See The Last Clouded Leopard: WildAid’s Wildlife Conservation Goes After The Poachers

Outside Magazine May 2004

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See the Last Clouded Leopard (Cont.)


	Steve Galster, WildAid's co-founder and point man in Thailand, meets with one of his informants, a former go-go girl based in Pattaya, a hub of black-market activity. (James Nachtwey)

BORN IN 1961, GALSTER FIFTH of seven children. He grew up mostly in Wisconsin and Michigan, where his father ran a landscaping business. When he was a kid, he liked to round up roadkill and give the animals proper burials in his own pet cemetery. This led to his first foray into political activism: a letter sent to then–first lady Pat Nixon in the early seventies, urging her to erect fences along the entire U.S. highway system to keep animals from wandering into traffic.

Back then, Galster figured he would grow up to be a high school biology teacher or a veterinarian, but he ended up majoring in political science at Grinnell College, in Iowa. In 1986, he enrolled in a security studies graduate program at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., where most of his teachers were either employees or alums of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, the National Security Agency, the State Department, or the White House. It was there—and during a subsequent job at the National Security Archive, a GWU think tank that oversees the world's largest collection of declassified U.S. government documents—that he learned to "treat every little piece of intelligence as significant information, part of a puzzle that becomes clear only later, when you put all the pieces together."

Galster coupled his curiosity with an inherent affinity for intrigue. In 1988, the Archive assigned him to analyze the U.S.-Soviet proxy war in Afghanistan, starting with declassified documents in which important information had been blacked out. He filled in the blanks by traveling to Moscow and convincing a few Soviet academics to endorse a visit to Afghanistan. He started off embedded with Soviet troops but ended up hanging out with the CIA-backed mujahedeen.

"The Russians were just desperate for people to tell their side to," Galster remembers. "When I got to Afghanistan, I met an Islamic fundamentalist commander—Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was getting a lot of the U.S. money and guns—and I became convinced he was the wrong guy for us to back. I made it a point to tell that to the other mujahedeen, who hated Hekmatyar, and that opened the door to them inviting me to check out their operations."

He recounts all of this blithely, but the work was both dangerous and enterprising. "I think Steve was fortunate that he began his Afghan project when glasnost was starting and the Kremlin had decided that they had a certain story to tell," recalls Thomas S. Blanton, director of the Archive. "That the Soviets chose to tell it to him showed he understood that if you go straight to the primary sources, you can quickly become an expert while all the cud-chewers back home are still passively looking into it. He did a remarkable job."

In 1991, the EIA hired Galster and his girlfriend at the time, an Africa scholar named Kathi Austin, to examine the connections between civil wars in Africa and the ivory trade. They got started by joining a Young Republicans chapter in Washington, which led to their meeting what Galster calls "mercenaries and right-wingers" who were supporters of such rebel leaders as Jonas Savimbi, in Angola, and Alfonso Dhlakama, in Mozambique. Posing as conservative journalists, the pair traveled all over southern Africa and met members of the Mozambique National Resistance (a.k.a. Renamo), who were arming themselves by selling elephant ivory, rhino horns, and gems. After more than a year of research, their 1992 report for the EIA, "Under Fire: Elephants in the Front Line," helped convince CITES to uphold the international ban on the ivory trade.

Galster was hooked. In 1993, working for the EIA, he dove back into the international rhino-horn trade, this time posing as a wealthy South African buyer and tracing one ring from South Africa to Asia. After convincing a major trafficker—who was moving rhino horns with the aid of Chinese government officials—that his financial interest was sincere, Galster was personally escorted to a 1.2-metric-ton hoard, housed in a huge warehouse on a remote stretch of the China-Vietnam border. Using a hidden camera, he captured footage of more than 500 rhino horns.

Back in Washington, the EIA arranged to show Galster's video to a contact at the National Security Council, the president's principal foreign-policy advisory group. At the time, the U.S. was threatening trade sanctions against the Chinese for not enforcing their own laws against the rhino-horn and tiger trade. With the help of the NSC, the EIA showed the video to delegates at a CITES meeting in Brussels that September. The Chinese government was caught flat-footed, and responded by raiding the warehouse, seizing the contraband, and holding a publicly televised rhino-horn bonfire in October 1993. Not long after, it banned the sale of rhino horns in China altogether.

For Galster, it was a spectacular success, and though he plays down the risks, they were real. "One lonely American in the middle of nowhere?" says Ted Osius, a State Department Asia expert who has helped secure federal funding for WildAid's Southeast Asia Environmental Law Enforcement Training Center. "Man, if the rhino-horn dealers were willing to eradicate an entire species, they definitely would have popped him if they'd found out what he was doing. He's got guts. He was definitely risking his life."

Still, Galster felt that he wasn't even scratching the surface of animal trafficking, which is why he decided to join forces with Gauntlett, Knights, and Trent. By 1999, they were all running up against frustrating limits in their particular fields. Galster, who first met Gauntlett when he requested emergency funding from the Barbara Delano Foundation to combat tiger poaching in Russia, was finding it difficult to raise money for his own anti-trafficking operation, the Global Survival Network. Gauntlett was itching to get her hands dirty fighting poachers in the field. Knights, who by then was managing the Delano Foundation, missed the conservation-security work he'd been doing for the EIA. And Trent wanted to make a longer-term impact on environmental crime.

"We all had the same thought," Galster recalls. "That other organizations with lots of funding were getting nowhere against trafficking—but maybe we could get somewhere, with less money, spent on field programs directly overseen by us.

"It was one thing to uncover an illegal trade, point fingers at corrupt players, and then have nothing happen. It was another to be able to follow up undercover research with action."

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