong all the people involved in ivory trafficking are actually not criminals. They are businessmen.

‍NARRATOR: What’s the saying about China and Hong Kong? One country, two systems? That might be true for most things but when it comes to crime and the ivory business it turns out it’s closer to one country, one system. But it’s understanding that system: how illegal ivory gets legitimized via Hong Kong and into mainland China. That’s key to the whole operation. Understand that and you have a chance of unraveling it. Fail to secure that info, and the whole endeavor could be for naught. No pressure then. Once again, it falls to Hong to take on the marks. This time, it’s not criminal traffickers though. It’s retailers and carving houses - both a common sight in Hong Kong at the time.

‍ANDREA CROSTA: The task was to understand exactly how they were using the loopholes in their laws in order to import illegal ivory from Africa and then re-export it legally to mainland China to clean it, launder it.

NARRATOR: This time, at least, there’s no remote village. No thugs patting you down for hidden wires. Just regular shop owners and carving factory managers. Although one might assume that criminal gangs are never too far away.

ANDREA CROSTA: You have to imagine the operation is about, first of all, meeting these people, the targets or persons of interest, or traffickers. And first of all, you have to get their trust, you have to sort of become friends, otherwise, they will never tell you what you need to know.

NARRATOR: Fortunately, if there’s one thing Hong can do, it’s talk. Quietly, casually, slowly disarming his targets, Hong leads the traders like a pro. And, smelling a potential sale, it doesn’t take long before they start talking candidly.

‍ANDREA CROSTA: They explained to us how they have, yes, they have a sort of a database with all the pieces of the ivory and numbers and codes but it was very easy to simply sell the legal ivory - the piece of legal ivory that they had - and then substitute with a piece of illegal ivory, but using the same number and the same tag so voila, as magic, the illegal ivory becomes legal.

‍NARRATOR: A bigger problem appears to be the collective blind eye that everyone is willing to turn. You can play dumb, convince yourself that you’re only buying legal back-stock. But the numbers really don’t add up. Just five tonnes or so a year is officially released for sale, yet the shelves are always full. 

ANDREA CROSTA: If the government will check what they will find - piece of ivory with that number - so all legal. So they were declaring to sell less, of course, but actually, they were selling a lot by simply replenishing their warehouse with illegal ivory. That mechanism before then was not really understood, was not known actually.

NARRATOR: Thousands of elephants butchered every year. A global enterprise encompassing militias and organized crime. Yet could this whole enterprise really come down to a few number-fudged spreadsheets? Andrea, Hong and his team needed to be confident this is how all illegal trade is legitimized so they visit multiple traders. Every single one gives the same story, but he can’t just show up to the local government with a video. All of this information needs to be scrutinized, corroborated, and neatly filed into a report. His team back in the US are about to get very busy.

ANDREA CROSTA: After the mission, our analysts work a lot. I mean, for every 10, 12 days of mission in the field, our analysts work three, four weeks on the amount of information coming from the field.

‍NARRATOR: With a good understanding of how the Hong Kong traders are manipulating their legal allocations, Andrea and his team can start planning the final stage of the mission. Their cache of intel is growing but remains incomplete. And it’s a very China-shaped hole. If they are going to get what they need on the mainland they’re going to need more help. A new agent, known only by her code name Omega, is about to join the team and will prove to play a pivotal role in the final push. 

ANDREA CROSTA: Omega was somehow, I cannot give you the details, but Omega was somehow linked to one of the leaks that we received through WildLeaks. There is a system in WildLeaks to exchange an anonymous message with the sender. And it's through that we got in contact with this person, one of these persons, and she was Omega, and at a certain point, she agreed to meet me.

NARRATOR: Andrea knows that for all their close relations, China is a very different beast to Hong Kong. The cultures share a lot but when it comes to politics, government, and law enforcement the differences matter. If they are going to achieve their objective, to close the ivory trading loophole through intelligence, they are going to need to proceed very carefully. Local knowledge has never been more important and it falls to Omega and her web of contacts to get their ‘in’. Of particular interest? A high ranking Chinese official who she knew was directly involved in the trading of illegal animals, including ivory.

ANDREA CROSTA: We decided to collaborate and, and she agreed to work undercover, for us doing things that for example, Hong could not do it for various reasons that I cannot explain now. But there are reasons related to you know, their profile, their legend, their background, or family and so forth.

‍NARRATOR: The sheer size of this one, illegal operation was alarming. Omega learned that they might be controlling as many as 300 small ivory workshops in the Beijing area alone. You only need to do some quick back-of-the-napkin calculations to work out that just this one outfit could be big enough to consume the official yearly supply of ivory on its own.

ANDREA CROSTA: I don't want to point the finger at China, because it happens everywhere in the world. Right now, we are working, for example, a lot in Latin America, and we are seeing exactly the same situation. So those traffickers always need support at the origin and the destination - the support of government agencies, customs, police. So how do you manage this by paying, of course.

NARRATOR: Ah yes, money. The true universal language. Implicating the government was never the goal. But that didn’t mean that they wouldn’t catch its attention. Like any good spy would, they make sure to keep a low profile. They don’t travel with their personal computers or mobile phones. They keep their heads down and try to fit in.

ANDREA CROSTA: From the moment you arrive, the assumption is they are watching you.

NARRATOR: But with an estimated 200mn CCTV cameras in operation, you’re never too far from a careful watching eye in China. And this became startlingly apparent barely hours after they arrived in Beijing.

‍ANDREA CROSTA: We check[ed] into the same hotel, but we checked into the same hotel at different times, completely, not as a group - different days even. And, and yet [I] think I forgot something like a jacket, or a T-shirt, in one room. They, without telling them anything, managed to bring me the stuff - to my room. So they knew we were connected. And we didn't tell them anything. We again, we checked in at different times, different days. We were three groups completely independently checking in and they knew.

NARRATOR: With a critical undercover mission coming up, this is unnerving. If even the hotel staff knows that they are traveling together as a group, what else is known about them? Has their cover already been blown? If there was ever a time to start being vigilant, this is it.

ANDREA CROSTA: That was another example of: ‘Hey, guys, be careful what you do here and with whom you talk, with whom you share.’

NARRATOR: Mild paranoia aside, Omega has set up the meeting via her contact. If all goes to plan, this should be the last link in the long chain from Tanzania. All they need to do is prove a connection between the laundered ivory in Hong Kong and China’s legal market and they can head home and start compiling confidential briefs to share with politicians. Simple, right? But the hotel incident has nerves running high. Their plans to go unnoticed fell at the first hurdle. It’s more apparent than ever that they need to be prepared and they need a watertight cover story.

‍ANDREA CROSTA: So the preparation, as you can imagine is, it's not easy. The objectives of the mission were to collect - because it was towards the end of our work - so it was very, very, very, very important to collect as much information as possible on how these people operate.

NARRATOR: By now, Andrea and his crew are practically old hands at these operations. They decide to go in as a team to maximize the amount of intelligence they can gather. 

ANDREA CROSTA: Of course, we need evidence, video and audio. So all the team was wired. So we were four people, and all four of us - including myself - we were wired with hidden cameras and hidden mics on our body. I was also filming with my iPhone, so I was filming [in] different ways.

NARRATOR: Despite all their planning there’s a tension in the group. Sure, there might be more moral support. With four of you there’s always someone to step in or create a diversion if things get tense. But that also means there are more tongues that can slip, more memories that can fail. Worse, for Andrea at least, he doesn’t speak a word of Chinese so he’s going to have to rely on body language and audio cues. If something does go wrong and they start asking questions he won’t know until maybe it’s too late.

ANDREA CROSTA: I needed a fake profile also for myself. So I introduced myself as an Italian coral trader. Italy's very famous for coral and carving coral, so it made sense to have this interest.

‍NARRATOR: But one thing’s for sure. They’re in the right place.

ANDREA CROSTA: You have to imagine a very big building right in the middle of Beijing not far away from Tiananmen Square. The only way to describe it. It was a sort of zoo of dead animals. Just dead animals of all kinds - illegal wildlife products, ivory and rhino and tiger and pangolins and timber and so forth.

NARRATOR: Before they can get up close to the illicit merchandise, however, there’s the small matter of Chinese hospitality.

ANDREA CROSTA: I remember, I think we drank liters and liters of green tea. It's all about, you sit and you start drinking tea.

NARRATOR: Things seem to be going well but Andrea soon hits the language barrier head first.

‍ANDREA CROSTA: And they start speaking in Chinese and I was just listening and filming, and while you drink tea they start slowly… you know… first, there is a bit of chitchat and there's all the formalities.

‍NARRATOR: He has to be careful not to lose focus. Every instinct is telling him to look around, to make sure that his hidden cameras are capturing everything, but his hosts don’t seem to be in a rush. No one told him that the local custom is to take things slowly, very slowly.

ANDREA CROSTA: You have to imagine hours and hours of these kinds of conversations, and this is when you get tired.

NARRATOR: Focus.

ANDREA CROSTA: You also stress because you know what you're doing. You're not there chatting. You know that you're fully wired and you are recording everything, so there is a lot of tension going on. There is a lot of stress.

NARRATOR: Thankfully, the conversation is flowing almost as readily as the green tea at this point. Omega and the other local operatives are slowly edging their way into the circle of trust. The traders start to brag, which is always a good sign.

‍ANDREA CROSTA: They had two beautiful art installations made of endangered butterflies from Brazil. And the guy explained to us that yeah, they were all endangered. But they bribed people at the airport in Rio de Janeiro and also the staff working for the airline, so they could export these butterflies to China.

NARRATOR: As convivial as this all sounds and with his agents taking care of the assets, Andrea’s mind starts to focus on his team. Unable to follow the conversation, bar the occasional update from Omega, he has a chilling moment of clarity realizing just where they are and what they’re doing, and the dangers that come with it. 

ANDREA CROSTA: You're not doing what you're doing in the easiest country in the world. You can get away with this kind of stuff if something goes wrong in other countries or in other settings. For example, a public place or a restaurant or whatever, but that one was, we were right in, I mean… we were inside this big building with hundreds of rooms and basements and it was a labyrinth. So you tell yourself: ‘Okay, if something goes wrong, I will never get out from here, because it's impossible. Even if I start running, I will probably get lost.’

NARRATOR: If the worst should happen, at least there’s a Plan B.

ANDREA CROSTA: We had a code word just to signal the team that it's better to end the meetings, find an excuse, and leave. The backup plan was to pretend that we're doing the research for the government of China on illegal wildlife trafficking, and then we have to report back to the police basically. But not me, of course.

NARRATOR: He’s a coral dealer, remember? And just like that, the conversation tapers off. The rest of the group stand up and start to move. One of them beckons to Andrea to follow them.

ANDREA CROSTA: So what happened is that they took us to another room, it was a big table, and they started to show us more interesting stuff. I remember they were showing us a lot of products made with the rhino horn, bracelets, and statues and trinkets and stuff like that.

NARRATOR: After hours of grinding small talk and trust-building, things are finally getting interesting. They’ve been presented with what can only be described as a buffet of illegal items. They don’t just show this sort of thing to anyone.

ANDREA CROSTA: And then if you have enough trust like we had you can also start asking questions like: ‘Oh, where did you get it? How do you import? How do you go around the laws? And what if I want to ship it back to Hong Kong, for example? Can you do it for me? How do you do it?’ And slowly they explained to you the whole thing basically because they felt comfortable with us and so I was extremely happy with how it’s going.

NARRATOR: Andrea’s Chinese-speaking colleagues are playing their role perfectly, asking more probing questions as they casually handle the illegal jewelry right where their hidden cameras will see it. Spirits are high and the mood is light. But not for long.

‍ANDREA CROSTA: Another team member thought she wanted to film better… those products that the traders were putting on the table. So she grabbed the bag of Omega and she moved it and she put it right in front of those objects but in a very unnatural position. If you have a bag you don't put it away from yourself, for example, right?

‍NARRATOR: Suddenly, the atmosphere changes. One of the traders barks something in Chinese and it doesn’t sound good. The angry man studies the group one by one before telling a colleague in Chinese to close the door. That’s never a good sign. You know the feeling. Time seems to slow down. A wave of cold washes over you. You intuit there’s a problem deep inside long before your senses catch up. Then suddenly, it seems like everything whooshes back to normal speed and there’s audible commotion, not that you understand any of it. But you don’t need to speak the language to grasp exactly what’s happened. Not least, because the very bag your team put a hidden camera in is now in the hands of one of the ivory traders and he’s inspecting it.

‍ANDREA CROSTA: One of them noticed something weird in the bag and I think that the guy noticed, probably there was a reflection in the lens of the hidden camera in the bag in the purse. So he probably saw that and it was probably the movement the team member attracted his attention and then he looked better and he saw... what's that? And then he just jumped on the bag, grabbed the bag, open the bag in front of us. And then he sort of ripped the interior of the bag. He destroyed the bag. And he found the camera and the cables and [he] took out everything. And that was a moment of terror, I would say. Right there you say: ‘Oh shit we are in trouble.’

NARRATOR: Ask yourself, what would your strategy be? You’re the one responsible for this operation but you can’t speak the language. One of your agents has potentially just blown your cover. They’ve found the hidden camera, there’s no putting that genie back in the bottle. Is there? The traders are, understandably, furious, demanding answers. You can’t run. They’ve lured you into the deepest part of an already labyrinthine building. You can’t call the police. They won’t take too kindly to you being there either. What’s the move?

ANDREA CROSTA: This is when Omega and I said: ‘Okay, Plan B.’ Remember Plan B? Okay Plan B is that we are not who we are. We are somebody else.

NARRATOR: By now, Andrea is relying entirely on the wits and charm of his team. They are about to deliver an audacious lie... that they are actually representatives of the Chinese government. If they can pull it off, they might just be able to secure themselves an exit route. Time to call in the cavalry.

ANDREA CROSTA: To support our story, we call up our driver. And the funny story is that our driver in Beijing was also an actor. She liked acting. So she put up the mother of all scenes telling the traders, the traffickers: ‘You don't know who they are? Oh my God, you are blocking these people now? Are you crazy?’ And this is when the traders started to believe the story that my team was really working for the Chinese government, that [we were] there to collect information, because they could not find any other explanation than that.

‍NARRATOR: Call it luck. Call it quick thinking. Either way, their scheme somehow seems to have worked. Andrea has successfully used the traders’ own fears against them.

ANDREA CROSTA: They're not used to this kind of stuff. It’s China. I mean, in the West, maybe you would think: ‘Oh, who are you? TV?’ Or [this] and that. But in China you don't think about these things.

‍NARRATOR: But there’s still a problem - Andrea’s cover story. If the Chinese traders now believe that his Asian agents are working for the government then what is he doing there? Not to mention there’s a more practical problem.

ANDREA CROSTA: Omega told me: ‘You just leave now. You are well known, if they Google your name, they will find who you are.’ 

NARRATOR: Could the former internet entrepreneur who uses the web as a device for catching poachers and traffickers be about to have his whole operation undone by a single Google search?

ANDREA CROSTA: I asked to go to the bathroom. The only reason I went to the bathroom was to unwire myself, so I took out all the cameras and wires, and I put it in my socks and in my shoes.

NARRATOR: With his wire removed and the recorded evidence hidden, he’s able to extract himself from the situation. Meanwhile, the tables have turned, and it’s his Chinese agents that are having to calm the nerves of the traffickers.

ANDREA CROSTA: After I left, Omega and the team remained for another hour just to calm them down. And then Omega told me that before leaving the guys, the Chinese guys, the traders, wanted to have tea again - once again, tea together.

NARRATOR: If they were still unsure if their marks believed their new cover story, they’d soon be left with little doubt.

ANDREA CROSTA: The guy was serving tea and his hand was shaking from fear because he was thinking: ‘Oh my God, if you are for real government, working for the government, I'm done. Because for the past six hours, I showed you only illegal stuff.’ Highly illegal in China to the point that you go to jail in China if you sell this kind of stuff. They have very harsh laws in China for wildlife trafficking. They don't use it often, but when they use it you go to jail for a long time for ivory trafficking.

NARRATOR: After almost eight hours working their marks and a very, very close call, Andrea’s team is able to safely exit the building. And while they were able to gather some vital intel, there’s a sense of frustration.

ANDREA CROSTA: I was, of course, fuming because from an intelligence point of view when something like this happens you lose that part of the network completely. You cannot go back. You cannot meet them anymore. You can also not meet their friends and their contacts because probably they will talk about it among themselves. So from an intelligent perspective, it was a disaster.

‍ANDREA CROSTA: We assessed the situation. We assessed the damages. So we understood that we could not meet other people we wanted to meet because they were linked to this group of people. So now they were… nope, not an option anymore, too dangerous. So we decided to cut short the operation and leave mainland China the day after, immediately.

NARRATOR: The operation may be over, but there’s still lots of work to be done. His analysts have to parse the hours and hours of footage and recordings so they can present a report to both the Hong Kong and Chinese governments.

ANDREA CROSTA: After that, we wanted to do two things. One was to put together a confidential brief for Hong Kong authorities to explain to the Hong Kong authorities how, basically, this illegal trade of ivory from Africa to China was actually facilitated by the weak laws and loopholes in Hong Kong.

NARRATOR: Once that’s complete, Andrea meets a member of the Hong Kong parliament and presents his findings - hidden camera footage, English and Chinese transcriptions - the works.

ANDREA CROSTA: That was very successful, because then she called for… she was already organizing a press conference. At the end [it] was a very strong press conference asking both the Hong Kong government and the Chinese government to close the loopholes.

NARRATOR: Now, with pressure coming from the Hong Kong side, it’s a waiting game.

‍ANDREA CROSTA: The second thing we needed to do - but for that we needed time, because I needed my analyst to work on it for a few weeks - was to put together a confidential brief in Chinese for Chinese authorities and then share it with them.

NARRATOR: Despite all the spy games, Andrea’s goal is always to be collaborative.

ANDREA CROSTA: Our approach with governments, including China, is non-confrontational. We don't want to. It's counterproductive to be confrontational with those governments.

NARRATOR: After months of work and thousands of miles of travel to complete numerous undercover operations, there’s nothing left to do but wait. Wait for the briefing to be compiled and wait to see if the Chinese government will actually do anything with it. With Hong Kong now signaling it’s ready to change maybe, just maybe, China will be ready to follow suit. As for Andrea, he’s already taking stock of what lessons he’s learned.

ANDREA CROSTA: Now we use different devices. Let's put it this way.

Postscript

NARRATOR: There’s a postscript. In 2015, just months after Operation Game Over, China held a rare, surprise media event. To demonstrate how serious it was about closing down illegal trading, 1,500 pounds of ivory was destroyed to much public fanfare. But many still doubted how serious the government was about following through. Then, later that year, China’s President Xi Jinping held a press conference with Barack Obama. Standing side by side at the lecterns in the White House’s Rose Garden, both superpowers outlined numerous agreements between the two nations, one of which was the enactment of a near outright ban on ivory trading. Thanks to the work of Andrea’s team, and numerous other NGOs, that ban took effect on January 1, 2018. 

I’m Vanessa Kirby. Join us next week for another brush with True Spies. We all have valuable spy skills, and our experts are here to help you discover yours. Get an authentic assessment of your spy skills, created by a former head of training at British intelligence at SPYSCAPE.com.